Friday, March 29, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
Her stupidity brings up a much more important question, though: what is the effectiveness of diversity and anti-prejudice training in actually reducing bigotry? And, specifically, what is the effectiveness of education meant to reduce antisemitism?
The answers are depressing. Billions of dollars are being poured into programs that seem to do little to reduce bigotry.
And no one seems to have any idea how to reduce antisemitism.
A seminal 2009 paper by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Donald P. Green on prejudice reduction determined that there was no evidence at that point that any of the anti-prejudice programs were effective.
Diversity training was only one of the methods analyzed, and at that time there were no studies that showed that it works, at all:
Several areas of prejudice reduction are in need of research and theory. Although antibias, multicultural, and moral education are popular approaches, they have not been examined with a great deal of rigor, and many applications are theoretically ungrounded. Spending on corporate diversity training in the United States alone costs an estimated $8 billion annually (cited in Hansen 2003), and yet the impact of diversity training remains largely unknown (Paluck 2006a).
....In terms of size, breadth, and vitality, the prejudice literature has few rivals. Thousands of researchers from an array of disciplines have addressed the meaning, measurement, and expression of prejudice. The result is a literature teeming with ideas about the causes of prejudice. In quantitative terms, the literature on prejudice reduction is vast, but a survey of this literature reveals a paucity of research that supports internally valid inferences and externally valid generalization.
This paper had a large impact. Studies since then attempted to use more structured methodologies to measure the success or failure of anti-bias programs. A number of papers appeared to show that some of these methods were effective in reducing bias. Yet the same authors of the 2009 paper did a meta-analysis of the research in 2021, and determined that the seeming effectiveness was more a result of publication bias than actual evidence.
PUBLICATION BIAS IN THE PREJUDICE REDUCTION LITERATUREPublication bias occurs when the direction or strength of a study's outcome influences whether it is published or not. When academic journals are reluctant to publish research papers that report statistically insignificant treatment effects, studies that produce weak or null effects may remain invisible to the academic community.A telltale sign of publication bias is a strong positive relationship between reported effects and their standard errors, because smaller studies, which tend to generate larger standard errors, must produce larger effect estimates in order to achieve significance at the 0.05 level. Our collection of studies displays a powerful relationship of this kind, even when we focus solely on lab experiments (N = 301): Lab studies that generate precise results tend to show less prejudice reduction than smaller studies that typically generate results with large standard errors. A linear regression of all effect sizes on standard error shows a distressing positive relationship (see the Supplemental Appendix for a graphical depiction) in which the intercept is close to zero, suggesting that a study large enough to generate a standard error of approximately zero would, on average, produce no change in prejudice at all. In other words, if the current collection of studies had been conducted on a much larger scale, our analysis would have shown no reduction in prejudice.
This is a very important point. If people undertake a study that shows that anti-bias training is ineffective, they are less likely to submit it for publication and journals are less likely to publish them. So other meta-analyses that appear to show effectiveness of training without accounting for publication bias appear to show that it works when there is no real evidence.
What about antisemitism reduction? Not surprisingly, the amount of evidence that any of it works is even lower.
A 2004 paper notes that antisemitism at the time was at an all-time low in America, and suggested that Holocaust education in schools could be a contributing factor, but did not have any means to prove that theory. Since antisemitism in America has now reached the highest levels in sixty years, it is clear that Holocaust education that many schools teach did not impact it at all.
In fact, other literature finds no correlation between exposure to Holocaust education and a reduction in antisemitism. Dara Horn suggests that Holocaust education might actually increase antisemitism.
The progressive Left represented by Lynn Gottlieb believes that fighting antisemitism is just a small component of a more general fight against all bias of all types. A little thought about the current state of diversity training shows that the opposite is the case: too much of diversity training is based on an "oppressor vs. oppressed" model that invariably places Jews on the oppressor side, and therefore people to be despised along with everyone who is not considered a person of color.
Over the past few months we have seen firsthand that Western antisemitism is being largely driven by the highly educated people who embrace DEI programs and other progressive concepts, the same people who proudly say they are anti-Zionist but deny they are antisemitic. The links between hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews are more obvious every day. But diversity training would deny the relationship between the two at the outset and, if anything, stoke modern antisemitism by associating "white" Jews with oppression of "people of color" Palestinians.
One widely believed assumption is that antisemitism correlates with lower education levels altogether. However, the opposite is the case. Carefully created surveys show the opposite - more educated people tend to be more likely to use double standards against Jews.
That paper concludes that no amount of education is likely to affect antisemitic attitudes.
As Harvard Professor and Yiddish scholar, Ruth Wisse (2017), has argued, anti-Semitism has not thrived because of ignorance, but because it “forms part of a political movement and serves a political purpose.” Those political causes making use of anti-Semitism are increasingly favored by the well-educated in this country. Countering the anti-Semitism of the well-educated will be a political and moral struggle, not one that addressed by conventional approaches and conceptions of education.
If anti-bias education cannot counter antisemitism, and in fact can make it worse, then what can be done?
I can't say. But I strongly suspect that the failure of all of these massive programs is because of an underlying misconception of what morality itself is. Marxism is immoral but it is being positioned as the ultimate good; moral concepts like the importance of the family and religion are denigrated. Morality has been supplanted by self-righteousness and virtue signaling. This new immorality as morality erases the lines between men and women while creating and enforcing differences between black and white people. Entire groups of people are considered to be irredeemably guilty by virtue of their skin color or religion.
The resurgence of antisemitism in the West is not only about Jews. It is a reflection of a much deeper problem in society itself tied to a breakdown of basic moral concepts that have been universally recognized for centuries. And as long as the critical institutions like education are controlled by people who have fundamentally immoral worldviews, Jews are only the first casualty.
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