Genetics, race, and crime: An audience study exploring<i>the bell curve</i>and book reviews

Ramsey, E. Michele; Achter, Paul; Condit, Celeste M.

doi:10.1080/15295030109367121

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Adding genetic science as a resource might be useful for bolstering racism in the present context, where science has more cachet for some audiences than do religious texts, but Michele Ramsey and colleagues’ mixed methods study of reactions to The Bell Curve indicated that racism remains the primary driver and genetics is a supporting justification, strategically deployed. That study showed that “those whites who had strong negative affect toward persons of other races appropriated both genetic and environmental accounts to bolster their racism, while both blacks and whites with more egalitarian attitudes were able to incorporate genetic accounts into their schemas.” Further, Byrd and Ray’s general population survey found high racism to be more closely associated with nongenetic accounts: “decreased belief in genetic explanations for blacks’ personality and behaviors among whites with higher traditional racial prejudice suggests that whites lean on cultural and individual arguments.” Their results are complex but indicate the ways in which ideological factors (such as individualism and suspicion of technoscience among some “whites”) influence how elements such as “genetics” and “race” may be deployed in different ways.…”

Section: Discrimination and Genetic Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laypeople Are Strategic Essentialists, Not Genetic Essentialists

Condit¹

2019

Hastings Center Report

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In the last third of the twentieth century, humanists and social scientists argued that attention to genetics would heighten already‐existing genetic determinism, which in turn would intensify negative social outcomes, especially sexism, racism, ableism, and harshness to criminals. They assumed that laypeople are at risk of becoming genetic essentialists. I will call this the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” This model has not accurately predicted psychosocial impacts of findings from genetics research. I will be arguing that the failure of the model can be traced to its inability to recognize the complexity of laypeople’s attitudes; its incorrect theory of how beliefs, attitudes, and discourse function; and its blindness to how academics’ own interests can override the available evidence. More specifically, I suggest that the substantial data about laypeople’s deployment of genetics supports what I will call the “laypeople are strategic essentialists model” better than the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” The strategic essentialists model holds that people tend to store multiple categories, including multiple causal forces, that they deploy “strategically” to serve context‐dependent goals. It will be difficult for academics to reorient ourselves to model laypeople as sophisticated strategic essentialists rather than as naïve genetic essentialists. Perhaps a little shift, however, will be of value.

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Section: Discrimination and Genetic Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laypeople Are Strategic Essentialists, Not Genetic Essentialists

Condit¹

2019

Hastings Center Report

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“…Entman and Rojecki, for example, found that only one of their interviewees articulated a biologically based view of racism. Other studies of lay discourse about race also did not find biological accounts playing a large role (34)(35)(36). Nonetheless, studies have suggested that persons who accept genetic explanations for racial differences tend to score relatively high on traditional measures of prejudice (25) (p466).…”

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confidence: 96%

Exploration of the impact of messages about genes and race on lay attitudes

et al. 2004

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The effect of messages about genetics on lay audiences was assessed through an experimental study that exposed participants (n = 96) to a Public Service Announcement about race, genes, and heart disease. Participants who received a message that specified either 'Whites' or 'Blacks' as the subject of the message demonstrated elevated levels of racism, genetic basis for racism, and one dimension of genetic discrimination as compared to those receiving a version of the message with no race specification or in a no-message control condition. The presentation of such messages to the public is not recommended until additional research clarifies this finding and perhaps describes mitigating vocabularies or approaches.

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“…That term describes a theory arising from numerous empirical studies that show how political values can color the interpretation of facts, 1 causing people to react more critically to evidence for politically inconvenient truths and less critically to evidence for politically convenient ones (e.g., lodge and Taber 2005;skitka et al 2002). beliefs regarding the origins of human characteristics indeed appear to be influenced by normative demands (e.g., hofstadter [1944] 1992lewontin, rose, and Kamin 1984;ramsey, Achter, and condit 2001). Although motivated reasoning is a compelling explanation for why ideology and attributions may be associated in general, the theory does not suggest any specific linkages between political ideology and genetic explanations, per se.…”

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Does Biology Justify Ideology? The Politics of Genetic Attribution

Suhay

Jayaratne

2012

Public Opinion Quarterly

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Conventional wisdom suggests that political conservatives are more likely than liberals to endorse genetic explanations for many human characteristics and behaviors. Whether and to what extent this is true has received surprisingly limited systematic attention. We examine evidence from a large U.S. public opinion survey that measured the extent to which respondents believed genetic explanations account for a variety of differences among individuals as well as groups in society. We find that conservatives were indeed more likely than liberals to endorse genetic explanations for perceived race and class differences in characteristics often associated with socioeconomic inequality (intelligence, math skills, drive, and violence). Different ideological divisions emerged, however, with respect to respondents' explanations for sexual orientation. Here, liberals were more likely than conservatives to say that sexual orientation is due to genes and less likely to say that it is due to choice or the environment. These patterns suggest that conservative and liberal ideologues will tend to endorse genetic explanations where their policy positions are bolstered by "naturalizing" human differences. That said, debates over genetic influence may be more politicized with respect to race, class, and sexual orientation than population differences generally: We find that left/right political ideology was significantly associated with genetic (or other) attributions for individual differences in intelligence, math skills, drive, or violence. We conclude that conceptions of the proper role of government are closely intertwined with assumptions about the causes of human difference, but that this relationship is a complex one.

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Genetics, race, and crime: An audience study exploringthe bell curveand book reviews

Cited by 20 publications

References 29 publications

Laypeople Are Strategic Essentialists, Not Genetic Essentialists

Laypeople Are Strategic Essentialists, Not Genetic Essentialists

Exploration of the impact of messages about genes and race on lay attitudes

Does Biology Justify Ideology? The Politics of Genetic Attribution

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