Prejudice and bias might be good, sometimes

When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” But, I think this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural, they’re often rational, and they’re often even moral. And I think that once we understand this, we’re in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we’re in a better position to know what to do when this happens. Start with stereotypes. You may look at me, you know my name, you know some certain facts about me, and you can make some certain judgments. You could make guesses about my ethnicity, me religious beliefs, my hobby. And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. We’re very good at this sort of thing. And we’re very good at this sort of things because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it’s a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. So everybody has a lot of experience with chairs, apples and dogs. And based on this, when you see some unfamiliar examples, you could guess you could sit on that chair, you can eat that apple, the dog will bark. Now, we might be wrong. The chair could collapse if you sit on it, the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark. But for the most part, we’re good at this. For the most part, we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain, and if we weren’t able to do so--- if we weren’t able to make guesses about new instance that we encounter, we wouldn’t survive. In facet, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this. He writes, “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.” Or take bias. Now sometimes, we break the world up into us versus them, into in-group versus out-group. And sometimes when we do this, we know we’re doing something wrong, and we’re kind of ashamed of it. But other times we’re proud of it. We openly acknowledge it. And in fact, in general, people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, and patriotism, towards their country or towards their ethnic group. Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be Chinese, and they favor China over other countries. Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, and we feel the same about our ethnicities. Now you may reject this. You may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway. But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family, of people you’re close to, and so even you make a distinction between us versus them. Now, this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough, but it can go awry. This is part of research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. He left to go to university in France, because as a Jew, he couldn’t go to university in Poland, and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II. He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp, and it was a terrifying time for him, because if it was discovered that he was a Jew, he could have been moved to a concentration camp, where he most likely would not have survived. And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, most of his friends and family were dead. He got involved in different pursuits. He helped out the war orphans. But he had a long lasting interest in the science of prejudice, and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, and he won it, then he began this amazing career. And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong. Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. And Tajfel rejected this. Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us. And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents. And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions, and then based on their answers, he said, “I’ve looked at your answers, and based on the answers, I have determines that you are either” he told half of them,“ a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, or a Klee lover.” It was entirely bogus. Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. They probably hadn’t heard of the artists. He just arbitrarily divided them up. But what he found was, these categories mattered, so when he later gave the subjects money, they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group. Worse, they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups, so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less. And there is another example. This bias seems to show up very early. Karen Wynn, at Yale, has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets, and the puppets have certain food preferences. So one of the puppets might like green beans. The other puppet might like graham crackers. They tested the babies own food preferences, and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. But the question is, does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. They tend to prefer the puppet that has the same food tastes that they have. And worse, they actually prefer puppets that punish the puppet with the different food taste. We see this sort of in-group, out-group psychology all the time. We see it in political clashes; we see it in its extreme in cases of war, where the out-group isn’t merely given less, but dehumanized, as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice, or the American perspective of Japanese as rats. Stereotypes can also go awry. So often they’re rational and useful, but sometimes they’re irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences. And the case that is been most studied is the case of race. There was a fascinating study prior to the American 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America, as in an unconscious association with the American flag. And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain, and they found McCain is thought of as more American that Obama, and to some extent, people aren’t that surprised be hearing that. McCain is a celebrated war hero, and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story that Obama. But they also compared Obama to British former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they found that Blair was also thought as more American that Obama, even though subjects explicitly understood that he’s not American at all. But they were responding, of course, to the color of his skin. At some point in his wonderful book “The Better angels of Our Nature,” Steven Pinker says, the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, and the New Testament says love thy enemy, but I don’t love either one of them, not really, but I don’t want to kill them. I know I have obligations to them, but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them, aren’t grounded in love. What they’re grounded in is the understanding of human rights, a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me. The best articulation of this view is actually, for me, it’s not from a theologian or from a philosopher, but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of “Casablanca.” So, spoiler alert, he’s telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good, and he says to her, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Our reason could cause us to override our passions. Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy, could motivate us to write a book like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or read a book like this. And our reason can motivate us to crate customs, taboos and laws… that will constrain us from action upon our impulses when, as rational beings, we feel we should be constrained. And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job, for an award, we are strongly biased by their gender, by how attractive they are. And sometimes we might say, “Well fine, that’s the way it should be.” But other times we ways, “This is wrong.” And so to combat this, we don’t just try harder, but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can’t bias us, which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so the only information they have is the information they believe should matter. I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, and the affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil, but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning, and we can use these to, in some cases, accelerate and nourish our emotions, and in other cases staunch them. And it’s in this way that reason helps us create a better world.