American Indian mascots create a hostile environment for all

By, Adam K. Fetterman
In the spring of 2010, the State Board of Education in North Dakota ruled to end the use of the University of North Dakota (UND) Fighting Sioux nickname/mascot. While some are praising the end, others are mourning the loss. Those that support the mascot assert that the mascot promotes American Indian honor and tradition. The opponents say that it promotes racism and a hostile environment for American Indians. While there seems to be little evidence for the former, aside from certain tribal councils supporting various mascots, there has been evidence for the latter. Martin Luther King Jr. once said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If so, this should be a good enough reason to retire American Indian mascots in its own. However, there may be even more of a reason to do so.

Recently, Kim-Prieto, Goldstein, Okazaki, and Kirschner (2010) found that when exposed to an image of an American Indian mascot, people were more likely to endorse stereotypes of other minority groups. They concluded that “the effects of these mascots have negative implications not just for American Indians, but for all consumers of the stereotype” (Kim-Prieto et al., 2010, p. 547). What this means is that the use of these mascots create a wider, hostile environment for all those exposed. Therefore, the retirement of the Fighting Sioux logo appears to be a step in the right direction towards reducing racism not only directed at American Indians, but also towards anyone else who may be a victim of racial stereotyping.

Kim-Prieto, C. et al. (2010)Effect of exposure to an American Indian mascot on the tendency to stereotype a different minority group. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40, 534-553

“N.D. board: Fighting Sioux nickname is retired”- By Dave Kolpack Associated Press. Bismark Tribune April 8th. 2010

UND Bridges Website “A UND student organization dedicated to fighting racism and the systems that support it”

“Pushing Some Buttons”  By: Sudi Hofmann: Helping Students Understand… The American Indian Mascot Issue

Internet Avengers

By Erica Zaiser

In China, the Internet has provided a new kind of medium for vigilantes to work together to dole out punishments to perceived offenders. This “human-flesh search engine”, as an article in the New York Times calls it, doesn’t work like a conventional Internet search. Instead, it is a vast network of online users who work together to reveal the location and personal details of people who the users feel have violated a norm. In one example, Internet users from all over China worked together to collect the personal data of a woman who posted a video on the internet of her stomping a kitten to death under her spiked heels.  After discovering her location, the vast network of users encouraged everyone who came in contact to her to assist in driving her out-of-town, ruining her business, and destroying her life. The article describes a number of examples of offenders (accused of committing a wide variety of perceived “crimes”) all being punished severely through this network and often being unable to return to work, their homes, or normal life after the “search engine” finds “justice”.

Although this type of mass justice seeking behaviour is relatively unstudied, it has interesting implications for a number of research areas like social identity, bullying behavior, collective action, social rejection, and anger and aggression. When people witness behavior that violates norms and invokes moral outrage, they often desire justice. According to social psychologists, there are different types of justice people can seek when they witness a crime, they include retributive justice (punishment for the offender) and compensatory justice (compensation – money and apology etc. for the victim). Interestingly, in this Chinese human network, the justice form doled out by online avengers is always a harsh punishment for the offender. Nobody in the network is encouraging others to seek compensation for the victims.

In line with this, one set of studies found that when people “observe” a crime, but are not close to the victim, they prefer a retributive type of justice to a compensatory type. The less close the bystander is to the victim, the more they prefer punishment to compensation. When you are dealing with an online network of avengers who likely don’t even know each other, much less the victim, its easy to see how this punishment response could escalate as the networks extends to more distant users. Furthermore, given that it’s all online, there is an added sense of anonymity for the justice seekers. All of these aspects make the “human search engine” an interesting phenomenon for social psychologists to unravel.

Read More: Retributive versus compensatory justice: Observers’ preference for punishing in response to criminal offenses