I find myself still strongly agreeing with your ‘friend A’ about the difference between someone having a preference for dating people of a particular race, and people stating that preference on their dating app profile.
The two things are, I think, miles apart, and it looks like the participants in that study were asked in the abstract about people having preferences and then given examples of people expressing, not even preferences, but hard and fast rules.
Take example people A and B:
Person A is asked to rate 100 pictures of strangers for attractiveness, from this data a statistical analysis is able to reveal that they have a dis-preference for a particular ethnic group. They may or may not be consciously aware of this, and they would still date the members of that group they thought were most attractive.
Person B has not only decided they will never date people of group X, no matter the context, but they have also decided that keeping this decision making inside their own head doesn’t do enough, because group X needs to be told to their face that their ethnicity is a problem and person B is very comfortable with the fact that this may offend people.
I think if people are judging Person A differently from B it doesn’t reflect any kind of muddled thinking. I don’t even think that race is important for seeing how these are different: if we discovered that some specific man had a preference for (eg.) thinner women, that is very different from a man who goes around telling specific women that he is not interested in them because they are not thin enough. Its insulting.
Some defense of the Michael Thai methodology, their Study 3 does look at non hard and fast rules (e.g. “Asians preferred”), and they still find penalties against perceived racism and dateability for those profiles even within the “preferences != racist” cohort.
To the essence of what you’re saying, I hear you and am sympathetic to the point you’re putting forth. I guess stepping back a bit, it just feels memetically unstable to live in a world where all implicit racial preferences are basically fine and unquestionable but it is a grave offense to actually articulate that preference to another person. Like let’s say Person A judged 100% of race [x] to be unattractive, but wasn’t even conscious about this and is careful not to humiliate people by expressing this preference in real life (but does act on it). Let’s say Person B makes similar judgments, but is aware about this and will tell people frankly that he has this preference. I think what’s weird (I don’t want to say ‘offensive’) about both of these situations is the 100% unattractiveness judgment, not that Person B has the self-access and confidence to articulate their tastes. Removing my own moral judgments from the scenario, functionally I think what’s going on is that we are socially punishing Person Bs (a minority) in order to exonerate Person As (the majority). To be clear, I’m not in favor of witch-hunting the Person As of the world, nor even concocting elaborate social schemes to prevent them from acting on their attractiveness judgments. Rather I think it’s fair game to point out “it is weird that you have such a strong implicit judgment, and it seems like there is some confusing socially-subjective mechanism that is putting those judgments into you”.
I find myself still strongly agreeing with your ‘friend A’ about the difference between someone having a preference for dating people of a particular race, and people stating that preference on their dating app profile.
The two things are, I think, miles apart, and it looks like the participants in that study were asked in the abstract about people having preferences and then given examples of people expressing, not even preferences, but hard and fast rules.
Take example people A and B:
Person A is asked to rate 100 pictures of strangers for attractiveness, from this data a statistical analysis is able to reveal that they have a dis-preference for a particular ethnic group. They may or may not be consciously aware of this, and they would still date the members of that group they thought were most attractive.
Person B has not only decided they will never date people of group X, no matter the context, but they have also decided that keeping this decision making inside their own head doesn’t do enough, because group X needs to be told to their face that their ethnicity is a problem and person B is very comfortable with the fact that this may offend people.
I think if people are judging Person A differently from B it doesn’t reflect any kind of muddled thinking. I don’t even think that race is important for seeing how these are different: if we discovered that some specific man had a preference for (eg.) thinner women, that is very different from a man who goes around telling specific women that he is not interested in them because they are not thin enough. Its insulting.
Some defense of the Michael Thai methodology, their Study 3 does look at non hard and fast rules (e.g. “Asians preferred”), and they still find penalties against perceived racism and dateability for those profiles even within the “preferences != racist” cohort.
To the essence of what you’re saying, I hear you and am sympathetic to the point you’re putting forth. I guess stepping back a bit, it just feels memetically unstable to live in a world where all implicit racial preferences are basically fine and unquestionable but it is a grave offense to actually articulate that preference to another person. Like let’s say Person A judged 100% of race [x] to be unattractive, but wasn’t even conscious about this and is careful not to humiliate people by expressing this preference in real life (but does act on it). Let’s say Person B makes similar judgments, but is aware about this and will tell people frankly that he has this preference. I think what’s weird (I don’t want to say ‘offensive’) about both of these situations is the 100% unattractiveness judgment, not that Person B has the self-access and confidence to articulate their tastes. Removing my own moral judgments from the scenario, functionally I think what’s going on is that we are socially punishing Person Bs (a minority) in order to exonerate Person As (the majority). To be clear, I’m not in favor of witch-hunting the Person As of the world, nor even concocting elaborate social schemes to prevent them from acting on their attractiveness judgments. Rather I think it’s fair game to point out “it is weird that you have such a strong implicit judgment, and it seems like there is some confusing socially-subjective mechanism that is putting those judgments into you”.