Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Portrait of Artest as a Young Man

It's hard to keep your mind on work when your favorite sports team is playing out of its mind. My team, the Houston Rockets, lost its star guard, Tracy McGrady, midway through the season. Then it lost its backup center, Dikembe Mutombo. Then, three days ago, it lost its center, Yao Ming. Yao and McGrady are done for the season; Mutombo is done for good. You might as well ask a country to fight a war without its army, navy, and air force. But on Sunday afternoon, the Yaoless, McGradyless, Mutomboless Rockets—a bunch of role players who'd been shrugged off by general managers around the NBA—stomped the Los Angeles Lakers, this year's front-runners for the league title. Their playoff series stands tied at 2-2.

Why am I bringing this up in a science blog? Because we've been talking lately about stereotypes, and the subject came up in a New York Times account of a confrontation between the Rockets' Ron Artest and the Lakers' Kobe Bryant during the series. Artest was angry that Bryant

had elbowed him near his neck. He jawed angrily at Bryant, at close range. Then, having made his point—and having been ejected by the referees—Artest calmly walked off the Staples Center court. ... Artest's turbulent past—a blur of technical fouls, scuffles, a smashed television camera and a domestic violence arrest—is fading but not forgotten. The consensus among the Rockets was that the Game 2 ejection stemmed not from Artest's actions but his résumé. Artest joked that it was akin to racial profiling—"past history profiling," he said with a chuckle.

"The thing about Ron is, he will never get the benefit of the doubt again," [Rockets forward Shane] Battier said. "Any questionable situation, people will automatically stereotype and refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt."

I love these guys. But there's no such thing as stereotyping a man based on his own past. Stereo means more than one person. Being judged by your own behavior is the opposite of stereotyping. And "racial profiling," as defined by the ACLU, means "targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin." If Artest were being targeted based on race, Battier would be getting the same treatment. But Battier gets the opposite treatment: If your grandmother bumped into Battier while asking for his autograph, she'd be whistled for a charge.

It seems a bit unfair that Battier gets the benefit of the doubt and that Artest doesn't. Referees, like the rest of us, are influenced, often unconsciously, by opinions they've formed about each player. Battier has earned a reputation for lawyerly adherence to the league's rules. Artest has earned a reputation for hotheadedness. For this reason, Artest is far more likely than Battier to be deemed guilty of a foul, even in identical circumstances.

Is this kind of discrimination wrong? If so, you'd better take it up with Martin Luther King Jr. His dream was that people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Character isn't whatever you did just now. It's the pattern of your life: your personality, your reputation, your profile. Judging a man by his character means taking account of that pattern. "Past-history profiling," the neologism Artest coined in jest, is actually a pretty good translation of what King envisioned.

So don't fret about the profiling, Ron. The civil rights generation fought for your right to be judged on your own history. The rest is up to you.

The Race Conversation, Continued

Based on the evidence so far, there's good reason to believe that genes influence everything and exclusively control nothing. Intelligence, in particular, is a field with lots of evidence for heredity but little evidence for the precise impact of any known gene. We're very early in this research. If you start poking around in scholarly debates over IQ and general intelligence, or "g," you start to realize how much the field resembles astronomy or particle physics, with entities and qualities being calculated from complex inferences rather than directly observed. That's not to say inferences and calculations aren't scientific. But we should beware mistaking them for unshakeable facts.

More here.

Genes, Inequality, and Colorblindness

We've already identified genes that correlate with traits and vary in prevalence between ethnic groups. Are you confident that intelligence will turn out to be exempt from this list? Confident enough to leave no backup plan, no understanding of equality that can withstand a partial role for heredity? Confident enough to keep tallying and reporting test scores by race? And if intelligence turns out not to vary genetically between groups, do you imagine that we'll get just as lucky with every other significant mental trait?

More here.

First They Came for the Mexicans

Wasn't it just this morning that we were talking about the perils of classifying and treating people according to race?

Look at the news from China this afternoon. According to the New York Times:

The Chinese authorities have confined dozens of Mexicans to hotels and hospitals despite having no signs of human swine virus, Mexican consular officials said Monday. ... Since last Thursday, when an AeroMexico flight from Mexico City arrived in Shanghai with an infected man, Chinese health officials have been rounding up his fellow passengers as well as travelers on other flights who showed no signs of illness. But authorities also sequestered a number of Mexican passport holders who had not been home in months ...

This is exactly what I worried about in last week's discussion of thermal scanners:

If you think heat is a bad proxy for flu infection, ask yourself whether it's worse than nationality. Travel companies are canceling flights to Mexico. Today, Japan began denying visas to Mexicans on arrival. Governments and businesses want an easy way to identify, segregate, and scrutinize the people most likely to be carriers. Which group would you rather they target? People with excess body heat? Or Mexicans?

Looks like China has already decided to target Mexicans. And please don't try to defend this as a logical response to a flu that came from Mexico. When you're rounding up Mexicans who haven't been home during the flu's existence, logic is out the window.

Strictly speaking, this isn't inappropriate classification and discrimination based on race. It's inappropriate classification and discrimination based on nationality. But the point is the same: Beware the easy recourse to crude categories.

Inequality, Racism, and Framing

People of your race may be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my race. But the opposite pattern may turn up if you and I are classified in some other way. ... The distribution question doesn't settle the framing question, because race is just one way in which ability can be unevenly distributed. To answer the framing question in the affirmative, you have to show something more. You have to show that classifying and comparing by race, rather than using some other classification system or judging each person as an individual, does more good than harm.

More here.

Race and Test Scores

Why categorize and measure students by race? Aren't there better ways to organize the data? "Lower-performing 9- and 13-year-olds make gains," says one section of the NAEP report. "No significant change for 17-year-olds at any performance level," says another. "Reading scores improve for 9-year-old public and private school students over long term," says a third. "Score increases for 17-year-olds whose parents did not finish high school," says a fourth. These tables organize the data by factors that can help us target and adjust educational policy: kids with low scores, kids in public school, kids in high school, kids whose parents didn't graduate. I'd like to see tables for income and spending per pupil, too. But race? Does that category really help? And what message does it send to kids when headlines assert a persistent "racial gap"?

More here.

Age, Wisdom, and Driving

Here's the theory: Old people are bad drivers. And we're living longer, so there are more old people on the road, so they're causing more accidents. And they're already fragile, so they're killing more people, including themselves. Right?

Wrong. According to the latest data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (flagged by Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times), it's true that "older people now hang onto their licenses longer, drive more miles, and make up a bigger proportion of the population than in past years as baby boomers age." It's also true that "per mile traveled, crash rates and fatal crash rates increase starting at age 70 and rise markedly after 80," possibly because "physical, cognitive, and visual declines associated with aging may lead to increased crash risk."

That's what makes the bottom-line findings so surprising:

Despite growing numbers on the road, fewer older drivers died in crashes and fewer were involved in fatal collisions during 1997-2006 than in years past. ... Crash deaths among drivers 70 and older fell 21 percent during the period, reversing an upward trend, even as the population of people 70 and older rose 10 percent. Compared with drivers ages 35-54, older drivers experienced much bigger declines in fatal crash involvements.

The institute's chief of research adds: "No matter how we looked at the fatal crash data for this age group—whether by miles driven, licensed drivers, or population—the fatal crash involvement rates for drivers 70 and older declined, and did so at a faster pace than the rates for drivers 35-54 years old."

So what gives? "Reasons for the fatality declines aren't clear, but another new Institute study indicates that older adults increasingly self-limit driving as they age and develop physical and cognitive impairments," says the IIHS. In that study,

The oldest drivers were more likely to say they restricted their own driving. Drivers 80 and older were more than twice as likely as 65-69 year-olds to self-limit driving by doing such things as avoiding night driving, making fewer trips, traveling shorter distances, and avoiding interstates and driving in ice or snow. The percentage of drivers who said they limit their driving increased with each added degree of impairment. Drivers cited memory and medical impairments more often than vision or mobility ones.

In other words, as we age, self-knowledge and self-regulation compensate for our loss of abilities. As Farhad Manjoo reported four months ago in Slate,

Statistics on current road deaths show that people over the age of 65 are only 16 percent more likely to cause accidents than are people aged 25 to 64. Drivers under 25, meanwhile, are the most dangerous people on the road—they're 188 percent more likely to cause crashes than middle-aged adults.

Aging is a tragic but beautiful process: As we decay in some ways, we grow in others. We become less able to control the world but more able to control ourselves. As IIHS points out, our decline isn't just physical; it's mental, too. Yet we understand ourselves better than ever. Even as our vision deteriorates, we become more clear-eyed about our own limits. And even as our memory degrades, we develop a more important kind of knowledge: We know what we don't know.

Not everyone grows this way. To the extent that self-regulation has reduced fatal crash rates among aging drivers, the implication is that old people can be made more aware of their limits and can adjust accordingly. If you're aging, the lesson is to monitor and govern your driving. And if you're young, the lesson is to cultivate what old people have—self-knowledge and self-control—while your mind and body are still at full strength.

Jihadettes, Again

The female suicide bombers have struck again. And again. And again.

Yesterday morning, I wrote about a woman who blew herself up in Iraq last Thursday. The body count in that attack was eight. I don't remember what the count was in terms of how many women had done the deed this year.

Anyway, that number is already obsolete. By the end of the day, three more women had killed themselves. The body count in yesterday's attacks exceeds 60, with more than 200 others wounded. The Los Angeles Times reports:

According to U.S. Army figures, 27 suicide attacks this year have been carried out by women, compared with eight in all of 2007 ... A tally by The Times indicates that about a quarter of all suicide attacks this year in Iraq have been conducted by women.

Again, the Washington Post explains why women are delivering the bombs:

Wearing their flowing black garments, they can carry hidden explosives past most checkpoints because customs of modesty prevent male guards from frisking them. On Monday, four female suicide bombers in two Iraqi cities used this tactic to enter areas defended by hundreds of soldiers and police officers.

The New York Times adds:

Police officers interviewed at the scene said that the authorities had heard that six women would blow themselves up in the area. "We can't search women," complained Atheer Allawi, a police officer. "They are wearing abayas, and God knows what they can hide under them."

And again, Iraq failed to provide enough female security officers to do the job. The Associated Press reports:

Iraqi security forces had deployed about 200 women this week to search female pilgrims in Kazimiyah, but the attacks took place along the procession some six miles southeast of the shrine. There were too few women guards to search people in the procession itself.

The bombings will continue until we get the message: Stop treating women as though they're too meek to fight and kill. They're already killing. Search women. Deploy women.

Jihadettes

Another suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another female perpetrator. The bomb "killed a pro-American Sunni militia leader, an Iraqi police captain, a local politician, and five other people," according to Friday's New York Times. Apparently, it's "at least the 16th time that a woman has donned a bomb and exploded herself in Diyala Province since last year."

Why women? The Times explains:

Wearing billowy, black head-to-toe garments, the female bombers have been able to conceal powerful explosives and slip into crowded areas too heavily guarded for a male suicide bomber to ease through undetected. While men often undergo physical searches, Islamic rules do not allow male security officers to pat down women.

How many more women have to blow themselves up before we get the message? Female suicide bombing is a logical extension of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing exploits your disbelief about what people will do. Female suicide bombing exploits your disbelief about what a particular group of people—women—will do. Your biases are no longer somebody else's problem. They're your problem. Look for Arab bombers, and terrorists will send an American-born Hispanic instead. Look for men, and they'll send a woman.

Actually, I don't like the way I wrote that. These women aren't just "sent" by somebody else. We've had enough socio-babble about how women commit such atrocities because they've been "marginalized" and "exploited" by men. It reminds me of the pro-life dogma that women shouldn't be prosecuted under abortion bans because the woman is just the abortionist's pawn. Spare these women your condescension. If you're going to make abortion a crime, charge the woman. If you're handling security where bombs are a threat, search everyone. And if you don't have enough female security officers to search the women, go hire some.

But this is just a Muslim problem, right? We Judeo-Christian Americans don't have these hang-ups, right? As the Washington Post noted two months ago:

In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units -- not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them.

But—oops!—the Post story is about Pfc. Monica Brown, who won

a Silver Star in March for repeatedly risking her life on April 25, 2007, to shield and treat her wounded comrades, displaying bravery and grit. She is the second woman since World War II to receive the nation's third-highest combat medal. Within a few days of her heroic acts, however, the Army pulled Brown out of the remote camp in Paktika province where she was serving with a cavalry unit -- because, her platoon commander said, Army restrictions on women in combat barred her from such missions.

Terrorism and Sexism

Now there's a new twist to the trend in Iraq: Many of the people blowing themselves up are women. According to Farhana Ali, a former U.S. adviser who presented data at a Washington conference yesterday, women executed 12 suicide attacks in Iraq during the first four months of this year. That's already more than the number of such attacks executed by women in Iraq over the previous five years.

In an interview with Agence France Presse, Ali blames this trend on male violence and the invasion, which she says has widowed many women and "marginalized" others. But then the AFP story gets to the really interesting point:

Ali warned that U.S. soldiers face a cultural barrier in detecting women bombers. "A marine officer coming back from Fallujah said to me: 'How are we supposed to detect these women if we are taught before we are deployed to not even look at them?'" she explained.

And here's Ali's solution: "If you want to gain entrance into female jihadi organisations, you need female case officers. You need female police officers. You need women in Iraqi law enforcement."

Suicide bombing has always exploited common disbelief about what people will do: You don't expect somebody to walk into a market and blow himself up. Nor do you expect him to take 20 or 30 civilians with him for no apparent reason. Why shouldn't this tactical exploitation of disbelief extend to sexism? You certainly don't expect somebody to blow herself up, much less kill a bunch of innocents.

This is one of the lessons terrorism will gradually teach us: Stereotyping is an exploitable security weakness. To overcome it, we'll have to overcome our sexism about women in the military and in law enforcement, as well as our sexism about women in crime and terrorism. If the moral faults of such stereotypes aren't enough to make you push them aside, do it for your country.