you can't be sure what you think

DOTE |  Implicit bias is usually associated (in research) with racial bias. Thus the Aeon article cited at outset goes through this exercise.

Do you think racial stereotypes are false? Are you sure? I’m not asking if you’re sure whether or not the stereotypes are false, but if you’re sure whether or not you think that they are. That might seem like a strange question.
We all know what we think, don’t we?

But of course the whole point is that we don't know what we think.

...Another consequence [of ISA theory] is that we might be sincerely mistaken about our own beliefs.
Return to my question about racial stereotypes. I guess you said you think they are false. But if the ISA theory is correct, you can’t be sure you think that.
Studies show that people who sincerely say that racial stereotypes are false often continue to behave as if they are true when not paying attention to what they are doing.
Such behavior is usually said to manifest an implicit bias, which conflicts with the person’s explicit beliefs. But the ISA theory offers a simpler explanation. People think that the stereotypes are true but also that it is not acceptable to admit this and therefore say they are false. Moreover, they say this to themselves too, in inner speech, and mistakenly interpret themselves as believing it.
They are hypocrites but not conscious hypocrites. Maybe we all are.

Maybe we're all unconscious hypocrites. In fact, that is part of the Flatland claim. The Flatland model also says that "implicit bias" is far more general than simple racial bias. We can't be sure what we think because those biases exist in the unconscious, which by definition is inaccessible to us.

Now, consider an essay which just appeared in The Guardian called—and I'm not kidding—Why elections are bad for democracy. The author is named David VanReybrouck.

Brexit is a turning point in the history of western democracy. Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure — a one-round referendum based on a simple majority.
Never before has the fate of a country—of an entire continent, in fact—been changed by the single swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens.

I'm here to tell you that there is nothing more democratic than a simple up/down referendum where each vote counts equally. Nothing. That's as democratic as things get.

warren beatty got blacklisted from hollywood for just pretending Trump...,

zerohedge |  Some people think that truth is relative. At least my relatives do. Try telling your friends and family that all truth passes through Three Stages, from ridicule to violent opposition to eventual acceptance, according to that guy Schopenhauer again, who must have been a lot of fun at parties. My friends and family remain at stage one.

In an essay called Bulworth In 2013, artist Jim Kirwan remarked: “Warren Beatty made Bulworth in 1998 to warn America about what this country had become . . . The film is about a disillusioned Senator who tires of the lies and begins to tell it like it is.  No other major filmmaker has dared to produce, much less chosen to put these topics before the public.” 

Bulworth quickly insults or provokes everyone he meets, from Black civic leaders to Jewish movie moguls to a roomful of the Senator’s corrupt corporate donors.  While on a fundraiser, Senator Bulworth visits the home of some Hollywood heavyweights and is asked bluntly by one of them: “Senator, do you think those of us in the entertainment business need government help in determining limits on sex and violence in today’s films and television programs?” 

Bulworth replies: “You know the funny thing is, how lousy most of your stuff is. You make violent films, you make dirty films, you make family films, but just most of them are not very good, are they? Funny that so many smart people could work so hard on them and spend so much money on them and, I mean, what do you think it is? It must be the money, huh. It must be the money, it turns everything to crap you know. Jesus Christ how much money do you guys really need?” 

And that is how you get black-listed from Hollywood, despite all the Oscars you have won in the past. Talk truth to power and damn if they don’t try to ruin you. 

Bulworth continues on in his suicidal mission. Warren Beatty is masterful and marvelous, like Trump on truth serum or steroids. Intoxicated with his candor, Senator Bulworth begins to rhyme, to a roomful of stunned corporate backers. “And over here, we got our friends from oil/ They don’t give a shit how much wilderness they spoil/ They tell us they are careful, we know that it’s a lie/ As long as we keep driving cars, they’ll let the planet die/ Exxon, Mobil, the Saudis and Kuwait, if we still got the Middle East, the atmosphere can wait/ The Arabs got the oil, we buy everything they sell/ But if the brothers raise the price, we’ll blow them all to hell.” 

Imagine Trump saying something like THAT? 

So ask yourself this, dear reader: When has ONE candidate managed to provoke and then UNITE the hysterical Left liberals and the entrenched, super rich & powerful oligarchs of the Extreme Right against him? Not to mention uniting the puppets and pundits of the mainstream media? Has that ever happened in American history? Before Bulworth? Before Trump? 

Consider the growing list of powerful, special interests arrayed against Donald Trump. Billionaire corporate heads oppose Trump. Dozens of them flew down to Sea Island, Georgia to devise ways to remove Trump from the Republican ticket. “”What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about bringing the blessings of democracy to the world’s benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, believe less in democracy than in perpetual control of the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites,” wrote Patrick Buchanan. “If an outsider like Trump imperils that control . . . the elites will come together to bring him down, because behind party lines, they’re soul brothers in pursuit of power.” 

Speaking of soul brothers, another billionaire, and self-confessed Nazi collaborator, George Soros backs BlackLivesMatters.  Soros provided in excess of $30 million in “seed” money to BLM.  Tweeted top BLM activist and rapper Tef Poe: “ If Trump wins, young niggas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go.”

Billionaires bankrolling ghetto brothers to burn and riot? And NO outcry from the American media, naturally.  Fist tap Don.

preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

frontiersin |  Ingroup favoritism—the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups—is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs. In doing so, we demonstrate how social psychological theory and research can be integrated with findings from behavioral economics, providing new theoretical and methodological directions for future research.

Across many different contexts, people act more prosocially towards members of their own group relative to those outside their group. Consequently, a number of scientific disciplines concerned with human cognition and behavior have sought to explain such ingroup favoritism (also known as parochial altruism). Here we explore to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the (future) behavior of ingroup and outgroup members.

In this theoretical review we combine insights from a behavioral economic approach with knowledge from social psychological research on social identity processes in intergroup behavior to explain the proximate psychological causes of ingroup favoritism. We expand upon previous discussions about ingroup favoritism by using a conceptual framework of preferences and beliefs to review present findings demonstrating ingroup favoritism in economic games. Although we focus on economic games here, we also selectively draw upon other related research to highlight how social-psychological theory and research can be incorporated with findings from behavioral economics to provide exciting new directions for research. We therefore provide an integrative review of ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature, as well as providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs.

Social Identity and Group Behavior From the dawn of our species to the present day, humans have lived, eaten, worked, and reproduced—that is, survived—in groups. These groups have expanded from small, primarily kin-based ties to groups based on language, nationality, religion, current geographical location, and even seemingly arbitrary characteristics such as the ownership of a particular brand of electronic device. As a species, we appear to have a remarkable tendency to seek out and identify with groups, and it has been suggested that cooperation with the ingroup and competition with the outgroup may have co-evolved (c.f. Rusch, 2014). Indeed, it is in our group-based character that the angels and demons of human nature can be seen: on the one hand, the success of intragroup cooperation that has given us democracy and civil rights; and on the other hand, the darkness of intergroup conflict that has given us the collective stains on human history of genocide and war. 

The concept of social identity (Tajfel, 1970, 1974, 1982) is key to this review—and more broadly most contemporary social psychological work on intergroup processes. Social identity is “that part of an individual’s self concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel, 1974, p. 69). We use here the definition of a group from work on intergroup relations in social psychology: a social group is a collection of individuals who perceive themselves to be members of the same social category, and therefore share a social identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Turner et al., 1987; Ellemers et al., 2002; Ellemers and Haslam, 2011; Turner and Reynolds, 2011). Social groups can be based on a range of objective and subjective criteria—from ethnic background to gender to nationality to occupation to religion. An intergroup context emerges when social identities are salient and individuals interact with one another in terms of these social group identities (Turner et al., 1987). Indeed, even assignment to random groups can be sufficient to engender a relevant intergroup context in which intergroup behavior is observed (Tajfel, 1974). Once groups have been formed, how does this influence behavior?

between-group competition, intra-group cooperation and relative performance

frontiersin |  We report the results of a new public goods experiment with an intra-group cooperation dilemma and inter-group competition. In our design subjects receive information about their relative individual and group performance after each round with non-incentivized and then incentivized group competition. We found that, on average, individuals with low relative performance reduce their contributions to the public good, but groups with low performance increase theirs. With incentivized competition, where the relative ranking of the group increases individual payoffs, the reaction to relative performance is larger with individuals contributing more to the group; further, we observe that the variance of strategies decreases as individual and group rankings increase. These results offer new insights on how social comparison shapes similar reactions in games with different incentives for group performance and how competition and cooperation can influence each other.

1. Introduction Collective action most likely evolved as a survival group strategy to overcome challenges and threats difficult to surpass individually. Achieving collective action, however, requires solving the problem of incentives within the group, namely, the conflict among individuals who would be better materially if they reap the benefits of cooperation by others but do not assume the cost. Groups with higher levels of cooperation, on the other hand, could reproduce their strategies more successfully making them more competitive against other groups. This competition among groups over scarce resources decreases the within-group conflict at the cost of raising the between-group conflict¹. 

One particular condition shaping competition is the availability of information on individual and group performance. When these informational sets are independently provided, the feedback at the group level decreases the salience of selfish incentives, increasing within-group cooperation (Burton-Chellew and West, 2012) at the cost of additional between-group conflict. However, subjects' reaction to the simultaneous provision of individual and group ranking has been rather unexplored. By receiving simultaneous feedback on individual and group performance subjects may develop richer responses to their relative success with respect to other group members but also to their group's success with respect to other groups, especially in presence of competition for additional resources. These different incentives bring a complex interaction of cooperation and conflict. One individual's higher relative performance could increase her individual payoffs at the expense of reducing the relative performance of her group, and thus harming the group's relative performance which in turn would decrease her individual payoffs.