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they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have cartesiandaemon January 11 2017, 13:53:16 UTC
I did wonder, if anyone said, "they're all human", the experimenter would have said, "yes, well done, good guess" and stopped, or gone on till they guessed "white".

I'm a bit torn, because it really really is a very big problem that people treat what's common as an unmarked default, and it does cause problems in all sorts of ways. But if some people genuinely ARE in a majority, it IS much less notable if you see three of them at once.

It's more blatant when a privileged group is thought of as unmarked default when they're NOT in a majority.

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Re: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have nancylebov January 11 2017, 14:53:11 UTC
I would like to see how that experiment works out if the subjects are black people.

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RE: Re: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have cartesiandaemon January 11 2017, 14:56:20 UTC
Indeed.

Although I remember from similar experiments (eg. assuming the race of a doctor when you're only told they're a doctor, etc), people who are not white usually having the same assumptions as white people, but not quite as strong, so while I can't know, I would guess something similar would happen here.

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RE: Re: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have andrewducker January 11 2017, 14:58:06 UTC
Me too. They test against the participants being black, but not the subjects, which is a shame.

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RE: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have andrewducker January 11 2017, 14:55:33 UTC
Agreed on all counts. And kinda what I was grasping for with my ntoe on the link.

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RE: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have cartesiandaemon January 11 2017, 15:18:08 UTC
Yeah, I realised you basically covered that in your tag, but I said the same thing with a bunch more words, because I'm me :)

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kalimac January 12 2017, 00:13:14 UTC
That's the impression I got: that if shown photos of different people and asked what they have in common, you should say, "They're all human."

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