[tt] [technoliberation] Review: Why we hate some kinds of people

[Eugen Leitl]

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http://www.in-mind.org/issue-4/the-double-edged-passion.html 

The Double Edged Passion

20-10-2007

By Dr. Alexander Gunz

Alex Gunz got his bachelors from the University of Toronto, and his PhD in
social psychology from the University of Waterloo, both in Canada. He is now
attempting to add a business credential to the pile at the University of
Missouri--Columbia in the United States. He is interested in motivation,
psychological needs, and tea.


Humans are passionate creatures. Our passions drive us, gives us a sense of
belonging, and unite us as few other things can. Still, there are only a
couple of passions that have been constants down the ages, passions that
people from every place and culture can agree on. Love is one, but another is
that "those no-good bastards over there are trouble." Of course, we quibble
endlessly over the exact definition of "those" -- every culture, pretty much,
has had a different group in mind. But the singular fact of prejudice per se
was as recognizable in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Samaria as it is now in
modern Greece, Rome, and Arkansas.

Not only do we disagree over who Those Bastards Over There (TBOT) are, but
also over why we hate them so much. Nose size has been cited in the past as a
reason, as has intellectual capacity (too much or too little), and bad
manners (eating without implements, eating with implements, etc). Hate may be
a massively universal thing, but we are shockingly divided over why we do it.
Personally, I blame TBOT.

Psychologists, though, (hate us or loathe us) aren't as sanguine about not
knowing, and have spent a great deal of time investigating prejudice in its
many guises. They have come to two broad classes of answers: (a) Reasons we
hate each other, and (b) Reasons we think we hate each other. There's not as
much overlap between those two as you might hope.

Why We Hate - A First Stab at Them It.

Scientific psychology started getting seriously interested in prejudice just
after the Second World War. There's nothing like a conspicuous mountain of
corpses to really get you going on the question of hate.

The first really influential answer that psychology came to was not the ever
popular theory that "some people are just jerks," but neither was it far off.
A German intellectual called Theodor W. Adorno released a book in 1950 called
"The Authoritarian Personality," in which he detailed research on his
"F-scale." This scale was designed to pick out people who were, among other
things, conventional minded, uncritically accepting of authority, and
accepting of the need for authorities to aggressively apply their power. He
called it the F-scale, because he thought it would pick out people prone to
fascism. Other people pointed out that it might not do a bad job picking out
Soviet style communists either, but as a committed Marxist Adorno wasn't as
taken with this application.

These ideas have been updated as the construct of "Right Wing
Authoritarianism," about which the leading authority, Bob Altemeyer, has
written a highly readable book which is available for free online HERE. New
research (e.g. Jost, 2006) is adding to this showing that people who are very
low in the commonly measured "openness to experience" construct seem to be
more likely to be both right wing, and prejudiced.

Psychologists have long noted people's over-fondness (at least in the western
world) for explaining actions in terms of the personalities of the actors
involved. It is therefore not really surprising that personality-based
explanations were the first ones to occur to psychologists too. However, we
tend to neglect the possibility that sometimes people fall because they are
tripped and not just because they are clumsy. In fact, this bias is so
commonplace that psychologists have named it the fundamental attribution
error. Might psychologists have fallen prey to this bias that they are so
keen to note in others? Might hate come from one's circumstances too, rather
than only just ornery dispositions?

Why We Hate - Situations That Lead to Hate

In 1954, psychologist Muzafer Sherif spent a summer dressed as a janitor at a
summer camp to which he had brought two dozen perfectly normal 12 year old
boys. In this classic study the boys were divided into two separately housed
groups, who spontaneously took on names for themselves - the Eagles and the
Rattlers.  There, he tried out one of the oldest, gold plated, tried and
true, best ways to get people to hate each other: finding something they both
can't have. Historically speaking, jobs, land, money, churches, all have been
favourites. Sports leagues have used this principle for years with silver
cups. 

Psychologists call it the realistic threat hypothesis. A quick glance at
those sports leagues will show that the prize doesn't have to be
realistically valuable, though, just somehow real. Still, honor and prestige
are both real to human minds, as is "truth," that most hard-fought-over piece
of mental real estate. Get people excited about any of the above, and you're
well positioned for a launch down the well-trodden road to belligerent
disrespect.

In his test of this theory, Sherif started his boys playing competitive games
against each other after a few days. He offered prizes such as penknives,
with the losing team receiving nothing. Within days, tauntings and food
fights escalated to the point that the boys refused to eat meals in the same
room. The campers began playing pranks on each other, stealing each others'
flags, and behaving in a generally rotten and scurrilous manner.

This may sound like nothing more than child's play, but adults, too, respond
to competition. As the anthropologist Thomas J. Schoeneman noted in 1975,
witch hunts worldwide tend to follow closely after social turmoil. They
peaked in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries when churches fell under
siege from science and monarchs, they peaked in Massachusetts when Puritan
influence there came under intense fire, and they peaked in Washington when
China and the USSR loomed as threats. Meanwhile, a paranoid Stalin was
holding witch hunts of his own. This isn't a uniquely Western phenomenon;
similar, if less murderous, patterns have been observed in Africa.

Competition, then, can spur prejudice. But if you look carefully at what
happened in the Sherif experiment, the boys actually started taunting each
other before competitive games were introduced --though they were still happy
to eat together at that point. This illustrates another psychological
finding, albeit one that has only come to be fully understood only recently:
ingroup biases really don't take much to get started.

Henri Tajfel's minimal ingroup experiment is famed for illustrating just how
little is required. He asked boys to guess how many dots were shown on a
speckled slide and subsequently announced they were over- or underestimators.
Next the boys distributed points (that were exchangeable for money) amongst
each other. They tended to give more to those who were the same 'type' as
themselves. They had spent mere minutes as a member of this transparently
meaningless ingroup, and yet were already showing favoritism! Before you
wonder which type you are, and how you can spot members of the other kind so
you can fleece them, know this: Tajfel decided which type they were based on
a coin flip, rather than anything they actually did. The kinships of
"overestimators" with other "overestimators" wasn't just flimsy, it was
completely fictitious.

Now short-changing a stranger for a few bucks is a long way from, say,
burning them as a witch, or blowing them up in a market place. But then being
told you're an "overestimator" is also a long way from discovering a wave of
heretics threatening your way of life, or foreign soldiers patrolling the
place you call home. It's amazing that such a small prod produced any
response at all.

Why We Hate - What We've Learned

In 1998 a man in Laramie, Wyoming named Matthew Shepard was robbed, beaten,
and left for dead. Mr. Shepard posed no threat to his attackers; he wasn't
competing with them for any resources, nor even carrying anything valuable.
He was just gay. But if the antipathy motivating this violence cannot
reasonably be ascribed to any very realistic threat, where did it come from?

Perhaps it was just learned. Cultures pass on many pieces of useful
information to their members -- how to make fires, raise kids, win friends,
and who to watch out for. People grow up hearing about the dangers of Black
"pimps" and White "trash." They read about thieving Jews (even in Dickens and
Shakespeare), Arab terrorists, and a panoply of other "thems," who are
variously sneaky, pushy, violent, dishonest, or just plain disgusting. The
hallmark of such cultural knowledge is that when asked, people reply
"everyone knows." For example, "everyone knows" that eating with your hands
is bad manners. Here and now it's a cultural truism. Where and when Matthew
Shepard went to school, homosexuality was inexplicably on this cultural hit
list.

Cultures can work quite hard on the problem of hate. The Nazis spent a great
deal of energy on propaganda to convince ordinary German to view Jews as less
than human. Conversely, much of the western world has spent the last half
century working in the opposite direction, expending a great deal of energy
to remove prejudices. It can go both ways.

Do We Hate to Feel Good?

Prejudices can be used as mental shortcuts to warn us away from liars, cheats
and other no-good bastards -- that's likely a big part of why we have them.
But prejudice can also salve our hurts and bring us closer together. No,
that's not a misprint. Let me explain.

In 1997 there was, at one large Midwestern university, a sizable population
of Jewish women from Long Island and New York, who were strongly and openly
stereotyped as "JAPs" - prissy, fussy, "Jewish American Princesses".
Recognizing this, Steven Fein of Williams College and Steven Spencer of the
University of Waterloo presented students there with the résumé and photo of
a job candidate, whom they were able to intimate, via subtle alterations of
her name, hair style, activities, and affiliations, was either Jewish ('Julie
Goldberg', wore a star of David, volunteered for Jewish charities, etc), or
not ('Maria D'Agostino', wore a crucifix, etc.). They then had people rate
how nice a person Julie/Maria was, and whether to recommend her for a job.

Before people completed this task, though, they were made to feel bad. The
researchers gave everybody impossibly hard logic puzzles, telling them that
it was an important and very widely used IQ test. The hapless test-takers, no
doubt already rattled, were then told that they had scored very badly
(obviously they were told the truth and apologized to before they left the
lab). The researchers knew from previous studies that when people have been
put through this type of wringer they are especially likely to lash out at
unpopular groups, and that's exactly what happened this time too. JAP Julie
was given much worse reviews than her (otherwise identical) alter ego Maria.

Interestingly enough, dumping on the Jewish girl seemed to cause people's
self-esteem to recover from the humiliation of the impossible IQ test. The
more negatively test-takers rated "Julie Goldberg", the closer they returned
to their initial baseline of self-esteem. Expressing prejudice actually
restored their temporarily dented feelings of self worth. These participants
would doubtless have recovered anyway, but they used prejudice as a cruel
shortcut back to equanimity. The philosophy seemed to be: "if life hands you
lemons, pelt them at someone until you feel better", Recall Matthew Shepard,
beaten to death by a pair of homophobic Wyomingites (State motto:
"Equality")? His assailants, perhaps suffering the ill effects of a cultural
squeamishness about gays, may have felt anxious. Apparently lacking the sense
to see this as their own problem, they appear to have indulged in hateful
action to make themselves feel better. Homophobia, then, might offer both
feelings of threat and a nasty shortcut to alleviate it. The inbuilt cure is
worse than the original disease.  On a more prosocial note, the boys at
Sherif's camp might have used prejudice not to feel better, but to pull their
groups closer together. It makes sense if you think about it. Humans have
clumped together since prehistoric times for protection, and that impulse
still runs strong in us, especially when we're faced with a threat. When the
United States was attacked on 9/11, there was an immediate and enormous
pulling together, as people turned to each other for support. The same
community bonding happened in World War II when London was blitzed, and seems
to happen all too often in the Middle East as its crises come and go.

There's a twisted yet compelling logic which says that if people pull
together in face of an enemy, and if pulling together is what you want, then
what you really need is an enemy. When the Rattlers and Eagles first started
disparaging each other, believe it or not, what they might have been trying
to do was make their group more cohesive.

Why We Think We Hate

Imagine talking to one of Sherif's campers. He could probably tell you with
great authority that Eagles are jerks, liars, and cheats. He would tell you
that they are stupid and tricky, blithe to the contradiction between those
two things. Furthermore, he would tell you (as 12 year-olds are wont), that
Eagles are smelly. If some egg-head scientist interrupted that this was all
really about realistic threat and attempts at group cohesion, the Rattler
would probably add some choice words about the scientist too. Eagles are
stupid, end of conversation.

"How do you KNOW they are stupid," the scientist might ask?

"Easy," the Rattler would say, "because they are." It's the Tupac hypothesis
of prejudice; "That's just the way it is."

The egg-headed scientist would be left to claim that the Rattler just doesn't
have mental access into why he started thinking such nefarious things about
Rattlers. She would be on strong ground with his claim, too. Perhaps the best
illustration is with split brain patients, who have had the connection
between the two halves of their brain literally chopped out (no,
psychologists aren't total sadists; this was done as an early treatment for
epilepsy). With these patients, you can tell one side of their brain to do
something, such as stand up, and often they will do so. If you ask them why
they leapt to their feet, the other side of their brain, not knowing why,
will just make a reason up. "There was a draft," the person might report.
"Why did I laugh? It's just a funny machine you've got me looking at here."
Psychologists call this confabulation.  Now our Eagle-hating Rattler
presumably has an intact brain, but he still might not have been aware of how
the right motivational context could have rewarded his early fumblings in the
direction of prejudice. But if asked, he will confabulate reasons about
stupidity, jerk-ishness, and odious smells. And then he will believe them.

Why We Think We Hate - Me? Prejudiced?

Currently in North America, the predominant belief about "why we hate" is
that "we don't." When asked "who are you prejudiced against?" most people
respond as if the question was about their predilection for eating puppies.
Of course, most understand "prejudice," here, to be synonymous with "hating
ethnic minorities," with a sideline in hating gays, and sometimes women.
Christian Crandall (2002) points out that prejudice comes in a continuum,
ranging from not-at-all hated groups (e.g., nurses) to very slightly disliked
ones (e.g., Americans/Canadians, depending which side of the border you live
on), to more openly disliked groups (e.g., prostitutes, gambling addicts), to
the outright reviled (e.g., child molesters, rapists). But what about ethnic
groups? Is prejudice against them dead? Adults may use more sophisticated
epithets than 'smelly' (well, sometimes), but do we have more in common with
Sherif's boys than we care to admit?

The last half century has seen a steady decline in racial stereotyping - or
at least, the type people admit to on surveys. There is a fair bit of
regional variation in this of course, with equality being more fashionable in
some places than others. As part of her research, one of my colleagues asked
students in Texas "what is the worst thing that could happen to you?" to
which some girls wrote: "I would become pregnant by a Black man." Such a
response would be considered unimaginably embarrassing at a liberal arts
school in, say, Boston. This isn't to suggest that all Texans are prejudiced
or that all Bostonians aren't, merely that the norms demanding outrage at
prejudiced behavior are not equally strong everywhere.

But is prejudice really clearing up completely, if only in the staunchest
bastions of egalitarianism? The late eighties saw several broadly similar
theories emerge, each describing people as being conflicted over the
expression of prejudice. Prejudiced actions would only emerge, these theories
claimed, when they could somehow be coded (ambivalent racism theory),
explained away (aversive racism theory), or when conflicting egalitarian
beliefs were out of mind (symbolic racism theory).

Ambivalent racism theory argued that while "old fashioned" blatant hatred may
be on the wane, its more subtle cousin, resentment, often creeps in to fill
the hole. Reasoning along these lines McConahay invented the enormously
influential modern racism scale, which aimed not directly at prejudice
itself, but indirectly at people dragging their feet over steps to oppose
prejudice. His scale quizzed people on issues such as whether Blacks were
getting too pushy for civil rights, and whether Blacks' anger was really so
justified.

Gaertner and Dovidio (1986) took a subtly different approach, arguing that
people don't so much code their prejudices, as they acquire highly aversive
feelings when those prejudices emerge too blatantly. Among the enormous
volumes of evidence they accumulated for this aversive racism theory is one
study that illustrates the difference particularly well. At an American
university they found a significant drop in the amount of prejudice shown on
the Modern Racism Scale between 1988 and 1999. On the surface of things, it
seemed, progress was being made. But a second test showed far less
encouraging results.  They asked students to evaluate a White or Black job
candidate who was given credentials that were varied to be either weak,
middling, or strong. The candidate's race made no difference when his
credentials were weak or strong. Nobody felt they could justify hiring a weak
White candidate, or blatantly rejecting a strong Black one. But when he was
given middling credentials, students had some wiggle room, with plausible
reasons to hire or fire either way. In both 1988 and 1999 students said a
middling candidate should be hired far less often when a photograph showed
him to have Black skin rather than White. The only time race influenced
people's action was when they were able to plausibly claim that it hadn't.

Is There No Hope?

Sherif's attempts to rile prejudice worked better than he had imagined they
would, but so too did the last phase in his camp experiment, which I haven't
told you about yet.

He rigged a number of events in which the Eagles and Rattlers were obliged to
work together to achieve larger goals. For example, he blocked up the entire
camp's water supply with an artfully placed sack, blaming the problem on
"vandals." The two groups investigated, and converged on the "broken" faucet,
which they then struggled together to fix. Final success brought universal
celebration. In another event, Sherif sabotaged their bus, and the boys had
to use their tug of war rope to start it again - everyone pulling, for once,
in the same direction on it.

Food fights in the cafeteria stopped, tauntings dropped right off, and on the
last day of camp they overwhelmingly voted to go home on the same bus
together. At a stop on the way home, the Rattlers even volunteered to use one
of their $5 prizes up buying a round of malted milks for everyone.

Prejudices, it seems, are more malleable than the people holding them tend to
think. The end of World War II saw Germany and Japan switch rapidly in the
Allies psyche from terrible enemies, complete with derogatory nicknames, to
stalwart friends, demonstrating that even those prejudices that had been
chiselled, literally, into granite, aren't. Ever since Sherif's experiment,
psychologists have wondered about the best way to help such thaws along.
Recently psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Trop (2006) gathered the
results from hundreds of studies on this question (covering thousands of
people), and used complex "meta analysis" statistics to take a powerful new
look at the collected results.

What they found is strong support for the 'contact hypothesis' - that
personal contact between group members helps improve feelings. Contact even
works substantially better when a number of conditions are present. From what
you've heard so far, you won't be surprised to know that it helps to have a
shared goal to work towards (like getting your bus unstuck), and that it is
good to have a shared outgroup to rally against ("stupid vandals"). Other
things help too, though, such as having the contact occur on an equal
footing, with no group having higher status than the other.

Conclusion

Our conviction over the years that TBOT are jerks has been matched in its
consistency only by our inability to keep straight exactly who TBOT are.
Three hundred years ago the French were popular in America as allies in the
American Revolution; one hundred years ago Italians were looked down on as
unwelcome American immigrants. Of late, Italians are considered
non-specifically White, whereas the French have been castigated with
outbursts of "freedom fry" munching spite by Americans who were upset that
they weren't doing their part to fight an even newer TBOT. If probed, many of
these same Americans (of either period) will happily claim that they dislike
the jerks they do, because, well, "everyone knows" that "that's the way it's
always been."

You may recall Muzafer Sherif ran his summer camp disguised as a janitor, but
you may not have realized why. What Sherif knew was that boys will clam up
instantly on sight of a grown up, but people will say almost anything when
only the janitor is present. Janitors aren't real people, you understand.
There is an old saying that you don't understand anyone until you have walked
a mile in their shoes. Sherif wore the shoes, shirt, slacks, and even pushed
the broom. Maybe if the rest of us spent more time wearing the shoes of those
we tread underfoot, there would be less hate in the world. Maybe, but
prejudice is a remarkably consistent human passion.

Glossary

Ambivalent Racism is described as disliking a group, but coding these
feelings into a more acceptable format. Example: "I'm not saying that
psychologists are evil, they're just always poking their noses in, making
like they understand everything," might be said by someone who feels, deep
down, that psychologists are evil.

Aversive Racism is described as disliking a group, but feeling extremely bad
at the idea of behaving in a clearly prejudiced fashion (or at least, of been
seen to behave this way). Prejudiced action will only emerge, then, in
situations where it's hidden, or at least plausibly deniable.

Authoritarian Personality refers to the idea that some people are
conventional minded, valuing authority, structure, and obedience. People who
fit this description seem far more willing to uncritically dislike others
when they are told to do so.

Contact Hypothesis is the notion that contact between members two groups
tends to reduce tensions between them, particularly when it occurs under
certain types of circumstances

Our Ingroup refers to Us.

Minimal Ingroup Paradigm is the mere act of declaring that a group exists can
be enough to make people start treating those in their new ingroup with
slight favouritism.

Our Outgroup refers to Them.

Prejudice is an emotional dislike of someone based purely on their group
membership. This can be conscious (i.e., "South-Eastern North Dakotans just
creep me out") or unconscious ("I guess we never did hire any of the Black
candidates. Funny that."). They can be justified ("I have inexplicable urges
to be mean to child molesters") or unjustified ("Those Jews, always out to
get us").

Realistic Threat Hypothesis refers to the idea that we dislike people with
whom we are competing for resources (food, jobs, silver cups, electoral
districts).

Stereotypes are the beliefs about another group. E.g., Blacks are aggressive,
doctors are smart, psychologists analyse you. Again, these vary in truth
value, but are almost never true of all members of the target group.

Symbolic Racism refers to disliking a group, while simultaneously believing
that egalitarianism is a virtue. Prejudiced behavior might be exacerbated for
such people in situations that remind them of the others' perceived
shortcomings, and attenuated in situations that remind them of their belief
that we're all part of the great siblinghood of homo sapien sapien.

References

Altemeyer, R. (2006). The Authoritarians. Retrieved from
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N.
(1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Oxford, England: Harpers.

Crandall, C. S., Eshleman, A., & O'Brien, L. (2002). Social norms and the
expression and suppression of prejudice: The struggle for internalization.
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 82, 359-378.

Fein, S., & Spencer, S. J. (1997). Prejudice as self-image maintenance:
Affirming the self through derogating others. Journal of Personality & Social
Psychology, 73, 31-44.

Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (1986). The aversive form of racism. In J.
F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination, and racism
(pp. 61-89). San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc.

Jost, J. T. (2006). The End of the End of Ideology. American Psychologist,
61, 651-670.

McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern racism, ambivalence, and the Modern Racism
Scale. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination,
and racism (pp. 91-125). San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc.

Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of
Psychology, 49, 65-85.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup
Contact Theory. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 90, 751-758.

Schoeneman, T. J. (1975). The witch hunt as a culture change phenomenon.
Ethos, 3, 529-554.

Sherif, M. (1961). Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation; The Robbers Cave
Experiment. Norman, Oklahoma: University Book Exchange. Retrieved from
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Sherif/index.htm.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup
Behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup
relations (pp. 7-24). Chicago: Nelson-Hall.