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What can experimental studies of bias tell us about real-world group disparities?
Behavioral and Brain Sciences ( IF 29.3 ) Pub Date : 2021-01-08 , DOI: 10.1017/s0140525x21000017
Joseph Cesario 1
Affiliation  

This article questions the widespread use of experimental social psychology to understand real-world group disparities. Standard experimental practice is to design studies in which participants make judgments of targets who vary only on the social categories to which they belong. This is typically done under simplified decision landscapes and with untrained decision-makers. For example, to understand racial disparities in police shootings, researchers show pictures of armed and unarmed Black and White men to undergraduates and have them press “shoot” and “don't shoot” buttons. Having demonstrated categorical bias under these conditions, researchers then use such findings to claim that real-world disparities are also due to decision-maker bias. I describe three flaws inherent in this approach, flaws which undermine any direct contribution of experimental studies to explaining group disparities. First, the decision landscapes used in experimental studies lack crucial components present in actual decisions (missing information flaw). Second, categorical effects in experimental studies are not interpreted in light of other effects on outcomes, including behavioral differences across groups (missing forces flaw). Third, there is no systematic testing of whether the contingencies required to produce experimental effects are present in real-world decisions (missing contingencies flaw). I apply this analysis to three research topics to illustrate the scope of the problem. I discuss how this research tradition has skewed our understanding of the human mind within and beyond the discipline and how results from experimental studies of bias are generally misunderstood. I conclude by arguing that the current research tradition should be abandoned.



中文翻译:

关于偏见的实验研究可以告诉我们关于现实世界的群体差异的什么?

本文质疑广泛使用实验社会心理学来理解现实世界的群体差异。标准的实验实践是设计研究,参与者对目标做出判断,这些目标仅在他们所属的社会类别上有所不同。这通常是在简化的决策环境下和未经培训的决策者一起完成的。例如,为了了解警察枪击事件中的种族差异,研究人员向本科生展示武装和非武装黑人和白人男子的照片,并让他们按下“开枪”和“不要开枪”按钮。在这些条件下证明了分类偏差后,研究人员然后使用这些发现声称现实世界的差异也是由于决策者的偏差。我描述了这种方法固有的三个缺陷,破坏实验研究对解释群体差异的任何直接贡献的缺陷。首先,实验研究中使用的决策环境缺乏实际决策中存在的关键组成部分(信息缺失缺陷)。其次,实验研究中的分类效应没有根据对结果的其他影响来解释,包括跨组的行为差异(缺失力缺陷)。第三,没有系统测试产生实验效果所需的意外事件是否存在于现实世界的决策中(缺少意外事件缺陷)。我将此分析应用于三个研究主题,以说明问题的范围。我讨论了这种研究传统如何扭曲了我们对学科内外人类思维的理解,以及偏见实验研究的结果是如何被普遍误解的。最后,我认为应该放弃当前的研究传统。

更新日期:2021-01-08
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