So I've read through the
training document provided by Starbucks. The vast majority of it is comprised of generic platitudes that are centered around your standard flowery buzzwords like
tolerance, love, warmth, acceptance, diversity and so on and so forth. It won't do anything to prevent future incidents, but at least it's harmless enough.
The only relevant part is where they try to refute the concept of color-blindness through pseudo-scientific eyewash that is borderline fraudulent. I've cropped the relevant part from page 22:
They present the
Stroop Effect as evidence that subconscious implicit racial bias exists in order to establish their claim that color-blindness is problematic. The problem with that assertion being that the Stroop test has never been conceived to measure implicit bias. In other words, the Stroop effect has f*ck all to do with implicit bias and cannot be used as evidence that people are victim of subconscious racism.
The Stroop test doesn't measure implicit bias
Let's start with what the Stroop Effect actually is:
When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") is printed in a color which is not denoted by the name (i.e., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color.
Here is what the Stroop Test actually measures:
In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task.
This is what Stroop testing is used for:
Among the most important uses is the creation of validated psychological tests based on the Stroop effect permit to measure a person's selective attention capacity and skills, as well as their processing speed ability. It is also used in conjunction with other neuropsychological assessments to examine a person's executive processing abilities, and can help in the diagnosis and characterization of different psychiatric and neurological disorders.
And finally, this is why the Stroop effect is happening:
This theory suggests there is a lag in the brain's ability to recognize the color of the word since the brain reads words faster than it recognizes colors. [...] It suggests that since recognizing colors is not an "automatic process" there is hesitancy to respond; whereas, the brain automatically understands the meaning of words as a result of habitual reading.
If anything, the Stroop effect would disprove the existence of implicit racial bias, because
color is harder for the brain to process, compared to symbols and patterns. This is because we are more used to reading to the point that it becomes an "automatic process", while color recognition requires more cognitive effort:
In most cases, it takes longer to state the colors of the words, rather than to read the text they are printed in, despite the incongruence being essentially the same across both lists. It appears we are more influenced by the physical text than than the text color.
If Starbucks would be so inclined to actually explain to me how the flippin' flip Stroop testing, a procedure that measures cognitive processing speed and is primarily used as a diagnostic tool for neurological disorders, actually measures implicit racial bias, I'd be much obliged!
Emotional Stroop Testing goes contrary to subconscious racial bias
Emotional Stroop testing measures the Stroop effect in relation to the cognitive processing of emotions. Emotional Stroop testing has consistently shown that humans process words and emotions faster than other cognitive tasks. Not only do they recognize
facial expressions faster than voices, their effortless capacity to process words is due to the fact that reading is
a learned behavior rather than an instinctive one:
Moreover, the faster processing of word reading compared to reporting face expressions is indicative of the formation of stronger stimulus–response associations of an over-learned behavior compared to an instinctive one, which could alternatively be explained through the distinction between awareness and selective attention.
From an evolutionary standpoint this makes perfect sense, since reading emotions and understanding signs in relation to other living beings is
much more important for survival than understanding color. In other words, human react much more to a face that smiles or is angry, rather than its color, i.e. they'd prefer the smile of a black person over the frown of a white person. The reason for this is simple, facial expressions and emotions tell you whether the person you're confronted with has friendly or hostile intentions.
Implicit Association Testing (IAT) is not reliable
Lastly, there is a form of
Implicit Association Testing (IAT) that claims to measure subconscious racial bias. The test was invented by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji and measures response time to various faces, suggesting that you react in a more biased manner toward black people. The methodology of the test seems to borrow heavily from Stroop testing and basically looks like this:
The problem with IAT is that it is a
complete and utter fraud as explained by these articles (
here &
here):
A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such.
So not only is IAT testing not reliable, it has even been rejected by its own inventors and has been
refuted by various other scientists through a big meta study published in 2013:
IATs were poor predictors of every criterion category other than brain activity, and the IATs performed no better than simple explicit measures. These results have important implications for the construct validity of IATs, for competing theories of prejudice and attitude-behavior relations, and for measuring and modeling prejudice and discrimination.
Here is
another study showing that IAT tests are highly unreliable and may not even measure subconscious bias at all:
According to Blanton and Jaccard, the conventionally acceptable correlation for test/retest reliability is a correlation coefficient of 0.70 and rises to 0.90 when used for individual assessment. They find that Greenwald’s test/retest reliability is 0.56, while another group of researchers found a test plus three re-tests over a two-week period caused correlation coefficients to plummet to 0.27. [...] While Greenwald and his colleagues argued that the longer response times of the “incompatible” pairings of black pictures and pleasant words versus white pictures and unpleasant words tap into unconscious prejudice, Brendl, Markman, and Messner proposed that the IAT registers “familiar” versus “unfamiliar” sets of associations. The more common associations result in faster reaction times; the more distinctive or less common, the slower times.
In other words, if you're used to seeing more black people in your daily life, you process these faces faster because you're used to seeing them. On the other hand, if you rarely encounter black people, you process white faces faster! In short, IAT testing doesn't measure racial bias, but is due to the fact that people process certain cognitive task faster, because they are more used to doing them. This, by the way, is completely in line with the Stroop effect where people can process words faster because reading is an over-practiced behavior.
The Starbucks training document is pseudo-academic snake oil
So not only is Starbucks pushing the dangerous conviction that color-blindness is a bad thing, they also rely on faulty evidence and are actively misinforming their staff through academic notions that have long since been utter and completely debunked. Stroop testing has nothing to do with implicit bias and IAT is completely unreliable. If Starbucks wants to have diversity training to save them from a PR disaster, that's their business, but selling lies to their employees and attempting to push these falsehoods on a global scale through their corporate reach is outright unacceptable!
As it stands, Starbucks are not combating discrimination by educating its people, they are indoctrinating them with ideological notions sold on a pseudo-scientific lie... and nobody seems to take notice because they probably don't even read that sh*t.
<+)O Robido O(+>
in order to have a meaningful discussion. While I don't expect others to reply in an equally lengthy manner, I certainly don't need childish bullcr*p like that.
Phoenix RISING
, participate or leave. Don't pretend you're barely suffering being here on a whim during work. Like we've talked about before: you're a good contributor here when you cut the crap and allow yourself to be honest and put some time in to contribute. Whenever that's not happening, though, you're a shitposter. Pick one. I'd much rather have
strange headache
and
D
Dunki
et al tend to go big and wrap their positions in comprehensive posts and demand the same from the people they engage in. Not everyone has the time to respond in kind or the practice at foruming to battle it out like that. Hell, some people are posting on mobile for that matter.
