I think Google autocomplete is fairly unreplicable in many cases. I don't doubt 
that putting "women should" into a Google search in Dubai might turn up those 
suggestions (the UN ad agency was in Dubai), but I wasn't able to replicate it 
here.



I don't begrudge someone advertising for a good cause to use a current trend 
like Google autocomplete to make a dramatic ad that makes a good point but I 
don't think it is a sociological IAT (or even a Rorschach). When I put in 
"women", mine says:



women seeking men

women of faith

women living well

women of the bible



When you put in "women should", it starts to go negative. And what would you 
expect? What sentence that starts out saying that a whole class of humanity 
"should" or "shouldn't" do anything is going to end well?



There was an interesting non-disclaimer disclaimer in the Guardian article: 
"The world as seen through the lens of autocomplete is a weird and not always 
wonderful place. It's a place where David Cameron "is a lizard", Obama is "a 
Muslim", Putin is a "badass" and Miley Cyrus, predictably, is "still twerking". 
But despite the suggestions that have been skewed by a popular blogpost or meme 
and are clearly bonkers, there is still much to be gleaned from them about our 
deep-seated discriminations." Really? Much to be gleaned? I doubt it.



For "psychology is", I got



psychology is



psychology is defined as

psychology is the study of

psychology is best defined as

psychology is not a science



Certainly there are some people who don't believe it is a science but I don't 
think 1/4 autocomplete recommendations is very disheartening. I would think 
someone was tampering with it if there was nothing negative at all.



Rick



Dr. Rick Froman, Chair

Division of Humanities and Social Sciences

Professor of Psychology

Box 3519

John Brown University

2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR  72761

rfro...@jbu.edu

(479) 524-7295

http://bit.ly/DrFroman



"The LORD detests both Type I and Type II errors." Proverbs 17:15



-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Green [mailto:chri...@yorku.ca]
Sent: Monday, November 04, 2013 4:05 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Cc: Ian Davidson
Subject: [tips] Google autocomplete & psychology



You may have seen, recently, that it has become a kind of informal method for 
discovering popular social trends to enter the beginning of a sentence into a 
Google search box and see how the engine completes the expression. The idea is 
that Google will come up with the most likely completions based on its 
"knowledge" of what people generally intend when they start a search expression.



This method was used very effectively in an ad campaign by UN Women a few weeks 
ago when they entered phrases like "women should" and "women need to" and got 
horrible completions like "stay at home," "be slaves," and "be in the kitchen." 
Here's a Guardian article about that experiment.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/22/google-autocomplete-un-women-ad-discrimination-algorithms



So, I decided to try the same thing with "psychology is". You should give it 
whirl. I don't think you'll find the results to be all that surprising, but 
they are a bit disheartening nevertheless.



Regards,

Chris

.......

Christopher D Green

Department of Psychology

York University

Toronto, ON M6C 1G4



chri...@yorku.ca<mailto:chri...@yorku.ca>

http://www.yorku.ca/christo

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