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.

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: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?

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: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."

Re:Popular research subject

[bennetthaselton]

Udderly inappropriate.

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?

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.

[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.

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.