Roots of Prejudice
Prejudice springs from a culture’s divisions, the heart’s passions, and the mind’s natural workings.
Social Inequalities and Divisions
Flip It Video: Ingroup and Outgroup Bias
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 and sometimes automatic 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 with either self-blame or anger (Allport, 1954). Either reaction can feed others’ prejudice through the classic blame-the-victim dynamic. 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.
Dividing the world into “us” and “them” can entail conflict, racism, 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—our social identity—partly in terms of our groups (Greenaway et al., 2016; 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. Mentally drawing a circle defines “us,” the ingroup. But the social definition of who we are also states who we are not. People outside that circle are “them,” the outgroup. An ingroup bias—a favoring of our own group—soon follows. In experiments, people have favored their own group (arbitrarily created by a simple coin toss) when dividing rewards (Tajfel, 1982; Wilder, 1981). Outside the lab, discrimination is often triggered not by outgroup hostility but by ingroup networking and mutual support, such as hiring a friend’s child at the expense of other candidates (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014).
We have inherited our Stone Age ancestors’ need to belong, to live and love in groups. There was safety in solidarity: Whether hunting, defending, or attacking, 10 hands were better than 2. Evolution prepared us, when encountering strangers, to make instant judgments: friend or foe? This urge to distinguish enemies from friends, and to “otherize” as different those not like us, predisposes prejudice against strangers (Whitley, 1999). To Greeks of the classical era, all non-Greeks were “barbarians.” In our own era, most students believe their school is better than all other schools in town. Perhaps you can recall being most conscious of your school identity when competing with an archrival school. Many high school students form cliques—jocks, 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). An ideal world might equally prioritize justice and love for all. But in our real world, ingroup love often outranks universal justice.
Negative Emotions
Negative emotions nourish prejudice. When facing death, fearing threats, or experiencing frustration, people cling more tightly to their ingroup and their friends. As fears of terrorism heighten patriotism, they also produce loathing and aggression toward “them”—those who threaten our world (Pyszczynski et al., 2002, 2008). Scapegoat theory notes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for our negative emotions. Following the 9/11 attacks, some outraged people lashed out at innocent Arab-Americans. A decade later, anti-Muslim animosities still flare. In 2015, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 67 percent from the year before (FBI, 2016). And after anti-immigrant sentiments flared in 2016 during the Brexit referendum in Britain and the contentious presidential election in the United States, reports of harassment, bullying, and hate crime rose (Crandall & White, 2016; Hassan, 2016; Kenyon, 2016; North, 2016). “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).
The ingroup Basketball fans, shown here from my [DM’s] own college during a game against their archrival, share a social identity that defines “us” (the ingroup) and “them” (the outgroup).
Evidence for the scapegoat theory of prejudice comes in two forms: (1) Economically frustrated people tend to express heightened prejudice. (2) Experiments that create temporary frustration intensify prejudice. Students who experience failure or are made to feel insecure often restore their self-esteem by belittling a rival school or another person (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980; Crocker et al., 1987). Denigrating others may boost our own sense of status, which 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.) By contrast, those made to feel loved and supported become more open to and accepting of others who differ (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001).
“ If the Tiber reaches the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields, if the sky doesn’t move or the Earth does, if there is famine, if there is plague, the cry is at once: ‘The Christians to the lion!’”
Tertullian, Apologeticus, 197 C.E.
Cognitive Shortcuts
Stereotyped beliefs are in part a by-product of how we cognitively simplify the world. To help understand the world around us, we sometimes form categories. Chemists categorize molecules as organic and inorganic. A basketball coach categorizes offensive players as guards and post players. Therapists categorize psychological disorders. We all categorize people by gender, ethnicity, race, age, and many other characteristics. But when we categorize people into groups, we often stereotype. We recognize how greatly we differ from other individuals in our groups. But we overestimate the extent to which members of other groups are alike (Bothwell et al., 1989). We perceive outgroup homogeneity—uniformity of outgroup attitudes, personality, and appearance. Our greater recognition for individual own-race faces—called the other-race effect (or 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). (We also have an own-age bias—better recognition memory for faces of our own age group [Rhodes & Anastasi, 2012]).
“ The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey.”
Japanese saying
Sometimes, however, people don’t fit easily into our racial categories. For example, mixed-race people are often assigned to their minority identity. Researchers believe this happens because, after learning the features of a familiar racial group, the observer’s selective attention is drawn to the distinctive features of the less-familiar minority. Researchers illustrated this learned-association effect by showing New Zealanders blended Chinese-Caucasian faces (Halberstadt et al., 2011). Compared with participants of Chinese descent, European-descent New Zealanders more readily classified ambiguous faces as Chinese (see Figure 77.3). With effort and with experience, people get better at recognizing individual faces from another group (Hugenberg et al., 2010; Young et al., 2012).
Figure 77.3 Categorizing mixed-race people
When New Zealanders quickly classified 104 photos by race, those of European descent more often than those of Chinese descent classified the ambiguous middle two as Chinese (Halberstadt et al., 2011).
Remembering Vivid Cases
As we saw in Module 35, we also simplify our world by employing heuristics—mental shortcuts that enable snap judgments. The availability heuristic is the tendency to estimate the frequency of an event by how readily it comes to mind. Vivid cases are memorable and they come to mind easily, so it’s no surprise that they feed our stereotypes. 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. Violent crimes form vivid memories (Figure 77.4).
Figure 77.4 Vivid cases feed stereotypes
Global terrorism has created, in many minds, an exaggerated stereotype of Muslims as terrorism-prone. Actually, reported a U.S. National Research Council panel on terrorism, when offering this inexact illustration, most terrorists are not Muslim and “the vast majority of Islamic people have no connection with and do not sympathize with terrorism” (Smelser & Mitchell, 2002).
Victim Blaming
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 amplifies victim blaming (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, two groups of people were given a detailed account of a date (Janoff-Bulman et al., 1985). The first group’s account reported that the date ended with the woman being raped. Members of that group perceived the woman’s behavior as at least partly to blame, and in hindsight, they thought, “She should have known better.” The second group, 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 and deserve to be. If people are rich, they must be smart (Hussak & Cimpian, 2015). 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, our “system justification” tends to preserve them.
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.