Dr. Jessica Flanigan’s “Three arguments against prescription requirements” was an incredibly interesting argument that brings ethical issues into the medicinal/healthcare contexts. Flanigan posits that “prescription drug laws violate patients’ rights to self-medication” and after reading through her well-argued paper and thinking about the ethical considerations we’ve learned through this class, I agree with her (579). This paper makes a strong ethical argument and is backed by anecdotal and statistical evidence to support the claim– it is unethical that we do not allow patients to carry out prescription treatment plans without permission from a physician. Flanigan argues that much of this system is embedded in paternalism that limits patients’ abilities to opt for medication when they want it; instead, we should have a “non-prohibitive drug system” where “prescription-grade drugs should be widely available without a physician’s notice” (580). Flanigan essentially argues for patient autonomy– even if their decisions go against physicians’ recommendations– because it is unjust that patients can opt-out of medication but cannot opt-in when they want it. Flanigan notes that one outlier to her argument is patient exposure to potentially dangerous drugs.

Given what we have learned so far about normative ethics, I agree with Flanigan’s proposal to remake the prescription drug system in the United States, and I think she makes a strong case for this idea. While I am not well-versed in the healthcare or prescription drug system, I do know there are problems and the “big pharma” concept is a huge problem for patients across the country, where big medical companies do profit off people’s suffering. I think with the potential decision to allow patients to decide if they want to self-medicate, the prescription drug system would be more open and improve the patient-physician dynamic, making it less authoritative. People should be able to make decisions about their own bodies and the state should recognize rights to self-medication, as Flanigan argues.

Anna Marston

As I am currently conducting research with Dr. Crystal Hoyt on growth mindset and stereotype threat (regarding drug/alcohol addiction), I was extremely excited to read her article “Managing to clear the air: Stereotype threat, women, and leadership” with Susan Murphy. In this post, I want to predominantly respond to the concept of stereotype threat as defined by the authors, because I think it pertains greatly to Critical Thinking as a course, and how we consume information. Stereotype threat is defined as “‘the concrete, real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a stereotype about one’s group applies’ (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002, p. 385)” (p. 388). This so-called stereotype threat is what can cause female underrepresentation in the workplace and leadership positions of all types. As I mentioned in my Implicit Bias test post, I took a class last semester where we learned in-depth about the social implications of gender/sexual/racial/ethnic/ability/etc. underrepresentation at work, but Hoyt & Murphy hone in on the psychological implications. For people who do not fit the major social identities seen as a leader– white and male–, they may face great bias and discrimination. While stereotype threat occurs across many social identities as I mentioned above, Hoyt & Murphy broadly focus on women in leadership and how these individuals are impacted by stereotype threat. For women in leadership, stereotype threat is evoked in many ways, such as explicit exposure to sexist commentary, being in the numerical minority (i.e. one woman in a large conference room full of men), and in other cues such as the media. This can lead to what the authors refer to as “vulnerability responses” where the woman may disengage or have an inhibited performance at work as a result.

It worries me that stereotype threat remains so prevalent in all types of workplaces– ranging from wage jobs to the tech industry– and the psychological implications it has on the group deemed socially inferior (in this article, for women). I am hopeful that with training in different spaces and an activist push for equality at work for people of a wide range of social identities we can reduce the harm stereotype threat imposes.

Anna Marston

For my implicit bias test, I chose to take the Gender-Career Task test. The Harvard website describes this as a test that “often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males,” and I was curious to test my implicit biases regarding this topic. Last semester, I took a class called Gender and Work where we spoke in-depth about gender stereotypes in the workplace, so I wanted to see if I conformed to these implicit biases.

My results were: Your result is described as an “Automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family” if you were faster responding when Career and Male are assigned to the same response key than when Career and Female were classified with the same key. Your score is described as an “Automatic association for Female with Career and Male with Family if the opposite occurred. Your automatic preference may be described as “slight”, “moderate”, “strong”, or “no preference”. This indicates the strength of your automatic preference.

I am not surprised with my results because I grew up with a pretty heteronormative, male-dominant family structure where my parents filled pretty traditional gender roles. My father is the main breadwinner for my family and my mom worked part-time after she had kids to take care of my siblings and me. While I am now well-aware that this is not the familial structure for many other families, before taking WGSS/Leadership classes at college I couldn’t envision a family structure any differently than I had it. It is often hard thinking about for women whether they want to rear children or continue on a full-time career path because they are often the ones giving up their careers to become full-time mothers (and there is nothing wrong with this!). My implicit biases show that I intrinsically associate careers with male figures and the family with female figures, but not super strong, so I figure I can continue to challenge these implicit biases in my lifetime and learn during Critical Thinking how to address stereotypes when analyzing sources/information.

Anna Marston

In the Blindspot reading, the “Mindbugs” chapter was so interesting as I had never heard of this concept before. Mindbugs, or “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” certainly pertains to this course (4). In becoming effective consumers of information, we need to be wary of these mindbugs. In understanding these errors, Hermann von Helmholtz describes the “unconscious inference” by which our visual system is tricked (6). I did not even think of this in how we process words– as for my classes pretty much all I do is read books and empirical articles! Now I wonder if I have ever fallen victim to mindbugs when processing information. Mindbugs also have the power to “produce greater recollection of things that didn’t occur than of things that did occur” and I have definitely been susceptible to this on exams that required me to pull from my short-term memory, such as a vocabulary quiz, where I tried to pull more information than was actually needed (9). While a quiz is not a big deal, the author mentions that mindbugs can come into play in criminal cases; I am taking a child development class right now and we discuss child eyewitness testimony was at times, children false report things they did not see. This can have extreme behavioral impacts on the witness’s reporting and can even lead to punishments to occur (like the death penalty) for someone who may have been falsely convicted…

Anna Marston