Stirring the pot, again

"Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind." Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate....For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is not longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me." Romans 7:15 & 19-20.


Let me start this by asking for your grace, gentle reader. This is something to be approached with fear and trembling, and that is what I will attempt to do. Please bear with me.

I have always been blunt. That is good and bad. I was this way forever, and then medical school beat a little bit more tact out of me. It is surprising how few doctors are able to look someone in the eye and say "the cancer is back." Or "I'm sorry; your son is dead." Or "Yes, you should call your family now. It's time." We prefer to look down at the chart and mumble some doctor-speak while backing out the door.

So I pride myself on my ability to speak truthfully and directly and plainly.

Except when it gets me into trouble. Sometimes a little beating around the bush is not such a bad thing.

Hold your nose; here goes the cold water.

I took a test called the Implicit Association Test. You can find it here. I would very much appreciate it if you would take the "race" test and report back with your thoughts. (In brief, the test shows you pictures of faces, and asks you to quickly categorize them as "European American" or "African American." Then you are shown words such as pain, failure, joy, or laughter, and asked to categorize them as good or bad. Then the words and faces are mixed together, and you sort good words with the white folks and bad words with the black folks, and vice versa. If you find it more difficult to associate good words with black people, that's described as an implicit preference for whites.)

The test is not designed to detect hidden racism that the poor test taker did not know they harbored. No one is saying that if you score "Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American" (my score report) that you are a closet member of the KKK.

But the test measures something, yes? The results are not random; and surely I can learn something from this experience.

I am not a racist. I have never been taught racism. I do not condone it. In any way.

It makes me so sad that I scored the way that I did. I wish I could change it.

At some level, for some reason, it is easier for me to associate positive traits with white people than with black people. And easier to attribute negative traits to black folks.

In any given situation, if I stop and think, even for a second, I will hopefully catch that fallacy and realize the irrationality. I don't really believe that white people are better or different or smarter or nicer or anything of the sort. But some aspect of my personality still tends to make those assumptions, at the level of gut instinct, when I don't stop and think. Or even for those few milliseconds before I stop and think.

So I guess my point is, I need to stop and think more often. And more quickly.

Or maybe the point is, I'm fallen and sinful, and I keep discovering more and more evidence of that fact in my own heart. (Why does this continue to surprise me???) Stopping and thinking is important, but only as a component of God's ongoing redemption at work in me. I need deliverance here. May He show grace. Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3) I am aware that willpower is insufficient to the task.

I'm glad I know this about myself. I wish it weren't there, but like a cancer, you have to know about it to take steps to get rid of it. The test served as a tutor, if you will. Or a CT scan, to keep with the medical metaphor. A Cat scan of the soul.

I'll copy over just a few of the most helpful tidbits from the FAQ section on the test website. Quotes are in blue. If you take a test, please, by all means, peruse that section to think about your results.

• Familiarity: There is a known relation between familiarity and liking - people tend to like things that are familiar more than things that are unfamiliar. In this way, familiarity might be importantly related to implicit attitudes. So, there may be a role for familiarity in liking of the categories – people tend to like things that they are familiar with compared to things that they are not. What might emerge as an implicit prejudice may have its basis in unfamiliarity. I think this definitely applies to me. The simple fact is that most of my friends are white. I grew up in a town that was mostly white. Went to a college that is mostly white. My medical school was more diverse and that was a great experience; I could definitely use more diversity in my life. For me, that helps the "other" to become the "familiar."

• Prejudice: So does this mean I am prejudiced? Social psychologists use the word 'prejudiced' to describe people who endorse or approve of negative attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward various out-groups. Many people who show automatic White preference on the Black-White attitude IAT are not prejudiced by this definition. It is possible to show biases on the IAT that are not consciously endorsed, or are even contradictory to intentional attitudes and beliefs. People who hold egalitarian conscious attitudes in the face of automatic White preferences may able to function in non-prejudiced fashion partly by making active efforts to prevent their automatic White preference from producing discriminatory behavior. However, when they relax these active efforts, these non-prejudiced people may be likely to show discrimination in thought or behavior. So I may be one of those people who may need to "make active efforts" to keep from behaving in a discriminatory manner.
  

I welcome feedback. I want to know what you think about this. Especially if you are uncomfortable or offended.

I'm putting myself out there, not because this is easy, but because I think it's important. This may not be politically correct, but I'm trying to be honest. I know I have much to learn. Much sin remains to be crucified. Much life to be regenerated.

Here's to redemption.

"So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Romans 7:21-25.

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Psychology 101: Just following orders

These experiments are absolutely fascinating to me. I remember watching video footage of the original Milgram study in undergrad, and I will never forget it. One thing they don't mention in this article is that the maximum voltage of 450 is clearly labeled "DANGER: LETHAL" on the machine.

I'm just copying this over from CNN:

Milgram, who also came up with the theory behind "six degrees of separation" -- the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else through a small number of acquaintances -- set out to figure out why people would turn against their own neighbors in circumstances such as Nazi-occupied Europe. Referring to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram wrote in 1974, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

His experiment in its standard form included a fake shock machine, a "teacher," a "learner" and an experimenter in a laboratory setting. The participant was told that he or she had to teach the student to memorize a pair of words, and the punishment for a wrong answer was a shock from the machine.

The teacher sat in front of the shock machine, which had 30 levers, each corresponding to an additional 15 volts. With each mistake the student made, the teacher had to pull the next lever to deliver a more painful punishment.

While the machine didn't generate shocks and a recorded voice track simulated painful reactions, the teacher was led to believe that he or she was shocking a student, who screamed and asked to leave at higher voltages, and eventually fell silent.

If the teacher questioned continuing as instructed, the experimenter simply said, "The experiment requires that you go on," said Thomas Blass, author of the biography "The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram" and the Web site StanleyMilgram.com.

About 65 percent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum voltage -- 450 volts -- in spite of the screams of agony from the learner.

"What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience," Blass said.

An update

Because of revised ethical standards for human subject research, this kind of experiment cannot be replicated exactly. But Jerry Burger, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, made some tweaks to see if Milgram's results hold up today. Watch an audio slide show for more on these experiments »

His study's design imitated Milgram's, even using the same scripts for the experimenter and suffering learner, but the key difference was that this experiment stopped at 150 volts -- when the learner starts asking to leave. In Milgram's experiment, 79 percent of participants who got to that point went all the way to the maximum shock, he said.

To eliminate bias from the fame of Milgram's experiment, Burger ruled out anyone who had taken two or more college-level psychology classes, and anyone who expressed familiarity with it in the debriefing. The "teachers" in this recent experiment, conducted in 2006, also received several reminders that they could quit whenever they wanted, unlike in Milgram's study.

The new results correlate well with Milgram's: 70 percent of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts, compared with 82.5 percent in Milgram's study -- a difference that is not statistically significant, Burger said.

Still, some psychologists quoted in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned how comparable this study is to Milgram's, given the differences in methods.

The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.

"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.

Stanford Prison Experiment

This idea of circumstances driving immoral behavior also came out in the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done in 1971 that is the subject of a film in preproduction, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Work on the film will resume in 2009 after McQuarrie's "Valkyrie" is released, his spokesperson said.

In this study, designed by Stanford's Zimbardo, two dozen male college students were randomly designated as either prison guards or prisoners, and lived in the basement of the university's psychology building playing these roles in their respective uniforms.

Within three days, participants had extreme stress reactions, Zimbardo said. The guards became abusive to the prisoners -- sexually taunting them, asking them to strip naked and demanding that they clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, Zimbardo said. Five prisoners had to be released before the study was over.

Zimbardo's own role illustrated his point: Because he took on the role of prison administrator, he became so engrossed in the jail system that he didn't stop the experiment as soon as this cruelty began, he said.

"If I were simply the principal experimenter, I would have ended it after the second kid broke down," he said. "We all did bad things in this study, including me, but it's diagnostic of the power situation."

What was so interesting to me was watching the poor subjects administering the shocks. They sincerely believed they were hurting, or even killing, a fellow participant, but they also sincerely believed that they didn't have a choice. The man in the white coat said to do it, and they did it. But they look so upset, they're in so much distress. They work so hard to "teach" the poor "student" the right answer, they really want them to get it right, and they don't want to have to shock them again. They don't know what to do, and the option of getting up and walking out just doesn't occur to most people. A few do, and they seem like ordinary people. We're not talking about Mel Gibson in Braveheart here. Normal folks. How are they different?

The original study mostly focused on authority and obedience, the idea that the people did what they did because someone told them to. And that's definitely a part of it. But the revision from 2006 seemed to remove a good portion of that, reminding subjects that they can leave anytime, and our society has changed a lot in its view of authority, and yet the results were very similar. Is it more of a desire to please, to behave as expected in any given situation? To be "normal"? We reference other people so much to know how to behave; I've mentioned that before here. The question is, at what point does that stop being helpful and normal, and become pathological?

I tacked the prison study on too, even though I'm most gripped by the Milgram study. Most people function to fulfill whatever "role" they think they've been assigned. Football teams with a "mean" mascot and black uniforms commit more fouls than players with a benign mascot and white uniforms. Why is that?

That's why I majored in psych. Fascinating stuff.

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Can anybody watch the news without crying???

Did anybody else see this case? A 78 year old man was struck by a car while crossing the street. He laid there in the street, conscious and bleeding, while ten cars passed and a crowd of pedestrians gawked. While 4 people did call 911, no one approached him to offer help. I'm sure you've heard of the bystander effect, and this case isn't really that surprising, but it's still sad. The effect was first described to explain the murder of Kitty Genovese, who was raped and murdered in an alleyway by her apartment with 38 witnesses. None of the witnesses intervened or even called police. In a psychological experiment,

Latané and Darley sat a series of college students in a cubicle amongst a number of other cubicles in which there were tapes of other students playing (the student thought they were real people). One of the voices cries for help and makes sounds of severe choking. When the student thought they were the only person there, 85% rushed to help. When they thought there was one other person, this dropped to 65%. And when they thought there were four other people, this dropped again to 31%.

It seems that "diffusion of responsibility" occurs, where everyone assumes someone else will do something. Also, you sort of look around to see how everyone else responds. If no one else is freaking out or doing anything, you probably won't either. But of course they're all doing the same thing.

So apparently, if you get hit by a car, or mugged, or worse, you're better off if only one person sees it happen. If you have the misfortune of being in a crowded area, single out one person to help. "You! Call an ambulance!" Then they feel some personal responsibility. Or if you are a witness who can manage to act, other people are more likely to follow your lead and pitch in as well. Andy and Gabrielle, your comments are eagerly anticipated.

What else is on the news this morning?

Let's see. So far I've seen dead bodies floating and children begging in Burma. What do you think; should we just roll some tanks in there and deliver aid whether the junta likes it or not? We've done that before. Probably not likely, though, since Western nations don't have a financial stake in the region. But isn't that the ostensible reason we're in Iraq? Delivery from an oppressive regime? I'm not a political junkie, or even terribly knowledgeable about foreign policy. I'm just venting here.

What else? Oh, the nine year old boy who dropped dead on the baseball field. His mom is campaigning for defibrillators on little league fields. Great idea. I support it fully. They're not hard to use at all. Nothing like on TV. (Sorry to disappoint.) Well, the ones in the hospital are like that. But not the little ones for public areas.

In Hyde family news:
Betty had been showing some interest in the potty, so I thought I'd give her a chance in pullups and see what happened. So now, she takes off her pullup, runs to the potty, and poops on the floor next to the potty. She's done this everyday since Monday. (I have pictures; you can thank me now for not putting them up.)

:::sigh:::

Don't worry, I'll keep you posted. Can you stand the anticipation?

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