How Did Everybody Get So Sensitive?

The ever expanding art of being offended.

May 20th, 1963. In a world where politicians are still striving to preserve segregation, the University of South Carolina (USC) becomes the last major university in the American South to allow black students to enrol. 

In response, over a thousand students burn a cross in front of the university president's home before marching to the state house chanting, “Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate.”

Unfortunately for them, after a string of failed appeals, Henrie Monteith, James Solomon Jr., and Robert Anderson become the first African American students at the University. Today, the campus bears a statue in their honour.

July 1st, 2010. In a world where people of colour are still a rare sight in elected office, Steve Benjamin, himself a USC graduate, becomes the first African American to be elected Mayor of South Carolina's capitol, Columbia. 

Citizens of Columbia express their feelings about his campaign by spray painting “No ni**er mayor” and “die” on the side of City Hall. 

Unfortunately for them, Benjamin wins the election and serves faithfully for the next twelve years. Today, he serves as a senior advisor to the President of the United States. 

January 9th, 2023. In a world where people occasionally use words that could potentially make a person of colour think of slavery, USC announces its plan to remove the word “field” from its curriculum and replace it with “practicum.”

...This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favour of inclusive language. Language can be powerful, and phrases such as "going into the field" or "field work" may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.

Unfortunately for all concerned, this wasn't a joke. So today, let’s talk about it.

In 2018, researchers at Harvard decided to figure out how everybody got so sensitive. 

They showed volunteers a randomised sample of 1000 coloured dots (ranging from dark purple to dark blue) and asked them to pick out only the blue ones. Once the volunteers had sorted around 200, the team started showing the volunteers blue dots less often.

But something strange happened: instead of reporting fewer blue dots, the volunteers started subconsciously classifying purple dots as blue.  

Even when the researchers warned the subjects that this might happen, even when they offered the cold hard cash to evaluate the colours consistently, the pattern stayed the same: the fewer blue dots there were, the more blue dots the volunteers thought they saw. 

And it wasn't just dots. 

In a study of 800 computer-generated faces, when the researchers reduced the frequency of genuinely aggressive faces, the volunteers started to think faces they'd previously judged to be neutral looked aggressive. In a study of ethical and unethical research proposals, volunteers began to see previously ethical proposals as unethical. Whenever the researchers reduced the prevalence of the problem the volunteers were looking for, the volunteers subconsciously shifted the goalposts to compensate. 

As Daniel Gilbert, the study's co-author, explained:

Our studies show that people judge each new instance of a concept in the context of the previous instances. So as we reduce the prevalence of a problem [...] we judge each new behaviour in the improved context that we have created.

But as counterintuitive as it might seem, sometimes, this is the way it's supposed to work.