We like to think we judge people as individuals, and at times we consciously try very hard to evaluate others on the basis of their unique characteristics. We often succeed. But if we don’t know a person well, our minds can turn to his or her social category for the answers. Earlier we saw how the brain fills in gaps in visual data—for instance, compensating for the blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. We also saw how our hearing fills gaps, such as when a cough obliterated a syllable or two in the sentence “The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city.” And we saw how our memory will add the details of a scene we remember only in broad strokes and provide a vivid and complete picture of a face even though our brains retained only its general features. In each of these cases our subliminal minds take incomplete data, use context or other cues to complete the picture, make educated guesses, and produce a result that is sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but always convincing. Our minds also fill in the blanks when we judge people, and a person’s category membership is part of the data we use to do that.
The realization that perceptual biases of categorization lie at the root of prejudice is due largely to the psychologist Henri Tajfel, the brain behind the line-length study. The son of a Polish businessman, Tajfel would likely have become a forgotten chemist rather than a pioneering social psychologist were it not for the particular social category to which he himself was assigned. Tajfel was a Jew, a category identification that meant he was banned from enrolling in college, at least in Poland. So he moved to France. There he studied chemistry, but he had no passion for it. He preferred partying—or, as one colleague put it, “savoring French culture and Parisian life.”11 His savoring ended when World War II began, and in November 1939, he joined the French army. Even less savory was where he ended up: in a German POW camp. There Tajfel was introduced to the extremes of social categorization that he would later say led him to his career in social psychology.
The Germans demanded to know the social group to which Tajfel belonged. Was he French? A French Jew? A Jew from elsewhere? If the Nazis thought of Jews as less than human, they nevertheless distinguished between pedigrees of Jew, like vintners distinguishing between the châteaus of origin of soured wine. To be French meant to be treated as an enemy. To be a French Jew meant to be treated as an animal. To admit being a Polish Jew meant swift and certain death. No matter what his personal characteristics or the quality of his relationship with his German captors, as he would later point out, if his identity were discovered, it would be his classification as a Polish Jew that would determine his fate.12 But there was also danger in lying. So, from the menu of stigmatization, Tajfel chose the middle dish: he spent the next four years pretending to be a French Jew.13 He was liberated in 1945 and in May of that year, as he put it, was “disgorged with hundreds of others from a special train arriving at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris … [soon to discover] that hardly anyone I knew in 1939—including my family—was left alive.”14 Tajfel spent the next six years working with war refugees, especially children and adolescents, and mulling over the relationships between categorical thinking, stereotyping, and prejudice. According to the psychologist William Peter Robinson, today’s theoretical understanding of those subjects “can almost without exception be traced back to Tajfel’s theorizing and direct research intervention.”15
Unfortunately, as was the case with other pioneers, it took the field many years to catch up with Tajfel’s insights. Even well into the 1980s, many psychologists viewed discrimination as a conscious and intentional behavior, rather than one commonly arising from normal and unavoidable cognitive processes related to the brain’s vital propensity to categorize.16 In 1998, however, a trio of researchers at the University of Washington published a paper that many see as providing smoking-gun evidence that unconscious, or “implicit,” stereotyping is the rule rather than the exception.17 Their paper presented a computerized tool called the “Implicit Association Test,” or IAT, which has become one of social psychology’s standard tools for measuring the degree to which an individual unconsciously associates traits with social categories. The IAT has helped revolutionize the way social scientists look at stereotyping.
IN THEIR ARTICLE, the IAT pioneers asked their readers to “consider a thought experiment.” Suppose you are shown a series of words naming male and female relatives, such as “brother” or “aunt.” You are asked to say “hello” when presented with a male relative and “good-bye” when shown a female. (In the computerized version you see the words on a screen and respond by pressing letters on the keyboard.) The idea is to respond as quickly as possible while not making too many errors. Most people who try this find that it is easy and proceed rapidly. Next, the researchers ask that you repeat the game, only this time with male and female names, like “Dick” or “Jane” instead of relatives. The names are of unambiguous gender, and again, you can fly through them. But this is just an appetizer.
The real experiment starts now: in phase 1, you are shown a series of words that can be either a name or a relative. You are asked to say “hello” for the male names and relatives and “good-bye” for the female names and relatives. It’s a slightly more complex task than before, but still not taxing. What’s important is the time it takes you to make each selection. Try it with the following word list; you can say “hello” or “good-bye” to yourself if you are afraid of scaring away your own relatives who may be within earshot (hello = male name or relative; good-bye = female name or relative):
John, Joan, brother, granddaughter, Beth, daughter, Mike, niece, Richard, Leonard, son, aunt, grandfather, Brian, Donna, father, mother, grandson, Gary, Kathy.
Now for phase 2. In phase 2 you see a list of the names and relatives again, but this time you are asked to say “hello” when seeing a male name or female relative and “good-bye” when you see a female name or male relative. Again, what’s important is the time it takes you to make your selections. Try it (hello = male name or female relative; good-bye = female name or male relative):
John, Joan, brother, granddaughter, Beth, daughter, Mike, niece, Richard, Leonard, son, aunt, grandfather, Brian, Donna, father, mother, grandson, Gary, Kathy.