Assigned Video 4.2: Race: The Power of an Illusion

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Wesleyan University의 강좌에서

Social Psychology

213개의 평가

Wesleyan University

Social Psychology

213개의 평가

Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.

수업에서

WEEK 4: Group Behavior: The Good, Bad, and Ugly

This week's goals are to: (1) examine behavioral dynamics within and between groups; (2) see what happens when people fall prey to the Abilene Paradox; (3) read about social loafing, groupthink, and group polarization; and (4) learn effective ways to reduce prejudice and discrimination in daily life.

Lecture 4.2: How Categorical Thinking Gives Rise to Prejudice14:59

Assigned Video 4.2: Race: The Power of an Illusion9:09

Assigned Video 4.3: Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She23:44

Lecture 4.3: The Minimal Group: From Dots to Discrimination in 60 Seconds11:58

Lecture 4.4: When Intergroup Biases Don't Feel Like Biases20:44

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Scott Plous
Professor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Department of Psychology

It is all around us.

It is an illusion and yet profoundly real.

What we perceive as race is one of the first things we notice about each other.

Skin: darker or lighter. Eyes: round or almond, blue, black, brown.

Hair: curly, straight, blond, or dark.

And attached to these characteristics is a mosaic of values, assumptions, and

historical meanings. We can see differences among populations,

but can populations be bundled into what we call races?

How many races would there be? Five?

Fifty five? Who decides?

And how different would they really be from one another?

>> The measured amount of genetic variation in the human population is

extremely small. That's something that people need to wrap

themselves around, that genetically we really aren't very different.

>> In fact, genetically, we are among the most similar of all species.

Only one out of every thousand nucleotides

that make up our genetic code is different,

one individual from another. These look-alike penguins have

twice the amount of genetic difference, one from the other, than humans.

And these fruit flies, ten times more difference.

Any two fruit flies may be as different genetically from each other

as a human is from a chimpanzee.

>> My favorite trivia question in baseball is which Italian-American player for the

Brooklyn Dodgers once hit 40 home runs in a season. No one ever gets it right,

because the answer is Roy Campanella, who is as Italian as he was Black.

He had an Italian father and a Black mother.

He is always classified as Black. You see, American racial classification

is totally cultural. Who's Tiger Woods?

Who's Colin Powell? Colin Powell is as Irish as he is African.

Being Black has been defined as just looking

dark enough that anyone can see you are.

>> Now the SPHAs fight a path through the Celtic defense.

>> In the urban environment of the 1930s, Jewish teams dominated

American basketball. >> Bud Castleman shoots from outside. It's good!

>> Sons of immigrants—theirs were the hoop dreams of the day.

>> And it was said that the reason that they were so good

at basketball was because the artful dodger characteristic

of the Jewish culture made them good at this sport.

There are strong cultural aspects of what sports individuals choose to play.

It has to do with the interaction of individual genetic background,

of opportunity, and training. History shows us that as

opportunities change in society, different groups get drawn into sporting arenas.

>> By 1992, America's Olympic Dream Team

was almost completely African-American.

Ten years later, 20% of NBA starters would be foreign born;

the top NBA draft pick, Chinese. In the 1960s, Richard Lewington decided to

find out just how much genetic variation fell within and how much between

the groups we regard as races. A new technology enabled him to do

pioneering work. >> And that method, which is called gel electrophoresis—

a very fancy name—we were able to use on any organism at all.

If you could grind it up, you could do it.

That included people. I mean, you don't have to grind the whole person,

but you could take a little bit of tissue or blood.

Over the years a lot of data were gathered by anthropologists and

geneticists, looking at blood group genes and protein genes and other kinds of

genes from all over the world. I mean, anthropologists just went around

taking blood out of everybody. I must say, if I were a South American

Indian, I wouldn't have let them take my blood, but they did.

And so, I thought, "Well, we've got enough of these data—let's see

what it tells us about the differences between human groups."

>> Lewington's findings were a milestone in the study of race and biology.

>> If you put it all together—and we've now got that for proteins, for blood groups, and now,

with DNA sequencing, we have it for DNA sequence differences—

it always comes out the same: 85% of all the variation among human beings

is between any two individuals within any local population:

between individuals within Sweden or within the Chinese or the Kikuyu or the Icelanders.

>> There just hasn't been time for the development of much genetic variation,

except that which regulates some very superficial features like skin color and hair.

For once the old cliché is true: under the skin we really are effectively

the same, and we get fooled because

some of the visual differences are quite noticeable.

>> The superficial traits we use to construct race are recent variations.

By the time they arose, important and complicated traits like speech,

abstract thinking, even physical prowess, had already evolved.

>> As geneticists, we now have the opportunity to investigate, using proper

genomic analysis, complex human traits— athletic ability, musical ability,

intelligence, all these wonderful traits that we wish we understood better,

and for which we'd very much like to know if there are genes that are involved,

how they interact, how they play out. Those traits are old.

We spent most of our history as a species together in Africa,

in small populations, before anyone left.

>> Physical differences don't make race. What makes race are the laws and

practices that affect life chances and opportunities based on those differences.

Courts and legislators had long been in the business of conferring racial identities.

In the [U.S.] South, to enforce Jim Crow segregation and laws against mixed marriages

courts had to first determine who was Black under law.

>> And here is where it really gets interesting.

You got some places, for example, Virginia— Virginia law defined

a Black person as a person with 1/16th African ancestry.

Now, Florida defined a Black person as a person with 1/8th African ancestry.

Alabama said you're Black if you have any Black ancestry—

any African ancestry at all. But you know what this means?

You can walk across a state line and literally, legally change race.

Now, what does race mean under those circumstances?

You give me the power, I can make you any race I want you to be

because it is a social, political construction.

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