Re:Study tracks how we decide which groups to join
by starkd on Saturday March 18, 2023 @10:44AM
(#35209502)
I don't think you can assume any of those bias assumptions form this article. There are well known attractiveness metrics that do not include race. The article gives no indication of the identities of those doing the ratings. The assumption that women are being judged more attractive than men belies your own identity as being a hetero male.
But the artificial task of collecting 500 washers with no other purpose than collecting them into a bin makes it hard to take any real meaning from this study.
Re:Study tracks how we decide which groups to join
by rossdavidh on Saturday March 18, 2023 @06:37PM
(#35213867)
You definitely cannot assume any of those bias assumptions from this article, for sure, but the point is you can't demonstrate that they are not. Maybe the actual experiment controlled for this, but if so the article here didn't mention any of that.
If they had to join together in small groups to perform some task together, it might have been a little more interesting. It also would have been more interesting if we had been given some measure of the correlation between the rated attractiveness and the propensity to join the same group.
I mean, for all we know, this could just mean that the people doing the attractiveness ratings gave anyone non-Anglo a low score, and that the students tended to join up more often than not with members of the same race. Or, they tended to rate women as more attractive than men, and the students tended to clump up in same-sex groups. I'm not saying that's what actually happened, but you can't tell from this article.