Discrimination seen in Connemara world has roots in baby biases

The discrimination seen in today’s American Connemara society is a relatively new thing.

For years, there were no inspections.

Likewise, there was no special stud book for the anointed horses who passed inspections.

All Connemaras were registered in one registry, and all were equal in the eyes of the breed.

The board didn’t run page after page of “approved” Connemaras in the breed magazine, thumbing its nose at the unregistered horses as if they might as well find another country to live in because they weren’t welcome in this one.

I’ve been puzzled by why this divisiveness was allowed to happen under the watch of reasonable adults who used to be friends with my parents.

Sure, there were differences among members about what each person believed was a perfect Connemara.

But to take it to the level of allowing so-called inspectors to fail horses that weren’t to their liking and exclude them in such an overt way has always felt to me like the breed society was turned over to a bunch of adolescents.

As it turns out, that comparison is more accurate than I thought.

“60 Minutes” did a special on Nov. 18, 2012, on a baby lab at Yale that is unlocking the mystery of morality and bias in infants.

It turns out that 5-month-olds understand a lot about right, wrong and discrimination.

In a test in which babies were shown two hand puppets that look like different colored cats, with one behaving nicely and one behaving meanly, three-fourths of the babies chose the nice one.

Yale baby researcher Karen Wynn told Leslie Stahl: “Study after study after study, the results are always consistently babies feeling positively towards helpful individuals in the world. And disapproving, disliking, maybe condemning individuals who are antisocial towards others.”

However, and this is a HUGE however, these positive feelings go away when the babies develop a bias toward the puppets.

In one of the segments, Wynn uses breakfast food to see if babies share the same tendency as adults to prefer others who are similar to themselves.

“Adults will like others who share even really absolutely trivial similarities with them,” Wynn says.

The lab tests this theory by offering the babies graham crackers or Cheerios. Then, the babies are shown one puppet “eating” the graham crackers and one “eating” the Cheerios. When the puppet that liked the same food as the child is mean to the puppet that liked the opposite food, the babies overwhelmingly approve of the similar puppet being mean to the dissimilar one.

Remember, the babies didn’t like the puppet being mean before. They only like the puppet being mean now because the puppet is picking on the puppet that chose the food the babies didn’t like. In the study, once the biased opinion was made, a whopping 87 percent of the babies chose the puppet that was mean to the puppet perceived as different.

Yale baby researcher Paul Bloom, who is Wynn’s husband, says the breakfast choice “matters to the young baby.”

“We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality,” Bloom says.

Stahl asks: “We want the other to be punished?”

Wynn says: “In our studies, babies seem as if they do want the other to be punished.”

Stahl says: “This is suggesting that we’re not taught to hate; we’re born to hate.”

Wynn says: “I think, we are built to, you know, at the drop of a hat, create us and them.”

Bloom says: “And that’s why we’re not that moral. We have an initial moral sense that is, in some ways, very impressive and, in some ways, really depressing.”

Bloom later concludes: “I think to some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias. It’s what one would expect from a creature like us who evolved from natural selection, but it has terrible consequences.”

And he adds that it makes sense that evolution would predispose us to be wary of “the other” for survival, so we need society and parental nurturing to intervene.

He goes on to show that child test subjects who are very selfish on a test involving possessions get far more generous as the test subjects get older.

Stahl suggests that the child test subjects who are generous have been educated to be so.

But Bloom says: “When we’re under pressure, when life is difficult, we regress to our younger selves, and all of this elaborate stuff we have on top disappears.”

In looking at the mean-spirited atmosphere that’s been created with Connemara inspections, I can only conclude that the board members who pushed so hard for this are people who lead difficult lives, and they are regressing to their younger selves in desiring to see animals that they don’t identify with be punished.

Would it be a stretch to suggest that those breeders who choose coarse looking horses come from families or genes that are more solidly built? Breeders who choose lighter horses perhaps come from more lighter-boned backgrounds? I’m not sure how else to summarize the preference and alliance for a particular Connemara type.

It’s clear that whatever education society has provided to these breeders to make them more generous and less biased, they are feeling stressed enough in the horse world that the veil of education has disappeared and they have reverted to children who want to see the different puppet punished.

No wonder it feels like Connemara inspections were created by kids on a playground. It’s all about punishing those that are different.