Close Reading

Psychology student here. In the interest of accurate information, I would like to point out some flaws I find with some of the studies in this documentary and question the conclusions reached. I understand that CBC Marketplace are not personality psychologists and therefore cannot be expected to produce the same quality of work as a scientist. However, I think it is worthwhile to think critically about the information in the media that we consume. I am also open to anyone who wants to engage in debating the contents of this documentary.\n\n\nThe following are some notes I took while watching the documentary outlining the individual hypotheses of the studies I think are flawed and descriptions of their respective accompanying errors. \n\n\nThere are three possible research questions, and thereby dependent variables, being answered by the apartment hunting studies.\n1. If there is no discrimination between the white man and the first-nations man, then they should get equal treatment, including quotes and availability, when apartment hunting. \na. Could the gender of the landlord be a confounding variable (perhaps men are more discriminatory than women)? \n \n2. If there is no discrimination between the white man and the first-nations man between Toronto, Montreal, Regina, and Victoria, then they should get equal treatment, including quotes and availability, when apartment hunting. \na. Could total apartments visited be a confounding variable? (4 in Toronto, 3 in Montreal, Regina, and Victoria) \nb. Could the gender of the landlord be a confounding variable (perhaps men are more discriminatory than women)? \nc. They only showed the black man apartment hunting in some of the trials. I am considering him out of the study for consistency purposes. The first-nations man is the only one who got unfair treatment in the footage of apartment hunting. \n \n3. Possible hypothesis: If male landlords/agents are more discriminatory than female landlords/agents, then the white man and the first-nations man will get different treatment at different Canadian apartments in equally diverse cities. \na. Don’t know all the information about the genders of the landlords/agents, not all the footage is shown, but the ones where they get ripped off are male. The others shown are female. The remaining interactions are not shown.\n\n\nThere are also some factors that may have influenced the racial bias survey and, in my estimation, rendered it scientifically unreliable.\n\n\n1. The bias survey and accompanying tests at the CBC attributed the differences between the studies to unconscious racism. What if it was just due to familiarity with certain racial groups over others? \na. The black participants had no bias between European-American and African Americans, supposedly indicating no racism, while the white and first-nations participants did, supposedly indicating racism. Is it possible that another interpretation of this result is that bias is a function of familiarity: that we are comfortable with the majority demographic in the geographical location we live in, as well as our own kind. Therefore, the black guys are less biased against black people due to being both black and living in a white majority demographic? \nb. The participants took the survey knowing the objectives of the researchers was to study racial discrimination. They might have influenced the answers they gave \nc. Whether the participants agreed with identity politics or not was a confounding factor that was not controlled . You can only be racially unbiased biased if you think that racial identity is a means of accurately viewing the world. People who do not believe in the existence of identity politics may answer the questions quite differently, which could be a different reason for the results.\nd. I took the study myself. The words that participants were required to match were a mix of adjectives and nouns. It is known within psychology that nouns have higher levels of imagery. This was not properly controlled and therefore is another confounding variable. \n \nAll the other studies looked fine to me. I welcome any discussion on my observations.

Considering this is a CBC video that is funded by the government I would call this propaganda...