36-1 What is prejudice? What are its social and emotional roots?

Prejudice means “prejudgment.” It is an unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group—often a different cultural, ethnic, or gender group. Like all attitudes, prejudice is a three-part mixture of

Some stereotypes may be at least partly accurate. If you presume that young men tend to drive faster than elderly women, you may be right. People perceive Australians as having a rougher culture than the British, and in one analysis of millions of Facebook status updates, Australians did use more profanity (Kramer & Chung, 2011). But stereotypes can exaggerate—as when liberals and conservatives overestimate the extremity of the other’s views (Graham et al., 2012). In the 14 years after the terror of September 11, 2001, many Americans feared attacks in the United States by the Muslim radical fringe, yet were nearly twice as likely to be killed by home-grown White supremacists and other non-Muslim extremists (Shane, 2015).

Stereotypes can also bias behavior. To believe that obese people are gluttonous, and to feel dislike for an obese person, is to be prejudiced; prejudice is a negative attitude. To pass over all the obese people on a dating site, or to reject an obese person as a potential job candidate, is to discriminate; discrimination is a negative behavior.

Prejudice comes as both explicit (overt) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward people of a particular ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation, or viewpoint. Some examples:

EXPLICIT ETHNIC PREJUDICE Americans’ expressed racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the last half-century. “It’s all right for Blacks and Whites to date each other,” agreed 48 percent of Americans in 1987 and 86 percent in 2012 (Pew, 2012). “Marriage between Blacks and Whites” was approved by 4 percent of Americans in 1958 and 87 percent in 2013 (Newport, 2013).

Yet as overt prejudice wanes, subtle prejudice lingers. Despite increased verbal support for interracial marriage, many people admit that in socially intimate settings (dating, dancing, marrying), they, personally, would feel uncomfortable with someone of another race. And many people who say they would feel upset with someone making racist slurs actually, when hearing such racism, respond indifferently (Kawakami et al., 2009). Subtle prejudice may also take the form of “microaggressions,” such as race-related traffic stops or people’s reluctance to choose a train seat next to someone of a different race (Wang et al., 2011). A slew of recent experiments illustrates that prejudice can be not only subtle but also automatic and unconscious.

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IMPLICIT ETHNIC PREJUDICE As we have seen throughout this book, the human mind processes thoughts, memories, and attitudes on two different tracks. Sometimes that processing is explicit—on the radar screen of our awareness. To a much greater extent, it is implicit—below the radar, leaving us unaware of how our attitudes are influencing our behavior. Modern studies indicate that prejudice is often implicit, an automatic attitude—an unthinking knee-jerk response. Consider these findings:

IMPLICIT RACIAL ASSOCIATIONS Using Implicit Association Tests, researchers have demonstrated that even people who deny harboring racial prejudice may carry negative associations (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013). For example, 9 in 10 White respondents took longer to identify pleasant words (such as peace and paradise) as “good” when presented with Black-sounding names (such as Latisha and Darnell) rather than with White-sounding names (such as Katie and Ian). Moreover, people who more quickly associated good things with White names or faces also were the quickest to perceive anger and apparent threat in Black faces (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). (By 2014, about 16 million people had taken an Implicit Association Test, as you can at www.implicit.harvard.edu.)

Although the test is useful for studying automatic prejudice, critics caution against using it to assess or label individuals (Oswald et al., 2013, 2015). Defenders counter that implicit biases predict behaviors ranging from simple acts of friendliness to the evaluation of work quality (Greenwald et al., 2015). In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, those demonstrating explicit or implicit prejudice were less likely to vote for candidate Barack Obama. His election in turn served to reduce implicit prejudice (Bernstein et al., 2010; Payne et al., 2010; Stephens-Davidowitz, 2014).

UNCONSCIOUS PATRONIZATION In one experiment, White university women assessed flawed student essays. When assessing essays supposedly written by White students, the women gave low evaluations, often with harsh comments, but not so when the same essays were said to have been written by Black students (Harber, 1998). Did the evaluators calibrate their evaluations to their racial stereotypes, leading to less exacting standards and a patronizing attitude? In real-world evaluations, such low expectations and the resulting “inflated praise and insufficient criticism” could hinder minority student achievement, the researcher noted. (To preclude such bias, many teachers read essays while “blind” to their authors.)

RACE-INFLUENCED PERCEPTIONS Our expectations influence our perceptions. In 1999, Amadou Diallo was accosted as he approached his apartment house doorway by police officers looking for a rapist. When he pulled out his wallet, the officers, perceiving a gun, riddled his body with 19 bullets from 41 shots. Curious about this tragic killing of an unarmed, innocent man, two research teams simulated the situation (Correll et al., 2002, 2007; Greenwald et al., 2003; Sadler et al., 2012). They asked viewers to press buttons quickly to “shoot” or not shoot men who suddenly appeared on screen. Some of the on-screen men held a gun. Others held a harmless object, such as a flashlight or bottle. People (both Blacks and Whites, in one study) more often shot Black men than White men who were holding the harmless objects. Priming people with a flashed Black face rather than White face also made them more likely to misperceive a flashed tool as a gun (FIGURE 36.1). Fatigue, which diminishes one’s conscious control and increases automatic reactions, amplifies racial bias in decisions to shoot (Ma et al., 2013).

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In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court, in upholding the Fair Housing Act, affirmed implicit bias research when noting that “unconscious prejudices” can cause discrimination even without conscious discriminatory intent. If your own gut-check reveals you sometimes have feelings you would rather not have about other people, remember this: It is what we do with our feelings that matters. By monitoring our feelings and actions, and by replacing old habits with new ones based on new friendships, we can work to free ourselves from prejudice.

GENDER PREJUDICE Overt gender prejudice has also declined sharply. The one-third of Americans who in 1937 told Gallup pollsters that they would vote for a qualified woman whom their party nominated for president soared to 95 percent in 2012 (Gallup Brain, 2008; Jones, 2012). Nearly everyone now agrees that women and men should receive the same pay for the same job.

But gender prejudice and discrimination persist. Despite equality between the sexes in intelligence scores, people have tended to perceive their fathers as more intelligent than their mothers (Furnham & Wu, 2008). We pay more to those (usually men) who care for our streets than to those (usually women) who care for our children. Worldwide, women are more likely to live in poverty (UN, 2010); they represent nearly two-thirds of illiterate adults (UNESCO, 2013); and 30 percent have experienced intimate partner violence (Devries et al., 2013).

Unwanted female infants are no longer left out on a hillside to die of exposure, as was the practice in ancient Greece. Yet natural female mortality and the normal male-to-female newborn ratio (105-to-100) hardly explain the world’s estimated 163 million (say that number slowly) “missing women” (Hvistendahl, 2011). In many places, sons are valued more than daughters. In India, there are 3.5 times more Google searches asking how to conceive a boy than how to conceive a girl (Stephens-Davidowitz, 2014). With scientific testing that enables sex-selective abortions, several Asian countries have experienced a shortfall in female births. Although China has declared that sex-selective abortions—gender genocide—are now a criminal offense, the country’s newborn sex ratio has been 111 boys for every 100 girls, similar to India’s 112 to 100 ratio (CIA, 2014). Some 95 percent of the children in Chinese orphanages have been girls (Webley, 2009). With under-age-20 males exceeding females by 32 million, many Chinese bachelors will be unable to find mates (Zhu et al., 2009). A shortage of women also contributes to increased crime, violence, prostitution, and trafficking of women (Brooks, 2012).

SEXUAL ORIENTATION PREJUDICE In most of the world, gay and lesbian people cannot openly and comfortably disclose who they are and whom they love (Katz-Wise & Hyde, 2012; United Nations, 2011). Dozens of countries have laws criminalizing same-sex relationships. But cultural variation is enormous—ranging from the 6 percent in Spain who say that “homosexuality is morally unacceptable” to 98 percent in Ghana (Pew, 2014). Anti-gay prejudice, though rapidly subsiding in Western countries, persists. In national surveys, 39 percent of LGBT Americans reported having “been rejected by a friend or family member” because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. And 58 percent reported being “subject to slurs or jokes” (Pew, 2013). Worldwide, anti-gay attitudes are most common among men, older adults, and those less educated (Jackle & Wenzelburger, 2014).

Do attitudes and practices that label, disparage, and discriminate against gay and lesbian people increase their risk of psychological disorder and ill health? In U.S. states without protections against LGBT hate crimes and discrimination, gay and lesbian people experience substantially higher rates for depression and related disorders, even after controlling for income and education differences. In communities where anti-gay prejudice is high, so are gay and lesbian suicide and cardiovascular deaths. In 16 states that banned same-sex marriage between 2001 and 2005, gays and lesbians (but not heterosexuals) experienced a 37 percent increase in depressive disorder rates, a 42 percent increase in alcohol use disorder, and a 248 percent increase in general anxiety disorder. Meanwhile, gays and lesbians in other states did not experience increased psychiatric disorders (Hatzenbuehler, 2014).

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Why does prejudice arise? Social inequalities and divisions are partly responsible.

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES When some people have money, power, and prestige and others do not, the “haves” usually develop attitudes that justify things as they are. The just-world phenomenon reflects an idea we commonly teach our children—that good is rewarded and evil is punished. From this it is but a short leap to assume that those who succeed must be good and those who suffer must be bad. Such reasoning enables the rich to see both their own wealth and the poor’s misfortune as justly deserved. When slavery existed in the United States, slaveholders perceived slaves as innately lazy, ignorant, and irresponsible—as having the very traits that justified enslaving them. Stereotypes rationalize inequalities.

Victims of discrimination may react in ways that feed prejudice through the classic blame-the-victim dynamic (Allport, 1954). Do the circumstances of poverty breed a higher crime rate? If so, that higher crime rate can be used to justify discrimination against those who live in poverty.

US AND THEM: INGROUP AND OUTGROUP We have inherited our Stone Age ancestors’ need to belong, to live and love in groups. There was safety in solidarity (those who didn’t band together left fewer descendants). Whether hunting, defending, or attacking, 10 hands were better than 2. Dividing the world into “us” and “them” entails prejudice and war, but it also provides the benefits of communal solidarity. Thus, we cheer for our groups, kill for them, die for them. Indeed, we define who we are partly in terms of our groups. Through our social identities we associate ourselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with others (Dunham et al., 2013; Hogg, 1996, 2006; Turner, 1987, 2007). When Ian identifies himself as a man, an Aussie, a University of Sydney student, a Catholic, and a MacGregor, he knows who he is, and so do we.

Evolution prepared us, when encountering strangers, to make instant judgments: friend or foe? Those from our group, those who look like us, and also those who sound like us—with accents like our own—we instantly tend to like, from childhood onward (Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010; Kinzler et al., 2009). Mentally drawing a circle defines “us,” the ingroup. But the social definition of who you are also states who you are not. People outside that circle are “them,” the outgroup. An ingroup bias—a favoring of our own group—soon follows. Even arbitrarily creating us-them groups by tossing a coin creates this bias. In experiments, people have favored their own group when dividing any rewards (Tajfel, 1982; Wilder, 1981). Much discrimination involves not outgroup hostility but ingroup networking and mutual support, such as hiring a friend’s child at the expense of other job candidates (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014).

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The urge to distinguish enemies from friends predisposes prejudice against strangers (Whitley, 1999). To Greeks of the classical era, all non-Greeks were “barbarians.” In our own era, most children believe their school is better than all other schools in town. Many high school students form cliques—theater people, athletes (sorted by sport), gangsters, preps, nerds—and disparage those outside their own group. Even chimpanzees have been seen to wipe clean the spot where they were touched by a chimpanzee from another group (Goodall, 1986). They also display ingroup empathy by yawning more after seeing ingroup (rather than outgroup) members yawn (Campbell & de Waal, 2011).

Ingroup bias explains the cognitive power of political partisanship (Cooper, 2010; Douthat, 2010). In the United States in the late 1980s, most Democrats believed inflation had risen under Republican president Ronald Reagan (it had dropped). In 2010, most Republicans believed that taxes had increased under Democratic president Barack Obama (for most, they had decreased).

Prejudice springs not only from the divisions of society but also from the passions of the heart. Scapegoat theory notes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for anger. Following the 9/11 attacks, some outraged people lashed out at innocent Arab-Americans. Others called for eliminating Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader whom Americans had been grudgingly tolerating. “Fear and anger create aggression, and aggression against citizens of different ethnicity or race creates racism and, in turn, new forms of terrorism,” noted Philip Zimbardo (2001). A decade after 9/11, anti-Muslim animosities still flared in the United States, with mosque burnings and efforts to block construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City.

Evidence for the scapegoat theory of prejudice comes from high prejudice among economically frustrated people. And it comes from experiments in which a temporary frustration intensifies prejudice. Students who experienced failure or were made to feel insecure often restored their self-esteem by disparaging a rival school or another person (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980; Crocker et al., 1987). To boost their own sense of status, people may denigrate others. That explains why a rival’s misfortune sometimes provides a twinge of pleasure. (The German language has a word—Schadenfreude—for this secret joy that we sometimes take in another’s failure [Hoogland et al., 2015].) By contrast, those made to feel loved and supported become more open to and accepting of others who differ (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001).

Negative emotions feed prejudice. When facing death, fearing threats, or experiencing frustration, people cling more tightly to their ingroup and their friends. Fears of terrorism both heighten patriotism and produce loathing and aggression toward “them”—those who threaten our world (Pyszczynski et al., 2002, 2008). The few individuals who lack fear and its associated activity in the emotion-processing amygdala—such as children with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome—also display a notable lack of racial stereotypes and prejudice (Santos et al., 2010).

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36-2 What are the cognitive roots of prejudice?

Prejudice springs from a culture’s divisions, the heart’s passions, and also from the mind’s natural workings. Stereotyped beliefs are a by-product of how we cognitively simplify the world.

FORMING CATEGORIES One way we simplify our world is to categorize. A chemist categorizes molecules as organic and inorganic. Therapists categorize psychological disorders. All of us categorize people by race, with mixed-race people often assigned to their minority identity. Despite his mixed-race background and being raised by a White mother and White grandparents, President Barack Obama has been perceived by White Americans (and American culture) as Black. Researchers believe this happens because people’s attention is drawn to the distinctive features of the less-familiar minority. Jamin Halberstadt and his colleagues (2011) illustrated this learned-association effect by showing New Zealanders blended Chinese-Caucasian faces. Compared with participants of Chinese descent, European-descent New Zealanders more readily classified ambiguous faces as Chinese (see FIGURE 36.2).

When categorizing people into groups, we often stereotype. We recognize how greatly we differ from other individuals in our groups. But we overestimate the homogeneity of other groups (we perceive outgroup homogeneity). “They”—the members of some other group—seem to look and act alike, while “we” are more diverse (Bothwell et al., 1989). To those in one ethnic group, members of another often seem more alike than they really are in attitudes, personality, and appearance. Our greater recognition for individual own-race faces—called the other-race effect (also called the cross-race effect or own-race bias)—emerges during infancy, between 3 and 9 months of age (Anzures et al., 2013; Telzer et al., 2013).

With effort and with experience, people get better at recognizing individual faces from another group (Hugenberg et al., 2010; Young et al., 2012). People of European descent, for example, more accurately identify individual African faces if they have watched a great deal of basketball on television, exposing them to many African-heritage faces (Li et al., 1996). And the longer Chinese people have resided in a Western country, the less they exhibit the other-race effect (Hancock & Rhodes, 2008).

REMEMBERING VIVID CASES We often judge the frequency of events by instances that readily come to mind. In a classic experiment, researchers showed two groups of University of Oregon students lists containing information about 50 men (Rothbart et al., 1978). The first group’s list included 10 men arrested for nonviolent crimes, such as forgery. The second group’s list included 10 men arrested for violent crimes, such as assault. Later, both groups were asked how many men on their list had committed any sort of crime. The second group overestimated the number. Vivid—in this case violent—cases are more readily available to our memory and feed our stereotypes (FIGURE 36.3).

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BELIEVING THE WORLD IS JUST As we noted earlier, people often justify their prejudices by blaming victims. If the world is just, they assume, people must get what they deserve. As one German civilian is said to have remarked when visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after World War II, “What terrible criminals these prisoners must have been to receive such treatment.”

Hindsight bias is also at work here (Carli & Leonard, 1989). Have you ever heard people say that rape victims, abused spouses, or people with AIDS got what they deserved? In some countries, such as Pakistan, rape victims have been sentenced to severe punishment for violating adultery prohibitions (Mydans, 2002). In one experiment illustrating the blame-the-victim phenomenon, people were given a detailed account of a date that ended with the woman being raped (Janoff-Bulman et al., 1985). They perceived the woman’s behavior as at least partly to blame, and in hindsight, they thought, “She should have known better.” Others, given the same account with the rape ending deleted, did not perceive the woman’s behavior as inviting rape. Hindsight bias promoted a blame-the-victim mentality among members of the first group. Blaming the victim also serves to reassure people that it couldn’t happen to them.

People also have a basic tendency to justify their culture’s social systems (Jost et al., 2009; Kay et al., 2009). We’re inclined to see the way things are as the way they ought to be. This natural conservatism makes it difficult to legislate major social changes, such as health care or climate change policies. Once such policies are in place, however, our “system justification” tends to preserve them as well.