On Fri, 8 Jun 2012, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
Edward Savage <epssyis@gmail.com> wrote:
I think Hanlon's razor applies here:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
There is a lot of actual malice however. One story I heard concerns a woman who got a pay rise. When the rumor went around the office a man went to his manager and demanded a pay rise because he "couldn't be paid less than a woman". He got the pay rise he wanted. I don't think that anecdote is in any way unusual and the only uncommon thing about that incident would be how fast the rumor spread.
Another possible explanation: implicit bias which operates at the unconscious level.
There is evidence from social psychology (but I don't have references ready to hand) which indicates that there are people who claim, when asked, to be unprejudiced, but who nevertheless behave in a prejudiced manner in their actual decision-making.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/04/23/unconscious-bias-against- short-men/ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ The above URLs should be useful to people who are interested in such things. I recommend adding Sociological Images to your feed list, it's got a lot of interesting articles which are generally short. Note that while the blog is about images, most of the pictorial posts have more than enough explanation for you to understand what it's about without seeing the picture and most of the videos are interviews which should work well if you can't see people's faces. People who can't see the images have to trust that the description matches. Also the comments are generally of a high quality. Sometimes the discussion about the article has more value than the article itself (IMHO). -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/