The Discrimination Paradox - by Lee Jussim - Unsafe Science
Longstanding and attentive subscribers have probably gotten used to me debunking woke nonsense masquerading as science. And lord knows there is plenty of that.
But the woke are not always wrong. This essay is based on ideas developed in two of my team’s published papers ( here and here). That second paper is mostly my usual fare, including scientific critiques of research on implicit bias, microaggressions and stereotype threat. But, because sometimes, discrimination and bias are real problems, it also includes a full development of:
Unsafe Science is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
There are quite good recent studies out there finding both very high and very low levels of racial discrimination. It might seem that something is wrong somewhere. Perhaps there are deep flaws in the studies finding little discrimination but not in the ones finding substantial discrimination (or vice versa) and I simply failed to uncover them. Perhaps the situations are too different to justify any comparison. Perhaps I am ignorant of a vast literature documenting acts of discrimination occurring at massive levels and the studies finding minimal discrimination are rare outliers.
These are all possible. But I don’t think so. Instead, I believe that the studies described below are all strong, credible and generalizable studies – but if that were true, we would have an apparent paradox of strong studies producing seemingly strikingly contrasting findings.
