Indeed, research suggests that even successful attempts to stem our prejudices can backfire later. We hold the stereotype down temporarily, but it bobs right back up again with increased vigour. Researchers asked people to write a day-in-the-life story about someone in a photo, who happened to be a skinhead.34 Some of the volunteers were asked to try to avoid stereotyping in their story. These volunteers did successfully suppress the skinhead stereotype; their stories contained far less material along the stereotypic lines of ‘… and then I thumped him one’ and the like. However, the stereotype actually gained new strength from its brief confinement. Thanks to the unfortunate side effect of the way that our brains exert mental control (the ironic process theory we came across in ‘The Weak-willed Brain’), repressed thoughts are actually primed by the mental butler. As a result, once our guard is down, these very thoughts are more likely to leap into consciousness. When the volunteers were asked shortly afterwards to write a second passage about a skinhead, their stories contained far more stereotyping than those of people who had been left to respond naturally to their stereotypes. The rebounding of the skinhead stereotype also showed its influence when the volunteers were invited to step into a room to meet the very skinhead whose photo they had seen. The skinhead wasn’t there, but his belongings were on one of the chairs. People whose skinhead stereotypes were acting with fresh force (after being damped down in the day-in-the-life task) showed their heightened disdain and fear of the skinhead by choosing to sit further away from his belongings.
Does this mean that even the Equal Opportunities lawyer, after a hard day battling for equality in the workplace, is eventually worn down by omnipotent stereotypes? Does he clutch his briefcase more closely to his side when a black man sits next to him on the bus and, once home, berate his wife for not having dinner ready on the table? The outlook, fortunately, may not be quite this bleak. People who sincerely wish to avoid stereotyping a particular group seem to be able to avoid the rebound effect that suppressing a stereotype usually brings. This motivation might be lacking in most people when it comes to skinheads, but strong enough (in at least some people) to keep less socially accept able stereotypes about black, Asian or gay people at bay for longer. But again, we can do this only when we are mentally completely on our toes.35
This has been a discouraging story so far and it would be understandable if, at this point, you were to lay down the book and weep. The problem is that we need the efficiency that schemas buy us. Schemas provide a quick means of extracting and interpreting information from the complicated world around us, of forming useful generalisations, and making helpful predictions. A bigoted brain is an efficient brain. A brain unburdened by egalitarian concerns can decide ‘Thug … tart … slob … nerd … airhead’, then move swiftly on to the next thing on its ‘To Do’ list.36 Yet this speed comes at the cost – mostly to others – of accuracy, particularly when our schemas fail to reflect reality truthfully. We don’t always have (or make available) the time, opportunity, motivation or mental resources we need to consider the rich, complex and unique personalities of everyone we encounter. Nor do we always have the time or the inclination to pause to consider whether we are in peril of being prejudiced, and attempt to compensate for it. We may not even recognise the henchmen – or women – of stereotypes when they are staring us in the face. So ubiquitous is the image of women as sex objects, for example, that the researchers in the priming experiment of women as sex objects found, during debriefing, that many of the men who watched the sexist adverts were adamant that they must have been in the control group because the ads they saw ‘weren’t sexist’.
However, social psychologists are beginning to explore which strategies might help us thwart the bigoted tendencies of our brains.37 The fact that our unconscious will eventually help out if we consistently make the conscious effort to act in a certain way in particular types of situation – the phenomenon described in ‘The Secretive Brain’ – offers a glimmer of hope. For it seems that we may be able to train our brain to replace its spontaneous prejudices with more acceptable reflexes.
The first step is to acknowledge your brain’s unwelcome bigotry. And indeed, most of us are familiar with the disconcerting experience of a shamefully bigoted thought popping into our consciousness unbidden. A white person might know that he shouldn’t feel especially worried about the intentions of a black man walking towards him on an empty street, yet in truth know that he probably would. When American researchers asked a group of non-black students about the differences between their ‘should’ and ‘would’ responses to black people, most admitted that they often experienced involuntary racist thoughts that were at odds with their consciously held colour-blind principles.
Yet a subset of the group claimed to almost always respond to black people as a good egalitarian should. You might think that they were deceiving themselves, or were perhaps trying to fake good to the researchers. But in fact, they seemed to have actually managed to reprogram their bigoted brains for the better. When the researchers gave these students the joke-rating task described earlier, the students remained unamused by the racist jokes, even when they were heavily distracted while they were making their Ha!Ha! ratings. Since their brains were too busy with the attention-grabbing counting and memorising to have been able to do much work suppressing any involuntary amusement at the racist jokes, these students must have been effortlessly disdainful of humour based on black stereotypes. From interviewing people with ‘would’ responses to black people that remained firmly in line with their ‘shoulds’, the researchers were inclined to think that these exemplary individuals had managed to rid themselves of their unwanted automatic prejudices through conscious effort and rehearsal.
If this sounds a little too daunting, a trusty implementation intention (one of the aides to the will we met in the ‘The Weak-willed Brain’) may offer an easier alternative for situations in which we know ourselves to be guilty of stereotyping. (‘Whenever I see a Scottish person, I tell myself, “Don’t stereotype!”’ could be the rallying cry of my husband when next he catches a glimpse of tartan.) Researchers have found that people who form egalitarian implementation intentions of this sort are happily impervious to the usual unconscious effects of stereotype priming.38
This, then, gives us all something to strive towards. We can be slightly cheered by the thought that – with unceasing vigilance, constant practice and strenuous mental exertion – we might come to treat others fairly and justly in at least a few of the many situations that invite stereotyping. However, it is likely to be a longer and more arduous walk to freedom from bigotry than many of us are able to withstand.
Particularly in a Scottish bed and breakfast without a nice strong cup of tea to fortify us.
Notes
1 P. Devine (1989), ‘Stereotypes and prejudice: their automatic and controlled components’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56: 5–18.
2 Most research investigating the effects of the black stereotype on perception and behaviour has used non-black participants. However, stigmatised groups are aware of the stereotypes that exist about themselves, and there is evidence that, at an unconscious level, they have a similar bias against their own group. For a useful discussion and data, see A.R. Greenwald and L. Hamilton Krieger (2006), ‘Implicit bias: Scientific foundations’, California Law Review, 94: 945–67. See also Correll et al. (2002), ‘The police officer’s dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83: 1314–29, which is discussed later in the chapter.
3 K.B. Payne (2001), ‘Prejudice and perception: the role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81: 181–92.
4 J. Correll, B. Park, C.M. Judd and B. Wittenbrink (2002), ‘The police officer’s dilemma: using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83: 1314–29.
&nb
sp; 5 E.A. Plant and B.M. Peruche (2005), ‘The consequences of race for police officers’ responses to criminal suspects’, Psychological Science, 16: 180–3.
6 L. Lepore and R. Brown (1997), ‘Category and stereotype activation: is prejudice inevitable?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72: 275–87.
7 L.A. Rudman and E. Borgida (1995), ‘The afterglow of construct accessibility: the behavioral consequences of priming men to view women as sexual objects’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 31: 493–517.
8 J.A. Bargh, M. Chen and L. Burrows (1996), ‘Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71: 230–44.
9 M. Chen and J.A. Bargh (1997), ‘Nonconscious behavioral confirmation processes: the self-fulfilling consequences of automatic stereotype activation’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33: 541–60.
10 C.O. Word, M.P. Zanna and J. Cooper (1974), ‘The nonverbal media tion of self-fulfilling prophecies in interracial interaction’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10: 109–20.
11 T.K. Vescio, S. J. Gervais, M. Snyder and A. Hoover (2005), ‘Power and the creation of patronizing environments: the stereotype-based behaviors of the powerful and their effects on female performance in masculine domains’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88: 658–72.
12 These results were obtained when men were encouraged to take a ‘weakness-based’ approach to leadership (to focus on weaknesses that might thwart a team’s chances of success). Men encouraged to take the contrary ‘strength-based’ approach treated men and women equally, as did women team leaders in both ‘weakness-based’ and ‘strength-based’ conditions.
13 See C.M. Steele (1997), ‘A threat in the air: how stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance’, American Psychologist, 52: 613–29.
14 S.J. Spencer, C.M. Steele and D.M. Quin (1999), ‘Stereotype threat and women’s math performance’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35: 4–28.
15 M. Johns, T. Schmader and A. Martens (2005), ‘Knowing is half the battle: teaching stereotype threat as a means of improving women’s math performance’, Psychological Science, 16: 175–9.
16 Unpublished manuscript of J. Aronson and J. Williams (2004), cited by M. Johns, T. Schmader and A. Martens (2005), ibid.
17 G.M. Walton and G.L. Cohen (2003), ‘Stereotype lift’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39: 456–67.
18 See L. Jussim (1991), ‘Social perception and social reality: a reflection-construction model’, Psychological Review, 98: 54–73.
19 A. Marcus-Newhall, S. Thompson and C. Thomas (2001), ‘Examining a gender stereotype: menopausal women’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 31: 695–719.
20 Z. Kunda and K.C. Oleson (1995), ‘Maintaining stereotypes in the face of disconfirmation: constructing grounds for subtyping deviants’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 565–79.
21 Z. Kunda and K.C. Oleson (1997), ‘When exceptions prove the rule: how extremity of deviance determines the impact of deviant examples on stereotypes’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72: 965–79.
22 L.A. Rudman and K. Fairchild (2004), ‘Reactions to counterstereotypic behavior: the role of backlash in cultural stereotype maintenance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87: 157–76.
23 L.A. Rudman and P. Glick (1999), ‘Feminized management and backlash toward agentic women: the hidden costs to women of a kinder, gentler image of middle managers’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77: 743–62.
24 L.A. Rudman (1998), ‘Self-promotion as a risk factor for women: the costs and benefits of counterstereotypical impression management’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 629–45.
25 P. Glick and S.T. Fiske (2001), ‘An ambivalent alliance: hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality’, American Psychologist, 56: 109–18.
26 ‘The ideological rationalization that men and women hold complementary but equal positions in society appears to be a fairly recent invention. In earlier times – and in more conservative company today – it was not felt necessary to provide the ideology with an equalitarian veneer.’ S. L. Bem and D. J. Bem (1970), quoted in J.T. Jost and A.C. Kay (2005), ‘Exposure to benevolent sexism and complementary gender stereotypes: Consequences for specific and diffuse forms of system justification’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88: 298–509.
27 See P. Glick and S.T. Fiske (2001), ‘An ambivalent alliance: hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality’, American Psychologist, 56: 109–18. In the four most sexist nations of the nineteen that they studied (as assessed by two United Nations cross-national indices of gender inequality), women endorsed benevolent sexism even more strongly than did men. (The countries were Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana).
28 J.T. Jost and A.C. Kay (2005), ‘Exposure to benevolent sexism and complementary gender stereotypes: consequences for specific and diffuse forms of system justification’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88: 498–509.
29 L. Sinclair and Z. Kunda (1999), ‘Reactions to a black professional: motivated inhibition and activation of conflicting stereotypes’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77: 885–904; L. Sinclair and Z. Kunda (2000), ‘Motivated stereotyping of women: she’s fine if she praised me but incompetent if she criticized me’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26: 1329–42.
30 S. Fein and S. J. Spencer (1997), ‘Prejudice as self-image maintenance: affirming the self through derogating others’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73: 31–44.
31 See Z. Kunda and S.J. Spencer (2003), ‘When do stereotypes come to mind and when do they color judgment? A goal-based theoretical framework for stereotype activation and application’, Psychological Bulletin, 129 : 522–44.
32 M.J. Monteith and C. I. Voils (1998), ‘Proneness to prejudiced responses: toward understanding the authenticity of self-reported discrepancies’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75: 901– 16.
33 B. Monin and D.T. Miller (2001), ‘Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81: 5–16.
34 C.N. Macrae, G.V. Bodenhausen, A.B. Milne and J. Jetten (1994), ‘Out of mind but back in sight: stereotypes on the rebound’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67: 808–17.
35 See M.J. Monteith, J.W. Sherman and P. Devine (1998), ‘Suppression as a stereotype control strategy’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2: 63–82.
36 C.N. Macrae, A.B. Milne and G.V. Bodenhausen (1994), ‘Stereotypes as energy-saving devices: a peek inside the cognitive toolbox’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66: 37–47.
37 See M.J. Monteith (1993), ‘Self-regulation of prejudiced responses: implications for progress in prejudice-reduction efforts’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65: 469–85; M.J. Monteith, L. Ashburn-Nardo, C. I. Voils and A.M. Czopp (2002), ‘Putting the brakes on prejudice: on the development and operation of cues for control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83: 1029–50.
38 P.M. Gollwitzer, B. Schaal, G.B. Moskowitz, H.J.P. Hammelbeck and W. Wasel (1999), ‘Implementation intention effects on stereotype and prejudice activation’, cited in P.M. Gollwitzer, ‘Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans’, American Psychologist, 54: 493–503.
Epilogue: The Vulnerable Brain
So what are we to make of ourselves now? Through the course of this book, we’ve seen that the brain that we trust so implicitly to do the right thing by us has a mind of its own. An adroit manipulator of information, it leaves us staring at a mere façade of reality. Vanity shields us from unpalatable truths about ourselves. Craven methods of moral bookkeeping also attentively serve the principle of self-glorification, often at others’ expense. The
emotions add a misleading gloss of their own, colouring and confusing our opinions while unobtrusively masterminding our behaviour and sense of being. Irrationality clouds our judgment, leaving us vulnerable to errors and delusions – a situation that is only worsened by our pigheadedness. The secretive unconscious delights in a handful of strings to pull, concealing from us many of the true influences on our thoughts and deeds. Our very own will, temperamental and capricious, weakly succumbs to unwanted impulses and distractions. And, careless of our good intentions, the brain’s ignoble use of stereotypes blurs our view of others to an all but inevitable bigotry.
Being confronted with the evidence of the distorting and deceptive window-dressings of the brain is unsettling, and rightly so. A brain with a mind of its own belies our strong sense that the world is just as it seems to us, and our misguided belief that our vision of ‘out there’ is sharp and true. In fact, it appears that our attitudes are the muddled outcome of many struggling factors. Tussling against our desire to know the truth about the world are powerful drives to protect our self-esteem, sense of security and pre-existing point of view. Set against our undeniably impressive powers of cognition is a multitude of irrationalities, biases and quirks that surreptitiously undermine the accuracy of our beliefs.
A Mind of Its Own Page 20