Menschen, die negative Emotionen vermeiden möchten, erkennen systemischen Rassismus seltener an | Diese Studie beleuchtet, wie emotionale Vermeidung als Hindernis für die Erkennung und Bekämpfung von Rassenungerechtigkeit dienen könnte.
People who desire to avoid negative emotions are less likely to acknowledge systemic racism
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From the article: A new study [published](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-70752-001?doi=1) in the journal Emotion has found that the more people try to avoid feeling negative emotions, the less likely they are to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism. The research suggests that interventions designed to reduce this tendency must be implemented thoughtfully, taking into account cultural norms that often discourage confronting discomfort. This study sheds light on how emotional avoidance might serve as an obstacle to recognizing and addressing racial injustice.
The murder of George Floyd and other tragic events in recent years have brought widespread attention to issues of racial injustice in the United States. Acknowledging systemic racism is considered an important step toward addressing it, yet many individuals often avoid these conversations. The researchers were interested in understanding whether this desire to avoid negative feelings might act as a barrier to acknowledging racism.
“My students and I have been studying how people’s desire to want to avoid feeling negative shapes how much people notice other people’s suffering,” said study author Birgit Koopmann-Holm, an associate professor of psychology at Santa Clara University.
Just learning psychology is accepted as science on Reddit.
> These scenarios included both isolated incidents of racism (such as an individual being denied service due to their race) and examples of systemic racism (like racial disparities in areas such as housing and employment).
> Participants who reported a stronger desire to avoid negative emotions were less likely to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism, even after controlling for factors like political beliefs and ethnicity.
This study seems to equate “systemic racism” with “racial disparities” and concludes if you don’t agree a racial disparity is necessarily because of racism then you must be “avoiding negative emotions” rather than that you simply don’t get emotional over such things and take a more logical view. This comes across as rather biased and uses a lot of loaded framing.
You could make the same exact study but rephrase the questionnaire to “do you decide things based on emotion” or something and conclude “emotional people are more likely to believe racial disparities are because of systemic discrimination” framing it in the opposite direction.
> Interestingly, the desire to avoid negative feelings did not affect participants’ acknowledgment of isolated acts of racism
The fact that both groups seem to agree on individual acts of racism tells me that the whether racial disparities are due to “systemic racism” or not is an opinion. To conclude one way or the other would need to actually be proven to support the claims of a study, otherwise that would just seem to reflect an inherit bias of the study.