If you have any questions, suggestions, or corrections to make, you can contact via email. Full-text PDF versions of all sources in the program can be provided free of charge upon request via email. A transcript of the podcast is available in the show notes if you listen via your preferred podcast app (i.e. Spotify). The transcript length is too long for YouTube's text limit, unfortunately. Shoutout to "One Time for a Good Time!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCheK4sFWZk (I highly recommend listening to this podcast) Email: MerchantsOfMiseryEditor@gmail.com Single Donation: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/merchants-of-misery/e/9a595629/height-privilege Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MerchantsOfMisery All donations are appreciated and will contributed towards future content. Please only donate if it will not not jeopardize your financial security. FULL TRANSCRIPT Note: Merchants of Misery is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using artificial intelligence, machine learning, human transcription by myself, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio and corrections at the end of this transcript before quoting in print. Host: So, I want to talk about two things— discrimination and survivorship bias. [MUSIC -- "MILITAIRE ELECTRONIC" BY KEVIN MACLEOD] The goal here is to incorporate science in this podcast in a way that helps bridge that gap in communication between scientists and the public. There's two conditions that I want us to consider before we start: The first condition is, let's just forget the idea that arguments have to be won. Thinking about things like that, it's just not productive. The second condition is, try to think of this podcast as more of a tool, like a device used to reveal an answer consistent with the truth. I don't want people to just believe that these issues are important either. Believing doesn't reflect an understanding. I want people to understand these issues. We live in a time where misinformation spreads fast, and I think that's something everyone should be concerned about, regardless of their politics. Part of the problem is that as we get older, we tend to share more misinformation. Dr. Nadia Brashier is a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University, who recently discussed this trend: [MUSIC - "INSPIRED" BY KEVIN MACLEOD] Dr. Nadia Brashier: So one of the strongest predictors of people engaging with and sharing fake news, typically political fake news, is advanced age. So older adults are more likely to see political fake news in their (news) feeds. And they're seven times more likely than the youngest users to share it. At this point, we don't have a lot of conclusive evidence for why that might be, but we do know that some of the sort of lay intuitions about why could be wrong. So I think it's easy to default to the perspective that older adults suffer from cognitive impairments, such as memory troubles, maybe attentional issues, and that that's a big reason why they're sharing so much fake news. I would push back against that perspective to say that the research doesn't exactly align with that, and that we should probably be considering other factors like social and motivational aspects and also digital literacy issues. Host: So the point here isn't to play some kind of blame game. The point is that we all need to realize that the spread of misinformation is getting significantly worse each year, and the response to this rise and misinformation requires high quality information, delivered in a clear way, guided by science. [MUSIC - "GRIPHOP" BY KEVIN MACLEOD"] Unknown Voice: Merchants of Misery, a podcast examining the pulse of society. Host: Act One-- "Height Privilege" [MUSIC -- "LOCAL FORECAST -- SLOWER" BY KEVIN MACLEOD] I'm six foot three. For men, height is usually considered a pretty good thing. And it comes with all kinds of benefits. I'll give an example: In a study from the University of North Carolina, researchers demonstrated that all men benefit from increased perceptions of competence. So if you're talking and listening to this, you might be nodding your head right now because you've experienced this too. Now, at this point, I do have to clarify one key detail. While it's true that being tall, it's beneficial for men in terms of things like salary and success. It's a little more complicated than that. [MUSIC ABRUPTLY STOPS] That only applies to men who are tall and white. So, according to that same study I just mentioned, quote, "for black men, height may be more costly than beneficial, primarily signalling threat rather than competence", unquote. The researchers conducted three different studies. Study one demonstrates that tall black men receive disproportionate attention from police officers. Data from over 1 million NYPD stop and frisk encounters over a span of eight years was analyzed and found that tall black men were especially likely to receive attention from police that was ultimately deemed unjustified. All raw data came from the NYPD’s annual reports. Study two involved testing whether height and race influenced people's perception by manipulating the height of black and white men in photographs. Both sets of men and the photographs who look down at the camera are perceived as taller than they were perceived in the photographs of them looking up at the camera. The study demonstrates that while height amplifies the perceived threat of black men, the opposite effect was found in that height amplifies the perceived competence of white men. Study three addressed stimuli concerns from study too, but again demonstrated that tall black men are perceived as especially threatening when compared to short black men, short white men and tall white men. The research I've been talking about was published three years ago, and is the first of its kind to demonstrate the link between perceptions of height and threat for tall black men. Now, just consider this. Why did it take until 2018 for an academic study to demonstrate that if you're black, being tall isn't always a good thing, and that it actually can be a very bad thing? The NYPD data was there well before this research was conducted. So why did it take so long to be studied? Before we go on, let's discuss some key points about the NYPD stop and frisk program using some stats directly from their own annual reports from 2002 to 2019. Almost 90% of people stopped and frisked were found to have been completely innocent. 57% of people stopped and frisked were black, even though black people only account for 24% of New York's population. Almost 40% of people stopped and frisked by police for black and Latino males from 14 years old to 24, despite accounting for only 5% of the city's population. These numbers clearly show that people are in fact disproportionately harassed by the police for the crime of being dark skinned. And if you're tall and dark-skinned, well, as we just learned a minute ago, adding height to the equation tends to make things worse, not better. I've been six three since grade five. I remember at the track and field meet that year, I somehow forgot my running shoes. And our vice principal was nice enough to offer his own pair of shoes, only for us to find out that they were like three sizes too small. And it was around that time that I was faced with this sort of kind of new and pretty bizarre reality of being perceived as a man or at least an older teenager by most people, even though I was a kid. So in this episode, I want to get more into the indirect effects of discrimination, and how they become significant underlying factors in terms of what paths we go down in life. [MUSIC - "MILITAIRE ELECTRONIC" BY KEVIN MACLEOD] When I was in high school, I could put on a button down shirt with an annoyed look on my face, and nine times out of ten that was enough to make it past the doors of liquor stores, bars, clubs, even casinos. It was ridiculous. So if you've been paying attention, you might be thinking, "Oh, hold on. That study said that tall black men are perceived as threats, not tall black males including underage teenagers". And you're right. But my counterpoint is that even if you're an underage teen, if someone is perceived as being a tall black man, that's what matters, in that they're far more likely to be perceived as a threat regardless of their true age. For me, the overwhelming evidence that people thought I was an adult when I was actually under age was how easily I could get into all kinds of age restricted businesses, without ever being asked for identification. I mean, look-- at 13 people thought I was 16. At 15 people thought I was 20. At that time, it came with a complicated list of advantages and disadvantages, like I generally didn't have to worry about physical confrontations but when I did, it often came from police officers. [MUSIC - "LIMIT 70" BY KEVIN MACLEOD] The worst offender in particular was an officer who for the better part of two years, went out of his way to harass me at school, at a community festival while he was off duty, at the gym while I was working out, and believe it or not, this officer even harassed my older brother at another gym after mistakenly recognizing him as me. That officer's harassment made me feel significantly less safe in my community around police officers in general because of how clearly unafraid he was ever being held accountable for his actions by his superiors. I'll just note that in those two years that officer only ever charged me once-- a made up ticket for littering that was eventually thrown out by a judge who seemed more angry about it than me when she realized what the officer had done. After that, it was like he knew better than to make up charges. So his main priority was just to make my life mis
