Name: Prejudice and Discrimination: Crash Course Psychology #39
Uploaded: 2022-02-18T07:01:09.000Z
Duration: 9 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In February 1999, four New York City police officers were on patrol in the Bronx when

they saw a young black man standing on a stoop. They thought he looked suspicious. When they

pulled over, he retreated into the doorway and began digging in his pocket. He kept digging

as the police shouted at him to show his hands; a few seconds later, the man, Amadou Diallo,

a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was dead, hit by 19 of the 41 bullets that the

police fired at him. What Diallo was reaching for was his wallet. He was going for his ID

as he stood on the steps of his own apartment building.

Diallo's story, and the officer's fatal pre-judgment of him, is recounted in Malcolm Gladwell's

2005 bestseller Blink. Gladwell, and the social psychologists whose

work he draws upon, explores Diallo's case as an example of that grey area between deliberate

violence and an accident, propagated by non-conscious, or implicit biases.

The officers did discriminate against Diallo, but the prejudice they acted on may have been

driven by something more subtle than simple hatred.

And that's an important thing to think about. Yes, there are lots of overtly bigoted people

and policies at work all over the world, but what we're interested in today is the more

insidious, non-conscious automatic bias, and how it can affect our behavior.

The fact is, our implicit biases affect the way we relate to others in a very real way.

Our race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation can make the difference between

whether we get a job or not, a fair paycheck, or a good rental, or whether we get randomly

pulled over or shot and killed for reaching for a wallet.

In the last two episodes, we've examined how we think about and how we influence one another,

but social psychology is also about how we relate to one another.

Like what factors might cause us to help another person, or harm them, or fear them? What are

the social, and cognitive, and emotional roots of prejudice, racism, and sexism, and how

do they shape our society? These are some of the aspects of ourselves that are the hardest

and most uncomfortable for us to explore, which is why they're so important to understand.

We've all been unfairly judged in our time, and let's not pretend that we haven't done

our fair share of uninformed judging too.

Like it or not, prejudice is a common human condition.

Prejudice just means "prejudgment." It's an unjustified, typically negative attitude toward

an individual or group. Prejudicial attitudes are often directed along

the lines of gender, ethnic, socioeconomic status, or culture, and by definition, prejudice

is not the same thing as stereotyping or discrimination, although the three phenomena are intimately related.

People may distrust a female mechanic. That's a prejudicial attitude, but it's rooted in

a stereotype, or over-generalized belief about a particular group.

Although it's often discussed in a negative way, stereotyping is really more of a general

cognitive process that doesn't have to be negative. It can even be accurate at times.

Like, I have the stereotype that all crows have wings, injuries and birth defects aside.

But on the negative end, your prejudice against female mechanics may be rooted in some inaccurate

stereotype about women's skills with a socket wrench.

And when stereotypical beliefs combine with prejudicial attitudes and emotions, like fear

and hostility, they can drive the behavior we call discrimination.

So a prejudiced person won't necessarily act on their attitude. Say you believe in the

stereotype that overweight people are lazy. You might then feel a prejudiced distaste

when you see someone who appears overweight.

But if you act on your prejudice, and, say, refuse to hire them for a job or don't let

them sit at your lunch counter, then you've crossed over into discriminating against them.

The former apartheid system of racial segregation in South Africa, the Nazis' mass killing of

Gypsies, Jewish people, and other groups, and centuries of bloodshed between Protestants

and Catholics, are all extreme examples of violent prejudice and discrimination.

The good news is that in many cultures, certain forms of overt prejudice have waned over time.

For example, in 1937 only 1/3 of Americans said that they'd vote for a qualified woman to

be president, while in 2007, that figure was up to nearly 90 percent.

But of course more subtle prejudices can still linger.

In the past, we've talked about dual-process theories of thought, memories, and attitudes,

and that while we're aware of our explicit thoughts, or implicit cognition still operates

under the radar, leaving us clueless about its effect on our attitudes and behavior.

In the same way, prejudice can be non-conscious and automatic. And I mean it can be so non-conscious

that even when people ask us point-blank about our attitudes, we unwillingly or unknowingly

Do you think that men are better at science the women? Or that Muslims are more violent

than Christians? Or that overweight people are unhealthy?

Our tendency to unwittingly doctor our answers to questions like these is why we have the

implicit association test, or IAT. The test was implemented in the late 1990s to try to

gauge implicit attitudes, identities, beliefs, and biases that people are unwilling or unable to report.

You can take the IAT online and measure your implicit attitudes in all kinds of topics,

from race, religion, and gender to disability, weight, and sexuality. It's basically a timed categorization task.

For example, the age-related IAT looks at implicit attitudes about older vs. younger

people. In it, you might be shown a series of faces, old and young, and objects, pleasant

and unpleasant, like pretty flowers vs. a pile of garbage.

You're then asked to sort these pictures, so you'd press the left key if you see a young

face or a pleasant object, and press the right key if you see an old face or an unpleasant

object. That's the stereotypic condition. Your keystrokes correspond to stereotypical

pairs; in this case, associating good stuff with youth and bad stuff with older age.

Then the test asks you to do the same thing in a counter-stereotypic condition, pressing

the left key if you see a young face or an unpleasant object and the right key if you

The core of the test is your reaction time. Are you faster at sorting when you're working

with a stereotypical pairing than you are with counter-stereotypical pairings? If that's

the case, even though you may think you're unprejudiced, you've got an implicit association

between youth and goodness, which, as you might guess, may have some implications about

how you think and act toward older people.

The test is widely used in research, and contrary to what some critics think, it's surprisingly

predictive of discriminatory behavior in all kinds of experimental settings.

So that's one way to measure subtle, implicit prejudice. But obviously, overt prejudice

is far from dead. That's why discrimination studies are prominent in social psychology

research, and they can also predict, sometimes with scary accuracy, how discrimination might

show up in broad social patterns, like wage inequality and job opportunity gaps.

For instance, the 2012 Yale study led by social scientist Corinne Moss-Racusin demonstrated

that science faculty across the country systematically discriminated against female science students.

In a double-blind study, a representative sample of science faculty members were asked

to hire a fictional student applicant for a lab-manager job.

When the applicant's name was Jennifer, instead of John, they viewed her as less competent,

were less likely to hire her, offered her less money, and were less likely to mentor her.

And this prejudice was even exhibited by women faculty members.

And that's an important point. People on both sides of the stereotype tend to respond similarly,

with the subjects of prejudice themselves often holding the same stereotypical implicit

attitudes or engaging in the same discriminatory behavior.

So when we say that stereotypes are pervasive, we mean pervasive.