Entry3_Lê Vân Anh

Entry 3

Identifying bias

Item 1

- Type of bias: Discrimination

- Analysis: There is a clear racial bias in the picture. A black man seems to need a help, but he sees a message “Help wanted white man only”. Obviously, according to the message, the black are not wanted. In other words, the black are not treated as equally as the white. This is one of the many cases of racial discrimination.

Item 2

Chất lượng hàng Trung Quốc

và nỗi ám ảnh...

Hàng loạt vụ bê bối liên quan đến chất lượng hàng Trung Quốc (TQ) bị phanh phui trên các phương tiện truyền thông đại chúng đã khiến người tiêu dùng Việt Nam hoang mang, bởi trên thị trường, hàng hóa TQ có diện bao phủ rộng và đa dạng... Chất lượng hàng hóa TQ đã trở thành nỗi ám ảnh đối với người tiêu dùng Việt Nam. Thậm chí, nó trở thành một ấn tượng mặc định, khiến tất cả mọi hàng hóa có nguồn gốc xuất xứ từ TQ đều bị liệt vào dạng “cần phải cảnh giác cao độ”.

- Type of bias: Prejudice

- Analysis: When there has been too many incidents with products made in China, people in Vietnam seem to be more cautious about these products. This results in a suspicion that any products made in China can be in bad quality. The above article is considered to be one example of prejudice against Chinese products. Actually, not all “made in China” products have bad quality.

Item 3

Are beautiful people smart, too?

A study says that attractive men and women do well in the brains department to boot. How come these people get all the breaks?

It has already been established that attractive people get paid more than average. Now, a study in the academic journal Intelligence concludes that they're smarter than the rest of humanity, too. According to the lead researcher from the London School of Economics, "physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence, both with and without controls for social class, body size, and health." Why is this?

What did the study find, exactly?
Researchers looked at 52,000 people from the United States and the United Kingdom. They found that men who were deemed attractive had IQs 13.6 points higher than average, while attractive women scored 11.4 points better than the general population. The British subjects were culled from the National Child Development Study, which has followed 17,419 Britons from their births in 1958; the 35,000 Americans were tapped from a similar study. The intelligence portion of the study was based on subjects' academic test scores.

Why are good-looking people so smart?
The study's authors postulate that intelligent men are more successful than their homelier counterparts, and thus more likely to attract beautiful women. The couple's offspring then inherit both the beauty and the brains, and the cycle continues.

What has the reaction been to this?
Satoshi Kanazawa, the study's lead researcher, took care to say that the study's results are "purely scientific," and not "a prescription for how to treat or judge others." "That's right, boys and girls," says Mike Fahey at Kotaku. "This is just cold, hard, scientific evidence. No need to treat people uglier than you as inferior just because science says they are."

- Type of bias: Assumption

- Analysis: According to a research carried out by the London School of Economics, attractive men and women are smarter than the rest of humanity. This conclusion is a wrong assumption because the research took place only in the United States and the United Kingdom, so this could not lead to a final conclusion for the whole people in the world. Moreover, this research also pointed out that men who were deemed attractive had IQs 13.6 points higher than average, while attractive women scored 11.4 points better than the general population. However, IQ test does not include all aspects of life, so it cannot conclude that attractive people with higher score are more intelligent than the general population.

References

1. http://www.randyboydsblocks.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

2. http://vietnamnet.vn/vn/xa-hoi/29522/chat-luong-hang-trung-quoc-va-noi-am-anh---.html

3. http://theweek.com/article/index/211176/are-beautiful-people-smarter-too