Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases | Hacker News Reader

Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases

livescience.com

This is a novel finding and does help parse out the difference between how gender bias and racial bias form.

That said, I wish people would stop talking about Williams syndrome as if it were, on the whole, desirable. Yes, these people are blessed with some desirable traits. They are also cursed with cardiovascular defects such as aortic and pulmonary stenosis; renal defects; vitamin D metabolic defects; and often delayed development. Not to mention that their most desirable trait — a lack of social fear which makes them very friendly — is incredibly maladaptive in most circumstances.

This is a novel finding

Yes, that is why I would look for replication of the finding, including replications with different ways of estimating racial prejudice, before accepting that this generalizes to the whole human population. But it's always a good idea to do research on a long-standing interesting issue (racism) with a new study population (Williams syndrome patients). An astrophysicist who was one of my undergraduate teachers said that one can often make a great scientific discovery simply by putting a scientific instrument where it has never been before. (His example was putting a Geiger counter into earth orbit, which discovered the Van Allen belts.) Similarly, doing this or that kind of psychological or sociological assessment or surveying can find new results if it happens with new subjects.

>I wish people would stop talking about Williams syndrome as if it were, on the whole, desirable.

I have a relative with WS. She's got a great personality, but has health issues that no one would want. Her intelligence is also well below average and she can't live on her own.

99 percent of the 40 children studied

  *facepalm*

And to finish that quote... "pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars."

Yeah one kid's arm had no gender bias, but the rest of them were full of it!

Also is the 40 kids 40 kids with Williams or 40 kids total? Either way it's a pathetically small sample size, but one is way worse...

A sample of 40 may well be enough to indicate a difference, depending on how large the effect is.

But more pointedly, it's not clear to me that saying that girls play with dolls is not a fact and not just an unfounded stereotype. That question seems very different from the racial one.

The problem I noted is that 99% is nonsense when your sample size is 40. 39 out of 40 kids is 97.5%. The next gradation, all 40 kids, is 100%.

The small sample size is also a concern, of course.

The study this organisation did polled several puppets and the consensus was that everyone's a little bit racist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbQiSVeQwVQ

An actual inability to formulate prejudice, as opposed to an ability to suppress it, would be a dangerous trait to have. Prejudice, whether it manifests itself in the form of latent tribal/racial preference or in sex/gender assumptions, is simply an indicator that the template-matching engine in the nearly autonomous, more primitive and survival-oriented areas of our brains are working properly. It takes training to associate "girl jobs" with girls and "boy jobs" with boys, or to associate skin tone with stereotype (and may we find a way to stop passing on our own training), but the recognition of "other" is probably vital to the survival of the individual. It's how we "smell danger" in details of our surroundings we may not have time to become consciously aware of. It's how we protect children and their nurturers, sometimes at our own expense, without thought of reward.

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? Nothing -- unless you think of it as a problem of genetics.

"Despite their lack of racial bias, children with Williams syndrome hold gender stereotypes just as strongly as normal children, the study found. That is, 99 percent of the 40 children studied pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars.

The fact that Williams syndrome kids think of men and women differently, but not blacks and whites, shows that sex stereotypes are not caused by social anxiety, Meyer-Lindenberg said."

Call me a crazy ignorant bigoted redneck, I don't think there's ANY bias in these kids minds. These kids do not think black kids are naughtier than white kids because they don't have the deep-rooted xenophobia we all do, so they just observe that on average, white and black kids are equally likely to be nice or mean.

On the other hand, girls ACTUALLY DO play with dolls more often than boys do, and boys ACTUALLY DO run around making explosion noises with their cards more often than girls do. It's not sexist to observe that. Whether you want it to be that way or not is a different question. Whether what you want is realistic is still another.

In a related study, blind people showed no racial bias due to skin color.

+1 best this actually does point out something important.

If you are incapable of forming biases about your environment, you are blind to the environment input that generates racial bais in most people. As pointed out earlier, this trait is also fatal in the wild, as blindness would be.

The clear implication is that racism has adaptive value for primates, or at least did in the period when we layed down this trait.

It's tribal cohesion, pure and simple: keep close to those like you, and fear those not like you. I wish there was a more widespread understanding that "racism" is just one facet of our instinctual fear of the other.

A mixture of LSD, psilocybin and early exposure to PBS has been proposed to also approximate this effect.

I think we can all accept that this is how we are. Its pretty consistent with what we see.

At the same time, its in our interest to treat people as individuals. Understanding our natural impulses can actually help us discount them when trying to assess the actual character of the people we meet.

And this is a "disorder", how?

Children with the condition are also severely mentally handicapped, and have stunted growth and abnormal facial features. It's a disorder.

"The most common symptoms of Williams syndrome are mental retardation, heart defects, and unusual facial features... many cardiac problems, commonly heart murmurs and the narrowing of major blood vessels as well as supravalvular aortic stenosis (SVAS)... hyperacusis and phonophobia which resembles noise-induced hearing loss, but this may be due to a malfunctioning auditory nerve... problems with visual processing, but this is related to difficulty in dealing with complex spatial relationships rather than to issues with depth perception"

It is entirely in keeping with Mother Nature that in order to get what you want, you have to make significant tradeoffs.

Fascinating find, but I wouldn't call this a disorder, rather a desired trait. The only issue with this "syndrome" is that they cannot process social danger signals--which I believe can be taught even though it is a fundamentally an intuitive defense.

The trade-off? "They do not experience the jitters and inhibitions the rest of us feel." Talk about a huge advantage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome

The disease comes with a large number of physiological problems, and also serious problems in intelligence outside of social behavior.

...which raises the question: do these people lack the capacity for racial prejudice, or do they lack the intelligence required to determine what race a person belongs to?

The boundaries between races are, after all, determined by culture (a hundred years ago, Italians, Russians, and Jews would not have been considered “white”), and culture has to be learned. To make matters worse, Williams is associated with severe deficits in visual perception (http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2004/WSDrawingslg.jpg), so it’s possible that someone with the syndrome would have trouble even recognizing the facial characteristics that neurotypical folks associate with various races.

Yeah, at first I thought it was something like "neurotypical." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotypical

It wouldn't be an advantage. I hate to break it to you, but Mother Nature knows her shit. We've evolved the "negative" tendencies we have for very good reasons and most of them are still doing their job at improving your odds for reproduction.

I suspect that (seemingly) ugly tendencies like confirmation bias, stereotyping, vengeance, shame, etc. all increase your personal odds of reproduction. Likely at the expense of society, but it is what it is.

I can understand how complete social trust and lack of anxiety would be beneficial in a perfect world; alas, we do not live in one.

Disagree. We humans are emphatically not optimized for the world we live in today. We're adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessma...

Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin to the comedian) has an incredible book on gender differences in psychology called "The Essential Difference", where he puts forth the theory that Williams Syndrome is a condition diametrically opposite from autism: whereas autistics exhibit hyper-masculine behavior, children with Williams Syndrome exhibit hyper-feminine behavior. As he describes it, children with WS have verbal and social abilities that far outpace their physical development, while suffering severe mental retardation in pretty much all other areas, especially spacial and quantitative reasoning.

As others have mentioned, the condition also results in physical changes including pale skin, stunted growth, and abnormal facial features. It's not something one might wish upon one's children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com