Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [29]
The very act of thinking that they are not as smart or reasonable as we are makes us feel closer to others who are like us. But, just as crucially, it allows us to justify how we treat them. The usual way of thinking is that stereotyping causes discrimination: Al Campanis, believing that blacks lack the “necessities” to be managers, refuses to hire one. But the theory of cognitive dissonance shows that the path between attitudes and action runs in both directions. Often it is discrimination that evokes the self-justifying stereotype: Al Campanis, lacking the will or guts to make the case to the Dodger organization for being the first to hire a black manager, justifies his failure to act by convincing himself that blacks couldn’t do the job anyway. In the same way, if we have enslaved members of another group, deprived them of decent educations or jobs, kept them from encroaching on our professional turfs, or denied them their human rights, then we evoke stereotypes about them to justify our actions. By convincing ourselves that they are unworthy, unteachable, incompetent, inherently math-challenged, immoral, sinful, stupid, or even subhuman, we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them. And we certainly avoid feeling that we are prejudiced. Why, we even like some of those people, as long as they know their place, which, by the way, is not here, in our club, our university, our job, our neighborhood. In short, we invoke stereotypes to justify behavior that would otherwise make us feel bad about the kind of person we are or the kind of country we live in.
Why, though, given that everyone thinks in categories, do only some people hold bitter, passionate prejudices toward other groups? Al Campanis was not prejudiced in terms of having a strong emotional antipathy toward blacks; we suspect he could have been argued out of his notion that black players could not be good managers. A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample. In his brilliant book The Nature of Prejudice, written more than fifty years ago, social psychologist Gordon Allport described the responses characteristic of a prejudiced man when confronted with evidence contradicting his beliefs:
Mr. X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group.
Mr. Y: But the record of the Community Chest campaign shows that they give more generously, in proportion to their numbers, to the general charities of the community, than do non-Jews.
Mr. X: That shows they are always trying to buy favor and intrude into Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that is why there are so many Jewish bankers.
Mr. Y: But a recent study shows that the percentage of Jews in the banking business is negligible, far smaller than the percentage of non-Jews.
Mr. X: That’s just it; they don’t go in for respectable business; they are only in the movie business or run night clubs.29
Allport nailed Mr. X’s reasoning perfectly: Mr. X doesn’t even try to respond to Mr. Y’s evidence; he just slides along to another reason for his dislike of Jews. Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or course of action. Suppose our reasonable Mr. Y told you that insects were a great source of protein and that the sensational new chef at the Slugs & Bugs Diner is offering delicious entrees involving puréed caterpillars. Will you rush out to try this culinary adventure? If you have a prejudice against eating insects, probably not, even if this chef has made the front page of the New York Times Dining Out section. You will, like the bigoted Mr. X, find another reason to justify it. “Ugh,” you would tell Mr. Y, “insects are ugly and squishy.” “Sure,” he says. “Tell me again why you eat lobster and raw oysters?