{"id":47007,"date":"2014-09-08T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=47007"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:38","slug":"should-journalists-trust-themselves-to-figure-out-which-sources-are-trustworthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/should-journalists-trust-themselves-to-figure-out-which-sources-are-trustworthy\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Journalists Trust Themselves to Figure Out Which Sources Are Trustworthy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Reg<\/a>

Reg Chua<\/p><\/div>\n

People Like Us<\/em><\/p>\n

Who should\u00a0you trust? (Or, for all you pedants out there, whom should you trust?)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an important question for all of us, not least when you\u2019re buying a used car (and believe me, I know.)<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s probably even more important for journalists, who talk to strangers on a regular basis and need to make snap judgments about how much faith we\u00a0should have in what they say.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s the\u00a0bad news: You shouldn\u2019t trust yourself to figure out who you should trust.<\/p>\n

At least that\u2019s the case if I understand Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People<\/a>, a very interesting book by social psychologists\u00a0Mahzarin Banaji<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Anthony Greenwald<\/a>, correctly. Blindspot<\/em> is a good book (although Mahzarin is an even better lecturer; she recently gave a great talk to a number of Thomson Reuters folks) that focuses on the biases and prejudices \u2013 \u201cmindbugs,\u201d she calls them \u2013 that we have, but that we don\u2019t know we have.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t believe me (or rather, her)? Check out the Harvard Implicit Association Test<\/a>, which tracks, via the length of time it takes for you to run through a series of matching tests, how strongly you associate one group with a set of traits \u2013 for example, female names with domestic terms, as opposed to men and work issues, or white faces with Americaness vs. non-whites. Try the test(s):\u00a0 They\u2019re both scary and enlightening. And if you\u2019re like me, you\u2019ll take them a couple of times because you don\u2019t like how\u00a0the results turned out.<\/p>\n

\"conformity<\/a><\/p>\n

Alas, the results don\u2019t change.\u00a0 At least not very much, and not without a fair amount of intervention.<\/p>\n

Which is another way of saying that we all have biases, many of which we\u2019re unaware of, and that we act on them unconsciously.\u00a0 That\u2019s not to say we\u2019re racist or sexist, or that we knowingly discriminate against groups we don\u2019t like.\u00a0 But it does mean we\u2019re often oblivious to the many small and large ways our biases tilt our judgement.<\/p>\n

Consider that in 1970 women comprised less than less than 10% of major orchestras in the US and fewer than 20% of new hires. \u00a0As Mahzarin recounts in her book, back then auditions for new members were conducted in front of a team of seasoned musicians, often from that orchestra.\u00a0 You\u2019d expect that they had well-trained ears, able to select the best candidates.\u00a0 And they largely picked men.<\/p>\n

But then an interesting thing happened when they started auditioning candidates behind a curtain, and taking pains not to let the panel know if it was a man or a woman was playing.\u00a0 More women won spots.\u00a0 And after two decades of what\u2019s now a widespread practice,<\/p>\n

\u2026the proportion of women hired by major symphony orchestras doubled \u2013 from 20 percent to 40 percent.\u00a0 In retrospect it is easy to see that a virtuoso = male stereotype was an invalid but potent mindbug, undermining the orchestra\u2019s ability to select the most talented musicians.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Here\u2019s\u00a0another study<\/a> of the same phenomena, with different numbers but the same conclusion.)<\/p>\n

What does that mean for our ability to spot people who seem to be more (or less) trustworthy or truthful? \u00a0Or more precisely, what does it mean for our bias towards trusting some types of people more than others? What mindbug do we have that says XXX = trustworthy<\/em>?<\/p>\n

It may come down to how much we identify with them.\u00a0\u00a0 Brain imagining scans show that we use one part of our brains to think about people we believe are more like us, and another part to deal with people we think are different from us. Researchers came up with profiles for fictional people who were similar to and different from experimental subjects; then they looked at the subjects\u2019 brain activity when asked simple questions about the fictional people \u2013 eg,\u00a0 how likely do you think is it that John will go home for Thanksgiving?<\/p>\n

The brain, it turns out, engages two different clusters of neurons in thinking about other people, and which cluster gets activated depends on the degree to which one identifies with those others.<\/em><\/p>\n

Does that mean that, in practice, we treat people we think are different from us differently? \u00a0It\u2019s not clear from the brain imaging research, but it\u2019s at least clear that we use a different part of our brain when we deal with them. \u00a0And that should be a warning to journalists, who have to deal with a broad range of people \u2013 many of whom we don\u2019t like, personally \u2013 and try to treat them all equally, at least in terms of the information they give us.<\/p>\n

And the issue\u00a0may be less about discriminating against people we dislike \u2013 I\u2019d like to think we\u2019re reasonably sensitive to that \u2013 but\u00a0more about\u00a0the additional credence we give people we do identify with.<\/p>\n

Mahzarin gives an example of a college professor who hurt her hand and had to go to the university ER; the attending physician\u00a0gave her professional but perfunctory help until someone mentioned her position at the university.\u00a0 The doctor quickly pulled in a specialist and escalated the level of her care once he identified her as\u00a0a colleague.<\/p>\n

The importance of (the professor\u2019s) story is that by capturing not just acts of commission but acts of omission, we expand our sense of how hidden bias operates.\u00a0 It allows us to see that the people responsible for such acts of omission are, like the doctor who is the main actor in this story, by and large good people who believe that helping is admirable.<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, the doctor didn\u2019t discriminate against<\/em> the professor by giving her adequate care; but he then did discriminate for<\/em> her once he realized her position.<\/p>\n

I remember, years ago, being on a panel and being asked by a journalism student about whether it was alright to be friends with\u00a0military and police personnel who she\u00a0had to cover (this was pre-9\/11, in the days before the military was much less visible in American society).\u00a0 The trouble with the question is that, as long as we see groups like that \u2013 or any group, whether evangelical Christians or gays and lesbians \u2013 as separate from \u201cus\u201d and our friends, we fire up a different part of our brain, and it\u2019s hard to give their testimony as fair a shake as we should.<\/p>\n

So what can we do to combat unconscious bias? It\u2019s tough.\u00a0 We can take the IATs until we\u2019re blue in the face, but it won\u2019t change very much.\u00a0 Still, it\u2019s important to know what our biases are; awareness is a good first step, and helps us be more conscious about compensating for our biases. We can get out more, and talk to, and get to know, a broader range of people; the more women we see as virtuoso musicians, the weaker the mindbug that virtuoso = male<\/em> becomes. We can depend less on human testimony \u2013 which is often flawed anyway<\/a> \u2013 and expand out to look at documents and data \u2013 also flawed<\/a> in their own way, but at least in different ways<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because all of this is important.\u00a0 As Mahzarin notes, one of the IATs tests the association of African Americans\u00a0with weapons, and it\u2019s a particularly strong one for many people.\u00a0 And as the events of Ferguson have show us,<\/p>\n

In terms of \u201cguilt by association,\u201d a Black\u00a0 = weapons stereotype is particularly consequential when it plays out in the interaction between citizens and law enforcement.<\/em><\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Reg Chua has been a journalist for more than a quarter-century; he’s currently Executive Editor, Editorial Operations, Data and Innovation at <\/em>Thomson Reuters. Prior to that, he was Editor-in-Chief of the <\/em>South China Morning Post and had a 16-year career at <\/em>The Wall Street Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Re)Structuring Journalism explores the evolution of information in a digital age and how we need to fundamentally rethink what journalists do and what they produce. And it proposes one possible solution: Structured Journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 structureofnews.wordpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s an important question for all of us. But it\u2019s even more important for journalists, who talk to strangers on a regular basis and need to make snap judgments about how much faith we should have in what they say. So here\u2019s the bad news: You shouldn\u2019t trust yourself to figure out who you should trust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}