Debunking a Viral Internet Post About Breastfeeding Racism

Bennett Haselton writes: A editorial with 24,000 Facebook shares highlights the differences in public reaction to two nearly identical breastfeeding photos, one showing a black woman and one showing a white woman, each breastfeeding an infant. The editorial decries the outrage provoked by the black woman's photo compared to the mild reaction elicited by the white woman's photo, and attributes the difference to racism. I tried an experiment using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to test that theory. Read on to see the kind of results Bennett found.

You can see the side-by-side pictures in the November 10 editorial by Ruby Hamad. My first thought, upon seeing the pictures, was that this is not a controlled experiment -- the woman on the left is breastfeeding in public, while the woman on the right is breastfeeding against a blank wall inside a presumably private room. While I think breastfeeding in public should be completely normalized, it's not the same thing as breastfeeding in private, and so that might have accounted for the difference in reactions, if there was any.

My second thought was that the data on people's reactions was not collected in a systematic way. According to the editorial, the black photo of the black mother, Karlesha Thurman, was posted on the Facebook page Black Women Do Breastfeed, and "[w]hile Karlesha received many supportive comments, the backlash was so severe, she eventually deleted the photo." The photo of the Australian woman, Jacci Sharkey, was posted by the University of the Sunshine Coast on their Facebook page, where it received 275,000 Facebook "likes", but also, according to the editorial, "more than a few detractors, proving that breastfeeding in public is (still!) a contentious issue for women of all races." There's no apples-to-apples comparison gauging people's reactions to the two photos under similar conditions.

But just because the methodology was imprecise, doesn't mean that the underlying phenomenon might not be real. Maybe Internet users really do have different gut reactions to pictures of black women and white women breastfeeding.

One quick way to get a rough answer is Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, where you can pay legions of workers some small amount of money per person to complete some menial task that can't be automated by a computer. I've used it dozens of times for surveys (such as gauging whether people would strongly prefer slideout keyboard phones) and for amateur psychological experiments (including one experiment which suggested that people who answered a math problem correctly were more likely to disagree with an attorney general's dubious legal argument). So I created a poll on Mechanical Turk, limited to U.S. users and with a payout of 25 cents for each person who answered. The poll asked:

Our academic department has asked everyone to submit a "fun" photo of themselves, so that our photos can be displayed together on the department home page. One of our employees submitted a photo that has caused some internal debate about whether the photo is inappropriate. I wanted to do a poll to get the opinion of a random sample of Internet users of different backgrounds.

Do you think this is an appropriate picture to be used in a photo collection on our academic department home page?

Since the original photos had been published in different contexts anyway, I tried to find a middle ground for the wording of the survey question, to emphasize that the photos were going to be published in a "fun" setting, but still integrated into the women's professional environments. The survey-takers were then (randomly) shown either the black woman's photo or the white woman's photo, and answered "Yes, the image is fine" or "No, the image is inappropriate". Then respondents were asked to fill in their age, gender, ethnicity, and education level.

(One thing that I've found with all of my previous surveys on Mechanical Turk, is that there is strong evidence that survey-takers are not answering randomly. Strong correlations often occur where you would expect them to -- for example, in a survey about what are the greatest causes of global strife, the same people tend to select "Energy shortages" and "Environmental damage" above other options, whereas another subgroup will tend to select both "Atheism" and "Decline of traditional values". And any survey where I've added a textbox for users to enter "more thoughts", most users enter something reasonably thoughtful which corresponds to the multiple-choice answers they've selected. Formal research by the psychologist Samuel Gosling has similarly found that Internet surveys can be useful for psychological research and are not plagued with bot-responders or random answers. So I'm working under that assumption.)

The results: Out of 47 respondents who saw the black girl's picture, 36 said the image was inappropriate (77%). Out of 54 respondents who saw the white girl's picture, 38 said the image was inappropriate (70%). For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed. What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos.

In both surveys, both male and female respondents voted the photos "inappropriate" with about the same frequency. For the black woman's photo, 22 out of 26 men (86%) and 14 out of 21 women (67%) voted the photo inappropriate; for the white woman's photo, 19 out of 30 men (63%) and 19 out of 24 women (79%) voted it inappropriate. There also didn't appear to be any correlation between the age of the respondents and their responses. (You can view the breakdown of answers in terms of respondent demographics here for the black woman's picture and here for the white woman's picture; the crummy layout is because I just copied-and-pasted the output from my own custom-written survey-taking tool, where I usually just view the results for myself.) As for the gap between black and white survey-takers, in the case of the black woman's photo, 24 out of 34 white survey-takers (70%) and 5 out of 6 black survey-takers (83%) voted it inappropriate, while for the white woman's photo, 25 out of 36 white survey-takers (69%) and 4 out of 4 (100%) of black survey-takers voted it inappropriate -- but those discrepancies probably don't mean much, since the population of self-identified black respondents was too small in both cases to draw any conclusions.

Even with small samples, though, I would argue that this is a better way to answer the question of latent racism than to draw fuzzy conclusions based on the trolling comments posted on a Facebook photo. My guess is that even if there was an underlying difference in the frequency of negative comments posted to the two photos, part of it could have been due to the photo being posted in a Facebook group titled "Black Women Do Breastfeed", a group name that is practically begging for trolls to wait for a chance to try and provoke an outraged response. The white woman's photo, on the other hand, was posted on the University of the Sunshine Coast Facebook page, which is not the kind of place that maladjusted nitwits hang out trying to start a flame war. And for the trolls who did post on the white woman's photo, their natural inclination would be to make some immature comment about b00bs; whereas for the trolls posting on the black woman's photo, the easiest cheap shot would be to make it about race. But that doesn't mean that there is actually a racially motivated difference in people's reactions to the photos.

Besides, if you want to use Facebook to raise awareness of racism, there are properly controlled scientific experiments that have demonstrated the extent of prejudice, such as the infamous 2003 resume callback experiment which showed that resumes with white-sounding names on them received about 50% more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. A viral story with 24,000 Facebook shares, about two isolated incidents under different circumstances, is not necessarily evidence of racism. It might be. But you have to do some kind of controlled experiment to check first.

Comments

Re:Popular research subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, here we go. Lets start milking those breast jokes, fellas.

I can haz experiments too!

[CajunArson]

First we'll post a video of ISIS beheading an innocent hostage.

Then we'll post a video of ISIS beheading Bennett Hasselton.

Afterwards, we'll look at the massive differences in the level of outrage, which is to say we'll have a kegger to celebrate Bennett's demise.

Re:I can haz experiments too!

[david_thornley]

Bennett is a "frequent contributor" who writes long and sometimes rambling and pointless mini-essays and gets them put up on Slashdot. Nobody knows why the editors keep putting his stuff in.

This one, on the other hand, I actually find interesting. It's got some actual quantitative research. It's not like the time he was thinking that the Fifth Amendment (against self-incrimination) was probably a bad thing.

Shut up Bennett!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty please?

Re:finally

[Anonymous Coward]

I was afraid he was back on his meds. What a relief!

Are you trying to get

[ruir]

us fed up for good with slashdot? this is clearly going downhill.

Re:Are you trying to get

[ArcadeMan]

Tell me about it. They talk about breastfeeding in public but the photos are nowhere to be seen.

Breastfeeding?

[sinij]

Unless you can find a way to network breastfeeding or find a way to run Lunix on it, I don't see how the topic is appropriate for /.

Astonishing grasp of the obvious

[tomhath]

First photo (black woman) breastfeeding in public with a race-baiting headline ("Black women do...") draws negative comments. Second photo of a woman apparently in private and wearing a wedding band draws positive comments. The editorial has both pictures cropped so you can't see if either woman is wearing a wedding band.

Typical news article -CLICKBAIT

[gurps_npc]

The original article was clearly click-bait. It was either designed poorly and published because of the perceived racism or more likely designed to elicit the racist response from the get go.

That is the difference between journalism and science. Journalism needs to get attention, science works best with little attention.

You can't trust science articles if they have any outrage.

Can't draw conclusions from this study

[myrdos2]

"For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed."

Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.

"What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."

No, it doesn't. You cannot draw conclusions from your results without significant data, because as you just said, your results could be due to random chance. I see this all the time in papers submitted for peer review. They'll say something like, "our technique showed benefit over the other techniques, even though the difference was not significant", and try to claim this as a win.

Re:Can't draw conclusions from this study

[Obfuscant]

Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.

No, by taking those photos so far out of context and asking a question about them that is so far out of context, his survey is made meaningless.

If the question is about general reactions to a photo, then trying to put those photos into a "fun photo on an academic website" you've already changed the question so much that it cannot answer the first. What you found out is that NATURALLY, 3/4 of people think a picture of a woman breastfeeding on an academic website is inappropriate. It's not about black or white at that point, it's about the website and audience. I gots no problem with pics of women breastfeeding, or real life for that matter, but a university faculty website is not the place for them, and I'd have been part of the 3/4 that said it wasn't appropriate, too.

Someone else earlier talked about women whipping out engorged breasts in public, as if that's how most women who breastfeed in public do it, claiming it was an inherently sexual thing. They don't, and it isn't. When I've seen it happening I actually had to look twice to realize that's what was happening. If you haven't seen it and you think it is a great way to ogle boobs, you're wrong.

Re:Can't draw conclusions from this study

[gstoddart]

Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.

Look, let's be honest here.

Bennett isn't doing a survey. He isn't doing science. He isn't even doing journalism.

He looked at pictures of tits on the interwebs, wrote a blog entry about an article someone else did, and looked at more tits on the interweb.

Timothy, who apparently is the dedicated handler for this click-baiting automaton which is Bennet Haselton, duly posts the crap onto Slashdot so he can tell his bosses he works had to be an editor and deserves his paycheck.

People come into the article, gripe about how inane and pointless Bennett's drivel is ... Dice sees page traffic and gets ad impressions.

Re:Can't draw conclusions from this study

[phantomfive]

Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.

You misunderstood. Read it again.

He's saying, there is no significant difference between the two groups. This contradicts the hypothesis; the hypothesis being that there would be a difference between the two groups.
He phrases it that way to remind the reader that there might still be significant difference, but if there is, it's smaller than the margin of error for his poll.
An actual weakness here is that he didn't establish a margin of error.

In any case, this is a huge improvement from previous Bennett posts, here he actually makes an attempt to collect data instead of rambling. So good on him for that.

Re:Most people don't object to public breast feedi

[iggymanz]

nah, it's a cultural thing. I've found in my travels at least half the world really doesn't give a shit if a woman breastfeeds in public. Would you rather listen to an angry hungry baby?

Ugh

[astro128]

Another TL:DR useless article by Bennett - please add a feature so we can block his boring, unending essays that no one cares about.

from the believe-the-worst dept

[enjar]

"Bennett Haselton writes"

Yep. Checks out. But I don't believe it.

I also don't understand the point of this post. Is Slashdot hoping to get picked up on HuffPo and on a bunch of mommy blogger sites? I don't really see how Bennett's keyboard diarrhea this week is anything remotely related to "News for Nerds".

Re:from the believe-the-worst dept

[bennetthaselton]

The idea was that it's about Internet culture (not technology-specific) and the problem of clickbait that can be easily debunked.

An interesting article by Bennett

[serviscope_minor]

OK

People here like to poke fun at the long posts by Bennett Hassleton. This one is actually pretty good.

He saw something, constructed an experiement using readily available resources, got statistically significant results (just about) and made an intereesting post detailing the methodology.

To my mind this is interesting in comparison to more formal academic studies as it shows that you can get reasonable results as a lone wolf with a limited budget and no research institution.

I like this post. Go Bennett.

Re:An interesting article by Bennett

[phantomfive]

Yeah, I agree with you. We can encourage people who are willing to experiment, as it's a clear step above what you normally find on the internet.

The biggest complaint I have with this post is that the prose needs to be tightened, it's kind of stream-of-conciousness writing, and thus a lot of people commenting have missed his main points.

Bennett, buddy

[mr.mctibbs]

We're happy to hear your stories. But, listen: maybe they should go on the fridge, instead of the front page of Slashdot.

Ok, bud?

Re:I'm all for exposed tits

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Two words:
Rosie and Roxanne

Re:finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Can these breasts be used to create decentralized networks of ice cream for Burning Man?

Re:I'm all for exposed tits

[PPH]

Reminds me of a scene from the show 'Friends'. There is a woman breastfeeding her baby and it is making Joey uncomfortable. Ross says, "This is the most beautiful, natural thing in the world. " Joey replies, "Yeah, but there's a baby sucking on it."

Warning Tag

[ThatsNotPudding]

I recall stories tagged with OhNoItsFlorian; well past time for a OhNoItsBennett tag.

Re:Popular research subject

[bennetthaselton]

Udderly inappropriate.

Re:Popular research subject

[mrzaph0d]

this site has gone titsup.

Re:Most people don't object to public breast feedi

[Whorhay]

Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual! They have been sexualized in much of our modern cultures but they are not intrinsically so.

One of the things that always amazes me about breastfeeding is how much more uptight our modern western culture is about it than our Victorian Era ancestors were. But today it's perfectly normal to see advertising that is overtly sexual, and almost pornographic in nature, plastered everywhere selling almost anything. Heaven forbid that a Mother feeds her child the highest quality food possible in a natural way, where someone else might see. How about we campaign for people eating disgusting things like fast food burgers and fries go do that in private somewhere?

Re:I hate to feed this, but

[bennetthaselton]

In this case, the survey on Mechanical Turk was limited to U.S. users only. I did say that in the article :) ("...limited to U.S. users...") But you certainly make a good point generally.

Seconded.

[khasim]

Really. He's offended by a FACEBOOK posting.

So he decides to write his own "survey" or whatever. Except he knows NOTHING about writing them. Or how to conduct them.

And then he puts it up on Amazon's Mechanical Turk site. Further evidence that he knows NOTHING about conducting a survey.

Which leads him to "analyize" the crap "data" that he has "collected".

The only "News for Nerds" here is how badly this was done. Anyone who publishes is (that would be you, Timothy) is an idiot for doing so. If anyone else had conducted this at any other site it would have been mocked here.

Re:Seconded.

[pz]

You forgot to mention that he has an embarrassingly small sample size and doesn't do any sample correction. He doesn't publish any significance values, so we have no way of knowing if 70% is the same or different than 77%, to the accuracy of the methodology (as well or as poorly thought out as it may be). Then he considers 86% and 67% to be about the same, and subsequently 63% and 79% to be about the same.

I am not a professional statistician -- I hire people to do that sort of work for me when I need definitive answers because I don't know the details. But I know enough to recognize handwaving, and that's all the long-winded original posting is.

Re:Seconded.

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, his sample sizes are small. He says this about your 70% to 77%:

For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed. What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos.

This is correct: for around 20 or 30 people, you can expect random chance of e.g. 20% (I don't care to remember how to do the math here). That's 20% of the value: if 70% of group A respond one way, then you would be within random chance if group B's responses fell within 56% and 84%, and not have any conclusion. Bennett says here that groupings of 70% and 77% don't conclude a difference due to random chance, but they DO indicate a small magnitude.

Let's say that the actual numbers are 72% and 71.5%. If you performed a properly controlled experiment with tens of thousands of people on each side, you'd find one group showing 72% and one showing 71.5%. Your alpha value would be around 0.001%, so you'd expect an identical population to show something like 72% and 71.93% A value of 71.5% would be conclusive of a nearly 0.4% difference between populations.

With the small sample size, you'd need a bigger gap. If the numbers were 70% and 20%, you'd have conclusive evidence of a significant difference between populations. At 70% and 77%, you have no evidence for any difference at all; a small difference could exist, but it is exceedingly unlikely that a LARGE difference exists.

Following this logic, 86% and 67% are about the same, and 63% and 79% are about the same. If you want these values to be different from each other, you need bigger sample sizes. Small sample sizes like this are only good for striking divides such as "is your skin more like a banana or chocolate?" surveying black vs white people.

To put this into perspective: out of 14 trials with a deck of 20 red/black cards shuffling 5 times and then predicting the top card, I am 68% likely to predict the correct card drawn from a deck; out of 180 trials, I am 54% likely; out of 700 trials, I am 53.8% likely to correctly predict the card. I did better on early trials, consistently getting 2/3 or more correct. Even hundreds of trials in, I haven't closed on random chance; but we also have about a 5% confidence value at 700 trials, and 53.8% - 5% is less than 50%, so it's quite possible I'm exactly 50% likely to select correctly.

Re:Seconded.

[logicnazi]

Umm, he gave you enough information to do the significance test yourself under standard polling assumptions.

No, he didn't use a particularly large sample size. But the way the sampling distribution works means that you pretty quickly reach the level of diminishing returns so his survey is a pretty good guide to whether there is a substantial difference in reactions.

Are his respondents trully selected at random from the population under examination (as all the statistical tools assume). Well no, not really. But neither are academic studies (either is a telephone/internet poll or undergraduates at fancy universities) nor traditional telephone polling. The fact that Pew calls up 10,000 people (or whatever to get the appropriate number of responses) can't change the fact that the people who take the time to answer telephone surveys differ substantially from the population at large. However, unless there is some particular reason to think that the group polled (undergrads, mechanical turk workers etc..) will have a different take on the question at large (undergrads probably aren't the right people to ask "Is a college education a useful investment") we still take the results to have substantial persuasive value.

Having said this I do think there is good reason to be skeptical of the studies conclusions. This study put the picture in a formal professional context. I don't care if your *employer* calls them fun pictures of people in our division/department everyone realizes you don't submit actually fun pictures but ones that reflect workplace norms. Even though employers often look at facebook pages it doesn't make them an employer webpage and while few employers would post a picture of someone good naturedly giving the photographer the finger or of a woman who had participated in a wet T-shirt contest many years ago in college few would care if they were published on a non-executives employee' facebook page. Worse, the question asked about an employee chosen picture.

So who would SUGGEST it was appropriate to submit a breast feeding picture to your employers webpage? Unlike actually breast-feeding in public which, while you know it may make some people uncomfortable, can often be the only way to feed your child while going about your professional business, the only reason to submit a picture of you breastfeeding is to make a point about the matter. Also this is very unlike breast-feeding on your facebook page (you aren't trying to force the image on purely professional contacts only "friends") which is theoretically aimed at friends. So I tend to suspect the only people who will find that an appropriate thing to do on an employers webpage are those who thoroughly support the point being made. Anyone who has a view somewhere in the middle, e.g., it seems unprofessional to them and makes them feel awkward but understands that there isn't really another option for mothers in many contexts and if that's the picture you share on facebook they don't have to look, is stripped out by the language suggesting this is self-selected for the employers webpage. Since it is those who are on the fence which are probably most influenced by supposedly extraneous factors like the person's race this language tends to particularly avoid.

Personally, this is the problem I have with the MANNER some women choose to breast feed in public. The fact that certain people feel uncomfortable about it isn't a good reason for mothers to endure substantial hardship feeding their children. Just as the fact that working with someone who privately has strong views about a controversial topic (religion, atheism etc..) isn't a good reason to try and clamp down on personal bloggers or *private* political conversations between friends overhead in the office. However, in both cases there is a reasonable duty to exercise this freedom with reasonable respect in the office place. You and the guy down the hall and three other guys at work might bond over Jesus and maybe that sometimes makes the loan muslim feel a bit

Re:Seconded.

[bluefoxlucid]

Your reasoning doesn't hold. The sample size has to be so small as to make the size of random chance distribution bigger than the size of the total possible distribution (i.e. 50% +/-50%, 70% +/- 70%) before you can't draw any conclusion whatsoever. If this weren't true, then even huge samples of millions of data points wouldn't provide enough information to draw any conclusion whatsoever.

There are two general areas in a statistical measurement: the area which shows a likely correlation, and the area which shows a correlation is unlikely. Small samples expand the area of a likely correlation, which is, interestingly, the area that doesn't tell you anything: there may be a difference of 1%, and a sample which provides a margin of error of 1.5% doesn't tell you if these things are the same or different. Large samples do largely suggest that the two things are the same--that the difference is *insignificant*.

In this case, the area that represents "insignificant" is larger than the area that represents "significant". What you learn is that the effect is almost certainly smaller than a certain size, same as when you have incredibly large samples.

Re:finally

[bennetthaselton]

The new orderlies don't check under your tongue.

Re:Most people don't object to public breast feedi

[gstoddart]

The opinion widely held in the USA and UK seems to be that it's nipples that cause the downfall of society

That's a provably false statement: a shirtless man does not cause the downfall of society. Yet, he has nipples.

Dogs and cats have nipples. Those, also do not cause the downfall of society.

Krusty the Klown has a superfluous third nipple (a trope borrowed from Goldfinger) ... again, no downfall of society. Yet you'd think if two are bad, three must be the sign of end-times, right?

This comes from puritanical people who believe that the sight of a woman's nipples would send humanity into fits of uncontrolled boobies, and that we'd be forced to face the fact that, yes, women have breasts, are in charge of those breasts, and that this is a perfectly normal fact.

This pretty much comes from religion, and nowhere else. You don't see "Atheists Against Boobies" campaigns.

You pretty much just see "God Will Punish You For Boobies" campaigns.

Re:finally

[sexconker]

My main page goes from "Ask Slashdot: How To Unblock Email From My Comcast-Hosted Server?" to "Popular Smartphones Hacked At Mobile Pwn2Own 2014" with no Bennett Haselton at all.

How? This greasemonkey script will prevent you from seeing Bennett Haselton's shit on the main page or an of the "older" pages ( http://slashdot.org/?page=1 ).
http://pastebin.com/RWCxT0jJ (Make sure you're redirecting beta to the real site.)

It just shits through the DOM looking for the shitty firehose/article/content structure and matching whole words against bennett or haselton in either the innerhtml or the plaintext node itself (just in case), then hides the article.

itwbennett is not blocked - does anyone know if it's the same persone? I checked itworld's shitty site but couldn't find anything. There's an amy bennett and some other bennett, but no haseldouche.

Re:Am I missing something?

[CajunArson]

Nice try Bennett. Nobody in their right mind would call anything you say "educated" or "meaningful". Instead we use words like, "malignantly narcissistic," and "full retard."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:finally

[Quirkz]

If you successfully hid this post from yourself, I have to ask, how is it you're here now telling others how to also hide it?

Quick chi-squared test, FWIW

[jdeisenberg]

Given the data (36 out of 47 found one photo inappropriate, 38 out of 54 found the other photo inappropriate), a chi-squared test without Yates's correction shows X2(1, N = 101) = 0.497, p = .481; thus, not significant. It would be nice if Mr. Haselton had posted a link to the raw data so we could look at it for ourselves. (Sorry for not using the Greek letter and superscript, but Slashdot didn't seem to like them.)

Re:Most people don't object to public breast feedi

[Pablew Nopl]

No, I honestly wouldn't care if someone was masturbating in a restroom. But I wouldn't care about breastfeeding either. Enough of this puritan nonsense.

Re:Popular research subject

[ceoyoyo]

Even bigger difference: the white woman is in Australia and the black woman is in the US.

Bullshit

[s.petry]

Actually it has concern has little to do with 'a certified union' and is more of a concern with the epidemic of single mothers forced to live on social welfare programs to support their kids, being given incentives to not have 2 parent families, and punished by the welfare systems if they attempt to establish or maintain a two parent household.

http://newsblogs.chicagotribun...
http://www.census.gov/prod/201...
http://www.actrochester.org/ch...
http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

These are just a few examples of the concern and impact this is having on society, and especially effecting certain ethnic groups.

Unfortunately while all of the corruption exist in Government this won't be fixed. You can do your own searching to find out why that is, but I'll give you a hint. Milton Friedman was one of many that explained this situation and why people want it that way.

There is no power.

[FhnuZoag]

I am actually a statistician. And this 'study' looks pretty worthless.

The problem is the issue of a 'huge gap'. What gap is huge? Well, we can try and do a power calculation. How big does the gap between the black and white targets *need* to be, to have a good chance of showing up in this test?

This is simple enough to calculate. Plug in some numbers:
1. Sample size in each group - 50
2. Level of Significance - 0.05
3. Power - i.e. the desired probability of finding there to be a significant difference, *if a difference exists*. I've chosen a standard number of 0.8 - i.e. allow for a 20% chance of missing a true effect by accident.

Fixing the proportion of inappropriates for the white woman at 70%, we find.... 91.8%.

In other words, with this sample size, we actually only rule out a difference of 70% vs 91.8%, or in other words, an over 2/3rds drop in the proportion of people finding the picture appropriate.

To rephrase: if the truth was that 2/3rds of the people who think a white woman is breastfeeding would *not* think a black person breastfeeding is appropriate - a situation that I think you'd agree is very racist - then we'd miss such an effect in an experiment like this over 1/5th the time. Even assuming the experiment was conducted ideally, and no one was just randomly clicking to earn money.

This article is meaningless.

Re:Please don't neogaf this place

[tehcyder]

This and geekhack are like the last BIG places where nerds can still be nerds without explaining themselves about the lack of women, blacks or x-men in our community

Stick to lurking, you racist, misogynist fuckbag.