CASE STUDY: Only 16 (white) students believed the false claim!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2022

Or quite possibly, none of them did: We'll repeat our earlier confession:

When we read the claim in the Washington Post, we didn't necessarily believe it.

We'd seen too many bogus claims from our own blue tribe in the past! That includes many claims like the claim in question—claims which express our blue tribe's love for "the racialization of everything."

Below, you see the claim in question. When we saw it in real time, we didn't assume it was accurate:

NORRIS (12/9/20): We are not just tussling with historical wrongs. A recent study of White medical students found that half believed that Black patients had a higher tolerance for pain and were more likely to prescribe inadequate medical treatment as a result.

The statement came from this column by Michele Norris—a good, decent person who has spent several decades at NPR and at the Washington Post.

The statement was made by an upper-end journalist—but was the statement accurate? Was it really true?

Did half of a group of (white) medical students really believe that black patients have a higher tolerance for pain than their white counterparts? According to Norris, a recent study had shown that very thing—but was her statement true?

We did what we've done a million times—we clicked the link provided by Norris and set out in search of the study. You can see the study here—and we weren't wholly surprised when found that Noris's statement was just ginormously wrong

As we noted in the last episode of our own case study, 222 medical students and fourth-year residents took part in the UVa study. The numbers broke down as shown:

Number of participants in the study:
First-year students: 63
Second-year students: 72
Third-year students: 59
(Fourth-year) residents: 28

Total participants: 222

Those 222 medical students (and residents) took part in the now-famous study. Needless to say, all these participants were white white white white white.

According to Norris, half those white participants said they believed the false claim to which she referred. Spoiler alert:

In fact, the study actually claims that only 16 of the 222 white participants said that they believed the claim—although, quite possibly, none of them actually did!

How could an upper-end journalist like Norris have been so grossly mistaken? In part, it seems that a long, sad game of "Telephone" led to her groaning misstatement that day. 

We'll examine the slippery writing involved in that hapless game when we file our next report in this series. For today, we'll merely show you how many participants are reported by the study's authors to have said that they believed the false claim—and we'll explain why it's possible that none of them actually did.

Let's take a look at the numbers! If you examine the study in question, you'll see a breakdown of the participants who (allegedly) said they believed the false claim. 

(Warning! The numbers which appear in the relevant chart represent percentages, not numbers of participants. The study's authors make that fact clear, but their layout could be a bit tricky.)

 Let's start with the fourth-year residents:

Of the 28 fourth-year residents, only one (1) is recorded as having said that he believed the false claim. Only one, out of 28!

The third-year medical students were even more skeptical! As you can see in the study itself, none (0) of those 59 participants are recorded as having said that they believed the false claim.

We've now accounted for 87 of the 222 participants. For the record, these are the 87 participants who were farthest along in their medical studies at the time in question.

Of those 87 participants, only one (1) is recorded as having said he or she believed the claim! And as we'll explain below, it's entirely possible that he or she never said any such thing!

Mathematically, one out of 87 is a great deal less than half! That said, here's the complete breakdown of the number of participants who (allegedly) said that they believed the false claim:

Number of participants who (allegedly) said that they believed the false claim:
First-year students: 5 of 63
Second-year students: 10 of 72
Third-year students: 0 of 59
Fourth-year residents: 1 of 28 

Total: 16 of 222

According to the authors of the actual study, 16 of the 222 participants said they believed the false statement. In a column in the Washington Post which remains uncorrected to this very day, Norris said that half these sketchy (white) medical students made this racist statement.

For the record, 16 out of 222 is 7.2%. Mathematically, that's substantially less than half. 

If we restrict ourselves to the third- and fourth-year participants—the participants who had already had two or three years of medical training—only 1 out of 87 stood charged with believing the false claim. That would be 1.1% of the group, an extremely small percentage.

Let's review:

According to Norris, 222 medical students participated in the study. These students were all white white white—and half of them said that they believed the false claim.

The actual text of the actual study doesn't make that claim. The study says the actual number is 7.2%.

That said, the study almost surely overstates the number of participants who said they believed the false claim. In fact, it's entirely possible that none of the (white) medical students said they believed the false claim. 

As we explained in our last report, here's the reason why we say that:

In the course of this study, the participants were asked to react to fifteen different statements about biological racial differences. Four of the statements were true; eleven of the statements were false.

The procedure employed in the study strikes us as slightly odd. As we explained in our last report, here's the way the process worked:

After being shown a statement, participants were asked to select from six possible reactions. They weren't allowed to say, "I don't know." Their only choices were these:

Possible reactions to each statement:
Definitely untrue 
Probably untrue
Possibly untrue
Possibly true
Probably true
Definitely true

Participants weren't given the option of saying they didn't know. If they didn't have any real idea if a statement was true or false, they had to select one of two (equivalent) reactions: 

They had to say it was "possibly true" or that it was "possibly untrue."

On its face, that strikes us as a slightly odd procedure. As we explained in our last report, a second procedure strikes us as flatly deceptive:

If participants chose "possibly true" as their assessment, they were scored as believing the statement was true—as "endorsing" the statement!

Langston Hughes said he'd seen rivers; to this day, we believe him. For ourselves, we've seen lots of thumbs on lots of scales as tribunes from our own tribe's academic and journalistic elites strain to establish claims reflecting preferred Storyline.

Let's think what that last procedure means, returning to the data concerning the third- and fourth-year participants.

According to the study, 87 such people—all of them white!—took part in the study. 

According to the study, only one of the 87 said he believed the false statement to which Norris referred. In fact, that one white person may have said that the statement was "possibly true."  

In the real world, that doesn't mean that he believed the statement in question. In a world where scholars put fists on scales, it's taken to mean that he did!

Your lizard brain will get busy now, insisting that we're somehow being unfair to someone. Like Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, we've been putting up with your lizard's trashy behavior all through our long life!

Bottom line for today:

Norris said, in the Washington Post, that half the medical students said they believed the false statement. (All the students were white!) In fact, only 16 out of 222 may have said that they believed the false statement—and it's entirely possible that none of the students did.

Norris' error remains uncorrected. Within our hapless, self-impressed blue tribe, blacks and whites join hands together to tell us the stories we'll like!

Coming next: Irate, slippery constructions—and a game of Telephone tag