So in my stats class, one of the quizzes I give presents a number of research scenarios. The student’s responsibility is to determine the appropriate statistical procedure they’d need to use to correctly solve the problem. The key to correctly answer the question is typically contained in the problem itself. More often than not, I use silly or disgusting examples. I was just reviewing quizzes my TAs graded for me and found the funniest answer.
I gave the following scenario:
On a willingness to eat disgusting things test, the possible scores range from 1 to 10 (the higher the score, the more tolerant a participant is of eating disgusting things), international data show that people typically score 6. Psychologists recently tested a group of 149 male college students who are members of Greek letter social organizations. This group scored an average of 9.3 and their standard deviation was .62.
Now the procedure they’d use to solve this is a single sample t-test because we have to estimate the standard deviation in the population based on our sample. They got the test right, but the explanation was awesome. To explain why they decided to do a t-test, they said:
…Greeks tend to be a smaller population who eat nasty things when joining the fraternity.
I laughed so hard tea came out of my nose.
Ethnocentrism. Is it ok?
In a recent assignment for a class I facilitate, one of the students posed the question (which I’m paraphrasing) of whether it was ok for people from subordinate or target racial groups to be ethnocentric. The question came after reading an article by Milton Bennett describing the DMIS (note: ours was different, but this is a good article available for free courtesy of Google Scholar).
The question is important. Ethnocentrism is often conflated with racial in-group price. Ethnocentrism, as Bennett describes it, is different. It’s a developmental stage wherein individuals lack sophisticated cognitive structures to understand, and meaningfully make sense of, difference. As a result, people in this stage tend to experience difference as bad and undesirable. Similar is good, different is bad, and when we apply this to racial thinking, those whose epidermal variation is significantly different from our own become the “bad” ones, people we oppose, and we get to be good, overlooking and justifying bad things that are done to those different as things that need to be done in the name of, well, all that is good. You know, God, country, flag and all.
When the dominant racial group is ethnocentric, the impact on subordinate racial groups is devastating. US culture provides many examples of the impact of ethnocentrism on People of Color, and I’m not just talking history.
That said, it is important to differentiate between ethnocentrism, which is poorly developed categories for understanding difference – racial difference in this example, and racial group pride – pride based on the positive contributions of one’s racial group(s) based on an understanding of the contributions of individuals and groups who share a common trait – epidermal variation – that does not rely on a negative experience of those who are different in skin color.
In the end, ethnocentrism isn’t necessarily bad, it is a developmental stage one goes through. A step, if you will, towards a greater understanding of difference. Much like we crawl before we walk, as we develop ways to understand and experience difference, we move from less sophisticated ways of understanding difference to more sophisticated ways of understanding difference.