Game Theory Suggests Prejudice Fails When Groups Interact Frequently

Swiss researchers from ETH Zurich have used game theory to find whether prejudices might sometimes be rational. Dirk Helbing, a professor of sociology, and Thomas Chadefaux investigated the conditions under which intuitive judgements might be sensible, and when they are misleading. Using game theory in which co-operation between people is tested, they created various scenarios and played them fifteen million times.

Prejudices are generally regarded as irrational because they are not based on sufficient social experience, and as unethical because they lead to misjudgements and discrimination disrupting sociality. Yet we tend to be quick to judge others. Might prejudices have been helpful in the course of evolution? be an especially effective decision making method that has evolved

Game theory experiments on people have been done for many years, and have yielded a reliable body of results. The game players simulated on the computer behave in a friendly or unfriendly manner depending on their traits—gender, age, assets, religion or cultural background. Anyone who makes wrong decisions is outsmarted. If the player is friendly and acts in a friendly way to mean one, they get taken for a ride. To avoid it, they have to know the other players and judge what is the best way to act.

The researchers exhaustively tested five different strategies:

1. ALLD—the players play it safe and are always UNfriendly. However, they do not profit from a friendly counterpart either, and miss many opportunities to be successful.
2. TFT—“Tit For Tat” begins in being friendly and then requires copying the opposite player. In game theory, TFT is often the most successful play.
3. P1—just one trait of the opponent decides whether one is friendly or not, a matter of extreme “black and white”—prejudiced—thinking.
4. P3—three traits are taken into consideration, differentiating the decision.
5. P5—five traits are taken into consideration, making the decision more differentiated.

In all five scenarios, the researchers varied the number of participants and the duration of the game, and played the simulation a total of fifteen million times. How long the game lasts and how many participants are involved is important.

If the game only lasts for a short time and many take part, the probability that any two players will meet several times is low. So, there is less time to get to know the others. Then the unfriendly ALLD strategy is the most successful. The “black and white” strategy P1 is also effective. But the “tit for tat” strategy has the disadvantage of insufficient time to learn the opposite player’s behaviour first. So, the ALLD and black and white strategy, P1, are triumphant in short games of several players.

Their success declines rapidly when the game lasts longer. The opposite happens for the differentiated P5 and the “tit for tat” strategies. Their success only becomes apparent after a while, but then remains at a high level.

Prejudiced strategies are therefore successful and rational for brief encounters, but, as learning from mistakes is precluded and behavior has no time for adjustment, in longer more complicated encounters they yield to more subtle strategies. Thomas Chadefaux explains:

If there are only five people on an island or the people on an island have known each other for a long time, prejudices are just plain useless.

Those who are prejudiced are soon at a disadvantage, as they learn nothing new and miss many opportunities. But how close are these simulations to reality? What do they say about our everyday life? Dirk Helbing thinks:

Prejudices are—especially because they are formed quickly and easily—often convenient in the everyday world but fail when the situation becomes more complicated.

To show this, the researchers took the real world into consideration. If participants are wrongly assessed and certain traits do not necessarily have anything to with the behaviour, then what happens? Prejudiced players cannot adjust their strategy. They cannot learn and cannot improve. So, they always come up short unless the interaction is brief. Prejudice therefore is only of value to groups of people who interact briefly, as in migrant tribes coming into contact, perhaps. When people meet in a settled cosmopolitan society, subtler, differentiated strategies fare better.

What happens when the participants simply behave randomly? Then, the result deteriorates for all strategies, but, even so, the more players act randomly, the worse prejudiced players perform. Helbing explains:

While it is efficient to react to a single trait in the beginning, you must not stop learning new things in a complex world, otherwise, you miss many good opportunities.

But, developing a differentiated, and, in the long run, more successful, judgement takes time. Helbing says:

The most successful strategy is to start with simple “rules of thumb” and then to refine them.

People who gain a wide range of experiences and are willing to adapt their behavior accordingly perform the best. How you can learn new things in a targeted fashion is central. Applied in real social situations, one should encourage the mixing of different people. Helbing says:

Minorities especially have the problem that they are often wrongly treated because they are not known well enough. So, multiplying contacts with different people avoids blowing your chances of successful interactions with them. Social networks play a key role here.

The UK Far Right is Ready to Arm Against British Moslems

In a survey of political extremism—From Voting to Violence? Far Right Extremism—Dr Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations, and Professor Jocelyn Evans, of the University of Salford, examined a YouGov survey of 2,152 supporters of the British extreme right wing parties, the British National Party (BNP), the UK Independence Party and the English Defence League (EDL).

To call a spade a spade, these are fascist or crypto fascist parties, so the results are hardly surprising. Large numbers of BNP and UKIP supporters agree that violence between different ethnic, racial and religious groups in Britain is inevitable. The BNP holds that view more strongly. Many went as far as approving armed conflict to ldquo;defend &the British way of life”, evidently a euphemism for killing British Moslems. Dr Goodwin said:

It is current and former BNP members who are the most likely to think that violence may be needed to protect their group, and that inter group violence is largely inevitable.

Large majorities of BNP and UKIP supporters are convinced that Islam poses a serious danger to the West. Dr Goodwin added:

Both groups express high levels of anxiety over Islam and its religious institutions. Both BNP and UKIP supporters would feel bothered by the presence of a mosque in their local community, but to a much higher degree among the BNP supporters. BNP supporters in our sample are overwhelmingly concerned about immigration and Muslims, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. Both BNP and UKIP supporters are considerably dissatisfied with the way democracy is functioning in Britain, and again BNP supporters are the least satisfied.

The authors stress that the report is exploratory rather than a definitive assessment of far right views. Their intention is that this will lead to far bigger research project analysing the beliefs held by far right extremists.

We want to examine whether these views, taken from a relatively small sample, are specific to the far right in Britain. This would include a much larger national population and serve to strengthen the evidence base we have, which is currently weak compared to that on religious extremism.

No doubt a lot of ordinary British people, readers of the dominant right wing press which daily stirs up hatred for immigrants, feel the same way. The answer is not to kill people but to stop hate mongering by millionaire press barons. Certainly, if we are to believe the history of Christianity, that Christians cite proudly, making martyrs of a persecuted monority is only likely to feed religious fanaticism. The Christians boast of their martyrs, just as do the Moslems, but Christians have few martyrs these days, they have millionaire TV evangelists instead, but our insane governments are giving Moslems all the modern day martyrs they need.

Fascists always pick on some unpopular minority to foster hatred of. It is a way of uniting people who otherwise have nothing in common, except their hatred or suspicion of the minority. For Hitler it was the Jews. For the Zionist Jewish state of Israel it is the Palestinians, who are, of course, Moslems. For western fascists the Moslems are the hated and feared minority, but the fear has been engendered by western and Israeli governments grossly abusing Moslem people in their own countries for decades, and indeed centuries.

Despite the justified suspicions of Romans, Christians ended up dominant, forcibly closing all rival religions and introducing a thousand year dark age in Europe. Those who refuse to learn from history are forced to relive it, as George Santayana famously said, though few people ever took any notice, especially the far right and our right wing politicians, whose simple philosophy is “if a battalion is not sufficinet to win, then send in a division, and if that is insufficient then send in an army, and if…”. Greater force is their perpetual answer, but all they do is lose the people, causing massive bloodshed in the meantime. If there are devils in the world, these right wingers are they. They are a distraction from our real enemies, the 1% and their management and banking prostitutes.

Most Moslems by far in the west are poor, they are with us among the 99% and so are our allies. Unite with them!

Antisemitism, a Convenient Hatred

The Huffington Post invites authors to publish articles about antisemitism but suppresses any critical responses. Antisemitism, a Convenient Hatred was one such written by Phyllis Goldstein and published a few days ago. It is a plug for her book, A Convenient Hatred: A History of Antisemitism. It is a short article with little that is not accepted in it, such as the role of Christianity in antisemitism, and the behavior of the church and European aristocracy. The real question is whose aims today is this hatred convenient for? Goldstein begins thus:

Many people thought antisemitism would disappear after the Holocaust, but it did not. Nor did it disappear when many Christian churches acknowledged that Jews were not responsible for the crucifixion. And antisemitism and other hatreds have persisted despite tough laws against discrimination, hate crimes and hate speech. To understand why hatreds endure, we have to confront history. Histories that are not confronted can never be reconciled and yet most people—including many Jews—know very little about the history of antisemitism.

Thereafter she goes back to those ancient histories mention above. What she does not address, and perhaps it was because the article was too short to do so, is the most relevant explanation today. It is that antisemitism is a valued tool of Zionism. I therefore pointed it out. The comment never got published! I wrote:

Modern antisemitism is being studiously promoted by Zionists and the Zionist state of Israel as the recent adverts calling upon Jews to return to Israel show. The notion of the fear of a future holocaust however goes right back to the Jewish scriptures. It is the fear generated by the strictures of the Mosaic law and emphasized by the Deuteronomic Historian. "Obey the law or be reduced to a remnant." The threat of such a destruction strengthens a community by emphasizing the bonds that unite it and distinguish it.

Zionists have made the most of this idea since the war, using the millions of Jewish dead to promote their own racialist and elitist, neo-fascist politics. Uri Avnery cites Yehayahu Leibowitz as having said to him, "The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust." It defines goyim as potentially irrational mass murderers of Jews, generating distrust in the diaspora while promoting antisemitism and emigration to the Zionist state, and making "vengeance into an acceptable western value", according to Gilad Atzmon.

"The Jew" is the new God of the Zionist religion, Atzmon, a Jew himself, tells us, the idealized image of the suffering, innocent Jews of the Nazi death camps, they use for their political ends, though the Zionist Jews of Israel are the bullies of the Middle east today, backed by the world's big bully, the pro-Zionist leadership of the USA.

The Great Hunger: Lessons Today of the Irish Famine 1845-1850

The Irish potato crop failed in 1845, 1846, 1848 and 1849, less than two present day lifetimes ago. A mysterious blight, now known as Phytophthora infestans, destroyed the potato harvest. The rural Irish poor, mainly subsistence farmers renting small plots of ground, were reliant on the potato as their staple food. The result was a dreadful famine in the United Kingdom—the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland part of the UK, then the most economically advanced place in the world. Huge numbers faced starvation, and 1 million Irish did die in “An Gorta Mór”, “The Great Hunger”.

Millions more fled the country, with the population of Ireland dwindling from around 9 million in 1845 to 6.1 million in 1851. The tide of emigration continued to swell long after the harvest failures—in 1866 Ireland’s population was roughly equivalent to its 1801 figure of 5.5 million. In comparative terms, the Great Irish Famine was one of the worst demographic tragedies of the nineteenth century and possibly the worst famine in recorded history when judged in terms of the mortality rate.

In Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine, Dr David Nally, a Cambridge University academic, examines the political, economic and social context of the Irish Famine—throwing up disturbing parallels between what happened in the 1840s and what is happening in Africa today. From contemporary material, Nally drew out the perceptions that shaped political decision making and directly affected the lives of millions of poor Irish families. Such decisions are as relevant today as they were then, centering on the ethics of free markets and government aid.

Nally’s book takes its title from a pamphlet written by the controversial English MP, George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876). In a scathing critique of British policies in Ireland, Poulett Scrope claimed that the Irish were being treated as mere “human encumbrances” to the long march of progress and agricultural development that was European modernity. Poverty was deserved coming from idleness, lack of intelligence, and improvidence, so Irish smallholders were eminently expendable to the English, and their way of life was backward, immoral and needed to be urgently reformed.

Contemporary reports noted distinctions at every level, between ruler and ruled, the “deserving” and “undeserving”, the indolent and the industrious. Even the food of the Irish peasants was seen in moral terms. The Irish were feckless and slothful, so ate potatoes, whereas the thrifty and hard working English ate wheat. Nally comments:

In terms of perceptions, not much has changed since the nineteenth century. Dominant economic institutions like the World Bank still consider poverty in the Global South in much the same way as the Victorians judged the Irish—the natives are fundamentally incapable of autonomous development and, in certain situations, corrective measures will be needed to stimulate social reform and promote agricultural development.

This tendency to “blame the victim”, as it has been described, allows rulers and élites to ignore the deeper injustices that expose populations to calamities—making disasters like famine more likely to occur in the first place—and to leave untouched the political and economic arrangements from which they clearly benefit. You could say that we are blinded by an ideology of poverty that the Victorians bequeathed to us.

A key phrase in Nally’s book is “structural violence”—describing how institutional arrangements can make entire communities vulnerable to famine, and at the same time impede reforms that build local resiliencies. For Nally, the current emphasis on increasing food production through market integration and technological fixes, ignores the well established fact that there is enough food to feed the world’s present population—recent estimates suggest that there is 20 per cent more food than the world needs. The relationship between food supply and starvation has long been a contentious issue, and the Irish Famine is no exception. Contemporary accounts describe ships carrying relief from England passing ships sailing out of Ireland with cargos of wheat and beef to be sold for prices out of reach to the starving population. Nally observes:

In an analogous way, Africa, a land synonymous with disease and starvation, is a major supplier of raw materials—including diamonds, gold, oil, timber, food and biofuels—that underpin the affluence of Western societies. The current focus on food availability and supply effectively masks how resources are unevenly distributed and consumed.

Famines not only destroy lives but whole ways of life. The culture and language of the Irish people were victims of the Famine. In 1800, half of the population spoke Irish, in 1900, it was 14 per cent. Rural social relations were disrupted, and, in particular, an ethic of mutual care that characterised the Irish way of life before the Famine. After the Great Hunger, Hugh Dorian, an Irishman, described his native Donegal as a place “where friendship was forgotten and men lived as if they dreaded one another”. Such descriptions stand in contrast to accounts of middle class farmers, and some English and Scottish settlers, who gained land and power by dispossession of the smallholders. Nally continues:

Famines leave behind a tense landscape of “winners” and “losers”. We ought to be honest about the fact that life and death decisions are woven into the texture of economic relations. Hunger persists because its presence serves an important function in the global economy—scarcity and abundance, privilege and suffering, are in fact mutually constituted.

To tackle global hunger we must therefore address the legal and institutional structures that directly restrict certain people’s ability to subsist. The reason that this is not done is because these same structures guarantee the high standard of living that many of us have become accustomed to.

As several observers of the Irish Famine recognised, hunger is not a natural disaster—it is a human induced problem that demands political solutions. Effective solutions require joined up thinking:

At present, the problem of “food insecurity”—to adopt the modern, sanitised term for widespread starvation—is generally conceptualised as a scientific and technical matter—geneticists and plant scientists will engineer harvests that produce more efficient, more abundant crops that are more tolerant of climatic stress, more resistant to attacks by pathogens, and so on. This, we are told, will be the basis for ending global hunger. While the physical sciences do have an important role to play, it is wishful thinking to believe that hunger can be avoided by simply turbocharging nature—that we can, if you like, engineer our way out of scarcity.

The food activist and writer Frances Moore Lappé maintains that the real scarcity we face is one of democracy, not food. Nally insists that there is an important truth to that statement, which is routinely ignored:

One is reminded of the French writer Guy de Maupassant who apparently used to take his daily lunch at the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place in Paris where he did not have to look at the imposing structure. We are behaving a bit like Maupassant—we can continue to enjoy “lunch as normal” as long as we maintain the fiction that hides us from the ugly truth that is otherwise staring us in the face.

Images from: http://www.skibbereen.ie/famine.php

People of Color Will be the US Majority by 2042

America's Tomorrow from PolicyLink on Vimeo.

The faces of America’s children are changing and many believe that the still white majority population and the political leaders do not see themselves in these new faces. By 2042, most Americans will be people of color. Already, California, Texas, Hawaii, New Mexico, and DC have more people of color than whites. And today, nearly half of all children are kids of color. If they don't succeed, the nation won't succeed.

While policies are looking at slashing Medicaid and cutting education budgets, the future generations of Americans are paying the price. There was a time not that long ago when we listened to the voices of tomorrow and invested in our national future. The GI Bill, affirmative action, and strong unions all helped the “Greatest Generation” establish a potent and stable middle class—and gave their children tangible hope for the future. But we aren't doing that any more. Too many who have achieved success for themselves now want to pull up the ladder behind them.

People of color are disproportionately saddled with high poverty rates, failing schools, poor health, and under-invested communities. But white families that rely on the public education system struggle with these nationwide school budget squeezes. White college students are graduating with six figure debt. White workers who need public transit to get to their jobs are hurt by the lack of forward thinking investment. And white entrepreneurs are having to spend money giving new hires the job skills a strong public school system should offer. It's no way to run a country.

This study implies the need to promote equity—just and fair inclusion. The next generation of Americans needs to be supported and encouraged, regardless of their skin color. Economists and community leaders are now seeing this idea of equity is no longer a moral battle. It will become imperative in order for America to succeed on an economic level.

PolicyLink, an American research institute which works to advance social and economic equity within the United States has released their new report titled Prosperity 2050. The report shows how, over the next 30 years, the face of America will be changing.

PolicyLink’s CEO and founder, Angela Glover Blackwell, said that the success and the future of the United States will depend on the success of people of color. She believes that equitable policies, in light of this new information, will become an economic imperative more so than a moral one. The current discrepancies of social status and wealth between the different demographics could be harmful to the future of the United States.

As a nation, we can see our future and it is captured in the hopes and dreams of a 5-year-old Latina girl and a 7-year-old African American boy. Our success depends on theirs.

PolicyLink was founded in 1999 and works on the mission of Lifting Up What Works. They believe that those people that are facing the hardest challenges, mainly the low-income and colored communities, are the most important in finding and creating solutions. In areas such as jobs, public schools, and affordable housing, PolicyLink believes that equity must be behind all federal, state, and local policies.

Prejudice Adversely Affects How Americans Judge their President

A University of Delaware psychology post graduate student, Eric Hehman, who specializes in intergroup relations focuses on prejudice and discrimination, and recently received a national research award for his work on it. The national award was won for his work on what characteristics of a person caused others to remember or forget having seen their face before. He found that people tend to recognize members of their own racial group better than those of different races, though they are better still at recognizing people of any race when they are considered similar to them in some other way, like being students of the same alma mater.

Following from this, Hehman noticed that the criticisms of Obama seemed to go beyond the kinds of criticisms that are commonly heard about presidents’ policies. He particularly noticed that rumors of doubts about Obama’s birth certificate, his religion and allegations that he was corrupting children with a socialist agenda and seemed not strictly based in reality. Hehman said:

I found these controversies fairly strange and wondered if the impetus behind them was rooted in racism, manifesting and rationalizing itself in accusations of Obama’s “un-Americanism”. Some of professor Gaertner’s previous work had dealt with similar issues of unintentional racial biases influencing behavior, often without the person even being aware of their biases. So investigating this with regard to Obama was a natural step.

Hehman’s hypothesis was that whites’ racial prejudices influenced how American they thought Obama was, and affected how they judged his presidential performance. Hehman predicted that whites would be the only group in which such racial prejudice would affect their judgements of performance, and that it would affect only their judgements of the president because he was black. He hypothesized that when whites judged Vice President, Joseph R Biden Jr, or when African Americans judged either Obama or Biden, racial prejudices would have no affect.

The paper describing the study, “Evaluations of Presidential Performance: Race, Prejudice, and Perceptions of Americanism”, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. UD professor of psychology Samuel Gaertner was Hehman’s adviser and co-author.

Hehman asked about 300 white and black members of the UD community to judge the success in office of either Obama or Biden. He said:

Our predictions were supported. Whites who were racially prejudiced against blacks saw Obama as “less American” and subsequently rated him as performing more poorly as president. Non-prejudiced whites, and both prejudiced and non-prejudiced blacks, did not do so. Additionally and importantly, this relationship was only found with Obama, and not in evaluations of Biden.

Racial prejudice among some white Americans—even though unintentional—influences their views of President Barack Obama’s “Americanism” and how well he is performing in office. Hehman hoped his paper would cause readers to see that:

…even among people who think themselves unprejudiced, unconscious racial prejudices could manifest themselves with important outcomes, such as evaluations of the leader of our country. I hope they examine their opinions and behaviors, both political and otherwise, to ensure they are based on a steady foundation of fact, rather than racial uncomfortability or prejudice.