Earlier today, I read a post at Myth & Culture about a study on racism at University of Michigan, by Brad Bushman and Angelica Bonacci. The basic premise of the study is that racism against people of Arab decent has increased dramatically since 9/11 and the ensuing events. I certainly agree with that part of the study. It seems very clear cut.

But their research methods are totally whack, in my opinion. Essentially, they sent out a series of unsolicited emails (SPAM!) to a target group. The emails basically claim to be offering a scholarship opportunity to another person, to which they must respond within 48 hrs. And the emails are written so as to appear like they were misdirected, and intercepted wrongly by the recipient.

Their research basically hinged around whether or not people would respond to these emails, or try to redirect them to the person they should have been sent to. Their “findings” apparently indicated that if the name of the person whom the letter should have gone to was Arab, then people were less likely to respond/redirect these letters. But if the name of the intended recipient was European, they were more likely.

So this study is total crap.

Reason being, that it’s based around SPAMMING people. Not only is that an irritating research tactic, but it essentially doesn’t prove anything at all. Why? Because, spam-marketing emails not infrequently take the form used by the emails used by these researchers. The old “misdirected letter urging you to take advantage of a fabulous financial opportunity” is as old as spam itself, almost. Shit, I wouldn’t even be surprised if some of the participants in the study had these emails automatically filtered out as junk by their email programs. So maybe they never even got them.

But anyway, people not responding to this doesn’t make them racist. It doesn’t have anything to do with racism at all. Just because I don’t respond to every scam email I get offering me a chance to invest in Nigerian oil doesn’t mean that I hate black people. And if I don’t respond to emails trying to sell me drugs to give me a 72-hour erection, then you can’t automatically make ludicrous assumptions like I hate women or I don’t have a penis or something. It’s just retarded.

Remind me never to study psychology at University of Michigan.