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When we think about prejudice and bias,

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we tend to think about stupid and evil people

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doing stupid and evil things.

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And this idea is nicely summarized

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by the British critic William Hazlitt,

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who wrote, "Prejudice is the child of ignorance."

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I want to try to convince you here

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that this is mistaken.

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I want to try to convince you

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that prejudice and bias

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are natural, they're often rational,

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and they're often even moral,

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and I think that once we understand this,

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we're in a better position to make sense of them

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when they go wrong,

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when they have horrible consequences,

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and we're in a better position to know what to do

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when this happens.

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So start with stereotypes. You look at me,

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you know my name, you
know certain facts about me,

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and you could make certain judgments.

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You could make guesses about my ethnicity,

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my political affiliation, my religious beliefs.

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And the thing is, these
judgments tend to be accurate.

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We're very good at this sort of thing.

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And we're very good at this sort of thing

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because our ability to stereotype people

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is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind,

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but rather it's a specific instance

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of a more general process,

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which is that we have experience

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with things and people in the world

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that fall into categories,

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and we can use our experience
to make generalizations

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about novel instances of these categories.

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So everybody here has a lot of experience

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with chairs and apples and dogs,

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and based on this, you could see

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unfamiliar examples and you could guess,

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you could sit on the chair,

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you could eat the apple, the dog will bark.

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Now we might be wrong.

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The chair could collapse if you sit on it,

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the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark,

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and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark.

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But for the most part, we're good at this.

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For the most part, we make good guesses

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both in the social domain and the non-social domain,

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and if we weren't able to do so,

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if we weren't able to make guesses about
new instances that we encounter,

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we wouldn't survive.

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And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay

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concedes this.

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He writes, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom,

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I should not be able to find
my way my across the room;

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nor know how to conduct
myself in any circumstances,

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nor what to feel in any relation of life."

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Or take bias.

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Now sometimes, we break the world up into

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us versus them, into in group versus out group,

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and sometimes when we do this,

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we know we're doing something wrong,

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and we're kind of ashamed of it.

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But other times we're proud of it.

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We openly acknowledge it.

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And my favorite example of this

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is a question that came from the audience

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in a Republican debate prior to the last election.

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(Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question,

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the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am.

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Woman: The American people are suffering

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in our country right now.

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Why do we continue to send foreign aid

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to other countries

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when we need all the help we can get for ourselves?

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AC: Governor Perry, what about that?

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(Applause)

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Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's—

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Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage

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agreed with the premise of her question,

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which is as Americans, we should care more

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about Americans than about other people.

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And in fact, in general, people are often swayed

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by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism,

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towards their country or towards their ethnic group.

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Regardless of your politics, many
people feel proud to be American,

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and they favor Americans over other countries.

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Residents of other countries
feel the same about their nation,

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and we feel the same about our ethnicities.

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Now some of you may reject this.

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Some of you may be so cosmopolitan

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that you think that ethnicity and nationality

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should have no moral sway.

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But even you sophisticates accept

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that there should be some pull

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towards the in group in the
domain of friends and family,

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of people you're close to,

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and so even you make a distinction

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between us versus them.

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Now this distinction is natural enough

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and often moral enough, but it can go awry,

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and this was part of the research

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of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel.

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Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919.

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He left to go to university in France,

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because as a Jew, he couldn't
go to university in Poland,

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and then he enlisted in the French military

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in World War II.

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He was captured and ended up

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in a prisoner of war camp,

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and it was a terrifying time for him,

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because if it was discovered he was a Jew,

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he could have been moved to a concentration camp,

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where he most likely would not have survived.

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And in fact, when the war
ended and he was released,

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most of his friends and family were dead.

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He got involved in different pursuits.

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He helped out the war orphans.

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But he had a long-lasting interest

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in the science of prejudice,

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and so when a prestigious British scholarship

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on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it,

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and he won it,

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and then he began this amazing career.

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And what started his career is an insight

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that the way most people were thinking

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about the Holocaust was wrong.

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Many people, most people at the time,

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viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing

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some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans,

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some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality.

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And Tajfel rejected this.

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Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust

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is just an exaggeration

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of normal psychological processes

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that exist in every one of us.

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And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies

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with British adolescents.

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And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked

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the British adolescents all sorts of questions,

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and then based on their answers, he said,

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"I've looked at your answers,
and based on the answers,

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I have determined that you are either"

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— he told half of them —

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"a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky,

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or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee."

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It was entirely bogus.

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Their answers had nothing
to do with Kandinsky or Klee.

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They probably hadn't heard of the artists.

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He just arbitrarily divided them up.

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But what he found was, these categories mattered,

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so when he later gave the subjects money,

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they would prefer to give the money

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to members of their own group

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than members of the other group.

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Worse, they were actually most interested

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in establishing a difference

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between their group and other groups,

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so they would give up money for their own group

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if by doing so they could give
the other group even less.

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This bias seems to show up very early.

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So my colleague and wife Karen Wynn at Yale

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has done a series of studies with babies

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where she exposes babies to puppets,

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and the puppets have certain food preferences.

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So one of the puppets might like green beans.

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The other puppet might like graham crackers.

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They test the babies own food preferences,

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and babies typically prefer the graham crackers.

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But the question is, does this matter to babies

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in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot.

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They tend to prefer the puppet

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who has the same food tastes that they have,

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and worse, they actually prefer puppets

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who punish the puppet with the different food taste.

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(Laughter)

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We see the sort of in group out
group psychology all the time.

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We see it in political clashes

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within groups with different ideologies.

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We see it in its extreme in cases of war,

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where the out group isn't merely given less,

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but dehumanized,

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as in the Nazi perspective of Jews

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as vermin or lice,

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or the American perspective of Japanese as rats.

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Stereotypes can also go awry.

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So often they're rational and useful,

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but sometimes they're irrational,

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they give the wrong answers,

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and other times

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they lead to plainly immoral consequences.

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And the case that's been most studied

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is the case of race.

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There was a fascinating study

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prior to the 2008 election

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where social psychologists looked at the extent

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to which the candidates were
associated with America,

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as in an unconscious association
with the American flag.

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And in one of their studies they compared

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Obama and McCain, and they found McCain

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is more thought of as more American than Obama,

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and to some extent, people aren't that surprised

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by hearing that.

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McCain is a celebrated war hero,

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and many people would explicitly say

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he has more of an American story than Obama.

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But they also compared Obama

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to British Prime Minister Tony Blair,

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and they found that Blair was also thought of

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as more American than Obama,

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even though subjects explicitly understood

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that he's not American at all.

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But they were responding, of course,

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to the color of his skin.

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These stereotypes and biases

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have real-world consequences,

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both subtle and very important.

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In one recent study, researchers

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put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards.

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Some of them were held by white hands,

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others by black hands.

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They were the same baseball cards.

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The ones held by black hands

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got substantially smaller bids

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than the ones held by white hands.

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In research done at Stanford,

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psychologists explored the case of people

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sentenced for the murder of a white person.

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It turns out, holding everything else constant,

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you are considerably more likely to be executed

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if you look like the man on the right

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than the man on the left,

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and this is in large part because

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the man on the right looks more prototypically black,

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more prototypically African-American,

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and this apparently influences people's decisions

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over what to do about him.

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So now that we know about this,

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how do we combat it?

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And there are different avenues.

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One avenue is to appeal

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to people's emotional responses,

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to appeal to people's empathy,

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and we often do that through stories.

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So if you are a liberal parent

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and you want to encourage your children

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to believe in the merits of non-traditional families,

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you might give them a book like this.

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If you are conservative and have a different attitude,

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you might give them a book like this.

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(Laughter)

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But in general, stories can turn

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anonymous strangers into people who matter,

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and the idea that we care about people

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when we focus on them as individuals

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is an idea which has shown up across history.

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So Stalin apocryphally said,

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"A single death is a tragedy,

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a million deaths is a statistic,"

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and Mother Theresa said,

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"If I look at the mass, I will never act.

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If I look at the one, I will."

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Psychologists have explored this.

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For instance, in one study,

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people were given a list of facts about a crisis,

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and it was seen how much they would donate

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to solve this crisis,

268
00:10:01,690 --> 00:10:03,527
and another group was given no facts at all

269
00:10:03,527 --> 00:10:05,625
but they were told of an individual

270
00:10:05,625 --> 00:10:08,065
and given a name and given a face,

271
00:10:08,065 --> 00:10:11,284
and it turns out that they gave far more.

272
00:10:11,284 --> 00:10:13,145
None of this I think is a secret

273
00:10:13,145 --> 00:10:15,256
to the people who are engaged in charity work.

274
00:10:15,256 --> 00:10:17,904
People don't tend to deluge people

275
00:10:17,904 --> 00:10:19,227
with facts and statistics.

276
00:10:19,227 --> 00:10:20,249
Rather, you show them faces,

277
00:10:20,249 --> 00:10:21,985
you show them people.

278
00:10:21,985 --> 00:10:25,212
It's possible that by extending our sympathies

279
00:10:25,212 --> 00:10:27,183
to an individual, they can spread

280
00:10:27,183 --> 00:10:30,061
to the group the individual belongs to.

281
00:10:30,061 --> 00:10:32,527
This is Harriet Beecher Stowe.

282
00:10:32,527 --> 00:10:34,970
The story, perhaps apocryphal,

283
00:10:34,970 --> 00:10:36,834
is that President Lincoln invited her

284
00:10:36,834 --> 00:10:39,042
to the White House in the middle of the Civil War

285
00:10:39,042 --> 00:10:40,626
and said to her,

286
00:10:40,626 --> 00:10:43,290
"So you're the little lady who started this great war."

287
00:10:43,290 --> 00:10:45,175
And he was talking about "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

288
00:10:45,175 --> 00:10:47,706
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not
a great book of philosophy

289
00:10:47,706 --> 00:10:50,850
or of theology or perhaps not even literature,

290
00:10:50,850 --> 00:10:53,365
but it does a great job

291
00:10:53,365 --> 00:10:55,863
of getting people to put themselves in the shoes

292
00:10:55,863 --> 00:10:58,196
of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of,

293
00:10:58,196 --> 00:11:00,598
put themselves in the shoes of slaves.

294
00:11:00,598 --> 00:11:02,379
And that could well have been a catalyst

295
00:11:02,379 --> 00:11:03,983
for great social change.

296
00:11:03,983 --> 00:11:06,345
More recently, looking at America

297
00:11:06,345 --> 00:11:09,414
in the last several decades,

298
00:11:09,414 --> 00:11:12,563
there's some who reasonably say
that shows like "The Cosby Show"

299
00:11:12,563 --> 00:11:15,161
radically changed American attitudes
towards African-Americans,

300
00:11:15,161 --> 00:11:18,234
while shows like "Will & Grace" and "Modern Family"

301
00:11:18,234 --> 00:11:19,597
changed American attitudes

302
00:11:19,597 --> 00:11:20,897
towards gay men and women.

303
00:11:20,897 --> 00:11:23,352
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say

304
00:11:23,352 --> 00:11:26,013
that the major catalyst in America for moral change

305
00:11:26,013 --> 00:11:28,906
has been a situation comedy.

306
00:11:28,906 --> 00:11:30,322
But it's not all emotions,

307
00:11:30,322 --> 00:11:31,388
and I want to end by appealing

308
00:11:31,388 --> 00:11:33,833
to the power of reason.

309
00:11:33,833 --> 00:11:35,989
At some point in his wonderful book

310
00:11:35,989 --> 00:11:37,212
"The Better Angels Of Our Nature,"

311
00:11:37,212 --> 00:11:39,228
Steven Pinker says, you know,

312
00:11:39,228 --> 00:11:41,810
the Old Testament says love thy neighbor,

313
00:11:41,810 --> 00:11:44,532
and the New Testament says love thy enemy,

314
00:11:44,532 --> 00:11:47,218
but I don't love either one of them, not really,

315
00:11:47,218 --> 00:11:48,885
but I don't want to kill them.

316
00:11:48,885 --> 00:11:50,751
I know I have obligations to them,

317
00:11:50,751 --> 00:11:54,221
but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs

318
00:11:54,221 --> 00:11:55,934
about how I should behave towards them,

319
00:11:55,934 --> 00:11:57,981
aren't grounded in love.

320
00:11:57,981 --> 00:11:59,920
What they're grounded in is the
understanding of human rights,

321
00:11:59,920 --> 00:12:02,143
a belief that their life is as valuable to them

322
00:12:02,143 --> 00:12:04,499
as my life is to me,

323
00:12:04,499 --> 00:12:06,431
and to support this, he tells a story

324
00:12:06,431 --> 00:12:08,279
by the great philosopher Adam Smith,

325
00:12:08,279 --> 00:12:09,965
and I want to tell this story too,

326
00:12:09,965 --> 00:12:11,261
though I'm going to modify it a little bit

327
00:12:11,261 --> 00:12:12,939
for modern times.

328
00:12:12,939 --> 00:12:14,530
So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine

329
00:12:14,530 --> 00:12:16,741
the death of thousands of people,

330
00:12:16,741 --> 00:12:18,781
and imagine that the thousands of people

331
00:12:18,781 --> 00:12:21,020
are in a country you are not familiar with.

332
00:12:21,020 --> 00:12:24,574
It could be China or India or a country in Africa.

333
00:12:24,574 --> 00:12:27,058
And Smith says, how would you respond?

334
00:12:27,058 --> 00:12:29,365
And you would say, well that's too bad,

335
00:12:29,365 --> 00:12:31,241
and you'd go on to the rest of your life.

336
00:12:31,241 --> 00:12:33,460
If you were to open up The New
York Times online or something,

337
00:12:33,460 --> 00:12:36,420
and discover this, and in fact
this happens to us all the time,

338
00:12:36,420 --> 00:12:37,941
we go about our lives.

339
00:12:37,941 --> 00:12:40,135
But imagine instead, Smith says,

340
00:12:40,135 --> 00:12:41,389
you were to learn that tomorrow

341
00:12:41,389 --> 00:12:43,928
you were to have your little finger chopped off.

342
00:12:43,928 --> 00:12:46,097
Smith says, that would matter a lot.

343
00:12:46,097 --> 00:12:47,508
You would not sleep that night

344
00:12:47,508 --> 00:12:48,861
wondering about that.

345
00:12:48,861 --> 00:12:50,880
So this raises the question:

346
00:12:50,880 --> 00:12:53,346
would you sacrifice thousands of lives

347
00:12:53,346 --> 00:12:55,315
to save your little finger?

348
00:12:55,315 --> 00:12:57,633
Now answer this in the privacy of your own head,

349
00:12:57,633 --> 00:13:00,552
but Smith says, absolutely not,

350
00:13:00,552 --> 00:13:02,244
what a horrid thought.

351
00:13:02,244 --> 00:13:04,275
And so this raises the question,

352
00:13:04,275 --> 00:13:05,649
and so, as Smith puts it,

353
00:13:05,649 --> 00:13:07,867
"When our passive feelings are almost always

354
00:13:07,867 --> 00:13:09,315
so sordid and so selfish,

355
00:13:09,315 --> 00:13:10,780
how comes it that our active principles

356
00:13:10,780 --> 00:13:13,313
should often be so generous and so noble?"

357
00:13:13,313 --> 00:13:15,363
And Smith's answer is, "It is reason,

358
00:13:15,363 --> 00:13:17,138
principle, conscience.

359
00:13:17,138 --> 00:13:18,679
[This] calls to us,

360
00:13:18,679 --> 00:13:22,104
with a voice capable of astonishing
the most presumptuous of our passions,

361
00:13:22,104 --> 00:13:23,781
that we are but one of the multitude,

362
00:13:23,781 --> 00:13:26,222
in no respect better than any other in it."

363
00:13:26,222 --> 00:13:28,347
And this last part is what is often described

364
00:13:28,347 --> 00:13:31,555
as the principle of impartiality.

365
00:13:31,555 --> 00:13:34,184
And this principle of impartiality manifests itself

366
00:13:34,184 --> 00:13:35,931
in all of the world's religions,

367
00:13:35,951 --> 00:13:38,209
in all of the different versions of the golden rule,

368
00:13:38,209 --> 00:13:40,663
and in all of the world's moral philosophies,

369
00:13:40,663 --> 00:13:41,970
which differ in many ways

370
00:13:41,970 --> 00:13:44,964
but share the presupposition
that we should judge morality

371
00:13:44,964 --> 00:13:47,949
from sort of an impartial point of view.

372
00:13:47,949 --> 00:13:49,771
The best articulation of this view

373
00:13:49,771 --> 00:13:52,856
is actually, for me, it's not from
a theologian or from a philosopher,

374
00:13:52,856 --> 00:13:54,213
but from Humphrey Bogart

375
00:13:54,213 --> 00:13:55,760
at the end of "Casablanca."

376
00:13:55,760 --> 00:13:59,536
So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover

377
00:13:59,536 --> 00:14:00,676
that they have to separate

378
00:14:00,676 --> 00:14:02,269
for the more general good,

379
00:14:02,269 --> 00:14:04,133
and he says to her, and I won't do the accent,

380
00:14:04,133 --> 00:14:05,815
but he says to her, "It doesn't take much to see

381
00:14:05,815 --> 00:14:07,274
that the problems of three little people

382
00:14:07,274 --> 00:14:10,385
don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

383
00:14:10,385 --> 00:14:13,665
Our reason could cause us to override our passions.

384
00:14:13,665 --> 00:14:15,381
Our reason could motivate us

385
00:14:15,381 --> 00:14:16,602
to extend our empathy,

386
00:14:16,602 --> 00:14:18,929
could motivate us to write a
book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"

387
00:14:18,929 --> 00:14:20,652
or read a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"

388
00:14:20,652 --> 00:14:23,346
and our reason can motivate us to create

389
00:14:23,346 --> 00:14:25,308
customs and taboos and laws

390
00:14:25,308 --> 00:14:27,118
that will constrain us

391
00:14:27,118 --> 00:14:28,794
from acting upon our impulses

392
00:14:28,794 --> 00:14:30,383
when, as rational beings, we feel

393
00:14:30,383 --> 00:14:31,778
we should be constrained.

394
00:14:31,778 --> 00:14:33,791
This is what a constitution is.

395
00:14:33,791 --> 00:14:36,712
A constitution is something
which was set up in the past

396
00:14:36,712 --> 00:14:38,019
that applies now in the present,

397
00:14:38,019 --> 00:14:39,004
and what it says is,

398
00:14:39,004 --> 00:14:41,231
no matter how much we might to reelect

399
00:14:41,231 --> 00:14:43,834
a popular president for a third term,

400
00:14:43,834 --> 00:14:45,929
no matter how much white Americans might choose

401
00:14:45,929 --> 00:14:49,997
to feel that they want to reinstate
the institution of slavery, we can't.

402
00:14:49,997 --> 00:14:51,673
We have bound ourselves.

403
00:14:51,673 --> 00:14:54,090
And we bind ourselves in other ways as well.

404
00:14:54,090 --> 00:14:56,848
We know that when it comes to choosing somebody

405
00:14:56,848 --> 00:14:59,799
for a job, for an award,

406
00:14:59,799 --> 00:15:02,757
we are strongly biased by their race,

407
00:15:02,757 --> 00:15:05,053
we are biased by their gender,

408
00:15:05,053 --> 00:15:07,268
we are biased by how attractive they are,

409
00:15:07,268 --> 00:15:09,919
and sometimes we might say,
"Well fine, that's the way it should be."

410
00:15:09,919 --> 00:15:12,226
But other times we might say, "This is wrong."

411
00:15:12,226 --> 00:15:14,115
And so to combat this,

412
00:15:14,115 --> 00:15:16,366
we don't just try harder,

413
00:15:16,366 --> 00:15:19,367
but rather what we do is we set up situations

414
00:15:19,367 --> 00:15:22,406
where these other sources
of information can't bias us,

415
00:15:22,406 --> 00:15:23,721
which is why many orchestras

416
00:15:23,721 --> 00:15:26,366
audition musicians behind screens,

417
00:15:26,366 --> 00:15:27,610
so the only information they have

418
00:15:27,610 --> 00:15:30,303
is the information they believe should matter.

419
00:15:30,303 --> 00:15:32,626
I think prejudice and bias

420
00:15:32,626 --> 00:15:35,720
illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature.

421
00:15:35,720 --> 00:15:39,496
We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions,

422
00:15:39,496 --> 00:15:41,657
and they affect our judgments and our actions

423
00:15:41,657 --> 00:15:43,988
for good and for evil,

424
00:15:43,988 --> 00:15:47,610
but we are also capable of rational deliberation

425
00:15:47,610 --> 00:15:49,045
and intelligent planning,

426
00:15:49,045 --> 00:15:51,862
and we can use these to in some cases

427
00:15:51,862 --> 00:15:53,805
accelerate and nourish our emotions,

428
00:15:53,805 --> 00:15:56,573
and in other cases staunch them.

429
00:15:56,573 --> 00:15:57,807
And it's in this way

430
00:15:57,807 --> 00:16:00,574
that reason helps us create a better world.

431
00:16:00,574 --> 00:16:02,918
Thank you.

432
00:16:02,918 --> 00:16:06,623
(Applause)