What's Behind Birthers' Obama Belief (From Scientific American)

[Kablooie]

The so-called birthers can’t accept that President Obama is really a natural-born American citizen. Part of what’s behind this seemingly irrational belief may lie in what’s called implicit social cognition—the deep-rooted assumptions we all carry around, and may act on without realizing it.

Harvard’s Mahzarin Banaji studies such implicit cognition. Last fall she talked to journalists at the annual conference of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing about research into bias against Asian-Americans. “So we thought, what if we picked Asians who are very well known to be American. What about Connie Chung? Are they going to be seen as less American than, let’s say, Hugh Grant? And so we thought this was a bizarre study to do but we did it anyway.”

Amazingly, white Americans did see a white European like Hugh Grant as being somehow more American than the Asian-American Connie Chung. And similar research in 2008 found that whites thought of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair as somehow more American than Obama. So the mental framework to believe that Obama is foreign probably was, to use a health care term, a preexisting condition.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=whats-behind-birthers-obama-belief-09-08-10

Transcribed from a Podcast :
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/podcast.mp3?e_id=050F5195-EA93-1EEB-1DCE56B862449CAA

[izquierdista]

1. Who is more American?

or

[supernova]

2. Got white?

Nice to know there's a scientific basis, if you're not white, you're not American.

Pissants.

:grr:

[Ilsa]

3. Or if you have different features, but are white, you can't be American. nt

[badgerpup]

4. self-delete...inadvertent dupe n/t

:blush:

[badgerpup]

5. ...in other news, water is still wet...

...and gravity still sucks.

I'd like to see this study done with various Native Americans as the subjects...are THEY perceived as more or less 'American' than any well-known European, Brit, or Australian (or anyone from that part of the planet- my geograpy's a bit sketchy) with distinctly Caucasion features and coloring?

the cognitive dissonance...it hurts...or at least, it SHOULD. :banghead:

[marmar]

6. A friend of mine, who is Indian-American, was flying and seated next to an idiot from TX....

..... The guy asked him where he was from, and my friend replied, "Ann Arbor."

The guy then says, "No, I mean originally." My friend responded, "Ann Arbor." The moron then says, "No, I mean where were you born?"

My friend responds, "At University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor." My friend says the guy still didn't look as if though he believed him.

My friend has no accent or anything that would suggest that he wasn't born in the States. But for this idiot, it didn't matter - he was a brown-skinned Indian so he had to be an immigrant from the Asian subcontinent.

[mwb970]

9. So many Americans are just like that guy.

Ignorant, dim-witted, bigoted. What a great country we have!

[intheflow]

7. Great post, shouldhave way more than 11 recs on the GP. n/t

[struggle4progress]

8. Nah. Mostly it's greedy dipsticks like Orly, hoping to make money off the thing. And

cynical manipulators like WND, hoping to organize the wingnuts to oppose anything Obama does. And meatheads like Dobbs, hoping to drive up ratings. Stuff like that -- plus the idiotic herd instinct of the Repub base, which wants nothing more than to go along with the crowd. There's nothing spontaneous about this