Intelligence and the stereotype threat

Annie Murphy Paul writes: We’ve all been there: you feel especially smart and funny when talking to a particular person, only to feel hopelessly unintelligent and inarticulate in the presence of another.

You’re not imagining things. Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.

It’s just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. As parents, teachers and students settle into the school year, this work should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a “lump of something that’s in our heads,” as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as “a transaction among people.”

Mr. Aronson, an associate professor at New York University, has been a leader in investigating the effects of social forces on academic achievement. Along with the psychologist Claude Steele, he identified the phenomenon known as “stereotype threat.” Members of groups believed to be academically inferior — African-American and Latino students enrolled in college, or female students in math and science courses — score much lower on tests when reminded beforehand of their race or gender.

The pair’s experiments in the 1990s, and the dozens of studies by other researchers that followed, concluded that the performance of these students suffered because they were worried about confirming negative stereotypes about their group.

In a 1995 article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Professors Steele and Aronson found that black students performed comparably with white students when told that the test they were taking was “a laboratory problem-solving task.” Black students scored much lower, however, when they were instructed that the test was meant to measure their intellectual ability. In effect, the prospect of social evaluation suppressed these students’ intelligence.

Minorities aren’t the only ones vulnerable to stereotype threat. We all are. A group of people notably confident about their mathematical abilities — white male math and engineering majors who received high scores on the math portion of the SAT — did worse on a math test when told that the experiment was intended to investigate “why Asians appear to outperform other students on tests of math ability.” [Continue reading…]

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Video: Is a Turkey-Syria conflict inevitable?

Today’s Zaman reports: Another mortar shell from Syria struck Turkish territory on Sunday, prompting a fifth straight day of retaliatory artillery fire by the Turkish military.

An Associated Press video journalist said Turkish artillery fired toward Syria minutes after a Syrian shell landed on Turkish territory.

The Syrian shell landed some 200 meters (200 yards) inside Turkey, near the border town of Akçakale. A short time later, at least six mortars could be heard fired from Turkey. It was the fifth day in a row that Turkey returned fire.

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Syrian activists reach across sectarian divide

BBC News reports: While the Syrian conflict has been characterised by fighting between the Sunni majority and ruling Alawite minority, it has also given birth to some movements which aim to bridge the sectarian divide, as Samer Mohajer and Ellie Violet Bramley report from Beirut.

Nabeel, a 24-year-old Alawite doctor from Homs, describes how he and other Syrian activists first decided to start campaigning against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the summer of 2011.

“A bunch of us were having coffee in Homs,” he said. “We wanted to have some influence on our revolution, so we tried to do something to express ourselves, to express our opinions.”

The result was the creation of the Nabd (or Pulse) Gathering for Syrian Civil Youth – one of the many cross-sectarian movements that have emerged from Syria’s 18-month-long revolt.

They are designed to campaign against the regime, but also to promote unity among Syria’s religious sects in the face of the increasing role of foreign and jihadi fighters and the characterisation of the struggle along sectarian lines.

“We started our work in Homs, addressing the dangerous subject of sectarianism,” explained Nabeel. “We organised some protests involving guys and girls from all sects, distributed flyers and put posters up. We campaigned against violence and distributed flowers.”

Next came a sit-in, in the Khaldiyeh neighbourhood of Homs attacked by security forces, and a week of national unity.

Quickly, “things escalated until we had cells in every city – Damascus, Salamiyah [an Ismaili Muslim town], and Latakia [an Alawite centre],” said Nabeel. [Continue reading…]

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Citing U.S. fears, Arab allies limit Syrian rebel aid

The New York Times reports: For months, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been funneling money and small arms to Syria’s rebels but have refused to provide heavier weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles, that could allow opposition fighters to bring down government aircraft, take out armored vehicles and turn the war’s tide.

While they have publicly called for arming the rebels, they have held back, officials in both countries said, in part because they have been discouraged by the United States, which fears the heavier weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists.

As a result, the rebels have just enough weapons to maintain a stalemate, the war grinds on and more jihadist militants join the fray every month.

“You can give the rebels AKs, but you can’t stop the Syrian regime’s military with AKs,” said Khalid al-Attiyah, a state minister for foreign affairs in Qatar. Providing the rebels with heavier weapons “has to happen,” he added. “But first we need the backing of the United States, and preferably the U.N.”

Saudi officials here said the United States was not barring them from providing shoulder-fired missiles, but warning about the risks. The Saudis and Qataris said they hoped to convince their allies that those risks could be overcome. “We are looking at ways to put in place practices to prevent this type of weapon from falling into the wrong hands,” one Arab official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with diplomatic protocol.

American support for such weapons transfers is unlikely to materialize any time soon. The Obama administration has made clear that it has no desire to deepen its efforts, mostly providing logistical support for the rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan blocks anti-drone protest in tribal region

The Associated Press reports: The Pakistani military blocked a convoy carrying thousands of Pakistanis and a small contingent of U.S. anti-war activists from entering a lawless tribal region along the border with Afghanistan on Sunday to protest American drone strikes.

The group, led by cricket star turned politician Imran Khan and his political party, was turned back just miles from the border of South Waziristan. After an hour of fruitless negotiations, Khan announced that the caravan would backtrack to the city of Tank, about 15 kilometers (nine miles) away. There, he delivered a speech to the crowd of about 10,000.

Khan has harshly criticized the Pakistani government’s cooperation with Washington in the fight against Islamist militants. He has been especially outspoken against U.S. drone strikes targeting militants and has argued that the country’s alliance with Washington is the main reason Pakistan is facing a homegrown Taliban insurgency. He has suggested before that militant activity in Pakistan’s tribal areas will dissipate when the U.S. ends the war across the border in Afghanistan.

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Follow the money: From Islamophobia to Israel right or wrong

Elly Bulkin and Donna Nevel write: You don’t have to get more than a minute into Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (2007) to begin to see how inextricably it ties Islamophobia to hardline Israeli policies. Despite its initial disclaimer, the film demonizes all Muslims, and through explicit statements and rapid-fire images, makes clear that there is a direct connection between Nazis and both Palestinians and Muslims.

Obsession played a brief but high-profile role during the 2008 presidential election campaign when the Clarion Fund distributed 28 million DVDs as a newspaper insert in swing states. A few years later, Clarion’s The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America (2008) — about an Islamic enemy that, purportedly, “the government is too afraid to name” — made its own headlines with reports that the New York City Police Department had showed the film to nearly 1,500 police officers. And in 2011, Clarion got still more attention when it issued its third big film, Iranium. The film pushes the Israeli and neoconservative narrative about Iran’s nuclear program and the need for military action against Iran, using a “clash of civilizations” framework that attributes “unavoidable” conflict to fundamental cultural differences between Islamic and Western civilizations.

Obsession and The Third Jihad ignited a firestorm of criticism from Muslim, civil rights and other groups. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) condemned Obsession for spreading “scurrilous accusations against Islam and Muslims,” while the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) denounced The Third Jihad as “blatantly anti-Muslim”. Activists, researchers, and journalists have commented on Obsession’s mistranslations and The Third Jihad’s use of a “discredited conspiracy theory”. They have also noted the films’ countless distortions and manipulations: benign images of Muslims at prayer made sinister by “scary music” and “repeated images of an Islamic flag flying over the White House” — “cherry picking . . . inflammatory images and splicing them together to create fear”.

But others, particularly supporters of Israel’s right-wing policies, found these films’ virulently anti-Muslim message to their liking. All three films have been effectively mainstreamed in the Jewish community, with local showings sponsored by such groups as Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, and the Dallas Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and B’nai B’rith chapters. Obsession has become a staple of David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness” weeks on college campuses. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire supporter of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney — and a critic of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) from the right — has distributed copies of Obsession to young people on Birthright-sponsored tours to Israel, a project he funds. [Continue reading…]

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The myth of freedom through autonomy

It’s no wonder that the fiction of the self-made man has deep roots in American culture. A society built on the land of indigenous people and on backs of African slaves needs to find ingenious ways to dignify itself. The myth of self-creation has an obvious appeal as it negates the past and glorifies the future.

In 1624, when John Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” he merely eloquently phrased what throughout human existence had always been understood. Yet in 21st century America a debate continues between those who exalt autonomy versus those who emphasize human interdependence.

Eric Michael Johnson writes: Black-and-white colobus monkeys scrambled through the branches of Congo’s Ituri Forest in 1957 as a small band of Mbuti hunters wound cautiously through the undergrowth, joined by anthropologist Colin Turnbull. The Mbuti are pygmies, about 4 feet tall, but they are powerful and tough. Any one of them could take down an elephant with only a short-handled spear. Recent genetic evidence suggests that pygmies have lived in this region for about 60,000 years. But this particular hunt reflected a timeless ethical conflict for our species, and one that has special relevance for contemporary American society.

Mbuti hunter unfolding hunting net in Congo’s Ituri Forest.

The Mbuti employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap. As Turnbull came to understand, Mbuti hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else. But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others. “In this way he caught the first of the animals fleeing from the beaters,” explained Turnbull in his book The Forest People, “but he had not been able to retreat before he was discovered.” Word spread among camp members that Cephu had been trying to steal meat from the tribe, and a consensus quickly developed that he should answer for this crime.

At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.

Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented. “He apologized profusely,” Turnbull wrote, “and said that in any case he would hand over all the meat.” This ended the matter, and members of the group pulled chunks of meat from Cephu’s basket. He clutched his stomach and moaned, begging that he be left with something to eat. The others merely laughed and walked away with their pound of flesh. Like the mythical figure Atlas from Greek antiquity, condemned by vindictive gods to carry the world on his shoulders for all eternity, Cephu was bound to support the tribe whether he chose to or not.

Meanwhile, in the concrete jungle of New York City, another struggle between the individual and the group was unfolding. In October of 1957, Ayn Rand published her dystopian novel Atlas Shrugged, in which a libertarian hero named John Galt condemns his collectivist society because of its failure to support individual rights. “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man — every man — is an end in himself,” Galt announced, “he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.” Unlike Cephu, Galt had the means to end his societal bondage. By withdrawing his participation and convincing others to do the same, he would stop the motor of the world. Atlas would shrug. “Every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature,” Galt insisted. “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Ayn Rand’s defense of a human nature based on rationality and individual achievement, with capitalism as its natural extension, became the rallying cry for an emerging libertarian stripe in conservative American politics. Paul Ryan cites Atlas Shrugged as forming the basis of his value system and says it was one of the main reasons he chose to enter politics. Other notable admirers include Rush Limbaugh, Alan Greenspan, Clarence Thomas, as well as Congressional Tea Party Caucus members Steve King, Mick Mulvaney, and Allen West.

“Collectivism,” Rand wrote in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.” An objective understanding of “man’s nature and man’s relationship to existence” should inoculate society from the disease of altruistic morality and economic redistribution. Therefore, “one must begin by identifying man’s nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.” She identifies two: a brain evolved for rational thought and a survival instinct based on the desire for personal freedom.

Ultimately, Rand was searching for the origin of John Galt in the pages of human nature. But was she right? Are we rational egotists trapped in a net of social obligations? Or are we an innately social species for whom altruism was integral to our success on this planet? There was only one place she could look: the Pleistocene. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s preference for killing terrorists rather than torturing them

In a review of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden, Steve Coll writes:

In early 2009, in a speech at the National Archives, Obama announced that he would end the policy of using interrogation methods judged to be torture by the International Red Cross, and that he would close Guantánamo’s prison. He indicated that he would be open to trying some terrorists before military commissions, rather than dispatching all of Guantánamo’s inmates to federal courtrooms, but he declared that we “cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” He promised policies based on “an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process.” He added that “fidelity to our values” is the “reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s Armed Forces than from their own government.”

In the years since, the president has struggled to live up to those pledges. In the one case where he took a major political risk to try a high-profile al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist in federal court, his decision ended badly. In late 2009, on the recommendation of Attorney General Holder, Obama ordered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the bin Laden ally who masterminded the September 11 attacks, transferred from Guantánamo to stand trial in the Southern District of New York. Republicans accused Obama of going soft and whipped up a political backlash that forced the president to retreat; Mohammed is now facing a trial before a military commission at Guantánamo.

In planning for Abbottabad, White House lawyers would almost certainly have assured Obama that it would be legal to kill bin Laden outright. The “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” enacted by Congress a week after the September 11 attacks provided for the use of deadly force against al-Qaeda’s leaders. Also, under international and American laws arising from the rights of self-defense, if a terrorist is actively planning deadly operations, it can be legal to strike first. We know from White House disclosures that Obama seriously considered bombing the Abbottabad compound to smithereens. He demurred out of concern that it might not be clear after the attack whether bin Laden had been there at all. Yet if the president had decided on bombing, he would surely have justified his decision by pointing to the principles of self-defense, just as he uses this doctrine to justify the dozens of drone strikes he has authorized against suspected militants in countries where the United States is not formally at war.

The Abbottabad raid, as it was ultimately designed, seems to have brought into play different questions of international and American law concerning the requirement of soldiers to accept surrenders when they are offered. Having chosen to go in on the ground, Obama evidently did not wish to design a mission that precluded the theoretical possibility that bin Laden might surrender. Instead, he approved rules of engagement that made bin Laden’s surrender all but impossible.

Coll concludes:

[T]he Obama administration’s terrorist-targeting and detention system is heavily biased toward killing, inconsonant with constitutional and democratic principles, and unsustainable. The president has become personally invested in a system of targeted killing of dozens of suspected militants annually by drone strikes and Special Forces raids where the legal standards employed to designate targets for lethal action or to review periodic reports of mistakes are entirely secret.

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Free speech in action on New York subways

The New York Times reports: Striking back against an anti-jihad advertisement in the subways widely perceived as anti-Muslim, two religious groups – one Jewish, one Christian – are taking out subway ads of their own to urge tolerance.

Rabbis for Human Rights – North America and the group Sojourners, led by the Christian author and social-justice advocate Jim Wallis, are unveiling their campaigns on Monday. Their ads will be placed near the anti-jihad ads in the same Manhattan subway stations, leaders of both groups said and transit officials confirmed. The groups said their campaigns were coincidental.

The ad by Rabbis for Human Rights turns the language of the earlier ad, placed by a pro-Israel group, on its head. The original ad says, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” The ad by Rabbis for Human Rights says, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.”

“We wanted to make it clear that it is in response to the anti-Islam ad,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, whose members include rabbis from all streams of Judaism.

The Sojourners ad simply says, “Love your Muslim neighbors.”

Another Christian group, United Methodist Women, an affiliate of the United Methodist Church, has placed similar ads in the same 10 Manhattan stations where the anti-jihad appears. The ads, which went up on Wednesday, say, “Hate speech is not civilized. Support peace in word and deed.”

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Just war moral philosophy and the 2008–09 Israeli campaign in Gaza

In a 37-page article for the journal International Security, Jerome Slater writes: Scholars and policymakers regard the Israeli-Palestinian conºict as one of the most serious and intractable conflicts in today’s world. In particular, there continues to be fierce controversy over the most recent large-scale Israeli military action in that conflict: the three-week attack on Gaza that began on December 27, 2008. Operation Cast Lead, as Israelis call the attack, was justified by Israel and its supporters as a legitimate use of force in self-defense, the purpose of which was to end Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel’s civilian population. Even critics of Cast Lead have mostly accepted this argument—despite condemning Israel’s methods and, especially, its indiscriminate attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and sometimes direct attacks on noncombatants. In particular, most of the leading investigations of Cast Lead, including those by the Goldstone Commission, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem (Israel’s leading human rights organization) did not seek to refute the self-defense argument, even as they concluded that Israel had been guilty of war crimes because of the manner in which it conducted the attack on Gaza.

The argument of this article, however, is not only that the Israeli methods were morally (and, in most cases, legally) wrong,1 but that the very purpose of Cast Lead cannot be justified as one of self-defense. Rather, I argue that Cast Lead was a moral catastrophe, a wholesale violation of the just war philosophy that has guided Western thought on war and morality for more than 2,000 years. In addition, with regard to the history of Israeli military strategies, Cast
Lead was hardly unprecedented, because it must be understood in the context of Israel’s “iron wall” strategy, which from the outset has included deliberate attacks on civilians or their economy, institutions, and infrastructures. [Continue reading…]

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Eric Hobsbawm: A British internationalist

Ramachandra Guha writes: In 1980, as a beginning graduate student, I was directed by my thesis supervisor to a short, pungent piece by Eric Hobsbawm that had just appeared in the journal Past and Present. This was a response to a previous essay in the same journal, by Lawrence Stone, that celebrated the “revival of narrative” in historical writing. In Stone’s view, this was a welcome departure from the arid, analytical, social-scientific and (not least) Marxian trends that had previously dominated the discipline. Hobsbawm, who died on Monday at the age of 95, saw Stone’s triumphalism as misplaced; to be sure, historians needed to write well, but they had also to analyse and synthesize, to explain events and processes in terms of what they meant to human values and institutions.

I first read Hobsbawm in 1980; I last read him in 2011, when seeking to understand an armed insurgent named Kishenji much written about in the Indian press. The man saw himself as an Indian Mao Zedong, who would one day capture state power in New Delhi; but he seemed rather to be what Hobsbawm called a “social bandit,” raiding the rich and killing policemen while being given refuge by the peasants and tribals with whom he identified. From Hobsbawm I learnt to see Kishenji as a figure of romance and daring but — despite his inflated self-image and the paranoia of the right-wing press — of no real historical or political significance.

I never met Eric Hobsbawm, yet he has kept me company throughout my working life. I suspect my experience is representative — other Indian, African and Latin American historians who never saw the man in the flesh likewise read his work very closely. And there was a great deal for us to read: some 30 books published over seven decades of a very long life and very active career. [Continue reading…]

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What the drones protest march in Waziristan aims to achieve

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NBC News reports: Dozens of anti-drone activists have traveled to Pakistan to join a march to the country’s tribal areas, where more than 300 strikes have killed thousands of people in the last eight years.

The 32 members of Code Pink have ignored a State Department travel warning to take part in Pakistani presidential candidate Imran Khan’s “peace rally” to the remote area bordering Afghanistan, where the vast majority of the nearly 350 US drone strikes in Pakistan have occurred.

“People are taking great risks to come here,” said Medea Banjamin, co-director of Code Pink. “It shows the depth of conviction that we have to say that ‘I don’t want my government killing innocent people in my name and I’m going to put my body on the line to try to stop it.’ “

James Jeffrey writes: The British civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and international cricketer turned politician Imran Khan will begin a peace march on 7 October into Pakistan’s Waziristan region. Their aim is to highlight the plight of innocent people killed or injured by US drones.

Smith took the precautionary measure of writing to President Obama and his CIA director, David Petraeus, informing them about the march. In the letter, he requested that the president ensure the names of him and the other marchers would not be on the weekly kill list the president reviews, along with security officials, in the White House situation room. Smith wrote:

“Please remember that you and I are both lawyers from the same tradition, and it would be unseemly (as well as being both illegal and upsetting for my family) if you were to authorize my assassination.”

Like the sealed corridors in which the top secret kill list nomination process occurs – an account of which was reportedly leaked by the Obama administration to the New York Times – Waziristan has, until now, remained in the shadows, a place about which very little is known or reported. It is hoped the march will help open the area to public scrutiny by taking media there to gather independent information. [Continue reading…]

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Iranians offer 9-step plan to end nuclear crisis

The New York Times reports: With harsh economic sanctions contributing to the first major protests in Iran in three years, Iranian officials have begun to describe what they call a “nine-step plan” to defuse the nuclear crisis with the West by gradually suspending the production of the uranium that would be easiest for them to convert into a nuclear weapon.

But the plan requires so many concessions by the West, starting with the dismantling of all the sanctions that are blocking oil sales and setting off the collapse of the Iranian currency, that American officials have dismissed it as unworkable. Nonetheless, Iranian officials used their visit to the United Nations last week to attempt to drum up support, indicating that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is finally feeling the pressure.

“Within the intelligence community, I think it’s fair to say that there is split opinion about whether the upper level of the regime is getting seriously worried,” one senior intelligence official said when asked why the Iranians appeared to be backing away from their earlier stand that nothing would stop them from producing more medium-enriched uranium, which can be turned into bomb fuel in a matter of months.

“He’s erratic, and we’ve seen him walk up to the edge of deals before and walk away,” the official said, referring to Ayatollah Khamenei.

The Iranian plan is based on a proposal made to European officials in July. It essentially calls for a step-by-step dismantling of the sanctions while the Iranians end work at one of two sites where they are enriching what is known as “20 percent uranium.” Only when the Iranians reach step No. 9 — after all the sanctions are gone and badly depressed oil revenues have begun to flow again — would there be a “suspension” of the medium-enriched uranium production at the deep underground site called Fordow. [Continue reading…]

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