Scientist demolishes a half century of bias.
Lee Jussim, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Oxford University Press, 2014, 404 pp., $84.00.
This is a very important book. It is an exhaustive and painstaking refutation of a set of mistaken assumptions that have dominated social science research since the 1950s, and continue to bias the thinking of most professionals in the field. It is a book for specialists–exhaustive and meticulously documented–but it systematically dismantles the illusions that helped give rise to today’s reflexive hatred of whites. The author, Lee Jussim, is chairman of the psychology department at Rutgers University, and has spent his entire professional life as a social psychologist.
The mistaken assumptions this book demolishes are that biases, stereotypes, and self-fulfilling prophecies are so powerful that social perception plays a central role in creating social reality. ...
Posts
