How can that possibly be? If the father is dead, then how can he be the surgeon? Is there some subplot or paternity mix-up? Maybe it was the stepfather who was killed. Around half of us who read this are at a loss to explain the scenario.53 Why are most of us so slow to realize that the surgeon is actually a woman – the boy’s mother?
As Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman addressed in his bestseller, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, we have two modes of thinking.54 One is fast and automatic that occurs without intention or effort. When we make these rapid decisions about people, we quickly pigeonhole them based on the stereotypes we hold. The other type of thinking is more slow, controlled and reflective. This allows for us to consider exceptions to the rules. However, we tend to rely on the rapid process of judging people rather than defer to the more considered evaluation of others, especially when we are put on the spot. For most of us, the stereotype of a surgeon is of a white male and, having reached that decision about his identity, we find it really hard to consider that the surgeon might be female.
Rapid pigeonholing does not bode well for racial prejudice. In one speeded response task55 adult participants earned money by ‘shooting’ an assailant on the screen if they were perceived to be holding a gun but punished if they were holding a camera. Of course, they made some mistakes but these were revealing. Participants were more likely to judge that a picture of a black male holding a camera showed him holding a gun instead, whereas a white male holding a gun was typically judged to be holding a camera. This was true irrespective of whether the person making the decision was white or black. Our society has become contaminated with stereotypes that we promiscuously apply out of context. This kind of stereotyped thinking is not trivial and can have fatal consequences if the one making the decision is an armed police officer.
A brain that seeks patterns in the world generates stereotypes. Our brains do this for good reasons. We build models of the world that enable us to interpret it more quickly and more efficiently. The world is also complex and confusing, so the models we build help to make sense of it. Speed, effort and efficiency mean that a stereotyping brain is going to be better adapted to deal with situations that require important decisions without the luxury of contemplative thought. Not that we have a choice. We cannot avoid building these models of the world because all experiences are filtered through the mental machinery that generates categories – summaries of our experience that chop the world up into meaningful chunks. Categorical processing is found throughout the animal kingdom, indicating that brains have evolved to seek out patterns and group them together. This happens in the brain all the way up the nervous system, from simple sensations to complex thoughts. Depending on the ecological niche a species occupies, it may only be sound and vision, but for contemplating humans it also includes judging the social groups we think others belong to and all the stereotyping that grouping entails.
Person categories refer to different classes of individuals we encounter – rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief. Each one of these categories takes many forms in terms of information, such as what they look like, how they speak, how they think and what they do. No one member is likely to tick all the boxes of the category to which they belong, but they are going to be more like each other in the same category in comparison to those from outside the category. When an individual is identified as belonging to a group, we assume they share the characteristic traits attributed to that group. This is because categories are networks of related concepts that are automatically triggered.
Another problem with pigeonholing people is that stereotypes are difficult to overcome. We accept them even when we have no evidence to either support or contradict them. We willingly accept the testimony of others because stereotypes strengthen the in-group/out-group division by attributing negative attributes to members outside our group and positive ones to our own members. We assign generalized characteristics to all members of an out-group and yet maintain that our group has much more individuality. Finally, we seek out evidence that confirms stereotypes rather than look for exceptions.56 In a cognitive exercise known as confirmation bias, we select those aspects of an individual’s behaviour that are consistent with our stereotype and conclude that they are typical.
Take the case of women drivers. Have you noticed how many bad women drivers there are? That, of course, is a negative stereotype that widely circulates in the West. In 2012, the mayor of Triberg, a small town in Germany, announced the opening of a new car park that had provision of a dozen ‘woman only’ spaces that were extra-large, well lit and near the exits.
Are women really such bad drivers? Experiments typically report superior spatial skills in males,57 which are used to justify the claim that women are really bad at parking. However, the story is somewhat different in the real world. In the UK, the National Car Parks company conducted their own covert study58 of 2,500 men and women using their sites and found that on average females were better at parking than males and that included the infamous reverse parking. This real-world analysis shows that women are better drivers and yet the UK Driving Standards Agency report that female drivers are more than twice as likely as males to fail their driving test on the reverse-parking manoeuvre. Are they better or not?
Females may have inferior spatial skills than males on computer lab tests, but it is probably the stereotype that women are bad at parking that is responsible for their failure on this component of the driving test. When women are reminded that males are better at maths, they perform worse in a subsequent maths test compared to women who are not primed with the stereotype.59 The same effect was observed for African Americans who were simply reminded of their ethnicity by stating it at the beginning of an IQ test.60 Those who wrote their race performed less well than other black students who were not reminded of the stereotype. So when it comes to parking under the scrutiny of the driving inspector, women may have a crisis of confidence and ‘choke’ in their performance. Simply giving women encouragement makes them more confident and improves their performance. The problem of stereotyping and why it is wrong, aside from the inequalities it creates, is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bad to the bone
When it comes to thinking about others, there is a real tendency to make judgements that appeal to a deeper sense of identity. As if there is something inside people that makes them who they are. This belief explains some surprising attitudes.
Would you willingly receive a heart transplant from a murderer? Under these life-or-death circumstances, I expect most people probably would, but they would be reluctant. Given a choice of organ transplantation from either a morally good person or someone who is bad, we prefer the Samaritan over the sinner.61 It’s not simply that one is evil. Rather, there is a real belief that our personality would be changed. In 1999 a British teenager had to be forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared that she would be ‘different’ with someone else’s heart.62 She was expressing what is a common concern, namely that someone else’s personality can be transferred through organ transplantation.63 It is not uncommon for transplant patients to report psychological changes that they attribute to characteristics of the donor but there is no scientific evidence or mechanism that could explain how such a transfer could happen. There is a much more likely explanation that comes down to the way that we reason about others.