Effect of racial bias on composite construction

We investigated how prior bias about a face's racial characteristics can affect its encoding and resultant facial composite construction. In total, 61 participants (24 Europeans, 18 Indians living in India and 19 Indians living in Europe) saw a racially ambiguous unfamiliar face and were led to believe it was either European or Indian. They created a composite of this face, using EFIT6. Two groups of independent raters (one Indian, the other European) then assessed the apparent race of each composite. A different two groups (one Indian, one European) assessed each composite's degree of resemblance to the target face, to determine whether this was influenced by the constructors' initial categorisation of the target face as “own-race” or “other-race.” Composites appeared significantly more “Asian” or “European” according to the bias induced in their creators, but there was no evidence of any own-race bias in the resemblance ratings for the composites.     

MENTAL ASSOCIATION: TESTING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES BEFORE BINET

This paper challenges the historiographical discontinuity established between earlier “anthropometric testing” and the arrival of “psychological testing” with Binet and Simon's intelligence test in 1905. After some conceptual clarifications, it deals with “word association”: a kind of psychological experimentation and testing which became popular over the last two decades of the 19th century. First Galton's exploration are presented, followed by experiments performed at the Leipzig laboratory by Trautscholdt, and then Cattell and Bryant's collective testing. Additionally, I document the use of this method for the study of mental difference through the works of Münsterberg, Bourdon, Jastrow, Nevers and Calkins. The cases I present show how the method gave rise to various measurements and classifications. I conclude that the word association technique triggered reflection on mental “uniqueness”, gender traits and the influence of education, among other topics. Moreover, it prepared the terrain and anticipated some basic attractions and problems intelligence testing would later encounter.     

Race,Caste, and Christianity

Race and caste are two important historical and social categories that had a significant role during the European colonial period and in the colonies. Christian missionary activities during the colonial period often colluded with the colonial institutions in perpetuating certain accepted worldviews that benefited the colonial authorities. The central argument of this paper is to highlight the impact of a racialized worldview that was prevalent among European colonial powers, its transmission to the colonial context, and its continuing social legacy within Christianity. This paper, through a post-colonial analysis of British mission history and its work in a South Asian context, raises some pertinent questions regarding the tacit role of race and caste in the Christianizing mission. It also argues the need for careful post-colonial analysis of mission practices to challenge reactivation of entrenched structures of discrimination and prejudice.     

印度穆斯林种姓摭议

穆斯林种姓是印度乃至南亚地区的特殊历史文化现象,它形成于中世纪时的印度,经历一定的发展变化后,以一种隐性的方式呈现。从构成形式上来讲,印度穆斯林种姓依出身尊卑划分为阿什拉夫、阿吉拉夫和阿贾尔;各种姓集团也具有传统的印度教种姓制度的一些基本特征,即存在等级秩序、流行内婚的习俗、部分种姓与世袭的职业有传统的关联。印度穆斯林种姓与印度教种姓制度并不具有同等意义。种姓作为印度穆斯林社会关系的一部分,呈现出其自身的一些特点。从整体结构来看,印度穆斯林种姓分为两大部分,即源于穆斯林群体特有的等级关系和源于种姓制度的等级关系,因而体现出混合文化的特质。     

INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM: HISTORICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS

This paper elucidates the historical origins and transformations of India’s caste system. Surveying the complex developments over many centuries, it points out that three positions have been taken in this regard. One suggests that the caste one is born into can be transcended within one’s lifetime by performing good deeds. The other declares caste to be immutable forever. And, the third says that one can be reborn into a higher caste if one lives a virtuous life. Moving on to the sociopolitical realm, the paper notes how these positions have been used and exploited. The paper then attempts to anchor the existence and purpose of the Hindu caste system in Freud’s ideas about group psychology and Klein’s proposals of splitting and projective identification. The paper also deploys the large group psychology concepts of Volkan and the culturally nuanced psychoanalytic anthropology of Roland and Kakar. It concludes with delineating some ameliorative strategies for this tragic problem in the otherwise robust democratic society of India.     

Immigration: The “Illegal Alien” Problem

ABSTRACT

The present paper explores the “immigration crisis” both in the United States and in countries around the world. Consideration is given to what is typically absent in public discourse—that is, that immigration is inflected with race, class, ethnicity, religion, and language. Drawing on the work of several leading scholars in philosophy and linguistics, with particular attention to how metaphor shapes thinking, the “immigration problem” is unpacked to examine the issues embedded within its characterization as a “crisis” and for whom that might be so. Examined as well are the larger sociopolitical issues beyond the worldwide public outcry about securing borders. The paper rests analysis of both how the immigrant “other” is characterized and the larger sociopsychological significance of that characterization within the idea of the social unconscious. Finally, the paper explores the role of the group analyst as “citizen therapist” in expanding empathic engagement among groups affected by the huge migration flows. Included are recommendations for the role the group analyst may play in addressing the issue of immigration in our groups and communities.     

Community Disadvantage and Race-Specific Rates of Violent Crime: An Investigation into the “Racial Invariance” Hypothesis in the United Kingdom

Research into how structural disadvantage affects violent crime among racial groups has produced mixed results. In the United States, however, black and white community-level disadvantage distributions only partially overlap, precluding critical tests of the “racial invariance” hypothesis. We examine the relationship between race, violent crime, and disadvantage in the United Kingdom, where disadvantage distributions for race-groups have greater comparability. Using London borough-level data, we observe racial-invariance at comparably low/high disadvantage. However, at extreme disadvantage the effect increases significantly for black communities but not white or South Asian. This conflicts with studies demonstrating either racial invariance or weaker effects among blacks.     

Examining Hindu Ethics: The Three Yogas in Bhāgavata Purāṇa Commentaries

The object of this article is pre-colonial Hindu ways of distinguishing “the path of devotion” (bhakti-yoga) from “the path of knowledge” (jñāna-yoga) and “the path of work” (karma-yoga). It highlights how a developing religious group in early modern India explained and justified its path—its ethics, its ritual, its theology—while in conversation with the larger Brahminical tradition out of which it was emerging. I argue that early authors in the Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition such as Sanātana (c.1475–1554), Rūpa (c.1480–1554), Jīva (c.1510–1606), and Viśvanātha (fl. c.1650–1712) used the authority of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa to elevate devotion to an ethical imperative by including and excluding the behaviors and the motives of the older and well-established paths like knowledge, works, and Patañjali’s yoga. Their ethics is connected to an ontology of god’s being in which the path of devotion is uniquely effective in revealing god’s being and uniquely salvific the among paths. I argue this discourse on the three paths is a type of Hindu ethics, but it is unclear how it might be reconstructed in rational terms to deal with contemporary issues and that its primary innovation for the time was the uncoupling of ethics from the caste system.     

Cooking Living Beings:

Bodies play important and diverse roles in Buddhist ethics. Drawing upon an Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist compendium of bodhisattva practice, this paper explores the role bodhisattva bodies play in the ethical development of other living beings. Bodhisattvas adopt certain disciplinary practices in order to produce bodies whose very sight, sound, touch, and even taste transform living beings in physical and moral ways. The compendium uses a common South Asian and Buddhist metaphor to describe a bodhisattva's physical and moral impact on others. Bodhisattvas are said to “cook living beings.” The paper considers how this metaphor suggests ways of nuancing modern Western conceptions of ethical self‐cultivation, particularly as articulated by Michel Foucault in his studies of the technologies of the self.     

Attending but not seeing: The "other race" effect in face and person perception studied through change blindness

We used a change blindness paradigm to examine the “other race” effect in perception. White Caucasian and Indian Asian participants viewed scenes in which White Caucasian and Indian Asian students were present. Changes were made either to the faces of the students, to their bodies or to an independent object in the background. Changes in faces were detected faster than changes in the bodies, which were in turn detected faster than changes in the background. For face detection there was a crossover interaction, with changes in White Caucasian faces detected faster than changes in Indian Asian faces by White Caucasian participants, whilst the opposite result occurred for changes in Indian Asian faces. In contrast, there was no effect of race on the detection of body-part changes or on the detection of changes to background objects. The results suggest that participants of both races attended equally well to subjects from the other race in the scene, but despite this they remained less sensitive to “other race” faces. Change blindness can provide a useful way of analysing attentional and memorial processes in social contexts.     

Rushton’s contributions to the study of mental ability

This essay describes Rushton’s contribution to examining the nexus of intelligence, race, and genetics, specifically what I termed “Spearman’s hypothesis”. It states that Black–White differences are “most marked in just those [tests] which are known to be saturated with g”. I (Jensen) had confirmed this hypothesis using large data sets in the 1970s and 1980s and also found that Black–White differences were most marked on the more heritable rather than the more cultural subtests. Rushton confirmed and extended these findings in many highly innovative ways and demonstrated Spearman’s hypothesis applied among samples of Gypsy Roma in Serbia, and East Asian, European, South Asian, Colored and Black samples in South Africa. He has not only documented group differences in brain size, intelligence, life span, family structure, infant mortality, developmental precocity, personality, and temperament, and rates of two egg twinning, and crime among East Asians, Europeans, and Africans, but also provided a life history theory that explains them.     

In God’s House

Abstract

By naming the ways silence and taboo structure the documentary, In God’s House, the article traces the ways personal narratives are deployed as: (1) a cultural practice to consolidate an “Asian” ethnicity; and as (2) a pedagogical strategy to address the silence of sexual discourse—particularly around LGBTQ issues—in Asian American contexts. As cultural practices, silence and taboo undergird the framework of community—protecting individual honor, securing public face and fortifying webs of relationships that sustain individual and social flourishing. More than a façade for the “inscrutable Asian,” silence illuminates a practice of communal relationality that reconfigures “American” significations of community, sexuality, race and identity.     

Leaders' Perceptions and Nuclear Proliferation: A Political Psychology Approach to Proliferation

Contributing to an emerging scholarship emphasizing ideational approaches for understanding nuclear proliferation, this work offers a new analytical framework focusing on leaders' perceptions about the international system and how their “perceived strategic context” may influence the decision of “going nuclear.” Rather than being an inevitable occurrence driven by abstract systemic factors, like the security dilemma, this actor‐specific, ideational approach offers a narrative depicting the fundamental role played by policy makers' perceptions about the international environment in which their proliferation decisions are made. Utilizing operational code analysis, leaders' unique perceived strategic contexts are identified and expectant strategies for self and other analyzed by using the theory of moves sequential game construct. Initial testing of the framework is performed by examining the debated nuclear proliferation cases of South Africa and India. The results highlight the important role of individuals' views concerning the strategic environment they inhabit when weighing proliferation decisions.     

Basements and Intersections

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the “mainstreaming” of intersectionality in (white‐dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now‐famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how—by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of “race” and “sex” tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness—antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of “intersectionality” that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio‐legal reproduction of hierarchical power.     

A Psychoanalytic Reader’s Commentary: On Erasure and Negation as a Barrier to the Future

This paper is a psychoanalytically informed critical race theoretical commentary on Daniel Gaztambide’s paper, “A Preferential Option for the Repressed: Psychoanalysis Through the Eyes of Liberation Theology,” which received the 2014 Multiculturalism and Psychoanalysis Award by the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis’ Committee on Ethnicity, Race, Culture, Class & Language. This discussion is an attempt to utilize psychoanalytic and literary techniques to explore some of the ways psychoanalysis continues to inscribe cultural practices and normative thinking that foreclose opportunities to expand its margins to be more inclusive. I selected one sentence and used it to suggest how it affected this Black American reader who is also a psychoanalyst.     

A sentimental reeducation: Postwar West Germany's intimate geographies

Can a population or community be “taught” to feel and act differently through an externally imposed politico-cultural paradigm? What kinds of unexpected feelings (at odds with behavioral norms and expectations of the educator/observer) emerge from the collision of different political histories and cultural orientations? This paper examines American and West German social theories concerned with democratizing West Germany in the context of the Cold War and in the wake of initial US-Allied attempts at “reeducation” in the postwar period. Based on an analysis of Theodor W. Adorno's radio broadcasts and writings on the possibility of an “education to autonomy” after Auschwitz, this paper explores how West Germans came to “feel differently” through the gradual and contradictory negotiation of a democratic “habitus”, ultimately demonstrating the agonistic and ambivalent processes constitutive of substantial democracy.     

The “analysis of competing hypotheses” in intelligence analysis

The intelligence community uses “structured analytic techniques” to help analysts think critically and avoid cognitive bias. However, little evidence exists of how techniques are applied and whether they are effective. We examined the use of the analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH)—a technique designed to reduce “confirmation bias.” Fifty intelligence analysts were randomly assigned to use ACH or not when completing a hypothesis testing task that had probabilistic ground truth. Data on analysts' judgement processes and conclusions were collected using written protocols that were then coded for statistical analyses. We found that ACH‐trained analysts did not follow all of the steps of ACH. There was mixed evidence for ACH's ability to reduce confirmation bias, and we observed that ACH may increase judgement inconsistency and error. It may be prudent for the intelligence community to consider the conditions under which ACH would prove useful and to explore alternatives.     

“WHITE CRISIS” AND/AS “EXISTENTIAL RISK,” OR THE ENTANGLED APOCALYPTICISM OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

In this article, I present a critique of Robert Geraci's Apocalyptic artificial intelligence (AI) discourse, drawing attention to certain shortcomings which become apparent when the analytical lens shifts from religion to the race–religion nexus. Building on earlier work, I explore the phenomenon of existential risk associated with Apocalyptic AI in relation to “White Crisis,” a modern racial phenomenon with premodern religious origins. Adopting a critical race theoretical and decolonial perspective, I argue that all three phenomena are entangled and they should be understood as a strategy, albeit perhaps merely rhetorical, for maintaining white hegemony under nonwhite contestation. I further suggest that this claim can be shown to be supported by the disclosure of continuity through change in the long‐durée entanglement of race and religion associated with the establishment, maintenance, expansion, and refinement of the modern/colonial world system if and when such phenomena are understood as iterative shifts in a programmatic trajectory of domination which might usefully be framed as “algorithmic racism.”     

Religion insulates ingroup evaluations: the development of intergroup attitudes in India

Research on the development of implicit intergroup attitudes has placed heavy emphasis on race, leaving open how social categories that are prominent in other cultures might operate. We investigate two of India's primary means of social distinction, caste and religion, and explore the development of implicit and explicit attitudes towards these groups in minority‐status Muslim children and majority‐status Hindu children, the latter drawn from various positions in the Hindu caste system. Results from two tests of implicit attitudes find that caste attitudes parallel previous findings for race: higher‐caste children as well as lower‐caste children have robust high‐caste preferences. However, results for religion were strikingly different: both lower‐status Muslim children and higher‐status Hindu children show strong implicit ingroup preferences. We suggest that religion may play a protective role in insulating children from the internalization of stigma.