The Two Big Lies of WSJ’s Attack on Critical Race Theory, by Julie Hollar, at Fair.

 

July 23, 2021

The Two Big Lies of WSJ’s Attack on Critical Race Theory

Julie Hollar

The Wall Street Journal (7/7/21) takes aim at critical race theory, which it describes as “a neo-Marxist ideology that…teaches that a person is defined above all else by race, gender and sexual orientation.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (7/7/21) recently condemned teachers’ support for anti-racist curricula and professional development. In a piece headlined “The Teachers Unions Go Woke”—because the right loves to use that term as a pejorative—the board wrote:

Believe it or not, union leaders claim that parents who oppose any of this are motivated by hate and are assaulting free speech….

But no one is opposed to teaching about America’s difficult racial history, including the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. What parents are awakening to is that their children are being told the lie that America has made little or no racial progress and therefore its legal, economic and political systems must be turned upside down.

While this may not be surprising coming from the notoriously right-wing Journal board, it’s worth unpacking as a window into the heart of the right’s anti–”critical race theory” campaign—what it’s trying to do, and how.

Opponents of teaching history

First, and crucially, the paper’s claim that “no one is opposed to teaching about America’s difficult racial history” is a flat-out lie, the one that is necessary to sustain the argument.

As much as the right whines about CRT supposedly calling people racists, the point of CRT is explicitly the opposite. CRT turns attention away from individual racist actions, instead highlighting the ways in which the history of racism in this country is embedded in present-day institutions. Right-wing movement leaders know this truth, and they are terrified of it. The evidence is clear as day in their messaging.

Take Texas. The state senate just passed a bill (SB3) that prohibits teaching that

with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.

Also on the Texas list of banned ideas: that “the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States.”

Curriculum elimination

This is the 21st century, so instead of banning a book, Texas is banning a multimedia web project (New York Times Magazine, 8/19/19).

Texas had passed a bill just a month earlier (HB 3979) prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory and the New York Times Magazine‘s 1619 Project, which has an accompanying curriculum and “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Texas Democrats managed to amend that bill to require that a number of historical texts and “historical documents related to the civic accomplishments of marginalized populations” be taught in the state’s social studies curriculum. SB3 would strip the vast majority of these, including:

• “The history of Native Americans”
• The Indian Removal Act
• MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
• Brown v. Board of Education
• The Emancipation Proclamation
• The 15th Amendment
• “The history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”

To top it off, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is also a member of the board that oversees the state’s history museum, successfully pressed the museum to cancel a book event slated to talk about the role of racism and slavery in the Battle of the Alamo (Texas Tribune, 7/2/21).

‘Divisive concepts’

Under Florida’s new rules, teachers “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” (USA Today, 6/11/21).

Texas, of course, is not alone. In Florida, which has also banned the teaching of the 1619 Project, teachers “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” (USA Today, 6/11/21).

Twenty-seven states at this point have introduced restrictions on what can be taught in schools regarding race. Most use identical language (lifted wholesale from Trump’s executive order to prohibit federal agencies, contractors and grant recipients from conducting diversity trainings) that prohibits schools from teaching a list of “divisive concepts”:

• “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist”
• “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex”
• “any other form of race or sex stereotyping or any other form of race or sex scapegoating.”

These further clarify that “race or sex stereotyping” means ascribing, among other things, “privileges, status or beliefs to a race or sex.” (Do you think white people or men have privileges in our society? Sorry, that idea is “divisive” and therefore banned.)

A threat to critical understanding

Kimberlé Crenshaw (Washington Post, 7/2/21): “Racism ended in the past, according to the developing backlash, and we would all be better off if we didn’t try to connect it to the present.”

As leading critical race theory proponent Kimberlé Crenshaw (Washington Post, 7/2/21) points out, while such language doesn’t technically ban teaching about historical racism, it

is even more insidious: It explicitly sets out to sanction certain feelings as part of a disingenuous crackdown on racial division. In closing off room to explore the impact of America’s racist history by citing “division”—a subjective condition that turns on any student’s (or parent’s) claim to feel resentment or guilt—the laws directly threaten any teacher who pursues a sustained, critical understanding of the deeper causes, legacies or contemporary implications of racism in fomenting uncivil discord.

Contrary to the Wall Street Journal‘s disingenuous protestations, the entire point of the current backlash campaign is precisely to arrest the recent movement toward teaching about the United States’ “difficult” racial history, because understanding the structural racism of the past reveals and gives context to its persistence.

A whitewashed history that erases the roots of structural racism is the linchpin to the right’s argument that America cannot be a racist or sexist country today. It follows that any inequalities that exist must be based on individual behavior, and racial (and gender) justice movements—against, say, police violence or attacks on voting rights—are misguided.

If they cannot teach about structural racism, then both the past and present of racial and gender inequality can only be attributed to a few bad apples.

The myth of ‘racial progress’

Which brings us to the second step in the argument, as presented by the Journal:

What parents are awakening to is that their children are being told the lie that America has made little or no racial progress and therefore its legal, economic and political systems must be turned upside down.

There’s no attempt at obfuscation here: They absolutely don’t want anyone talking about the fact that systemic racism continues to this day, and therefore needs to be addressed institutionally—which is exactly what the BLM protests of last summer made the country talk about.

The Black/White Economic Divide Is as Wide as It Was in 1968, the Washington Post (6/4/20) reported.

They don’t want anyone talking about the fact that Black men are two and a half more times as likely as white men to be killed by police (PNAS, 8/20/19), but that those Black men killed are twice as likely to be unarmed (Nature, 5/26/21).

They don’t want anyone talking about the fact that the current life expectancy for a Black American is 73 years, versus 78 for white Americans—with Covid only expanding the discrepancy (PNAS, 2/21/21). This gap has not not narrowed appreciably since the Jim Crow era.

They don’t want anyone talking about the fact that Black people are uninsured at almost twice the rate of whites (Center for American Progress, 5/7/20), and that Black and Indigenous patients continue to receive poorer health care than white patients (New England Journal of Medicine, 2/25/21).

They don’t want anyone talking about the fact that race and ethnicity are better predictors of exposure to pollution than poverty is (Atlantic, 2/28/18).

They don’t want anyone talking about the fact that the median Black family has less than one-eighth the net wealth of the median white family, and that this number essentially hasn’t changed in 30 years.

After beginning by warning against “progressive political indoctrination,” the Journal concluded, “Parents have every right, even a duty, to fight back against this invasion of progressive politics in their schools.”

By “fight[ing] back” against an “invasion of progressive politics,” the Journal means cleansing the classroom of any serious discussion of racism—whether in the past or present.

Pensamento Crítico e Desinformação (Fake News) - Confiança perdida: quando a confiança na ciência fomenta a pseudociência

"“As pessoas precisam entender como a ciência funciona e como chega às suas conclusões”, acrescentou Albarracín. "As pessoas podem aprender em quais fontes de informação confiar e como validar essas informações. Não é apenas um caso de confiar na ciência, mas ter a capacidade de ser mais crítico e entender como fazer uma dupla verificação sobre a informação.""

July 26, 2021

Misplaced trust: When trust in science fosters pseudoscience, by University of Pennsylvania

The COVID-19 pandemic and the politicization of health-prevention measures such as vaccination and mask-wearing have highlighted the need for people to accept and trust science.

But trusting science isn't enough.

A new study finds that people who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims containing scientific references than people who do not trust science. Reminding people of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, but reminding them of the value of trusting science does not.

"We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience," the researchers write. "These findings have implications for science broadly and the application of psychological science to curbing misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic."

"People are susceptible to being deceived by the trappings of science," said co-author Dolores Albarracín, the Alexandra Heyman Nash Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor of the University of Pennsylvania. She said, for example, that COVID-19 vaccines have been the target of false claims that they contain pollutants or other dangerous ingredients. "It's deception but it's pretending to be scientific. So people who are taught to trust science and normally do trust science can be fooled as well."

Albarracín, a social psychologist and director of the Science of Science Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said, "What we need are people who also can be critical of information. A critical mindset can make you less gullible and make you less likely to believe in conspiracy theories."

The study, conducted by Albarracín and colleagues when she was in her former position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was published recently in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The experiments: Misinformation about a virus and GMOs

For the study, researchers conducted four preregistered experiments with online participants. The researchers created two fictitious stories—one about a virus created as a bioweapon, mirroring claims about the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and the other about an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about the effects of genetically modified organisms or GMOs on tumors.

The invented stories contained references to either scientific concepts and scientists who claimed to have done research on the topic or descriptions from people identified as activists. Participants in each experiment, ranging from 382 to 605 people, were randomly assigned to read either the scientific or non-scientific versions of the stories.

Findings

What the researchers found was that among people who did not have trust in science, the presence of scientific content in a story did not have a significant effect. But people who did have higher levels of trust in science were more likely to believe the stories with scientific content and more likely to disseminate them.

In the fourth experiment, participants were prompted to have either a 'trust in science' or a 'critical evaluation' mindset. Those primed to have a critical mindset were less likely to believe the stories, whether or not the stories used seemingly scientific references. "The critical mindset makes you less gullible, regardless of the information type," Albarracín said.

"People need to understand how science operates and how science arrives at its conclusions," Albarracín added. "People can be taught what sources of information to trust and how to validate that information. It's not just a case of trusting science, but having the ability to be more critical and understand how to double-check what information is really about."

The lead author, postdoctoral researcher Thomas C. O'Brien of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, added, "Although trust in science has important societal benefits, it is not a panacea that will protect people against misinformation. Spreaders of misinformation commonly reference science. Science communication cannot simply urge people to trust anything that references science, and instead should encourage people to learn about scientific methods and ways to critically engage with issues that involve scientific content."

The researchers concluded that "although cynicism of science could have disastrous impacts, our results suggest that advocacy for trusting science must go beyond scientific labels, to focus on specific issues, critical evaluation, and the presence of consensus among several scientists... Fostering trust in the 'healthy skepticism' inherent to the scientific process may also be a critical element of protecting against misinformation ... Empowering people with knowledge about the scientific validation process and the motivation to be critical and curious may give audiences the resources they need to dismiss fringe but dangerous pseudoscience."

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Explore further

How news coverage affects public trust in science

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More information: Thomas C. O'Brien et al, Misplaced trust: When trust in science fosters belief in pseudoscience and the benefits of critical evaluation, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104184

Inteligência Artificial - Vai ser possível parar de construir Inteligência Artificial ruim?

 “Stop Building Bad AI” [Boston Review].

A obstacle to more robust ethical reflection on AI [Artificial Inteligence] development is the presumption that we always have the option of non-deployment. If at some point in the future it turns out that an AI tool is having unacceptably bad consequences, some might say, we can simply decide to stop using the tool then. 

This may be true in some cases, but it is not clear why we should think it is always possible—especially without industry-wide regulation. The labor effects of automation, for example, may well be effectively irreversible. In current market conditions, it is hard to imagine how a company could take back its decision to replace a human-executed task with an AI-driven, automated process. 

Should the company face backlash over its AI tool, current incentives make it far likelier that it would seek to find another way to automate the task rather than rehire humans to execute it. The pressure to automate is now so strong in some sectors that some companies are pretending to have built and deployed AI. In 2016, for example, Bloomberg News reported that personal assistant startup X.ai was directing employees to simulate the work of AI chatbots, performing avalanches of mind-numbing, repetitive tasks such as generating auto-reply emails and scheduling appointments. 

It would be naïve to think that once such tools are actually built and deployed, the work force could easily revert to its pre-automated structure.

apud: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/07/200pm-water-cooler-7-26-2021.html

Política - "cidadãos comuns podem começar a espelhar as emoções raivosas dos políticos sobre os quais lêem nas notícias".

"Se os democratas lerem sobre um colega democrata ficar bravo, por exemplo, eles frequentemente relatam que eles próprios estão com raiva. Em contraste, os eleitores azuis [Democratas] que encontraram informações neutras ou viram uma citação irada de um republicano não experimentaram as mesmas oscilações de emoção."

"O furor político pode se espalhar facilmente: os cidadãos comuns podem começar a espelhar as emoções raivosas dos políticos sobre os quais lêem nas notícias. Esse" contágio emocional "pode até levar alguns eleitores - que, de outra forma, se desligariam da política - a irem às urnas."

 July 19, 2021

Angry politicians make angry voters, new study finds, by Daniel Strain, University of Colorado at Boulder

Politicians may have good reason to turn to angry rhetoric, according to research led by political scientists from Colorado—the strategy seems to work, at least in the short term.

In a new study, Carey Stapleton at the University of Colorado Boulder and Ryan Dawkins at the U.S. Air Force Academy discovered that political furor may spread easily: Ordinary citizens can start to mirror the angry emotions of the politicians they read about in the news. Such "emotional contagion" might even drive some voters who would otherwise tune out of politics to head to the polls.

"Politicians want to get reelected, and anger is a powerful tool that they can use to make that happen," said Stapleton, who recently earned his Ph.D. in political science at CU Boulder.

He and Dawkins, an assistant professor, published their results this month in the journal Political Research Quarterly.

The researchers surveyed roughly 1,400 people online from across the political spectrum, presenting them with a series of mock news stories about a recent political debate. They discovered that when it comes to politics, anger may lead to more anger. Subjects who read about an enraged politician from their own party were more likely to report feeling mad themselves than people who didn't. Those same steaming partisans also reported that they were more likely to get involved in politics, from attending rallies to voting on Election Day.

"Anger is a very strong, short-term emotion that motivates people into action," said Stapleton. "But there can be these much more negative implications in the long term. There's always the potential that anger can turn into rage and violence."

Tempers rising

Anger and politics in the U.S. have long gone hand-in-hand—the nation's second president, John Adams, once referred to Alexander Hamilton as a "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler." But Stapleton and Dawkins' findings come at a time when American politics has grown especially divisive.

According to the Pew Research Center, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, "around nine-in-ten Trump and Biden supporters said there would be 'lasting harm' to the nation if the other candidate won." That anger boiled over with deadly results when a mob of supporters of then-President Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Stapleton, who is not related to the Colorado political family, wanted to find out just how contagious those kinds of emotions could be. He will start a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame in the fall.

"Most political science research to date has focused on what we do when we feel an emotion like anger, rather than how our emotions affect other people," Stapleton said.

Fighting words

To find out how the emotions of politicians might rub off on their supporters, he and Dawkins ran an experiment. The duo wrote a series of news stories about a debate on immigration policy between two candidates for an open Congressional seat in Minnesota. Unbeknownst to the study's subjects, neither the candidates nor their debate were real.

In some cases, the faux politicians used language that tipped into outrage (although it might still look tame in the current political landscape). "When I look at our borders, I'm enraged by what I see," as an example. In other cases, the soap boxers stuck to more neutral language.

The team's results are among the first to show what many Americans have long known—that political anger can be a powerful force.

"We report being angrier after seeing our fellow partisans being angry," Stapleton said. "When the other side is angry, it doesn't seem to affect us much at all."

If Democrats read about a fellow Democrat getting mad, for example, they often reported feeling angry themselves. In contrast, blue voters who encountered neutral information or saw an angry quote from a Republican didn't experience the same swings in emotion.

The study also brought a twist: The people who were the most susceptible to those shifts weren't the die-hard partisans on either side of the aisle. They were more moderate voters.

"The really far left and right are already so amped up," Stapleton said. "But these weakly-aligned partisans who are notoriously less likely to participate in elections were more susceptible to changing their emotions."

For Stapleton, the results carry an important lesson for ordinary voters: When watching the news, people should pay attention to how politicians may try to appeal to or even manipulate emotions to get what they want. But, he added, anger is only part of the picture. In a previous study, he and his colleagues discovered that optimistic people are much more likely to be politically active than pessimists.

"Anger is one way we can get people to vote and get engaged in politics, but it's not the only way," he said. "It doesn't have to be all doom and gloom."

Explore further

Researchers point to populism's appeal to victimhood and resentment

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More information: Carey E. Stapleton et al, Catching My Anger: How Political Elites Create Angrier Citizens, Political Research Quarterly (2021). DOI: 10.1177/10659129211026972

Inteligência Emocional, comportamento-social e locomoção: cruciais para melhor desempenho matemático

“De fato, análises estatísticas específicas (regressão e mediação) mostram que altas pontuações em testes que avaliam o conhecimento emocional, a atividade locomotora e o comportamento social predizem um melhor desempenho matemático desses alunos”, observa Thalia Cavadini, pesquisadora do Departamento de Psicologia da FAPSE e primeira autora do estudo ".

JULY 15, 2021

Emotion, cooperation and locomotion crucial from an early age, by University of Geneva, at Phys.org

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

What are the fundamental skills that young children need to develop at the start of school for future academic success? While a large body of research shows strong links between cognitive skills (attention, memory, etc.) and academic skills on the one hand, and emotional skills on the other, in students from primary school to university, few studies have explored these links in children aged 3 to 6 in a school context. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and Valais University of Teacher Education, Switzerland (HEP-VS), in collaboration with teachers from Savoie in France and their pedagogical advisor, examined the links between emotion knowledge, cooperation, locomotor activity and numerical skills in 706 pupils aged 3 to 6. The results, to be read in the journal Scientific Reports, show for the first time that emotion knowledge, cooperative social behavior and locomotor activity are interrelated and associated with numerical skills. These results are in line with the political and scientific consensus on the importance of social-emotional skills in early schooling and suggest that locomotor activity should be added to these fundamental skills.

A growing number of studies are examining the fundamental abilities that prepare children for school and that are particularly crucial for their future academic success. "Among these abilities, 'emotion knowledge' contributes significantly and is a long-term predictor of social behavior and academic success," says Edouard Gentaz, professor in the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE) of the UNIGE and the last author of this study. On the other hand, few studies have examined the links between socio-emotional and academic skills in preschool children. "To fill this gap, we joined forces with the HEP-VS and a team of teachers from Savoie in France and their pedagogical advisor to examine how emotion knowledge, social behavior and locomotor activity are associated and linked to the numerical skills in 706 pupils aged between 3 and 6 years old," continues the Geneva-based researcher. Unlike most research that generally examines school results through reading tests, this study focuses on numerical learning, the performance of which is less correlated with parents' socio-economic level than language skills.

Original tests adapted to the preschool age and educational context

To examine the links between the four variables studied, age-appropriate tests were developed in close collaboration with 33 volunteer teachers, who participated in an interactive workshop in which they were trained to set up, perform and evaluate the different tests in a standardized manner. Thus, emotion knowledge was assessed through two emotion comprehension tasks. The first measured the recognition of the primary emotions of anger, fear, joy and sadness as well as a neutral facial expression and the second measured the understanding of the external causes underlying these emotions in others. This second task was subdivided into two different subtasks: the teacher successively presented the student with five drawing scenarios illustrated by a picture of a character with a blank face facing a particular situation (e.g., "This boy has just received a present for his birthday') and then asked the student to indicate, among five illustrations of facial expressions, the one that corresponded to what the character felt in each situation, first by pointing to it (non-verbal responses) and then by naming it. The assessment of mathematical skills included three numerical tests. For example, the first test sought to assess whether students understood that the cardinal of a collection does not change when the spatial arrangement or nature of its elements is modified: the teacher placed a photograph in front of the student showing four collections of objects (two of which were composed of the same number of elements) and asked the student to indicate which collection contained the largest number of objects, which contained the fewest, and which two collections contained the same number.

Working closely with the teachers and their advisor, the psychologists developed observation grids to assess the locomotor activity and social behavior of the pupils. For locomotor activity, the grid created made it possible to rate the children's performance on an agility course consisting of various installations on the ground and in the air. As for social behavior, the grid developed made it possible to evaluate the children's reactions and attitudes during the practice of two different team games (one with a ball and the other without) observed by the teachers.

Key skills to promote numerical learning

The results of this study reveal that emotion knowledge, locomotor activity and social behavior are interdependent and associated with pupils' numerical skills from the age of 3 to 6 years. "Indeed, specific statistical analyses (regression and mediation) show that high scores on tests assessing emotion knowledge, locomotor activity and social behavior predict better mathematical performance in these students," notes Thalia Cavadini, researcher in the Department of Psychology at FAPSE and first author of the study. "Thus, our results are in line with the scientific consensus on the importance of social-emotional skills at the beginning of schooling and suggest that locomotor activity should be added to these fundamental skills," she concludes. Furthermore, this study is the first to show that emotional, social and locomotor skills promote school learning in toddlers.

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Explore further

Using play to 'school' children's emotions

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More information: Thalia Cavadini et al, Emotion knowledge, social behaviour and locomotor activity predict the mathematic performance in 706 preschool children, Scientific Reports (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-93706-7

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Etnia, Gênero e padrão de beleza: -"Um estudo de 25 anos com mulheres negras relaciona o uso frequente de relaxantes capilares à base de soda cáustica a um risco maior de câncer de mama", no The Conversation, por Kimberly Bertrand,

"Um estudo de 25 anos com mulheres negras relaciona o uso frequente de relaxantes capilares à base de soda cáustica a um risco maior de câncer de mama", no The Conversation, por Kimberly Bertrand, professora assistente de medicina, Universidade de Boston
...
O Estudo de Saúde da Mulher Negra da Universidade de Boston acompanhou 59.000 mulheres afro-americanas autoidentificadas por mais de 25 anos, enviando questionários a cada dois anos sobre novos diagnósticos e fatores que podem influenciar sua saúde.

Usando esses dados em nosso próprio estudo, minha equipe de epidemiologistas e eu descobrimos que mulheres negras que usaram produtos para cabelo contendo soda cáustica pelo menos sete vezes por ano durante 15 ou mais anos tiveram um risco aumentado de aproximadamente 30% de câncer de mama positivo para receptor de estrogênio em comparação com usuários menos frequentes.

...
https://theconversation.com/25-year-long-study-of-black-women-links-frequent-use-of-lye-based-hair-relaxers-to-a-higher-risk-of-breast-cancer-163563

25-year-long study of Black women links frequent use of lye-based hair relaxers to a higher risk of breast cancer, at The Conversation, by Kimberly Bertrand, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Boston University

he Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

Frequent and long-term use of lye-based hair straightening products, or relaxers, may increase the risk of breast cancer among Black women, compared with more moderate use.

Boston University’s Black Women’s Health Study followed 59,000 self-identified African American women for over 25 years, sending questionnaires every two years on new diagnoses and factors that might influence their health.

Using these data in our own study, my team of epidemiologists and I found that Black women who used hair products containing lye at least seven times a year for 15 or more years had an approximately 30% increased risk of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer compared with more infrequent users.

The Conversation is a news organization dedicated to facts and evidence

The minimal association between hair relaxers (with or without lye) and breast cancer risk for moderate users is generally reassuring. But the elevated risk for the heaviest users of lye-based hair products – which included about 20% of study participants – is concerning.

Why it matters

There is an urgent need to address racial disparities in breast cancer.

Black women diagnosed with breast cancer are 40% more likely to die from the disease than white women. While systemic factors such as delays in diagnosis and poorer health care likely contribute to this disparity, they don’t seem to fully explain the survival gap between Black and white women.

Black and white women have the same lifetime risk for breast cancer, but Black women are often diagnosed with more aggressive forms earlier in life. kali9/E+ via Getty Images

Black women are more likely than white women to develop highly aggressive breast cancers that have higher mortality rates, but researchers don’t really know why. However, scientists do know that chemical hair relaxers, more often used by Black women, contain potentially harmful chemicals, including possible carcinogens and chemicals known as endocrine disrupters, which can interfere with hormone function and could raise breast cancer risk. In the Black Women’s Health Study, 95% of women reported past or current use of these products.

This study fills a knowledge gap on the potential health effects of a consumer product popular among Black women. Given these findings, women may want to be cautious about the types of personal-care products they choose.

What still isn’t known

Because the Black Women’s Health Study did not have information on specific brands of hair relaxers, my team and I could not determine which specific ingredients might be most relevant for breast cancer risk. In addition, because we asked about hair relaxer use before 1997, the results of this study may not apply to products on the market today.

Though our findings suggest a link between the use of certain types of hair relaxers and breast cancer, epidemiologic studies such as this one cannot definitively prove that hair relaxers cause breast cancer. Additional research is needed, especially on currently available products.

What other research is being done

Evidence from animal and other experimental studies support a possible link between chemicals included in hair relaxers and cancer development. Studies on hair relaxer use and breast cancer risk in people, however, have had inconsistent results, possibly because of differences in the types of products used or asked about.

What’s next

Thanks to 59,000 study participants in the Black Women’s Health Study, our research team continues to investigate risk factors for breast cancer and other diseases in Black women. By understanding what causes disease and learning about ways to lower risk, society can move one step closer toward eliminating health disparities.

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]

Diferença e apropriação cultural - A meditação da mente plena pode tornar alguns americanos mais egoístas e menos generosos, Por Michael J. Poulin,

Envolver-se em um breve exercício de atenção
- tornou as pessoas que identificaram palavras “eu / meu” 33% menos propensas a se voluntariar,
- mas fez com que aqueles que identificaram palavras “nós / nosso” 40% mais propensas a se voluntariar.
Em outras palavras, apenas mudar a forma como as pessoas pensavam sobre si mesmas no momento - filtrando a água dos pensamentos relacionados a si mesmas, se preferir - alterou os efeitos da atenção plena no comportamento de muitas das pessoas que participaram deste estudo (Traduçaõ, VanRes).

Mindfulness meditation can make some Americans more selfish and less generous, By Michael J. Poulin, Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Buffalo. Originally published at The Conversation

July 12, 2021 8.26am EDT

When Japanese chef Yoshihiro Murata travels, he brings water with him from Japan. He says this is the only way to make truly authentic dashi, the flavorful broth essential to Japanese cuisine. There’s science to back him up: water in Japan is notably softer – which means it has fewer dissolved minerals – than in many other parts of the world. So when Americas enjoy Japanese food, they arguably aren’t getting quite the real thing.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to food. Taking something out of its geographic or cultural context often changes the thing itself.

Take the word “namaste.” In modern Hindi, it’s simply a respectful greeting, the equivalent of a formal “hello” appropriate for addressing one’s elders. But in the U.S., its associations with yoga have led many people to believe that it’s an inherently spiritual word.

Another cultural tradition that has changed across time and place is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental expansive awareness of one’s experiences, often cultivated through meditation.

A range of studies have found mindfulness to be beneficial for the people who practice it in a number of ways.

However, very little research has examined its effects on societies, workplaces and communities. As a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, I wondered if the growing enthusiasm for mindfulness might be overlooking something important: the way practicing it might affect others.

A Booming Market

In just the past few years, the mindfulness industry has exploded in the U.S. Current estimates put the U.S. meditation market – which includes meditation classes, studios, and apps – at approximately US$1.2 billion. It’s expected to grow to over $2 billion by 2022.

Hospitals, schools and even prisons are teaching and promoting mindfulness, while over 1 in 5 employers currently offer mindfulness training.

The enthusiasm for mindfulness makes sense: Research shows mindfulness can reduce stress, increase self-esteem and decrease symptoms of mental illness.

Given these findings, it’s easy to assume that mindfulness has few, if any, downsides. The employers and educators who promote it certainly seem to think so. Perhaps they hope that mindfulness won’t just make people feel better, but that it will also make them be better. That is, maybe mindfulness can make people more generous, cooperative or helpful – all traits that tend to be desirable in employees or students.

Mindfulness Migrates

But in reality, there’s good reason to doubt that mindfulness, as practiced in the U.S., would automatically lead to good outcomes.

In fact, it may do the opposite.

That’s because it’s been taken out of its context. Mindfulness developed as a part of Buddhism, where it’s intimately tied up with
- Buddhist 

    spiritual teachings and 

    morality. 

- Mindfulness in the U.S., on the other hand, is often taught and practiced in 

    purely secular terms.  It’s frequently offered simply as a tool for 

    focusing attention and 

    improving well-being, 

            a conception of mindfulness some critics have referred to as “McMindfulness.”

Not only that, mindfulness and Buddhism developed in Asian cultures in which the typical way in which people think about themselves differs from that in the U.S. Specifically, Americans tend to think of themselves most often in independent terms with “I” as their focus: “what I want,” “who I am.” By contrast, people in Asian cultures more often think of themselves in interdependent terms with “we” as their focus: “what we want,” “who we are.”

Cultural differences in how people think about themselves are subtle and easy to overlook – sort of like different kinds of water. But just as those different kinds of water can change flavors when you cook, I wondered if different ways of thinking about the self might alter the effects of mindfulness.

For interdependent-minded people, what if mindful attention to their own experiences might naturally include thinking about other people – and make them more helpful or generous? And if this were the case, would it then be true that, for independent-minded people, mindful attention would spur them to focus more on their individual goals and desires, and therefore cause them to become more selfish?

Testing the Social Effects

I floated these questions to my colleague at the University at Buffalo, Shira Gabriel, because she’s a recognized expert on 

independent versus interdependent 

ways of thinking about the self.

She agreed that this was an interesting question, so we worked with our students Lauren Ministero, Carrie Morrison and Esha Naidu to conduct a study in which we had 366 college students come into the lab – this was before the COVID-19 pandemic – and either engage in

- a brief mindfulness meditation or
- a control exercise that actually involved mind wandering.

We also measured the extent to which people thought of themselves in independent or interdependent terms. (It’s important to note that, although cultural differences in thinking about the self are real, there is variability in this characteristic even within cultures.)

At the end of the study, we asked people if they could help solicit donations for a charity by stuffing envelopes to send to potential donors.

The results – which have been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science – detail how, among relatively interdependent-minded individuals, the brief mindfulness meditation caused them to become more generous. Specifically, briefly engaging in a mindfulness exercise – as opposed to mind wandering – appeared to increase how many envelopes interdependent-minded people stuffed by 17%. However, among relatively independent-minded individuals, mindfulness appeared to make them less generous with their time. This group of participants stuffed 15% fewer envelopes in the mindful condition than in the mind-wandering condition.

In other words, the effects of mindfulness can be different for people depending on the way they think about themselves. This figurative “water” can really change the recipe of mindfulness.

Of course, water can be filtered, and likewise, how people think about themselves is fluid: We’re all capable of thinking about ourselves in both independent and interdependent ways at different times.

In fact, there’s a relatively simple way to get people to shift their thinking about themselves. As the researchers Marilynn Brewer and Wendi Gardner discovered, all you have to do is have them read a passage that is altered to have either a lot of “I” and “me” statements or a lot of “we” and “us” statements, and ask people to identify all of the pronouns. Past research shows that this simple task reliably shifts people to think of themselves in more independent versus interdependent terms.

Our research team wanted to see if this simple effect could also shift the effects of mindfulness on social behavior.

With this in mind, we conducted one more study. This time, it was online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we used the same exercises.

First, however, we had people complete the pronoun task mentioned above. Afterwards, we asked people if they would volunteer to contact potential donors to a charity.

Our results were striking: Engaging in a brief mindfulness exercise made people who identified “I/me” words 33% less likely to volunteer, but it made those who identified “we/us” words 40% more likely to volunteer. In other words, just shifting how people thought of themselves in the moment – filtering the water of self-related thoughts, if you will – altered the effects of mindfulness on the behavior of many of the people who took part in this study.

Attention as a Tool

The take-home message? Mindfulness could lead to good social outcomes or bad ones, depending on context.

In fact, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard said as much when he wrote that even a sniper embodies a type of mindfulness. “Bare attention,” he added, “as consummate as it might be, is no more than a tool.” Yes, it can cause a great deal of good. But it can also “cause immense suffering.”

If practitioners strive to use mindfulness to reduce suffering, rather than increase it, it’s important to ensure that people are also mindful of themselves as existing in relation with others.

This “water” may be the key ingredient for bringing out the full flavor of mindfulness.

Michael J. Poulin Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Buffalo

Disclosure statement

Michael J. Poulin receives funding from the National Science Foundation. He is affiliated with the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

Ética: "Esconder a verdade pode promover a cooperação"?

 July 9, 2021

Obscuring the truth can promote cooperation, by University of Pennsylvania, at phys.org 

"Typically when we and others have considered how to maintain cooperation, it's been thought that it's important to punish cheaters and to make that public to encourage others to cooperate," Morsky says. "But our study suggests that a side effect of public punishment is that it reveals how much or how little people are cooperating, so conditional cooperators may stop cooperating. You might be better off hiding the cheaters."

Remember Napster? The peer-to-peer file sharing company, popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depended on users sharing their music files. To promote cooperation, such software "could mislead its users," says Bryce Morsky, a postdoc in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences.

Some file-sharing companies falsely asserted that all of their users were sharing. Or, they displayed the mean number of files shared per user, hiding the fact that some users were sharing a great deal and many others were not. Related online forums promoted the idea that sharing was both ethical and the norm. These tactics were effective in getting users to share because they tapped into innate human social norms of fairness.

That got Morsky thinking. "Commonly in the literature on cooperation, you need reciprocity to get cooperation, and you need to know the reputations of those you're interacting with," he says. "But Napster users were anonymous, and so there should have been widespread 'cheating'—people taking files without sharing—and yet cooperation still occurred. Evidently, obscuring the degree of cheating worked for Napster, but is this true more generally and is it sustainable?"

In a new paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, Morsky and Erol Akçay, an associate professor in the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology, looked at this scenario: Could a cooperative community form and stabilize if the community's behaviors were masked? And would things change if the community members' true behaviors were eventually revealed?

Using a mathematical model to simulate the creation and maintenance of a community, their findings show, as in the example of Napster, that a degree of deceit or obfuscation does not impede and, indeed, can promote the formation of a cooperative community.

The researchers' modeling relied on an assumption that has been upheld time and time again, that humans are conditionally cooperative. "They will cooperate when others cooperate," Akçay says.

But the threshold of when someone will start cooperating differs from individual to individual. Some people will cooperate even when nobody else is, while others require most of the community to cooperate before they will do so too. Depending on the number of people with different cooperation thresholds, a community can wind up with either very high or very low levels of cooperation. "Our goal was to figure out, How can obfuscation act as a catalyst to get us to a highly cooperative community?" says Morsky.

To model this, the researchers envisioned a theoretical community in which individuals would join in a "naïve" state, believing that everyone else in the community is cooperating. As a result, most of them, too, begin cooperating.

At some point, however, the formerly naïve individuals become savvy and learn the true rate of cooperation in the community. Depending on their threshold of conditional cooperation, they may continue to cooperate, cheat, or get discouraged and leave the community.

In the model, when the researchers decreased the learning rate—or kept the true rate of cooperation in the group a secret for longer—they found that cooperation levels grew high, and savvy individuals quickly left the population. "And because those savvy individuals are the ones that don't cooperate as readily, that leaves only the individuals who are cooperating, so the average rate of cooperation gets very high," says Akçay.

Cooperative behavior could also come to dominate provided there was a steady inflow of naïve individuals into the population.

Akçay and Morsky note that their findings stand out from past research on cooperation.

"Typically when we and others have considered how to maintain cooperation, it's been thought that it's important to punish cheaters and to make that public to encourage others to cooperate," Morsky says. "But our study suggests that a side effect of public punishment is that it reveals how much or how little people are cooperating, so conditional cooperators may stop cooperating. You might be better off hiding the cheaters."

To continue exploring conditional cooperation, the researchers hope to follow with experiments with human participants as well as further modeling to reveal the tipping points for moving a group to either cooperate or not and how these tipping points could be changed by interventions. "You can see how conditional cooperation factors into behavior during this pandemic, for example," Akçay says. "If you think a lot of people are being careful (for example, wearing masks and social distancing), you might as well, but if the expectation is that not many people are being careful you may choose not to. Mask wearing is easy to observe, but other behaviors are harder, and that affects how the dynamics of these behaviors might unfold.

"This is a problem that humans have had to solve over and over again," he says. "Some amount of cooperation is required to have a society be worthwhile."

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Explore further

Designing public institutions that foster cooperation

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More information: Bryce Morsky et al, False beliefs can bootstrap cooperative communities through social norms, Evolutionary Human Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2021.30