We can all personally fight unconscious bias, for research has shown that our tendency to categorize people can be influenced by our conscious goals. If we are aware of our bias and motivated to overcome it, we can. For example, studies of criminal trials reveal one set of circumstances in which people’s bias regarding appearance is routinely overcome. In particular, it has long been known that people’s attributions of guilt and recommendations of punishment are subliminally influenced by the looks of the defendant.25 But: typically, more attractive defendants receive more lenient treatment only when accused of minor crimes such as traffic infractions or swindles, and not with regard to more serious crimes like murder. Our unconscious judgment, which relies heavily on the categories to which we assign people, is always competing with our more deliberative and analytical conscious thought, which may see them as individuals. As these two sides of our minds battle it out, the degree to which we view a person as an individual versus a generic group member can vary on a sliding scale. That’s what seems to be happening in criminal trials. Serious crimes usually involve longer, more detailed examination of the defendant, with more at stake, and the added conscious focus seems to outweigh the attractiveness bias.
The moral of the story is that if we wish to overcome unconscious bias, it requires effort. A good way to start is by taking a closer look at those we are judging, even if they are not on trial for murder but, instead, are simply asking for a job or a loan—or our vote. Our personal knowledge of a specific member of a category can easily override our category bias, but more important, over time repeated contact with category members can act as an antidote to the negative traits society assigns to people in that category.
I recently had my eyes opened to the way experience can trump bias. It happened after my mother moved into an assisted living center. Her cohorts there are mainly around ninety. Since I have had little exposure to large numbers of people that age, I initially viewed all of them as alike: white hair, slouched posture, tethered to their walkers. I figured that if they’d ever held a job, it must have been building the pyramids. I saw them not as individuals but, rather, as exemplars of their social stereotype, assuming they were all (except my mother, of course) rather dim and feebleminded and forgetful.
My thinking changed abruptly one day in the dining room, when my mother remarked that on the afternoons when the hairdresser visited the assisted living center, she felt pain and dizziness as she leaned her head back to have her hair washed. One of my mother’s friends said that this was a very bad sign. My initial thoughts were dismissive: What does she mean by a bad sign? Is that an astrological prediction? But the friend went on to explain that my mother’s complaints were the classic symptoms of an occluded carotid artery, which could lead to a stroke, and urged that she see her physician about it. My mother’s friend wasn’t just a ninety-year-old; she was a doctor. And as I got to know others in the home, over time, I started to see ninety-year-olds as varied and unique characters, with many different talents, none of which related to the pyramids.
The more we interact with individuals and are exposed to their particular qualities, the more ammunition our minds have to counteract our tendency to stereotype, for the traits we assign to categories are products not just of society’s assumptions but of our own experience. I didn’t take the IAT before and after, but my guess is that my implicit prejudice concerning the very old has been considerably reduced.
IN THE 1980S, scientists in London studied a seventy-seven-year-old shopkeeper who had had a stroke in the lower part of his occipital lobe.26 His motor system and memory were unaffected, and he retained good speaking and visual skills. For the most part he seemed cognitively normal, but he did have one problem. If shown two objects that had the same function but were not identical—say, two different trains, two brushes, or two jugs—he could not recognize the connection between them. He could not tell, even, that the letters a and A meant the same thing. As a result, the patient reported great difficulty in everyday life, even when attempting simple tasks such as setting the table. Scientists say that without our ability to categorize we would not have survived as a species, but I’ll go further: without that ability, one could hardly survive even as an individual. In the previous pages, we’ve seen that categorization, like many of our unconscious mental processes, has both up- and downsides. In the next chapter, we’ll find out what happens when we categorize ourselves, when we define ourselves as being connected, by some trait, to certain other individuals. How does that affect the way we view and treat those within our group and those on the outside?
CHAPTER 8
In-Groups and Out-Groups
The dynamics of us and them … the science behind Lord of the Flies
All groups… develop a way of living with characteristic codes and beliefs.
THE CAMP WAS in a densely wooded area in southeastern Oklahoma, about seven miles from the nearest town. Hidden from view by heavy foliage and ringed by a fence, it was situated in the midst of a state park called Robbers Cave. The park got its name because Jesse James had once used it as a hideout, and it was still an ideal place to hole up if being left undisturbed was a priority. There were two large cabins inside the perimeter, separated by rough terrain and out of sight and hearing both from any road and from each other. In the 1950s, before cell phones and before the Internet, this was enough to ensure their occupants’ isolation. At ten-thirty on the night of the raid, the inhabitants of one of those cabins darkened their faces and arms with dirt, then quietly made their way through the forest to the other cabin and, while its occupants slept, entered through the unlocked door. The intruders were angry and out for revenge. They were eleven years old.
For these kids, revenge meant ripping the mosquito netting off the beds, yelling insults, and grabbing a prized pair of blue jeans. Then, as their victims awoke, the invaders ran back to their own cabin as suddenly as they had arrived. They’d intended to inflict insult, not injury. Sounds like nothing more than a typical story of summer camp gone awry, but this camp was different. As these boys played and fought, ate and talked, planned and plotted, a corps of adults was secretly watching and listening, studying their every move with neither their knowledge nor their consent.
The boys at Robbers Cave that summer had been enrolled in a pioneering and ambitious—and, by today’s standards, unethical—field experiment in social psychology.1 According to a later report on the study, the experimental subjects had been carefully chosen for uniformity. A researcher laboriously screened each child before recruiting him, surreptitiously observing him on the playground and perusing his school records. The subjects were all middle-class, Protestant, Caucasian, and of average intelligence. All were well-adjusted boys who had just completed the fifth grade. None knew any of the others. After targeting two hundred prospects, the researchers had approached their parents offering a good deal. They could enroll their son in a three-week summer camp for a nominal fee, provided they agreed to have no contact with their child throughout that period. During that time, the parents were told, the researchers would study the boys and their “interactions in group activities.”