Popular Press Vs Academic Research Essay

In the New Yorker article, “Troublemakers” by Malcolm Gladwell a claim is made about people who are quick to make bad generalizations, follow stereotypes and profile. Gladwell introduces the article with a horrific story of a vicious Pitbull attack on a two-and-a half year-old boy, resulting in a law being passed to ban all pitbulls. This issue is important because this ban on pitbulls means they are unnecessarily being punished for traits they may or may not have. Just like a person may be profiled and punished for a crime they may or may not have committed. According to Gladwell ,we all tend to make decisions based off of inaccurate stereotypes like “overweight middle-aged men to heart-attack risk” or “young men to bad driving”(3).

To stress the prevalence of the effects of stereotypes, Steele repeated his first experiment with white men and Asian men as the subjects. As the dominant group, white people are often unaffected by the stereotype, but in this particular experiment they underperformed greatly. Stereotypes even exist within racial groups. In one experiment, Steele had older people and younger people try to memorize 30 words for two minutes. Afterwards, they would try to write down as many words as they can. The group of older people who read an article confirming that age impairs memory wrote down significantly fewer words than the group of older people that did not receive the treatment. This is also an example of ageism (Henslin, 2017). A common motif in Steele’s experiments is a reminder of the stereotype, referred to as a cue. The experiments demonstrate that the smallest hint of a stereotype is enough of a cue to cause underperformance. In an experiment with girls and boys ages five to seven, the only difference between the treatment and control group was coloring a picture of a doll.

The act of disregarding fact, evidence, proven studies or statistics in favor of the approval or acceptance of one’s peers is a toxic trend, brought on by an over-correction to post 9/11 Islamophobia. Being able to differentiate between personal prejudice and proven study is detrimental towards ending intolerance, allowing society to move forward, in establishing peace and prosperity.

Prejudice according to Healey & O’Brien (2015, p. 21), “is the tendency of an individual to think and feel about other groups in negative ways, to attach negative emotions to those groups, and to prejudge individuals on the basis of their group membership”. There are two dimensions of prejudice. One dimension of prejudice is the feeling aspect, also known as “affective dimension of prejudice” (Healey & O’Brien, 2015, p. 21). This is where one feels negative towards a person/group based upon their association with a specific group. The second dimension of prejudice is cognitive. This is how one thinks about individuals in specific groups (“Prejudice and Discrimination,” 2003). The thinking dimension aspect of prejudice is usually based

The article also states that “studies have consistently shown that negative, automatic evaluations of racial outgroup members are elicited on indirect measures of racial bias despite explicit, self-reported nonprejudiced attitudes” (Ronquillo, 1). While the amygdala activity was suppressed in the span of seconds by areas of the prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain associated with thinking and learning), the results of this and other studies still propose a controversial idea: people, regardless of self-reported prejudice, have biases that cause them to instinctively fear people who are unlike themselves. The opposite also seems to be true: people instinctively feel less fear towards people who look like them. Similarly, in her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explores biases in humans and how they translate into outward behavior. Additionally, through the extreme, rash, and deadly behaviors of the monster, she suggests that people will go to surprising ends to have relationships with similar

My view on this article is mostly that he is giving his opinion on how poverty affects brain growth. The author predicts that poverty is harmful to brain development. He also predicts that poverty is a toxin to brain development. In the chart above are words found in his article that involve poverty probability, and statistics. In a portion of the article he says he thinks poverty affects the development of children’s brain. He only states about two or three statistics and he tries to make his article sound like he got his information from stats but, he didn’t all he did was used large words that sound smart or are related to statistics. So he wanted people to read his article and believe what he was talking about but my question is where

When compared to scholarly articles, popular articles are always watered down versions of the scientific data within the scholarly article. Such is the case for Alice Park’s “Why Your Job Affects How Much You Exercise” and the study Occupational Differences Among Employed Adults Who Met 2008 Federal Guidelines for Both Aerobic and Muscle-strengthening Activities: United States, 2008-2014 by Debra Blackwell and Tainya Clarke. Noticeably, the scholarly article appears to be formatted in APA format and was conducted under the supervision of two doctors. The popular article, in comparison, was written in no particular format by a journalist for a large magazine company. Along with this, the scholarly article utilizes multiple operational definitions in regards to what type of exercise they are observing, yet the popular article simply presents vague and brief descriptions of what the study had looked at.

Cognitive prejudice refers to what people believe is true or in other words, stereotypes of people. Although studies have shown that cognitive forms of prejudice have declined over the years, it can be seen as important because the way we view racial groups can dramatically affect our attitudes towards them, rather that be positive or negative.

The operational levels of prejudice are more commonplace and recognizable. The three operational levels are: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. The Cognitive Level is what people believe about others and their stereotypes. The Emotional Level are the feelings that the Other arouses in an individual. The Behavioral Level consists of the tendency to engage in discriminatory behavior (Rosado, 1996). The concepts and levels of prejudice factor into the meaning or definition of

The article describes a correlational study, so the researchers are not able to make causal claims. It is identified as a correlational study because the researchers are looking at two variables and looking to see the connection. The researchers are looking at 330,000 men and women who exercise for 20 minutes a day. They are not making them do

Since this is a correlational study the results do not prove causation. One issue with performing a correlation study is the fact that even though you can get valuable information from doing one it does not prove cause and effect like an experimental study would. I am not that confident in the results of this study. One reason being that they did not use a large number of people to conduct the study. Using only

The correlation between increased levels education and decreased degrees of prejudice has been a highly debated phenomenon and vice versa—where low education levels lead to increased prejudice. Another approach to this correlation suggests “education is an institutional device that is used for reproducing hierarchies among social classes.” However, I am primarily interested in the former hypothesis. My goal is to examine the role education plays in shaping ideological attitudes among members of the low and middle/upper class. Does education help conceal prejudice or genuinely reduce it? This concept then brings into question the notion of social desirability. Therefore, some scholars may argue that highly educated or “enlightened”

D-value was calculated based on the participant’s response latencies for both the congruent vs. incongruent trials (for details on scoring, see Greenwald et al., 2003). A positive D-value represents an implicit negative bias whereas a negative D-value suggests the opposite e.g. a positive D-value in the race IAT to blacks would reflect a negative attitude bias towards blacks relative to whites. For the purposes of comparing unprejudiced vs. prejudiced individuals a median split was performed on the prejudice

I think it is more important for a book to be interesting rather than popular. An interesting book can keep you reading throughout the story. Just because a book is popular does not mean that it will be appealing or interesting to you. A popular book could attract a certain type of crowd and you may not fall in that category of the book that is intended for that specific poll of people.

Lee and Burk both argue that prejudice comes in different forms, such as passive prejudice, active