Penn: Diverse, But Not

Big breaking news from a Penn class: Turns out, at Penn, all the races stick together!

Students in professor Paul Rozin’s Psychology 001 class conducted a “racial association” study which found that, despite Penn’s diverse student body, people on campus tend to spend time with others of the same ethnicity.

Geeze, they coulda learned that at Orientation 001. Or asked anyone who has ever gone to Penn. I’d bet it’s still a running joke in the student body. Rozin himself even knew what the results would be, but said “sometimes what we find out in psychology is that something everyone already knows is true, but once in a while we find it is the opposite of what we expect.” Makes sense.

Fair enough. Now let’s take a look at the students in the class who the Daily Pennsylvanian talked to:

But the point of this exercise was not simply to analyze data. Rozin said he was trying to teach his students how hard it is to make accurate observations. “It turns out when you want to observe something simple” - like someone’s race - “you have to make a lot of judgement calls,” Rozin said.

College sophomore Jayme van Oot conducted her study on a rainy day and said it was hard to discern race and ethnicity when people were wearing raincoats and holding umbrellas. “My results weren’t very accurate because they weren’t representative of a normal day,” van Oot said, adding that it is hard to categorize people unless you ask them to place themselves in a group.

College freshman Ali Levine also did not think her results were representative of those of the rest of the class. “I didn’t really see any patterns,” she said. “In fact, a lot of them were mixed groups.”

Hmm. I sense a pattern of my own here: No matter who the DP talks to, the response will be that he or she found a lot of mixed groups on campus, and he or she has lots of friends of other races.

Or, you know, small sample size. Or something, I dunno, let’s just hit “Send to Weblog” because I’ve spent far too much time on bad jokes in this post already.

A new kind of people-watching [DP]