We’re very sorry about the disrupted service over this summer! It’s been hectic with work and a house move and various things. To tide you over, here’s a formerly paywalled episode: our very first one.

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If you’ve ever done a diversity training session at work, you’ll almost certainly have learned about unconscious bias, microaggressions, stereotype threat, and trigger warnings. Prejudice, racism, and trauma are apparently simmering constantly, just under the surface of our conscious minds.

It turns out that each of these concepts has been subject to a lot of scientific research. It also turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they’re all extremely controversial. In this first paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look at each of them in turn and try to decide which of them—if any—stand up to scrutiny.

To listen to the full version of this episode and see the show notes, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to The Studies Show podcast on Substack. See below, or go to www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe, for the options.

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Show Notes

* Unconscious bias:

* The Implicit Association Test at Harvard

* The 2019 meta-analysis on experiments that try to change implicit, explicit, and behavioural biases

* Article by Patrick Forscher, meta-analysis co-author, on unconscious bias training in CapX

* Equality & Human Rights Commission Report on unconscious bias training

* Microaggressions:

* Original 2007 American Psychologist paper on microaggressions

* Scott Lilienfeld’s 2017 critique of microaggression research

* His article in Aeon summarising the critique

* Response to Lilienfeld by Monnica Williams

* Lilienfeld’s reply to Williams

* Stereotype threat:

* In the UK, girls now do better than boys at maths

* 2015 meta-analysis on sex-related stereotype threat for maths

* 2018 follow-up study by the same authors

* 2019 meta-analysis on sex- and race-related stereotype threat

* Planned meta-analysis on the decline effect in stereotype threat research

* Trigger warnings:

* The 2023 meta-analysis on trigger warning research

* Scott Alexander on “The Wonderful Thing About Triggers”

* Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book The Coddling of the American Mind

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe