Stanford Prof Who Claimed Police Brutality Caused by Subliminal Monkeys Wins MacArthur “Genius” Grant

JACKSONtin-foil-hat

Genius doesn’t mean what it used to. The only genius in the MacArthur “Genius” Grant is in its branding and promotion. It usually goes to boring liberal hacks pushing the same boring predictable agenda.

Or in some cases it goes to groundbreaking geniuses like Stanford Social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt whose work is so ridiculous that it’s a sitcom punch line.

You already know that things are going to be bad because of the “social psychologist” part of the title. Social psychology is one of those fields that serves as a spawning ground for demented leftist ideas while producing nothing useful.

Jennifer Eberhardt’s work is a case in point.

In one study, for example, we exposed some participants to words such as “chimp,” “gorilla” and “orangutan,” flashed on a computer screen at such a rapid rate that they could not be consciously detected. Next, we asked all the participants to watch a two-minute videotape of police officers who had surrounded a suspect and were violently subduing him. Some participants were led to believe that the suspect was white; others were led to believe he was black.

What did we find?

When the participants were led to believe that the suspect was white, exposing them to the ape words beforehand made no difference in their judgments about the use of force displayed in the video. However, when participants believed the suspect was black, those who were exposed to the words thought the police officers were more justified in the amount of force they used. They thought that the black suspect deserved the violence that was directed at him.

Let’s assume that the results here weren’t manipulated, which they probably were, what exactly does it establish? That white people hate monkeys? That white people support police brutality because they think black people are chimpanzees?

The entire idea that people pick up subconsciously on words that they can’t see and that their behavior is then shaped by it is considered scientifically dubious.

This goes back to James Vicary who promoted himself with claims that he could get people to drink coca cola in theaters by flashing subliminal messages.

“In 1957 Vicary conducted his research in to subliminal messaging. He used a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and over a 6 week period he tested subliminal messaging on over 45,000 movie goers.

While the patrons watched a movie, Vicary displayed 2 subliminal messages – on stating “Eat Popcorn” and another stating “Drink Coca-Cola”. The messages were text based subliminal messages and were displayed much faster than the human eye can see – they flashed on the screen for 3/1000s of 1 second – and they were displayed once every 5 seconds.

Results were taken by comparing the current 6 weeks sales of Coca Cola and popcorn to sales figures from the previous 6 weeks. The difference was phenomenal:

Popcorn sales had risen by 57%
Coca Cola sales rose by 18.1%

Except it was all a lie. Vicary was a fraud. So is Eberhardt.

The difference is that Eberhardt probably knows a lot more ways to manipulate the outcome. It works better with people who are tired and people who have been set up to provide a particular response.

You can get people to more readily pick a word if they’ve been subliminally prompted for it and even that is debatable. But that hasn’t stopped a proliferation of “If you show people X and they process it subconsciously, they’ll be more likely to Y” studies out of the soft sciences.

But here’s more Eberthardt

We read every article published about these cases in the Philadelphia Inquirer, from the time the crime was first reported to the sentencing of those arrested, and we tallied the number of ape-related metaphors that appeared in print — things such as “an urban jungle” and “aping a victim’s screams.” Not only were black men and their crimes much more likely to be described in apelike terms, but the number of ape-related metaphors predicted the likelihood that a defendant would be sentenced to death.

Once the jury is sequestered, they aren’t supposed to read the Inquirer. And cities have been called an urban jungle in numerous contexts. That’s a more likely description of a more brutal crime.

Jennifer Eberhardt has set up the outcome of her “research” by selecting the criteria. It’s a common problem in the soft sciences, which use ridiculous criteria to reach their premeditated conclusions.

She isn’t even particularly original. The left has been banging away at this for some time. I recall one survey which asked people if gorillas had black or white skin underneath their fur. If people answered black skin, it was assumed that they were racist.

I hope whoever came up with that one got a genius grant too.

  • http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/ Edward Cline

    There’s the MacArthur grant — which you can’t apply for, you have to wait to be “discovered” by the high priests and priestesses of its nomination panel — and the Guggenheim Foundation, which ladles out sumptuous grants, as well, but not “lifetime fellowships” as MacArthur does. In my salad days, I applied to the Guggenheim twice for a grant to write a novel, and was rejected twice. However, other novelists were awarded grants. I read their novels, and they were left wing, angst-ridden trash about how awful it was to live in America. So, I wrote a novel about Guggenheim-like foundations, “First Prize.” It’s doing very well in sales, thank you.

    • truebearing

      It’s better this way for you. These lefty writers need to be subsidized. They can’t function outside of the hive. You earned your success on your own — the only true success there is. More power to you.

      • http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/ Edward Cline

        Well, I was much younger at the time, and naturally thought that the Guggenheim was sincerely looking for real talent to help advance. What I learned was that it was quite the opposite. That’s the main theme of “First Prize” (almost as a foil, together with the whole publishing industry), and I touch on the subject again at the beginning of “Honors Due.”

  • Boots

    What is interesting is that, from the San Jose Mercury News, she states she moved, with her parents, from a primarily black neighborhood to a primarily Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland when she was young. Her observation was that success wasn’t optional in the Jewish neighborhood. Now she is married and raising three children in a two parent household. Meaning… she grew up in a stable traditional family and is raising her children the same. This is important because she fails to address liberal policy designed to destroy the two parent family and how that has created the environment where far too many young black males are being raised by gangs instead of fathers. The blacks being targeted need look no farther than their own behavior… behavior, attitude and dress are profiled and people are judged by their associates.

    • Pete

      “The blacks being targeted need look no farther than their own behavior… behavior, attitude and dress are profiled and people are judged by their associates.”

      You mean like black kids being targeted by other black kids for being too smart/too white?

      These kids literally get beat down at times for good school performance.

      There have been stories like that going back to 1979. I read an editorial by a young black man. He said he was called a duck for being too studious. I have had a hard looking that editorial up using that word in a search string. It is very frustrating and I doubt I will be able to find it, but I know I read it.

      Alas, there are so many more recent examples and essays to choose from.

      • Boots

        What blacks do to each other is far worse than what “racist society” and liberal policy have done to them. I still default to white liberals as being the root of the problem as they have herded blacks in to liberal run ghettos (HUD Housing) in liberal run Meccas (Detroit, Chicago and so on) where daily survival is the goal for many. But I do recall but not sure where I’ve read about deep resentment by some blacks against others for “acting white” because they were good students or didn’t embrace the hip hop culture. You might try googling “blacks acting white” and see what pops up.

  • Hard Little Machine

    Derp

  • https://www.facebook.com/libertariandude FatLibertarianDude

    If they would have replaced the words Ape, Gorilla etc with cracker, honkey and milky, the outcome would have still been the same. People didn’t subconsciously associate those words with guilt or innocence, they associated skin color based on statistics and personal experience.

    The democrat party has infused such a level of distrust of white people into people with brown skin, that people with brown skin are scared to be ACCUSED of not being “black enough” or being a “token”.

    Of course this distrust works in the favor of the democrat party. It keeps people with brown skin believing they are being held down and subsequently made to believe they are dependent on the democratic big government machine. However, it is all a farce and the strategy has a much darker goal of keeping people with brown skin enslaved for their votes, at the expense of their humanity.

    This has in turn led to more criminal activity in the “black community” and by effect has increased the statistical crime gap between white and minorities.

  • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

    Subliminal messaging theory never made much sense, since if the text was flashed for too brief a time to be perceived, it could not have been read, which means it could not have had any effect.

    Meanwhile, Eberhardt wastes time and money trying to bolster some of the many untruths the Left holds as sacred, such as that whites are prejudiced against blacks. It would be very interesting to have Eberhardt’s exact numbers – how many “more” people who were shown the messages found the force used against blacks to be justifiable? A tiny increase could simply be random chance, which is what hypothesis testing is all about. What alpha level of significance did she use? 20%?

  • truebearing

    What was the racial breakdown of the participants in her idiotic, corrupt “research?” Were there any black participants, and if so, did they react differently, or did they react the same as the white participants? Her study is meaningless and something one would expect from a high school sociology student.

    Sociology definition: the science of pretending to be a science.

  • Douglas J. Bender

    One question that is not answered in her study is if the apes and gorillas were wearing hoodies or not. That could bias the results.

  • Douglas J. Bender

    Knowing you came up with that post is its own reward. Kudos!