Category Archives: Sociology

‘Asian Advantage’ By Nicholas kristof

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THIS is an awkward question, but here goes: Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

It’s no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American schools, and even in American society as a whole. Census data show that Americans of Asian heritage earn more than other groups, including whites. Asian-Americans also have higher educational attainment than any other group.

I wrote a series of columns last year, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” about racial inequity, and one of the most common responses from angry whites was along these lines: This stuff about white privilege is nonsense, and if blacks lag, the reason lies in the black community itself. Just look at Asian-Americans. Those Koreans and Chinese make it in America because they work hard. All people can succeed here if they just stop whining and start working.

Let’s confront the argument head-on. Does the success of Asian-Americans suggest that the age of discrimination is behind us?

It’s not surprising that the children of Asian-American doctors would flourish in the United States. But Lee and Zhou note that kids of working-class Asian-Americans often also thrive, showing remarkable upward mobility.

And let’s just get one notion out of the way: The difference does not seem to be driven by differences in intelligence.

Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellentbook about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.

So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn’t intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.

Some disagree, but I’m pretty sure that one factor is East Asia’s long Confucian emphasis on education. Likewise, a focus on education also helps explain the success of Jews, who are said to have had universal male literacy 1,700 years before any other group.

Immigrant East Asians often try particularly hard to get into good school districts, or make other sacrifices for children’s education, such as giving prime space in the home to kids to study.

There’s also evidence that Americans believe that A’s go to smart kids, while Asians are more likely to think that they go to hard workers. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but the result is that Asian-American kids are allowed no excuse for getting B’s — or even an A-. The joke is that an A- is an “Asian F.”

Strong two-parent families are a factor, too. Divorce rates are much lower for many Asian-American communities than for Americans as a whole, and there’s evidence that two-parent households are less likely to sink into poverty and also have better outcomes for boys in particular.

Teachers’ expectations can also play a role. This idea was explored in afamous experiment in the 1960s by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-advantage.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

 

Iqbal writes to his son

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Subject: Iqbal writes to his son

From:    "Mirza Ashraf" 


Here is unique message a father sends to his son in response to his letter.

‘The Hidden Connection Between Morality And Language’ By Cody Delistraty

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Tragedy can strike us any time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it. When Frank’s dog was struck and killed by a car in front of his house, he grew curious what Fido might taste like. So he cooked him up and ate him for dinner. It was a harmless decision, but, nonetheless, some people would consider it immoral. Or take incest. A brother, who’s using a condom, and his sister, who’s on birth control, decide to have sex. They enjoy it but keep it a secret and don’t do it again. Is their action morally wrong? If they’re both consenting adults and not hurting anyone, can one legitimately criticize their moral judgment?

Janet Geipel of the University of Trento in Italy posed fictional scenarios like these to German-, Italian-, and English-speaking college students in each student’s native language and in a second language that they spoke almost fluently. What Geipel found in her July 2015 study is that “the use of a foreign language, as opposed to a native language, elicited less harsh moral judgments.” She concluded that a distance is created between emotional and moral topics when speaking in a second language.

 

People are more likely to act less emotionally and more rationally when speaking their second language, according to Geipel. Nelson Mandela seemed to have understood this dynamic decades ago when he said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

The distinction is an important one: If moral decisions are contingent on the language in which they are posed then the decisions of people who must work in a foreign language on a daily basis—immigrants, international corporations, international institutions—would need to be reevaluated. Whether it’s Goldman Sachs in Paris or the United Nations in Burma, decisions made by people speaking their non-native languages appear to be less concerned with morality and more concerned with rationality and utilitarianism. Click link for full article.

http://nautil.us/blog/the-hidden-connection-between-morality-and-language

posted by f. sheikh

‘tragedy of the commons’ extra credit challenge By Dylan Selterman

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Imagine you’re a student and your teacher poses this challenge to the entire class:

You can each earn some extra credit on your term paper. You get to choose whether you want 2 points added to your grade, or 6 points. But there’s a catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points. All selections are anonymous, and the course grades are not curved.

I pose this exact challenge to students each semester in my social psychology course at the University of Maryland. This summer, one of my studentshappened to tweet about it, and his reaction went viral. This puzzle has resonated with millions of people around the globe—in the past week I’ve gotten responses from people in Poland, Spain, Italy, Croatia, New Zealand, and Paraguay, to name a few.

This exercise impels students to consider how their actions affect others, and vice versa. I’ve been giving it to students since 2008, and only one class has successfully mastered the challenge. In all other classes, more than 10 percent chose 6 points. Students’ temptation to reach for more points is very strong, and they often express exasperation when things don’t go their way. Last semester after I announced the results, one student threw up her hands and emphatically said, “If only everyone chose 2 points, we all would have gotten the points!”

Many professors in my field use versions of this exercise, which was first developed 25 years ago. I learned it as an undergraduate studying psychology under Steve Drigotas at Johns Hopkins. (I chose 2 points, and watched with extreme frustration as those points were lost when too many of my classmates choose 6 points.) As climate change and population growth threaten our resources, the experiment is more relevant now than ever.

This exercise illustrates the tragedy of the commons (or the “commons dilemma”), and is very similar to other exercises developed by behavioral scientists and game theorists (such as the “prisoner’s dilemma”). In cases like these, there’s a public resource that people can freely use to benefit themselves. In the classroom example it’s points, but in the real world the resource can be food, water, land, electricity, etc. If everyone is mindful about collective consumption and limits their personal use, the group will thrive. But if too many people behave selfishly (trying to maximize their own personal outcomes), then the group eventually suffers and everyone is left with nothing as the public resource is depleted.

It feels good to be cooperative both from a strategic and moral perspective. After all, if every student chose 2 points, everyone would get the extra credit, thus making it a rational choice. Furthermore, it’s the communal choice, based on an ethical imperative to do what’s best for others in the group. But many students choose the seemingly selfish option. Why? Perhaps to increase their own grades, or perhaps because they fear that they will be taken advantage of. No one wants to be the chump that chooses fewer points when they could have had more. The ideal scenario would be if everyone else was cooperative but you were selfish, thereby maximizing your reward while maintaining the health of the group. But it rarely works out that way, and people often find themselves in deadlocks of mistrust with others in their group.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/20/why-i-give-my-students-a-tragedy-of-the-commons-extra-credit-challenge/?hpid=z3

posted by f.sheikh