Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [30]
Once people acquire a prejudice, therefore, it’s hard to dislodge. As the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of an eye—it constricts.” Most people will put a lot of mental energy into preserving their prejudice rather than having to change it, often by waving away disconfirming evidence as “exceptions that prove the rule.” (What would disprove the rule, we wonder?) The line “But some of my best friends are…,” well deserving of the taunts it now gets, has persisted because it is such an efficient way of resolving the dissonance created when a prejudice runs headlong into an exception. When Elliot moved to Minneapolis years ago to teach at the University of Minnesota, a neighbor said to him, “You’re Jewish? But you’re so much nicer than…” She stopped. “Than what?” he asked. “Than what I expected,” she finished lamely. By admitting that Elliot didn’t fit her stereotype, she was able to feel open-minded and generous, while maintaining her basic prejudice toward the whole category of Jews. In her mind she was even paying him a compliment; he’s so much nicer than all those others of his … race.
Jeffrey Sherman and his colleagues have done a series of experiments that demonstrate the effort that highly prejudiced people are prepared to put into maintaining consonance between their prejudice and information that is inconsistent with it. They actually pay more attention to this inconsistent information than to consistent information, because, like Mr. X and the Minnesota neighbor, they need to figure out how to explain away the dissonant evidence. In one experiment, (straight) students were asked to evaluate a gay man, “Robert,” who was described as doing eight things that were consistent with the gay stereotype (e.g., he had studied interpretive dance) and eight things that were inconsistent (e.g., he had watched a football game one Sunday). Anti-gay participants twisted the evidence about Robert and later described him as being far more “feminine” than unbiased students did, thereby maintaining their prejudice. To resolve the dissonance caused by the inconsistent facts, they explained them away as being an artifact of the situation. Sure, Robert watched a football game, but only because his cousin Fred was visiting.30
These days, most Americans who are unashamedly prejudiced know better than to say so, except to a secure, like-minded audience, given that many people live and work in environments where they can be slapped on the wrist, publicly humiliated, or sacked for saying anything that smacks of an “ism.” However, just as it takes mental effort to maintain a prejudice despite conflicting information, it takes mental effort to suppress those negative feelings. Social psychologists Chris Crandall and Amy Eshelman, reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group. When Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and launched into an anti-Semitic tirade, he claimed, in his inevitable statement of apology the next day, that “I said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said….I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state.” Translation: It wasn’t me, it was the booze. Nice try, but the evidence shows clearly that while inebriation makes it easier for people to reveal their prejudices, it doesn’t put those attitudes in their minds in the first place. Therefore, when people apologize by saying, “I don’t really believe what I said; I was tired/worried/angry/drunk”—or, as Al Campanis put it, “wiped out”—we can be pretty sure they really do believe it.
But most people are unhappy about believing it, and that creates dissonance: “I dislike those people” collides with an equally strong conviction that it is morally or socially wrong to say so. People who feel this dissonance,