Majorityrights Central > Category: Psychology

James mailed me a link to Dienekes Pontikos’s copy and paste of this study by researchers in the psychology department at Northwestern university.

The study is interesting for two reasons.  First, it is pleasing to see the emergence of gene studies into the racial phenotypes of individualism and collectivism.  This, of course, is a live issue for us but as always much depends on its handling - which brings us to the second reason.  The two lady researchers have linked causal pathogens to the pressures producing collectivism, which has the effect of rather neatly pathologising the individualism of Europeans as anxiety-ridden and presenting Asiatic indifference as calm!

The ladies concerned are:

Dr Joan Chiao, an assistant Professor of Psychology working in the Brain, Behaviour, Cognition and Social Psychology programmes.  She is also affiliated with the Asian American Studies programme, among others;

Kate Blizinsky, a grad student interested in - wouldn’t you know it - the neurology of stress and well-being.

Speaking purely as a know-nothing racist white man, I find the dynamic opposites used in this study misleading from the European perspective.  To my cavalier mind, the individualism of Europeans is not polarised in that evolutionary human way against the collectivism of East Asians, but against the Europeans’ own weak cooperative nature.  We Europeans cannot and do not seek to collectivise, and lose ourselves therein.  That is an affront to our nature.  I strongly contend that if Europeans ever “slough off their anxiety” and so evolve away from individualism, it would not be towards indifference.

I am reminded from long ago of a couple of television programmes on military confrontations with East Asians, one being Slim’s campaign in Burma and the other the forced retreat from Gloucester Hill in Korea.  What those two programmes left me with was the negligible (not to say pathological) value which, respectively, the Japanese and Chinese soldiers attached to life.  In both programmes, the British ex-soldiers described them as vermin throwing themselves into the fire of the enemy.  These were not men, for they did not behave in any way the Brits knew men to behave, and killing them was not difficult or a cause for regret.

We Europeans can cooperate on the basis of our natural values, but it takes a certain effort.  It is not our default position.  We definitely cannot “do” blind collectivism like the East Asians, and I don’t accept that the polar opposite to East Asian collectivism is our innate individualism.  It might be something closer to the chaotic assertiveness endemic among Sub-Saharan Africans.  Perhaps a third leg to Africa - ending no doubt in West Africa - would make the research more complete and enlightening.  It certainly seems to me that more racial space and a greater degree of subtle thinking is required of anyone seeking to split this psychological log.  But what we have in this study is a Chinese woman who probably doesn’t comprehend very much about us, and a Jew whose “interest” would, in some hands, lend itself well to the tribal delights of pathologisation.

So with that (perhaps unfair) caveat, here are the money quotes:

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An email arrived in my inbox today from that indefatigable chercheur de la vérité, he of the lion’s claw.  It announced a new addition to his website, titled The Math Sex Gap revisited: a Theory of Everyone.  It features Prodigy eviscerating two papers that have appeared in 2008, both of which found cultural bias to be the cause of the gap, then introducing his own Theory of Everyone which accounts for race, culture and geography.  Culture, you ask?  Only this much:-

We should all be grateful for the thought of La Griffe and all his like.  Without their contribution there would be no counter-argument besides commonsense to those who do their best to undermine intellectual salience for no better reason than it is white and male.  Or as Prodigy says to his feminist audience, “I always enjoy visiting La La Land where a gap-free society defines the goal of human striving.”

So Natalie Shook, a young and not unattractive, not-Jewish psychologist at Ohio State University, specialises in ...

exploring prejudice reduction through intergroup contact. Specifically, I am interested in how automatically activated racial attitudes are affected by successful interracial relationships, and vice versa.

Natalie may or may not be room-sharing with her gris eminence, Russell Fazio, but she certainly likes to work with him.  His research ...

centers upon the study of attitudes. ... We have proposed a model of attitudes as associations in memory between the attitude object and one’s evaluation of the object. Our concern has been with the likelihood that such evaluations will be activated automatically from memory upon the individual’s encountering the attitude object. ... In particular, the research has focused upon (a) the influence that accessible attitudes have upon attention, categorization, judgment and, ultimately, behavior, and (b) the functional value of such attitudes. The implications of this view of attitudes are currently being examined in the domain of prejudice. The role of both automatic and more motivated, controlled processes, on race-related judgments and behavior are under investigation. We also are conducting research on the implicit development of attitudes via classical conditioning, attitude formation via exploratory behavior, and implicit measures of attitude.

So what these intellectual lovebirds are setting out to do is prove that white prejudice is learned and can be unlearned.  Their latest two papers, which relate to studies conducted in 2001 and 2002, are:-

Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Roommate relationships: A comparison of interracial and same-race living situations. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 11, 425-437.

Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Interracial roommate relationships: An experimental test of the contact hypothesis. Psychological Science, 19, 717-723.

However, ISO’s press office marketed the Shook-Fazio papers thus:-

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This morning the Telegraph ran a short news feature titled, “People who believe in God are more helpful.

Scientists say that those who frequently pray and attend religious services report more charitable donations and volunteer work

However the review, published in the journal Science, does suggest that believers acting for the greater good may be doing so to enhance their own reputation among friends and acquaintances.

In one experiment, volunteers who had been told that a dead student’s ghost had been seen in the experiment room cheated less on a test than those who had not.

In another, children who were told that a fictional character called Princess Alice was watching them were less likely to disobey their instructions.

In Science, the authors wrote: “These findings are consistent with the idea that outward evidence of religious devotion may engender more trust.”

The evidence also suggests that trust in other members of a religious group is higher when those groups involve a greater degree of commitment, for example in stricter forms of religious belief, such as Mormonism.

The authors say that the research supports the idea that in early societies religion helped to foster social cohesion by encouraging cooperation.

The original paper is titled The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality and is by Norenzayan and Shariff, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.  The abstract reads:-

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Richard D. Fuerle

The Flynn Effect, discovered by Richard Lynn (Lynn, 1977) and documented and named for James R. Flynn (Flynn, 1984, 1987), is a world-wide increase in IQ scores of about 3 IQ points per decade.  That is, people today score higher on an old IQ test than people the same age did who took the same test decades earlier.

By suggesting the malleability of intelligence and the possibility that tweaking the environment might increase it, the Flynn Effect has raised the hopes of egalitarians, who believe that “all the races are equal in intelligence” (United Nations, 1950;  also Flynn, 1999) and fervently want to erase the black-white IQ gap.  Unfortunately, the cause of the Flynn Effect has not yet been pinpointed and, until it is, a program cannot be designed that will put the cause of the Flynn Effect to work increasing black intelligence.  Moreover, as many experts suspect, the Flynn Effect may be only an increase in IQ scores, not an increase in real intelligence (i.e., the genetic potential for high intelligence), which may actually be declining (Lynn, 1996).

A possible explanation for the increase in IQ scores is that children today mature sooner, both physically and mentally, than children did decades ago (Sarich, 1999).  Today’s children score higher, not because their real intelligence has increased, but because their brains are more mature.  A 10 year old today has a brain that has grown faster and has more neural connections than the brain of a 10 year old who lived, say, 50 years ago.  Because today’s 10 year olds have brains that, perhaps, 12 year olds had 50 years ago, they do better on an IQ test taken by 10 year olds 50 years ago.  Psychologists think they are comparing identical groups of children – 10 year olds to 10 year olds, but they are actually comparing apples and oranges – 10 year old brains to 12 year old brains.  Real intelligence has not increased, children just acquire it sooner, and fully mature people today may actually be less intelligent than fully mature people were decades ago.

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How gratifying when some geek researches an area of extreme and totally unacceptable male prejudice, and only ... confirms it.  Plus, in this case, an unexpected bonus.

From the Mail article, with apologies for the eggregious use of dishonest homosexual labels:-

Gay men are as bad as women at navigating, research has shown.  Both share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around, a study suggests.  They are also slower to take in spatial information than heterosexual men.

... researchers say it is likely to make driving in a strange environment more challenging for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, conducted computer-based tests of spatial learning and memory on 140 volunteers recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines.  They showed that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses.  But there were also differences between gay and heterosexual men and straight and lesbian women.

The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University. In one,

... the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find a hidden submerged platform.  Cues in the form of pictures, doorways, a lamp, a bookcase and other landmarks were sited in different places.

The other task,

... the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” - musical tones - by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.

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We never knew for sure whether it was real, what caused it or whether it was limited only to the left side of the curve.  But the Flynn Effect appears to be at the end of its days in Europe, at least.

This from the Times:-

WE ARE ABOUT AS SMART AS WE’RE GOING TO GET, SAYS IQ PIONEER
* Test Results are starting to level out
* Morality skills are the next step

It is a common refrain, repeated in response to every new television reality show and every bumper crop of school exam results: society is dumbing down. Scientists have long argued the opposite, pointing to the now widely accepted “Flynn effect”, which shows that over the past century average IQ scores have improved across the developed world, irrespective of class or creed.

Now the man who first observed this effect, the psychologist James Flynn, has made another observation: intelligence test scores have stopped rising.

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A subject that crops up pretty regularly at MR is the profound unsuitability of the standard left-right political spectrum, as expressed in the seating arrangements in revolutionary French parliamentary life and employed in the standard political compass.  The correlation of anarchism <> fascism and collectivism <> libertarianism simply cannot process, and so mischaracterises, radical-right or even fundamentally Conservative thinking.  Nowhere is that more true than with the very normal human characteristic of racial consciousness, and if you want to know why just visit the front page of politicalcompass.org where you can read:-

The idea was developed by a political journalist with a university counselling background, assisted by a professor of social history.  They’re indebted to people like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno for their ground-breaking work in this field.

There is a body of psychological research that affirms the conventional axes, as John Ray has often attested here.  I contend that this is prejudiced by the researchers’ own immersion in the liberal analysis.  They do not ask the questions that would test true radical-right motivation and represent it accurately.  The result is nothing more than a test of liberalism.

So, I wondered whether political orientation could be addressed by using a system that, from the outset, describes the radical right and allows the liberal sleepers to fall where they will.  It does not matter where (it would likely be bottom right, off the chart!).

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