Just Babies (14 page)

Keep in mind also that, in the world, just as in the lab, distinctions that start off as arbitrary can become real if enough people believe that they are. This is why social differences are so slow to eradicate: they are self-perpetuating. Berreby describes attending primary school in California, where half the students were white and half were black. For administrative purposes,
teachers sorted the children into groups by astrological sign, and the categories took on social significance—as he puts it, “We Tauruses soon came to feel that we belonged together,” and soon the Tauruses tended to act similarly, which convinced some of the teachers of the truth of astrology. Or consider the belief held by some Asians that children born in the Year of the Dragon are superior. A study of Asian immigrants to the United States shows that
children born in 1976, which was a Dragon year, actually do turn out to be better educated than children born in other years. This isn’t because the year itself really makes a difference, of course; it is because people believe that it does. The research finds that Asian mothers of Dragon babies are themselves better educated,
richer, and slightly older than other Asian mothers—and hence better able to adjust their birthing strategies to have Dragon children.

While the origin of group differences takes us outside the sciences of the mind, the question of how we learn about these differences is bread-and-butter psychology, and the answer is simple: humans (and other creatures) are natural statisticians. The only way to cope with the present is by making generalizations based upon the past. We learn from experience that chairs can be sat upon, that dogs bark, and that apples can be eaten. Of course, there are exceptions—fragile chairs, mute dogs, and poisonous apples—and it’s worth it to be on guard for such outliers. But life would be impossible if we weren’t constantly going with the odds; otherwise, we wouldn’t know what to do with a new chair, dog, or apple.

We do statistics on people as well. As the social psychologist Gordon Allport put it in his classic book,
On the Nature of Prejudice
,
we “must think with the aid of categories.… We cannot possibly avoid this process.” If I’m walking down the street and need to ask for directions, I won’t ask a toddler, because my stereotype about toddlers is that they aren’t good at giving directions, and I won’t ask someone who is screaming into the air, because such a person fits my stereotype of someone who is insane, and insane people tend to be neither reliable nor helpful. If I hear about a killer or rapist on the loose, I might resolve to keep my eyes open for him—yes,
him
, because while it might be a woman, my intuitions are guided by the statistics. And, indeed, various
studies have found that when people are asked about athletic achievement, criminality, income, and so on, their
stereotypes of racial and ethnic groups tend to be accurate.

So what’s not to like? Well, one concern is moral. Even if stereotypes are accurate, it may sometimes be wrong to utilize them. The issues here are subtle: we are not morally bothered by
some
generalizations about people. We are comfortable with laws and policies that discriminate on the basis of age, for instance. This is because we are forced to do so (we can’t let everybody drive); because the stereotypes are so clearly rooted in facts (four-year-olds are really too young to drive); and because such policies apply to a slice of everyone’s life span, not to a subset of the population, so they seem fairer. Sooner or later, everyone will get his or her chance. As another example, life insurance companies are allowed to make generalizations based on whether a person smokes and how much he or she weighs.

But the use of stereotypes based on gender, race, or ethnicity is more fraught. This is in part because it can cause suffering—even if the stereotypes are accurate, the costs that are borne by those discriminated against may outweigh the increased efficiency of the people doing the discriminating—and in part because it can violate certain notions of fairness. A T-shirt printed by the satirical magazine
The Onion
says, “Stereotypes Are a Real Time-Saver”—but there are instances where it’s just wrong to treat an individual on the basis of the group he or she belongs to; it’s better to take the extra time.

A further problem is that stereotypes are influenced by
coalitional bias, not just empirical data. We are powerful statistical learners for chairs, dogs, and apples, but when it comes to people, our biases can distort our conclusions. At the moment the groups are formed, no real difference exists between the Klee lovers and the Kandinsky lovers, or the red-shirt children and the blue-shirt children, but the participants will come to think that real differences exist and will believe that their own groups are objectively superior. We see this outside the lab as well.
After World War II started, Americans switched their attitudes about the Chinese and the Japanese. The Japanese, who had been regarded as progressive and artistic, became sly and treacherous; the Chinese went from sly and treacherous to reserved and courteous. Similarly, the Russians were brave and hardworking when they were fighting Hitler with the Americans in 1942 and cruel and conceited in 1948 as the Cold War dawned.

Indeed, just thinking of someone as a member of an out-group influences our feelings toward him or her. We have seen that babies and children prefer to interact with people who speak with a familiar accent; similarly,
adults tend to rate individuals with certain non-native accents as less competent, intelligent, educated, and attractive. Other studies find that
we are prone to think of members of highly unfamiliar out-groups as lacking emotions that are seen as uniquely human, such as envy and regret. We see them as savages, or, at best, as children.

T
HE
typical participants in a psychology experiment are university or college students from North America or
Europe, and these may well be the least racist people in the world. Even when tested in the most anonymous of contexts, they tend to be diligently nonracist. In fact, race is taboo for this population. It meets two criteria for being taboo: it’s the stuff of obscenity (racial terms are prime epithets), and it’s the stuff of comedy (there are comedians who make their living with material of the form “White people do
this
and black people do
that
”). In both of these regards, race falls into the same category as human waste and sexual intercourse, two topics we will address in the next chapter.

Children don’t start off seeing race as taboo. In one study, inspired by a once-popular game called “Guess Who?,” researchers showed an array of forty pictures of individual people, arranged in four rows of ten, to a group of mostly white children between the ages of eight and eleven. The experimenters then pointed to one of the pictures and told the children to narrow the array down to that picture by asking the fewest possible yes/no questions (such as “Is your person a woman?”). When all the pictures showed white people, ten- and eleven-year-olds did better than the eight- and nine-year-olds, which isn’t surprising. But when some of the pictures showed white people and others showed black people, the older children did worse, because they avoided asking questions such as “Is your person white?” They had reached the point in development at which there is a psychic cost to even mentioning race. Indeed, social psychologists find that many of their overtly nonprejudiced white research subjects experience
a pressing anxiety about appearing racist when interacting with blacks.

It is one of the more interesting discoveries of psychology, then, that
even the least racist people in the world have unconscious racial biases. A black face, flashed on a computer screen too fast to consciously perceive, tends to trigger thoughts of aggression among white subjects; they are more likely to complete a word fragment like “HA_E” as “HATE.” Black male faces also tend to lead to greater responses in an area of the brain called the amygdala, which is associated with fear, anger, and threat, among other things. In the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, most subjects are quicker to associate white faces with positive words like
joy
and black faces with negative words like
horrible
than to do it the other way around.

These studies get a lot of play in the popular media, where they are sometimes portrayed as a means to flush out hidden racists.
The worst example I ever saw was during an episode of the television show
Lie to Me
, where a crack team of psychologists and investigators uses a muddled version of the IAT to determine which of a group of firemen has committed a hate crime. They find that one firefighter is slower than the rest to associate positive words like
principled
with black faces such as Barack Obama’s, and this settles it. “I’m not a racist,” he later protests. His interrogator snaps back: “You don’t think you are.” This is the sort of media depiction that makes social psychologists wince. Even if the firefighters were tested on the actual IAT, it wouldn’t help ferret out the racist. These methods were developed to gather aggregate data about people’s unconscious biases. They are not racist-detectors.

At the other extreme,
some critics have argued that such findings tell us little about stereotyping and prejudice in the real world. Who cares about subtle measures such as reaction time, skin conductance, or the activation of the amygdala? But in fact,
these measures correlate with considerations that really matter, such as how awkward someone is when interacting with someone from another race. Furthermore, the same implicit biases show up when people make real-world decisions such as whether to hire someone for a job or whether to assist someone who is crying out for help.

This research illustrates how we can be at war with ourselves. Part of a person might believe that race should play no role in hiring decisions (or even that racial minorities should get an advantage), while another part guides the person against choosing a black person. This tension can reflect a moral struggle; one’s explicit view about what’s right clashes with one’s gut feelings.

M
Y BET
is that a hundred years from now, we are likely to still reason in terms of human groups; we will keep some of our biases and hold to some of our prejudices.

This is in part because group differences really do exist. For example, Americans often stereotype students from some Asian countries as being academically more successful than average, and indeed,
Asian applicants to universities have higher-than-average SAT scores. Now, one can make it taboo to discuss this, or taboo for anyone other than Asians to discuss it, but, absent brainwashing or mass
hypnosis, you can’t rewire people’s brains to make their knowledge go away.

And some such generalizations are likely to persist. The groups we view as races and ethnicities share similarities for some of the same reasons that the groups we view as families do. Just as members of an immediate family share genes that make them more likely to have certain distinctive traits, so do members of larger human groups that are collections of families. Most of all, people who live together—families or collections of families—will come to share certain properties over time: they will come to eat distinctive foods, engage in certain activities, speak in distinctive ways, and hold certain values. Cultural differentiation happens quickly, as we see in cases where nations get split, as in East and West Germany, and North and South Korea.

Another reason why our biases are here to stay has to do with our coalitional natures. We favor our own groups. This is evident in the minimal-group experiments, and it’s obvious in the real world, where we are pulled by bonds of country, neighborhood, and kinship. The tightest bonds here are kin. There have been all sorts of attempts to dissolve the special ties of family, to replace it with other groups, such as the state or the church. All have failed. Indeed, race and ethnicity share something with kinship: when classifying people as falling into one category or another, even the most liberal and determinedly antiracist people understand that this as a question about who your biological relatives are.
As the psychologist Francisco Gil-White points out, when someone says that they are half Irish, one quarter Italian,
and one quarter Mexican, this isn’t a statement about their attitudes or affiliations; it’s a statement about the ethnicities of their ancestors.

On the bright side, our tendency to sort ourselves and others into groups affords us real pleasures. People don’t
want
their cultures and languages to be extinguished; we get joy from belonging to a specific community. And while many of us disapprove of those who think worse of other groups, it’s not usually seen as wrong to be proud of, and concerned about, your own group. When I was a child growing up in Quebec, the Jews in my community were actively involved with helping Jews in Russia—strangers in an impossibly distant country who mattered because they were our people. Citizens of France are outraged if a foreign government unfairly imprisons a French citizen; Italians take pride in the accomplishments of other Italians they’ll never meet. As I was writing this chapter, I received an invitation from a colleague to go to a political event in support of someone who, if elected, “would be the first Chinese American senator to serve in the continental United States.” Are you surprised to hear that the person who sent the invitation is herself Chinese American?

Even those who are fiercely opposed to religion and nationalism will seek out the joys of community in other ways, through their immediate family, or their circle of friends, or their professional community. Now, seeing oneself as part of the community of psychology professors, to take a random example, might differ from seeing oneself as a Catholic, or a Greek, or an American. But one still
experiences the same feelings of warmth, pride, and belonging. Berreby goes so far as to call our focus on human groups
“one of the natural founts of human imagination and creative pleasure.”

One might object that the benefits of our parochial nature can never outweigh its costs. For every in-group there is an out-group, and that’s where the trouble lies. We would have no Holocaust without the Jews and Germans; no Rwandan massacre without the Tutsis and Hutus. Still, it’s not clear whether there is any alternative to dividing humanity into groups. Nobody knows whether a truly universalist ethic is humanly possible, whether we can be truly indifferent to ties of culture, country, or blood and still be good and decent people.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah notes that even engagement with distant strangers “is always going to be engagement with particular strangers; and the warmth that comes from shared identity will often be available.” American Christians will send money to fellow Christians in the Sudan; writers will campaign for the freedom of writers around the world; women in Sweden will work for women’s rights in South Asia, and so on.
Appiah cites Cicero on this point: “Society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.”