In their book on social dominance, Sidanius and Pratto make a relevant point: first, they cite a bunch of audit studies where researchers send fake resumes to employers, and find a marked bias against employing African American. Then, they point to Gallup polls asking people whether African American face any discrimination, and almost half of African-Americans themselves say they don’t. Same for discrimination in justice or housing. So, when the book was published back in the 90s, many black people didn’t believe in racial discrimination, even though it affected them personally in their life.
I don’t think the Gallup polls are very well-designed (at least for this purpose). It seems like they ask about only a few bits of information about very abstract general questions that aren’t straightforwardly related to people’s personal experiences, and then they aggregate the data together into averages, destroying most of the information about who sees what. I don’t feel I get a picture of what people mean by their claims of discrimination when reading those polls.
This means that people’s perception of discrimination is not so much influenced by lived experience, but by what the dominant ideology is at a particular time. Back in the 90s, racial discrimination wasn’t emphasized in the dominant discourse, so people thought it wasn’t very important. In that case, standpoint epistemology just entrenches the dominant beliefs.
Another example: today, there’s a vast body of research showing large discrimination against men when applying for housing. If you’ve ever applied for a place to rent, this has affected you personally favourably or not. But were you aware of it? If you did an online survey asking men what discrimination they face, how many of them would bring up housing discrimination? They don’t know about it, because the dominant ideology doesn’t talk about it.
So I agree that when a problem appears very diffusely, without it being reliably observable in the instances where it does occur, then it is hard to identify it by asking people about their experiences.
However I am not sure social science is the solution to this. Social science typically also seems driven by ideology more than factual matters, and also social scientists usually seem plain bad at their job. Furthermore these sorts of studies tend to strip away so much context that they are hard to make sense of.
I haven’t specifically read the literatures you point at. If you think they are much better than other social science, feel encouraged to write it up.
I see this as a critical failure of standpoint epistemology (and the “lived experience” approach in general). Here is a 2011 survey where white Americans claimed that white people face more discrimination than black people. I don’t think this gives us any valuable information about how much discrimination white people actually face.
Again this is a really abstract study which strips away most detail. I’m not sure how I’d quantify discrimination in such a way that one can about who faces “more” discrimination, and I’m not sure how the participants quantify it.
But I feel like there could totally be some sort of experiences behind it which explains their views. In fact the paper itself speculates that maybe what white people have in mind is that the institutions designed to rank and teach people have policies prefer to admit lower-skilled black people to higher-skilled white people, or that the American government has policies to require the contractors it works with to prefer hiring black people.
Does this mean white people are “”“more””” discriminated against than black people? Dunno. It seems like the discrimination is in different areas that are hard to compare.
I don’t think the Gallup polls are very well-designed (at least for this purpose). It seems like they ask about only a few bits of information about very abstract general questions that aren’t straightforwardly related to people’s personal experiences, and then they aggregate the data together into averages, destroying most of the information about who sees what. I don’t feel I get a picture of what people mean by their claims of discrimination when reading those polls.
So I agree that when a problem appears very diffusely, without it being reliably observable in the instances where it does occur, then it is hard to identify it by asking people about their experiences.
However I am not sure social science is the solution to this. Social science typically also seems driven by ideology more than factual matters, and also social scientists usually seem plain bad at their job. Furthermore these sorts of studies tend to strip away so much context that they are hard to make sense of.
I haven’t specifically read the literatures you point at. If you think they are much better than other social science, feel encouraged to write it up.
Again this is a really abstract study which strips away most detail. I’m not sure how I’d quantify discrimination in such a way that one can about who faces “more” discrimination, and I’m not sure how the participants quantify it.
But I feel like there could totally be some sort of experiences behind it which explains their views. In fact the paper itself speculates that maybe what white people have in mind is that the institutions designed to rank and teach people have policies prefer to admit lower-skilled black people to higher-skilled white people, or that the American government has policies to require the contractors it works with to prefer hiring black people.
Does this mean white people are “”“more””” discriminated against than black people? Dunno. It seems like the discrimination is in different areas that are hard to compare.