That brings us to
stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination.
And I want to make some distinctions between these terms because they're important.
Stereotypes are categories. They're general categories.
You can make stereotypes about me, right? You can look at me
and say, well, he's a long-haired white male with a tie, I'm not sure what to do about that.
I don't really
have a stereotype for that. Most people have a stereotype for
long-haired white male, as we said before not necessarily a positive one,
some people might have a positive one. Others have a
stereotype for short-haired white male with a tie on, but very few people have a
category
that fits long-haired white male with tie. In other words, it violates some
stereotypes and assumptions then are harder to make,
because the stereotype is the schema that guides our judgment.
It's the category we use to judge the world around us.
Some stereotypes can be positive. So you might think, well this group is always...
insert your positive characteristic here... and they also can be very negative. This
group is always like...
you insert your group and you insert your characteristic. You've got to be careful to
realize,
and we'll be pointing this out, It isn't about
the validity of this. It is about human beings,
the validity of the judgments. The judgments are almost by definition invalid. You
can't paint a broad brush across a group
and apply that to any individual. Think about yourself for a moment.
You're a member of a group. You're a member of an ethnicity.
You're a member of a sex group. You're a member of an age group. You're a member of a geographical group.
You're probably a member of some kind of
political group. You're probably a member of some kind of religious group, and
all those things are labels, and then you think to yourself
are you exactly like everybody else in that group, or do you differ in some
significant and individual and unique ways?
And you wouldn't want people to take their label that they have, positive
or negative, well you might take their positive, you certainly wouldn't want their negative label,
to be applied to you as an individual, because it wouldn't apply
necessarily to you as an individual. It would be a schema based
judgment that you're laying on somebody based on their membership in a group and
that's essentially what you have
with stereotype. So stereotypes then will lead to prejudices.
Prejudice is an unjustified negative attitude towards an individual-based
on that person's membership in a group. So
we then take those categories and we apply them to people
like they are valid. So, oh, they're one of those, I know all about those,
and those put your group in there. You know you have biases. You know you have
stereotypes. You know you have
negative groups that you think exist in this world. Whether you want to admit that or
not is a different question.
Admitting it is the first step to fixing it, because what happens is we have in
groups
and we have out groups, and that is the way it is.
In groups are the people we feel affiliated with,
out groups are them. Them are people we usually don't trust but we tolerate.
We tolerate them. And it can be concocted
so simply. Research has shown us the minimal group paradigm.
You can put people together randomly and within an
hour they have formed some negative opinions about another group that's been formed
randomly
without any real information about them. That's powerful.
I'll give you an example I saw once. I go to UT games because my wife loves UT.
Tennessee Vols. Now me, I'm sports neutral.
I like sports. I'm glad people do sports. I enjoy watching people do
their thing
and I can get into almost anything. When I go to watch little league sports, if I
don't have a kid on the team, then I'm for whatever team is behind and as soon as they get ahead, I'm for
the other team. I just want people to have a good time doing what they do. But I go to a
sporting event, I get into it.
I yell. I like to have a good time. And I was sitting there at this UT game
in Neyland Stadium, which has a lot of people in orange in it,
and I was sitting in some seats that a friend gave my wife
tickets to, which were season ticket seats,
and behind us are a bunch of people with seasons tickets which means they have
some disposable income because those are not cheap,
right, so we know something about these people. We could put a stereotype on them
perhaps, but let's not do that.
All I know is, these people may have gone
to this school. They may be college-educated, they may not. They may have borrowed
tickets like I did,
but they're sitting there watching this game with us and they seem like nice people.
Everybody's having a good time and then all of a sudden you have this guy who walks out of
the little chute that goes back under the stands
and he walks out and he looks up and it's an older fellow. He's probably in his forties or fifties,
i'm basing that on the gray hair that he had, and he's wearing a Florida Gators shirt,
and people start booing this man. They start
chanting and they start throwing epithets at him, they start cussing at him,
and the people behind me, whom I just happen to be close enough to hear, are saying, man, what an ass, he
can't believe he did that,
and he's sitting there, he's committed the crime of being
them. All he's done at this point is wear a t-shirt
for an opposing team and these people who have never met this man before
are getting really agitated at his mere presence.
That's stereotype leading to prejudice. He then goes and does this Gator Chomp
thing.
He seems to be reveling in this negativity he has created,
and then they really let loose on him and the people behind me said he's gonna get
his ass kicked and
he'll deserve it too. Now, keep that in mind.
He's going to get his ass kicked and he will deserve it. What they are doing now,
they've gone from peaceful, sports-loving people to advocating violence
against a man who wore a t-shirt and did this.
They're not going to go down and commit the violence but if somebody else did it, they'd go,
oh well, you know, that's what you get for being
in the wrong place at the wrong time and being proud of being them.
It's that pervasive. It's religion against religion,
it's country against country, it's race against race, it's men against women,
it's old against young, it's every label you can apply and
form an in group with against all the other labels who represent out groups.
That then can lead to discrimination. Prejudice is an attitude.
Discrimination is an action. It's an attitude made manifest in a behavior
that in some way is negative or harmful towards a member of a group because
they are a member of that group. That's key.
Now, in olden days, which aren't that old,
people wearing their racial prejudices on their sleeves in America
were very common and I don't like to hear the term
reverse racism because racism is just racism.
Do some white people hate black people? Yes, they do. Do some black people hate
white people? Yes, they do.
Do some blacks hate Hispanics? Yes. Do some Hispanics hate whites? Yes.
You name the group. Do some Protestants hate Catholics?
Just go to Ireland. Does some group of people hate some other group of people?
Absolutely. Be real clear on this. I'm not talking about
just race in America. It's just a very convenient example of a worldwide human
phenomenon.
Right? When you look at this now,
people today don't wear their racial prejudices on their sleeve very often
because it's become politically incorrect.
It doesn't mean that they've gone away. Racism that has been
institutionalized doesn't just disappear. Sexism
that's been institutionalized doesn't just disappear. Agism that's been
institutionalized doesn't just disappear. Religious prejudices
that are institutionalized don't just disappear. There's actually a clause in
the Tennessee State Constitution
that says an atheist may not hold office in Tennessee.
That's a category of person who is now not allowed to participate
in civil governance because of their label.
It's codified. That's the point here.
So anytime we are behaving in a negative way toward some body
overtly it's easy to see that is based on prejudice.
But what if we do it covertly? What if we even do it without being aware
that we're doing it? Could we possibly
behave in a way that we weren't aware of? Well Freud said we do it all the time
and I told you before, Freud's hard to operationalize.
Freud is hard to get a hold of because how do you make that manifest? How do you
show that people
aren't aware of the driving forces of their own behaviors?
Well there's a whole host of research in this domain
that shows it and I'm going to get to an example of that.
Another application of this is the just world hypothesis
or the just world belief which allows us to derogate,
to put down victims. People who are victims
of crimes or situations by blaming them because
in a just world good people have good things happen to them.
Bad people have bad things happen to them and we all have this
belief that this world is
on the whole probably just and that if something bad happened to you,
and I don't know anything about you, it must be because you deserved it
in some way, somehow. You look back at mental illness and we'll see that it was
considered to be
a demon possession. Well you must have offended God or you must have invoked the
devil.
You must have deserved that. And you see it today in rape victims. The first thing a lot people say is, well,
what was she wearing?
It doesn't matter what she was wearing. Well, was she drunk? It doesn't matter if she was
drunk.
Those are ways to say how was she a bad person that deserved
to be raped and nobody deserves to be raped.
It's a human cognitive process that allows us to
correct an injustice in the world by just believing that somehow
the victim deserved it, and if we have prejudices,
they may or may not be manifest into behaviors
but sometimes they are and this is a
a study that I just wanted to give you an example of this. So this is
a common thing in America as race relations can be tense.
Again, the world over, there are tribes that
fight tribes in Africa, there are Catholics who fight Protestants in Ireland.
People who homogeneously, or appear homogeneous
in terms of their skin tone still have in groups and out groups, and this is not a
black-white thing but this is a way of demonstrating how implicit
prejudice can result in discrimination. So
looking at pre-interview racial bias, white sales managers evaluate the resume
of either a white or African-American applicant
for a sales position. Now, how do you know if they're white or African-American?
These resumes are identical. They're identical resumes that people have never met these
quote-unquote applicants. They're being asked to evaluate what they think is just a
random
resume. The only difference is the name on the resume.
It's either a quote unquote African-American sounding name or a
white sounding name. Males in this case cause you add in females and that adds in another
little layer of complexity,
right? What's an African-American sounding name? They did some pre-testing. They
tested names and had people rate whether it sounded white or whether it sounded
African-American and they used the ones that were most reliably categorized as one or the
other . They were making
these labels stick. They're using the stereotypes for the
express purpose of seeing whether people have their stereotypes
and prejudices activated by a simple name change,
that's it. So you have these objectively very, very good
resumes and here, in short, is a result.
We have
a low accountability group in the dotted line
and we have a high accountability group in the straight line,
this undotted line right here. The high accountability group,
nobody is told what the purpose is. They just think that their they're reviewing
resumes.
They have no idea what's really going on. They're managers. They do this all the time.
And in the low accountability group, they're just doing that. In the high accountability group,
they're told that
somebody will come along and review their choice and see how they made their
choices, right? They don't say anything about race or anything like
that. They're just going to
talk to you about how you made your decisions
so they can better understand how people evaluate resumes. It seems pretty
innocuous
and it doesn't seem like it would have any effect whatsoever but they call it the high
accountability
group because somebody's going to hold you accountable for the rating you made.
The low accountability group, you just make a rating
and this is what emerges. In the low accountability group,
the white sounding applicant rates at 4.85.
That's 97%.
You can't get much higher than a 4.85,
at 97 percent out of 5. So you look at a five-point scale, it's very hard to convert
that in you mind to what's the meaning of that.
That's pretty high. It doesn't get much higher than 4.85.
In other words, this must be an awesome resume.
But look in the same group what the
African-American sounding name gets as a score.
A 4.12. A 4.12 and a 4.85, they're both over 4, does that really
matter?
Well it really does matter. That's almost 15 percentage points different.
And the only difference is the name on the application.
Now if you ask these people are they racist, they probably
would say of course not. Why would I let that even enter my mind? I would
only evaluate a candidate on their qualifications. They don't know
what's happening here. They're unaware of the research paradigm.
If you ask them if they're racist, most of them would probably say, no, of course note, I'm not racist but
that's the whole point.
If you don't admit to yourself that you have stereotypes, that you have schemas,
that you have biases,
you'll never even really be able to work on them
and they exist and they can cause actual real-world damage
and again 4.12, is that really any different? Yeah, you think about a job
with a hundred applicants and somebody scores 15 percent higher than another
person.
Who's going to get the job? Who's going to get the interview? There it is,
right there in black and white, no pun intended. That's a huge difference based on
nothing, upon a name, it's a reliable difference.
it's an average of many ratings, so we have confidence in it,
and it's been replicated many times. It's also been replicated with other race groups.
It's also been replicated with sex, male and female.
These things happen. Check out the high accountability group though.
This is fascinating to me. In the high accountability group, where all they
know is that somebody is going to check my ratings later,
they don't give the African-American a giant boost, but they give them a
boost, it actually goes up. It goes up to 4.35.
But what happens now is also fascinating. Becoming aware that somebody else is
going to review what you did,
the white applicants, that white sounding name,
evaluation goes down, way down to 4.12.
These people don't know what's going on. They don't know that they did that
because they're not connected to all the other people in the study.
What you just see is a correction
of a racial prejudice, probably because people don't want to see themselves as
prejudiced
and they made a course correction which is maybe
more likely to be the quality of the application.
If we average this and that, that's probably the real quality.
Without any accountability, it was inflated
but with accountability, it was deflated, maybe more than it should have
been.
This one was inflated but maybe as it should have been,
right? So you see that this is an insidious process that happens between
in groups and out groups, has eternally happened since
human beings have come about, and unless we do something,
will continue to happen. But your education puts you in a position to help
correct these issues and the first corrections should start with ourselves.
I'm a person with biases and schemas that
aren't valid but I know that and I check that against reality as often as I can
and I try not to be a cognitive miser. I try to think about it deeply
and I try to be willing to change.