The Turban Effect : The Science and the predictable responses

Damn the friendly fire!

Chancing upon this at the end of the day I just know that all manner of social activists (whether they be of the armchair variety or tenured) are going to start to apply pressure to attack it’s findings. I’ll admit that the possibility of confirmation bias is only too real but the researchers did pose a fairly simple question and went on to test their hypothesis:

“Does Islamic appearance increase aggressive tendencies, and what role does affect play in such responses? In a computer game, participants made rapid decisions to shoot at armed people, some of whom wore Islamic head dress. We predicted and found a significant bias for participants to shoot more at Muslim targets. We also predicted and found that positive mood selectively increased aggressive tendencies towards Muslims, consistent with affect-cognition theories that predict a more top-down, stereotypical processing style in positive mood. In contrast, induced anger increased the propensity to shoot at all targets. The relevance of these results for our understanding of real-life negative reactions towards Muslims is discussed, and the influence of affective states on rapid aggressive responses is considered.


Reference:

• Christian Unkelbach, Joseph P. Forgas and Thomas F. Denson (in press). The turban effect: The influence of Muslim headgear and induced affect on aggressive responses in the shooter bias paradigm. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
  

So far the only responses to the findings has been one person asking if the journal that published this was peer reviewed. For the record it is and unfortunately for much of the Muslim community and their academic allies on the Left it is in an academic field that they will have a hard times confronting if they choose to use the polemics of another time or take a stand similar to the Church of Scientology’s attacks on psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. They’ll give it a try and it may just well bring out echoes of similarly themed incidents.

Of course, I could do an experiment asking if “Does kaffir appearance increase aggressive tendencies, and what role does affect play in such responses? And so and so forth.

Victims of confirmation bias