-
When we think about prejudice and bias,
-
we tend to think about stupid and evil people
-
doing stupid and evil things.
-
And this idea is nicely summarized
-
by the British critic William Hazlitt,
-
who wrote, "Prejudice is the child of ignorance."
-
I want to try to convince you here
-
that this is mistaken.
-
I want to try to convince you
-
that prejudice and bias
-
are natural, they're often rational,
-
and they're often even moral,
-
and I think that once we understand this,
-
we're in a better position to make sense of them
-
when they go wrong,
-
when they have horrible consequences,
-
and we're in a better position to know what to do
-
when this happens.
-
So start with stereotypes. You look at me,
-
you know my name, you
know certain facts about me,
-
and you could make certain judgments.
-
You could make guesses about my ethnicity,
-
my political affiliation, my religious beliefs.
-
And the thing is, these
judgments tend to be accurate.
-
We're very good at this sort of thing.
-
And we're very good at this sort of thing
-
because our ability to stereotype people
-
is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind,
-
but rather it's a specific instance
-
of a more general process,
-
which is that we have experience
-
with things and people in the world
-
that fall into categories,
-
and we can use our experience
to make generalizations
-
about novel instances of these categories.
-
So everybody here has a lot of experience
-
with chairs and apples and dogs,
-
and based on this, you could see
-
unfamiliar examples and you could guess,
-
you could sit on the chair,
-
you could eat the apple, the dog will bark.
-
Now we might be wrong.
-
The chair could collapse if you sit on it,
-
the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark,
-
and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark.
-
But for the most part, we're good at this.
-
For the most part, we make good guesses
-
both in the social domain and the non-social domain,
-
and if we weren't able to do so,
-
if we weren't able to make guesses about
new instances that we encounter,
-
we wouldn't survive.
-
And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay
-
concedes this.
-
He writes, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom,
-
I should not be able to find
my way my across the room;
-
nor know how to conduct
myself in any circumstances,
-
nor what to feel in any relation of life."
-
Or take bias.
-
Now sometimes, we break the world up into
-
us versus them, into in group versus out group,
-
and sometimes when we do this,
-
we know we're doing something wrong,
-
and we're kind of ashamed of it.
-
But other times we're proud of it.
-
We openly acknowledge it.
-
And my favorite example of this
-
is a question that came from the audience
-
in a Republican debate prior to the last election.
-
(Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question,
-
the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am.
-
Woman: The American people are suffering
-
in our country right now.
-
Why do we continue to send foreign aid
-
to other countries
-
when we need all the help we can get for ourselves?
-
AC: Governor Perry, what about that?
-
(Applause)
-
Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's—
-
Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage
-
agreed with the premise of her question,
-
which is as Americans, we should care more
-
about Americans than about other people.
-
And in fact, in general, people are often swayed
-
by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism,
-
towards their country or towards their ethnic group.
-
Regardless of your politics, many
people feel proud to be American,
-
and they favor Americans over other countries.
-
Residents of other countries
feel the same about their nation,
-
and we feel the same about our ethnicities.
-
Now some of you may reject this.
-
Some of you may be so cosmopolitan
-
that you think that ethnicity and nationality
-
should have no moral sway.
-
But even you sophisticates accept
-
that there should be some pull
-
towards the in group in the
domain of friends and family,
-
of people you're close to,
-
and so even you make a distinction
-
between us versus them.
-
Now this distinction is natural enough
-
and often moral enough, but it can go awry,
-
and this was part of the research
-
of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel.
-
Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919.
-
He left to go to university in France,
-
because as a Jew, he couldn't
go to university in Poland,
-
and then he enlisted in the French military
-
in World War II.
-
He was captured and ended up
-
in a prisoner of war camp,
-
and it was a terrifying time for him,
-
because if it was discovered he was a Jew,
-
he could have been moved to a concentration camp,
-
where he most likely would not have survived.
-
And in fact, when the war
ended and he was released,
-
most of his friends and family were dead.
-
He got involved in different pursuits.
-
He helped out the war orphans.
-
But he had a long-lasting interest
-
in the science of prejudice,
-
and so when a prestigious British scholarship
-
on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it,
-
and he won it,
-
and then he began this amazing career.
-
And what started his career is an insight
-
that the way most people were thinking
-
about the Holocaust was wrong.
-
Many people, most people at the time,
-
viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing
-
some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans,
-
some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality.
-
And Tajfel rejected this.
-
Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust
-
is just an exaggeration
-
of normal psychological processes
-
that exist in every one of us.
-
And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies
-
with British adolescents.
-
And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked
-
the British adolescents all sorts of questions,
-
and then based on their answers, he said,
-
"I've looked at your answers,
and based on the answers,
-
I have determined that you are either"
-
— he told half of them —
-
"a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky,
-
or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee."
-
It was entirely bogus.
-
Their answers had nothing
to do with Kandinsky or Klee.
-
They probably hadn't heard of the artists.
-
He just arbitrarily divided them up.
-
But what he found was, these categories mattered,
-
so when he later gave the subjects money,
-
they would prefer to give the money
-
to members of their own group
-
than members of the other group.
-
Worse, they were actually most interested
-
in establishing a difference
-
between their group and other groups,
-
so they would give up money for their own group
-
if by doing so they could give
the other group even less.
-
This bias seems to show up very early.
-
So my colleague and wife Karen Wynn at Yale
-
has done a series of studies with babies
-
where she exposes babies to puppets,
-
and the puppets have certain food preferences.
-
So one of the puppets might like green beans.
-
The other puppet might like graham crackers.
-
They test the babies own food preferences,
-
and babies typically prefer the graham crackers.
-
But the question is, does this matter to babies
-
in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot.
-
They tend to prefer the puppet
-
who has the same food tastes that they have,
-
and worse, they actually prefer puppets
-
who punish the puppet with the different food taste.
-
(Laughter)
-
We see the sort of in group out
group psychology all the time.
-
We see it in political clashes
-
within groups with different ideologies.
-
We see it in its extreme in cases of war,
-
where the out group isn't merely given less,
-
but dehumanized,
-
as in the Nazi perspective of Jews
-
as vermin or lice,
-
or the American perspective of Japanese as rats.
-
Stereotypes can also go awry.
-
So often they're rational and useful,
-
but sometimes they're irrational,
-
they give the wrong answers,
-
and other times
-
they lead to plainly immoral consequences.
-
And the case that's been most studied
-
is the case of race.
-
There was a fascinating study
-
prior to the 2008 election
-
where social psychologists looked at the extent
-
to which the candidates were
associated with America,
-
as in an unconscious association
with the American flag.
-
And in one of their studies they compared
-
Obama and McCain, and they found McCain
-
is more thought of as more American than Obama,
-
and to some extent, people aren't that surprised
-
by hearing that.
-
McCain is a celebrated war hero,
-
and many people would explicitly say
-
he has more of an American story than Obama.
-
But they also compared Obama
-
to British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
-
and they found that Blair was also thought of
-
as more American than Obama,
-
even though subjects explicitly understood
-
that he's not American at all.
-
But they were responding, of course,
-
to the color of his skin.
-
These stereotypes and biases
-
have real-world consequences,
-
both subtle and very important.
-
In one recent study, researchers
-
put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards.
-
Some of them were held by white hands,
-
others by black hands.
-
They were the same baseball cards.
-
The ones held by black hands
-
got substantially smaller bids
-
than the ones held by white hands.
-
In research done at Stanford,
-
psychologists explored the case of people
-
sentenced for the murder of a white person.
-
It turns out, holding everything else constant,
-
you are considerably more likely to be executed
-
if you look like the man on the right
-
than the man on the left,
-
and this is in large part because
-
the man on the right looks more prototypically black,
-
more prototypically African-American,
-
and this apparently influences people's decisions
-
over what to do about him.
-
So now that we know about this,
-
how do we combat it?
-
And there are different avenues.
-
One avenue is to appeal
-
to people's emotional responses,
-
to appeal to people's empathy,
-
and we often do that through stories.
-
So if you are a liberal parent
-
and you want to encourage your children
-
to believe in the merits of non-traditional families,
-
you might give them a book like this.
-
If you are conservative and have a different attitude,
-
you might give them a book like this.
-
(Laughter)
-
But in general, stories can turn
-
anonymous strangers into people who matter,
-
and the idea that we care about people
-
when we focus on them as individuals
-
is an idea which has shown up across history.
-
So Stalin apocryphally said,
-
"A single death is a tragedy,
-
a million deaths is a statistic,"
-
and Mother Theresa said,
-
"If I look at the mass, I will never act.
-
If I look at the one, I will."
-
Psychologists have explored this.
-
For instance, in one study,
-
people were given a list of facts about a crisis,
-
and it was seen how much they would donate
-
to solve this crisis,
-
and another group was given no facts at all
-
but they were told of an individual
-
and given a name and given a face,
-
and it turns out that they gave far more.
-
None of this I think is a secret
-
to the people who are engaged in charity work.
-
People don't tend to deluge people
-
with facts and statistics.
-
Rather, you show them faces,
-
you show them people.
-
It's possible that by extending our sympathies
-
to an individual, they can spread
-
to the group the individual belongs to.
-
This is Harriet Beecher Stowe.
-
The story, perhaps apocryphal,
-
is that President Lincoln invited her
-
to the White House in the middle of the Civil War
-
and said to her,
-
"So you're the little lady who started this great war."
-
And he was talking about "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
-
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not
a great book of philosophy
-
or of theology or perhaps not even literature,
-
but it does a great job
-
of getting people to put themselves in the shoes
-
of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of,
-
put themselves in the shoes of slaves.
-
And that could well have been a catalyst
-
for great social change.
-
More recently, looking at America
-
in the last several decades,
-
there's some who reasonably say
that shows like "The Cosby Show"
-
radically changed American attitudes
towards African-Americans,
-
while shows like "Will & Grace" and "Modern Family"
-
changed American attitudes
-
towards gay men and women.
-
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say
-
that the major catalyst in America for moral change
-
has been a situation comedy.
-
But it's not all emotions,
-
and I want to end by appealing
-
to the power of reason.
-
At some point in his wonderful book
-
"The Better Angels Of Our Nature,"
-
Steven Pinker says, you know,
-
the Old Testament says love thy neighbor,
-
and the New Testament says love thy enemy,
-
but I don't love either one of them, not really,
-
but I don't want to kill them.
-
I know I have obligations to them,
-
but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs
-
about how I should behave towards them,
-
aren't grounded in love.
-
What they're grounded in is the
understanding of human rights,
-
a belief that their life is as valuable to them
-
as my life is to me,
-
and to support this, he tells a story
-
by the great philosopher Adam Smith,
-
and I want to tell this story too,
-
though I'm going to modify it a little bit
-
for modern times.
-
So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine
-
the death of thousands of people,
-
and imagine that the thousands of people
-
are in a country you are not familiar with.
-
It could be China or India or a country in Africa.
-
And Smith says, how would you respond?
-
And you would say, well that's too bad,
-
and you'd go on to the rest of your life.
-
If you were to open up The New
York Times online or something,
-
and discover this, and in fact
this happens to us all the time,
-
we go about our lives.
-
But imagine instead, Smith says,
-
you were to learn that tomorrow
-
you were to have your little finger chopped off.
-
Smith says, that would matter a lot.
-
You would not sleep that night
-
wondering about that.
-
So this raises the question:
-
would you sacrifice thousands of lives
-
to save your little finger?
-
Now answer this in the privacy of your own head,
-
but Smith says, absolutely not,
-
what a horrid thought.
-
And so this raises the question,
-
and so, as Smith puts it,
-
"When our passive feelings are almost always
-
so sordid and so selfish,
-
how comes it that our active principles
-
should often be so generous and so noble?"
-
And Smith's answer is, "It is reason,
-
principle, conscience.
-
[This] calls to us,
-
with a voice capable of astonishing
the most presumptuous of our passions,
-
that we are but one of the multitude,
-
in no respect better than any other in it."
-
And this last part is what is often described
-
as the principle of impartiality.
-
And this principle of impartiality manifests itself
-
in all of the world's religions,
-
in all of the different versions of the golden rule,
-
and in all of the world's moral philosophies,
-
which differ in many ways
-
but share the presupposition
that we should judge morality
-
from sort of an impartial point of view.
-
The best articulation of this view
-
is actually, for me, it's not from
a theologian or from a philosopher,
-
but from Humphrey Bogart
-
at the end of "Casablanca."
-
So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover
-
that they have separate
-
for the more general good,
-
and he says to her, and I won't do the accent,
-
but he says to her, "It doesn't take much to see
-
that the problems of three little people
-
don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
-
Our reason could cause us to override our passions.
-
Our reason could motivate us
-
to extend our empathy,
-
could motivate us to write a
book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
-
or read a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
-
and our reason can motivate us to create
-
customs and taboos and laws
-
that will constrain us
-
from acting upon our impulses
-
when, as rational beings, we feel
-
we should be constrained.
-
This is what a constitution is.
-
A constitution is something
which was set up in the past
-
that applies now in the present,
-
and what it says is,
-
no matter how much we might to reelect
-
a popular president for a third term,
-
no matter how much white Americans might choose
-
to feel that they want to reinstate
the institution of slavery, we can't.
-
We have bound ourselves.
-
And we bind ourselves in other ways as well.
-
We know that when it comes to choosing somebody
-
for a job, for an award,
-
we are strongly biased by their race,
-
we are biased by their gender,
-
we are biased by how attractive they are,
-
and sometimes we might say,
"Well fine, that's the way it should be."
-
But other times we might say, "This is wrong."
-
And so to combat this,
-
we don't just try harder,
-
but rather what we do is we set up situations
-
where these other sources
of information can't bias us,
-
which is why many orchestras
-
audition musicians behind screens,
-
so the only information they have
-
is the information they believe should matter.
-
I think prejudice and bias
-
illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature.
-
We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions,
-
and they affect our judgments and our actions
-
for good and for evil,
-
but we are also capable of rational deliberation
-
and intelligent planning,
-
and we can use these to in some cases
-
accelerate and nourish our emotions,
-
and in other cases staunch them.
-
And it's in this way
-
that reason helps us create a better world.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)