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Stanford Prof Who Claimed Police Brutality Caused by Subliminal Monkeys Wins MacArthur “Genius” Grant
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 17, 2014 @ 11:26 am In The Point | 12 Comments
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.
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