by Adam Alter
Since spending their resources is costly, men are more likely to succeed in the mating game if they spend on women who are capable of conceiving. So if the men were subconsciously reserving generous tips for fertile women—those who could at least theoretically satisfy Maslow’s sexual motive—the researchers expected the dancers’ tips to rise as they approached the fertile estrus phase, and to fall during the nonfertile menstrual and luteal phases. Meanwhile, those who were taking the contraceptive pill were likely to attract smaller tips without the same day-to-day cyclical variance that affected those who weren’t taking hormonal contraceptives. When the women reported their day-to-day earnings at the end of the sixty-day experiment, the results were striking. For each five-hour shift, women who were not taking the pill earned an average of $335 during the fertile estrus phase, $260 during the infertile luteal phase, and only $185 when they were menstruating. According to the researchers, the men were picking up on subtle, “leaked cues” when the women were fertile. As you might expect, then, these dramatic variations were absent among women who were taking the pill, and they rarely earned more than a relatively modest baseline of roughly $250 per shift. These results suggest that men are more ostentatious and willing to part with their resources in the company of women who are biologically capable of satisfying Maslow’s survival mating motive.
Having addressed their basic survival needs, Maslow believed, people turn to the second tier in his motivation hierarchy: safety. Shelter and security seem like basic inalienable human rights, but the human drive for safety comes with dark costs. We’re a generous species, capable of great acts of kindness and sensitivity, but we’re also a fearful species prone to acts of prejudice and discrimination. In theory, the United States grants the vote and equal rights to ethnic and racial minorities, but minorities are still haunted by the relics of our xenophobic past.
The Safety Motive: A Partial Explanation for Racism?
In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King granted an interview to the BBC’s Bob McKenzie on his way to collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. During the interview, McKenzie asked King a controversial question that drew an optimistic response:
BOB MCKENZIE: Robert Kennedy, when he was Attorney General, said that he could imagine the possibility of a Negro President of the United States within perhaps 40 years. Do you think this is at all realistic?
DR. KING: . . . I am optimistic about the future. Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States over the past two years that surprise me. I’ve seen levels of compliance with the Civil Rights Bill and changes that have been most surprising. So, on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro President in less than 40 years. I would think this would come in 25 years or less.
Forty-five years later, Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States and collected his own Nobel Peace Prize. King’s prediction wasn’t too far off, though Bobby Kennedy was closer to the mark. Obama’s presidency heralded a new age in the United States, but a small band of jubilant social commentators went too far when they claimed that the nation was now “post-racial.” In truth, xenophobia—the fear of difference—is a deeply ingrained component of being human, and racial prejudice persists in part because people see difference as a barrier to personal safety.
One of the classic demonstrations of ingrained xenophobia comes from a series of studies conducted by social psychologist Bob Zajonc in the late 1960s, a year before he published the social facilitation studies I described in chapter 4. Zajonc began by showing the photos of twelve strangers who were graduating from a nearby university to students at the University of Michigan. During the first phase of the experiment, each student saw some of the photos twenty-five times, some of them five or ten times, some of them only once or twice, and some not at all. Later, when asked how much they liked the men depicted in the photos, the students had a strong preference for the men they had seen more frequently. In fact, they rated the men they had seen twenty-five times as 30 percent more likable than the men they had seen only once, which shows that familiarity signals safety, which in turn overcomes our innate human tendency toward xenophobia.
Though the fear of difference is deeply ingrained, the nature of discrimination has changed. Today it’s far more subtle than it was in Martin Luther King’s 1960s, when clear lines distinguished opulent white buses, schools, and restaurants from allegedly inferior black buses, schools, and restaurants.
Take the critical question of whether black males still experience discrimination at the hands of the U.S. justice system. In a series of elegant experiments, social psychologists have shown that black criminal defendants are at a disadvantage even in the absence of overt discrimination. In one experiment, white undergraduate students were exposed to pictures of either fifty black or fifty white male faces, each for a tiny fraction of a second. The pictures were flashed on the screen so quickly that none of the participants knew they had seen faces, let alone whether the faces belonged to black or white males. Still, this process, known as subliminal priming, has remarkable effects on how people think. Even when they’re unable to identify the content of the images, those images rest quietly just below the level of conscious awareness, shaping their subsequent thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. In this case, after the students saw the black or white faces, they were asked to identify a series of objects. Some of those objects were crime-related (e.g., guns), whereas others were unrelated to crime. Each object was displayed first as a noisy, scrambled image, similar to the snowy black-and-white images on a TV with poor reception. As the figure shows, below, those degraded images became progressively clearer with each frame, so they were eventually identifiable. The students were able to identify the crime-related objects after only nineteen frames when they were primed with the black faces, whereas they took more than twenty-six frames to identify those same objects when primed with white faces. (The primes had no effect when the students tried to identify the objects that weren’t related to crime—they took roughly twenty-three frames regardless of whether they were primed with black or white faces.) This result tells us that exposing people to black male faces—even briefly and without their awareness—readies them to perceive crime in the world at large.
A degraded picture of a gun from an experiment on race and object detection. The image becomes progressively clearer with each frame.
This result is disturbing, because it suggests that people harbor strong mental links between black males and crime—but it doesn’t directly answer the question of whether this association actually disadvantages black males in the real world. To answer that question, the same researchers turned to a database of death penalty cases tried in Philadelphia between 1979 and 1999. In a provocative paper titled “Looking Deathworthy,” they showed that when the victim was white, black men who looked stereotypically black were dramatically more likely to receive a death sentence than were black men who looked less stereotypically black. Whereas stereotypically black men tended to receive a death sentence in 58 percent of all cases, black men who did not look stereotypically black received a death sentence in only 24 percent of all cases. These results held even when the researchers carefully removed the effects of other variables that may have inflated the difference, like the defendants’ and victims’ socioeconomic status.
This striking result suggests that our quest for safety, and our resulting fear of difference, has fostered a justice system that discriminates against black defendants. Put simply, under some circumstances a black man who looks “more black” is 33 percent more likely to receive the death penalty than is a black man who commits the same crime but looks less stereotypically black. Inequalities like these illuminate the sad truth that our hidden, unconscious attitudes toward minorities evolve far more slowly than our overt spoken attitudes. Many of those ugly views are so well hidden that we’re not even aware that we hold them.
In the early 2000s, when social psychologists asked college s
tudents whether they knew of the stereotype that “black people are like apes,” only 9 percent of them claimed to know of the stereotype. The researchers weren’t content to rest on spoken responses alone, so they ran a series of studies that revealed a more sinister truth: regardless of whether or not the students were consciously aware of the stereotype, their decisions were clearly swayed by the association between black people and apes. In one study, students who were subliminally primed with images of apes were more likely to focus on black faces than white faces later in the experiment. They were also more likely to perceive the police beating of a black man who resisted arrest as more justifiable than did other students who were not exposed to images of apes, or who made similar judgments about the beating of a white man. The briefest flash of an image of apes was enough to shift people’s attention toward black faces—clear evidence that they associate the two concepts—and, more distressing still, to weaken their reactions to the police beating of a black victim. In the world at large, this last result is especially troubling, because people are less likely to treat others with respect if they harbor hidden associations between those people and animals. In a final study to hammer home that very point, the researchers found that newspaper articles had referred to black defendants in death penalty cases using ape-related words (ape, monkey, and gorilla) four times as often as they did when referring to white death penalty defendants. When the researchers looked deeper, they also found that the black defendants who were ultimately sentenced to death attracted twice as many ape-related descriptions as did the black defendants who were spared the death sentence. Unfortunately, we’re largely incapable of eliminating these hidden prejudices from our judgments. The United States has come a long way in the past century—not least in twice democratically electing Barack Obama to the highest seat in the land—but associations between black people, crime, and animalism still persist.
Of course, racial xenophobia extends beyond the borders of the United States, and beyond attitudes toward black people. During the month of July 2005, London was under siege. On July 7, fifty-two people were killed during a series of coordinated suicide attacks, and two weeks later, on July 21, another four would-be terrorists failed to detonate bombs designed to kill dozens more. The four men of “Middle Eastern appearance” managed to escape, and London’s Metropolitan Police Service responded by launching its largest-ever manhunt operation. The day after the manhunt began, a series of tragic events culminated in the murder of a man who was mistaken for one of the attempted bombers. These events were difficult to comprehend without an understanding of how prejudice clouds our capacity to perceive the world as it really is.
On the morning of July 22, police followed a man as he left his home. According to later reports, he was wearing a suspiciously thick jacket given the mild weather, and he appeared to live in a building associated with the bombers. As time passed, a growing squad of police officers joined the pursuit, and when the man left a bus and ran toward an Underground train station, they were convinced they had only one choice. Witnesses described seeing several officers following the man onto the train, cornering him, pushing him to the ground, and finally, firing seven shots into his head at point-blank range.
The victim was Jean Charles de Menezes, a twenty-seven-year-old Brazilian electrician who was described by his friends and family as a gentle family man. Menezes was not Middle Eastern and did not have the “Mongolian eyes” his pursuers described. Surveillance footage showed that he was not wearing a suspiciously thick puffy jacket after all, but rather a thin denim jacket that seemed appropriate given the mild morning weather. Witnesses disagreed about whether he ran toward the train, but public transport users routinely run toward trains. These ambiguities, innocuous in isolation, were enough to convince police that they were pursuing a man who was seconds shy of detonating a hidden bomb. Police officials opened several inquiries, but none of the officers faced disciplinary action, and a coroner’s inquest ultimately ruled that the death was suspicious but not unlawful.
As the word suggests, prejudices prepare us for interactions that we’re yet to have, and we rely on them because we believe that people who are different from us are more likely to threaten our safety. Of course, they’re often misleading and mistaken, and those mistakes sometimes produce tragic consequences. As the death of Jean Charles de Menezes illustrates, preconceived notions sometimes prepare us for precisely the wrong kinds of snap judgments. When faced with ambiguity—whether a surprisingly thick jacket conceals a bomb, or why a person is running toward a departing train—our prejudices tend to break the tie, resolving the scene before us so that it confirms those pre-existing beliefs.
Sometimes life imitates research, which is precisely what happened several years before the Menezes tragedy. Social psychologists at the Universities of Colorado and Chicago devised an engaging computer game to illustrate the difficulties that police face when deciding whether or not to shoot a potential assailant. In a series of photos, male youths posed holding either weapons or innocuous items like wallets and cell phones. Students and adults sat in front of the computer, and their job was to decide whether or not to shoot the series of youths on the screen. The “winners,” who quickly shot the assailants and just as quickly allowed the innocents to go unharmed, received cash prizes, so players were motivated to take the experiment seriously.
The researchers added an important tweak to the game: some of the males in the pictures were black and some of them were white. The game was difficult, and players struggled to decide whether to shoot or withhold fire. But as the researchers expected, the game was especially difficult when it contradicted the players’ pre-existing prejudices. All too often, mirroring the Menezes case, players tended to shoot the innocent black males who were holding wallets and cell phones and to allow the armed white males to go free. They were also much slower to respond in these cases, as the obvious conflict between their prejudices and the image on the screen could only be resolved with great mental effort. Some years later, two psychologists in Sydney, Australia, showed the same effect with men wearing Muslim headgear: students tended to shoot young men holding coffee cups and bottles more often when those men wore turbans than when they were bareheaded. Their post–September 11, 2001, prejudices prepared them to shoot even when the turbaned target was innocent.
Images from the University of Colorado shooter-detection computer game.
Prejudice arises in part because people are innately averse to novelty and difference, both of which threaten our quest to fulfill Maslow’s safety motive. Consequently, we form associations between groups and character traits, like friendliness, animalism, laziness, rudeness, ostentatious displays of wealth, aggressiveness, and dangerousness. Sometimes these associations keep us safe from novel threats, but often they’re also hurtful, and they explain a diverse constellation of distressing behaviors, from biased death penalty decisions to dangerously itchy trigger fingers.
The Power of Love(d Ones)
Moving beyond the often destructive human drive for safety, Maslow turned to the sunnier motives of love and friendship. Despite his turbulent childhood, he remained optimistic about the power of social connection. By the age of twenty he had married his first cousin, Bertha, and fifteen years later social affiliation occupied a central position in his hierarchy of motives. Maslow had a vague sense of love’s ineffable power, but now, sixty years later, scientists believe they have a far deeper understanding of the biology that underpins the experience of love—so much so, in fact, that a New York company has begun to sell the power of love in the form of Liquid Trust.
According to its website credo, Vero Labs is a New York City–based company “dedicated to researching and developing innovative products that help foster and enhance human relationships.” One of those products is a nasal spray known as Liquid Trust. Vero Labs’ website suggests that the product enhances human relationships in three simple steps. First, users apply the Liquid T
rust spray while they’re getting dressed before important meetings or social events. Second, when people encounter the wearer, they unconsciously inhale Liquid Trust. And third, those people unwittingly develop a strong feeling of trust for the wearer.
Liquid Trust sounds like a creature of science fiction, but it’s both real and at least theoretically capable of synthesizing trust between two people. The mechanism that explains how Liquid Trust encourages bonhomie is supposedly grounded in science, and its adherents are convinced that it works as advertised. It contains a single active ingredient, oxytocin, which is the same chemical that compels mothers to care for their newborn babies. Although oxytocin plays a prominent role in childbirth and breast-feeding, recent research suggests that it also encourages people to trust one another, and to suspend their evolved tendency to distrust strangers just long enough to enable them to build close relationships. The Vero Labs website includes testimonials from satisfied customers, like G, a part-time barman who claimed that his tips increased fivefold when he began using Liquid Trust.