The other day I ran into a Facebook
video that claimed to “[D]estroy the myth of 'White Privilege' with
basic stats.” The video was a couple of brief excerpts from a talk
given by a fellow named Ben Shapiro who is proudly on the “Right”
side of American politics. The video just focused on the portion of
his remarks about how the Brookings Institute, which Shapiro calls a
“very left institute,” asserted that permanent poverty in the
United States can be prevented by finishing high school, getting a
job, and not getting pregnant before getting married. He notes that
single motherhood in the black community is extremely high by
historical standards going from 20% in 1960 to “upwards of 70%
today.” [This claim is confirmed by an article in the Washington
Post- links below.] He then states emphatically that taking personal
responsibility is the key to changing outcomes in the black
community. He says white privilege, therefore, has nothing to do with
it in the same way that his not playing in the NBA is not due to a
conspiracy against 5'9” jews playing professional basketball. (In
the unedited version I linked to below the NBA comments preceded the
others.) So, he clearly claims that the sole or at least a primary
cause of single motherhood and drop-outs in the black community is a
failure to exercise personal responsibility.
This brought to my mind a famous
experiment by the psychologist Walter Mischel that amazingly showed
how personal self-control at the age of about four strongly predicts
outcomes in the adult lives of those children. It is known as the
Marshmallow Experiment. The kids with less self-control had worse
outcomes as adults, the kids with more self-control had better
outcomes. So this would seem to be a piece of evidence in favor of
Mr. Shapiro's hypothesis. And the popular press and some schools have
had a field day with this experiment to the point that the schools
teach elementary school children about the experiment and put posters
on the walls that remind them: “Don't eat the marshmallow!” In
other words the children are being taught to take personal
responsibility for their ability to resist temptations that could
distract them from obeying the dictates of their school.
Shapiro is applying the concept of
direct causation to the situation of permanent poverty in the United
States and the popular interpretation of the Marshmallow Experiment
does the same. According to cognitive linguist George Lakoff direct
causation is enshrined in the grammatical structure of every known
language but systemic causation is not encoded in the structures,
grammatical or otherwise, in any known language. Human languages
operate on the wiring of our brains in a manner that makes direct
causation the obvious answer to every question of causation. However,
that doesn't make direct causation the correct answer to every one of
those questions. In response to this challenge to the truth we have
developed elaborate social systems like science to help us answer
those questions correctly by constructing elaborate stories to
explain the truth of causation when it is systemic. Given that we are
predisposed to think in terms of direct causation rather than
systemic causation, the popular sentiments that make personal
responsibility central to interpreting both the Marshmallow
Experiment and Permanent Poverty in the United States are
understandable. But are these really cases of direct causation? How
much of a role could personal responsibility have played?
Let's start with the Marshmallow
Experiment. The basic situation is that the experimenters presented
the small children with a marshmallow, pretzels, or even a poker chip
and proposed that if the child could resist the temptation to eat the
item (or whatever would be tempting to do with a poker chip) for 15
minutes the experimenter would give them another one. Then the kids
were left alone to wait in the presence of their temptation.
Actually, they were being secretly observed to find out what they
would do. So the logic was simple, eat the one now or eat two later.
The challenge for the kids in the minds of economists was whether
that particular length of time to wait was worth it to double your
take. The experimenters found that the kids who failed tended to have
poorer outcomes in their later lives statistically. Notice that this
is a statistical effect, not an unwavering inevitability. It is also
not a causal claim, no one believes that the failure on the
marshmallow test caused the poor outcomes. The argument is that the
test result is indicative of something about the kids that would
follow them throughout the rest of their lives. The something else is
most often posited to be a cognitive process called executive
function. Those with less developed executive function would fail the
test and those with more developed executive function would pass it
and those differences in executive function would remain throughout
life thus causing differential life outcomes.
Walter Mischel, the experimenter, was
specifically concerned with the methods that children came up with to
mange the task they were given. He wanted to find out how they would
cope with a temptation that he knew would be hard to resist. He
deliberately created a challenge for them so that he would be able to
observe a range of outcomes. So now I ask you to reconsider who was
responsible for the outcomes of the experiment. In particular I want
you to reconsider who is responsible for the failures. Were the
children responsible for failing to wait long enough to get the
second marshmallow?
Would you be surprised if I said that
if I were the experimenter I could guarantee 100% success in
resisting temptation? The method is simple: don't present the
children with a temptation and they will all succeed in not
succumbing to it. The truly responsible party for the failures was
the creator of the situation, not those who happened to lack the
skills for resisting the temptations to which they were exposed.
Walter Mischel deliberately created a situation in which he expected
to observe failures. If he did not create a situation that exhibited
a mixture of success and failure he would have had to change the
situation until he did, because that mix of failure and success was
exactly what he wanted to learn about!
Now, let's consider why this experiment
was so predictive of later outcomes in life. Where did the kids spend
the majority of their time growing up? In school. Given that the
school system does not even consider issues of executive function in
their conception of what school should provide, then it is even less
likely that the children will have any training that is relevant to
the development of the executive function system at school. We know,
thanks to Gallup, that today at least 50% of school children are
disengaged. A majority of them can be expected to fake their way
through the content-based tasks that schools at least pretend they
are concerned with developing. How much transformation of an
undeveloped executive function system should we expect from
disengaged students in a system that does not even pretend to provide
any stimulation for that system? Based on this view of the school
system, then there is no reason to believe that there would be any
substantive change in the relative development of executive function
across the K-12 years.
In case you objected to my solution for
getting 100% success at resisting temptation, this is where I
acknowledge that my solution does nothing to ensure success in later
life. What is needed to improve the outcomes in later life is to
provide the kids with exactly the right amount of temptation to be
successful much of the time, but not all of the time. They need to be
put into situations that stretch their executive functioning. They
need a balance between the level of challenge their environment
provides and the level of skill they have to address the challenges
they face. They need to participate in an environment that engages
them in making meaningful decisions on a regular basis. This will
guarantee that their executive functions develop rather than
stagnate. This is the basis of most of the work I do on improving
education, so I refer you to my web site rather than attempting to
detail it here: http://www.HolisticEquity.org
And those posters reminding the kids to
resist the temptation? Those schools are attempting to abdicate
responsibility for creating situations that are not geared to match
up the levels of challenge and skill for each child. To be fair the
children share responsibility to the degree that they have made
choices that reinforce their commitment to participating in that
environment. But, if they are forced to be there then they are not
the responsible party, the school is. So, the true victims are the
ones unwillingly subjected to the school program. The personally
responsible ones are those who have made valid choices to participate
in the school program. And the personally responsible students can
become victims if outside forces invalidate their choices. The death
of a family member or any other significant change in their home life
might invalidate their choices. When circumstances deal a blow to a
child, then the school needs to take action to enable that child to
make a new valid choice for themselves in order to get back on track.
But that will usually take an unpredictable amount of time, so for
schools that operate in inflexible academic schedules it will be
unlikely that they can meet the challenge. The responsibility for the
situation of school is, in any case, largely the responsibility of
the school, not the children. So blaming children for their outcomes
in that situation is only valid if you can show that they were on
board with participating in that situation and made valid on-going
choices to participate. That is rarely the case in mainstream
schooling.
Now let's consider Mr. Shapiro's
argument. Is personal responsibility all it takes to overcome the
problems of poverty, drop-outs, and single mothers? If my critique is
to apply then we have to consider whether the situation has been
created for the poor, the drop-outs and the single mothers by someone
else. It is utterly absurd to believe that children are responsible
for the society and the schools they are subjected to so I believe
Mr. Shapiro's argument about the cause of single motherhood and
drop-outs is fundamentally also absurd. He is just blaming the
victims of the situations that are created by schools which are
subject to the conditions in the society in which they are situated.
I will readily concede that there is some degree of personal
responsibility involved, but it is trivial compared to the
responsibility that the schools bear for creating situations in which
the primary psychological needs of children and teens are routinely
thwarted. By the time a teen is dropping out and getting pregnant
they have lived in a situation for many years in which they are
effectively starved for opportunities to exercise autonomy and
relatedness. Over those years within the school situation that takes
up most of their waking hours they have no practice making meaningful
decisions. Under the influence of the hormones of puberty that
notoriously short circuit executive function they discover that
sexuality is way to actively meet both of those needs. And lo and
behold they tend to mess up that particular decision making process.
What a surprise! Ben Shapiro believes that their failures to use the
executive functions that their early experiences in impoverished
homes and psychologically inappropriate schooling prevented them from
developing is their fault. They are to blame for not having been
provided with the appropriate opportunities to develop the executive
functions in their brains.
Whatever it was that enabled some four
year olds to develop more executive function provided them with an
undeserved advantage. And that advantage clearly made a difference
over the course of those children's lives. They experienced the
benefit of privilege. He may have some valid points in questioning
the role of race as a mechanism of privilege, but he is flat wrong to
deny that privilege, in itself, exists.
I do agree with Mr. Shapiro and other
critics that “privilege” is sometimes used more as an epithet and
a mechanism for shutting down conversation rather than as a
productive critique. So, I sympathize with those who feel embattled
by the persistence of the privilege police. But that does not change
the fact that it exists, at least for people who do not elevate
“personal responsibility” into an ideological principle that
takes precedence over psychology. The politically conservative
“right” seems to sometimes verate personal responsibility as the
sole form of responsibility. Such veneration seems to dismiss social
responsibility and the various forms of systemic causation as
mechanisms of productive change. Social responsibility is far more
important than personal responsibility due to the fact that social
responsibility has more far reaching consequences.
For me the concept of privilege is just
a recent variation on the theme of how policies interact with brains
to create limitations on what can happen in the situations subject to
those policies. In other words, privilege is just another part of the
hidden curriculum. Once again, just because a curriculum or a
privilege is “hidden” does not mean that “exposing” it will
provide access to a solution. The fact is that the nature of
privilege is such that it will always be hidden. The challenge is to
ensure that certain privileges become pervasive. The fundamental
privileges that all humans should have unconscious access to are the
privileges of having each of our primary human needs supported. Right
now there is clear evidence that primary needs are not supported for
most people with disproportionate lack for people of color.
I do not know if whiteness is the cause
of the privilege or merely occurs as a coincident to the true cause.
I am confident that we will not make true progress on the problem of
privilege until we measure the right things to indicate where it is
lacking. The right things to measure are the satisfaction of primary
needs or the things that satisfying them leads to such as intrinsic
motivation for and engagement with the typical activities you do in
your school or work place.
Links:
The
unedited video of Ben Shapiro's talk with text summarizing his
talking points:
Brookings
Institute's 3 rules to end permanent poverty:
Washington
Post confirmation of the single motherhood stats:
Atlantic
Magazine Interview with Walter Mischel:
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