My thanks to wasoxygen too, for his characteristic diligence.

As for the study, it would be laughable but for the fact that people actually take it seriously. Just consider this quotation for starters:

“…They looked at the faces of their subjects, and rated how much anger they saw. They shook the young [men’s] hands to see if their grip was firmer than usual…”

Ok, so they were setting out to prove a certain hypothesis about a group of people that, from the gleeful tone of the rest of text, it was obvious that they disliked – and they helped themselves to subjective assessments of their grip strength and facial expressions! Right from the outset, Cohen and Nisbett were not doing science.

Basically, this sort of study is what I would characterize as a “culture trap.” One begins by picking out a certain stereotypical trait that one’s own culture finds alarming or offensive. Then one carefully crafts conditions that will bring out that trait in the target subjects but not in the control group. Imagine one wanted to make exactly the same assertion about blacks that the experimenters wanted to make about (white) southerners. It could be easily done. Just substitute the word “boy” for “asshole”. The non-black control group would simply shrug it off as odd – but one can practically guarantee the black target group wouldn’t. Presto! This would prove that blacks are hypersensitive hotheads with an excess of testosterone – right? No, quite obviously, it wouldn’t prove anything except the propaganda value of crafting a study to “prove” something that your intended audience already wants to believe.

When was the last time an academic from a liberal university set out to prove something bad about blacks, gays, Hispanics, the poor, fellow liberals, or anyone else it would be embarrassing to admit had flaws? White southerners, conservatives, businessmen, and the religious are, on the other hand, fair game. And they really do display disturbing tendencies – just like any other group of human beings. Odd how they to display even more flaws, though, if you target them almost to the exclusion of other groups and help yourself to some bad methodologies.

The cottage industry of pathologizing cultures that are incompatible with your own is nothing very new or very clever. People will always be grateful if you endow their pet prejudices with a certain scientific smell. If you have any doubts about this, take a trip to the Creation Museum and see for yourself. And there are always “scientists” willing to do it. See Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko.