twenty-year eruption of research reveals - Specialized Research AI at MIT

twenty-year eruption of research reveals
exactly how automatically and uncon-
sciously prejudices operate. As members
of a society with egalitarian ideals, most
Americans have good intentions, but our
brains and our impulses all too often be-
tray us. That’s the bad news from the
‘decade of the brain.’

But the good news, from the current
‘decade of behavior,’ provides solutions.
Individual values and organizational
commitment can override our worst im-
pulses. Getting information, however,
is the necessary ½rst step, and we now
know a lot about bias, both blatant and
subtle, with the aid of the social sciences
and neurosciences.

The ½rst thing to understand: modern
prejudice is not your grandparents’ prej-
udice. Old-fashioned racism and sexism
were known quantities because people
would mostly say what they thought.
Blacks were lazy; Jews were sly; wom-
en were either dumb or bitchy. Modern
equivalents continue, of course. Look
at current images of immigrants. But
most estimates place such blatant and
empirically wrongheaded bigotry at on-
ly 10 percent of citizens in modern de-
mocracies. Blatant bias does spawn hate
crimes, but these are fortunately rare
(though not rare enough). At the least,
we can identify the barefaced bigots.
Our own prejudice–and our chil-
dren’s and grandchildren’s prejudice,
if we don’t address it–takes a more
subtle, unexamined form. People can
identify another person’s apparent race,
gender, and age in a matter of millisec-
onds. In this blink of an eye, a complex
network of stereotypes, emotional preju-
dices, and behavioral impulses activates.
Why? Because the culture puts them in
our brains. That’s how they become so
widespread and automatic. These knee-
jerk reactions do not require conscious
bigotry, though they are worsened by it.

Susan T. Fiske

on prejudice &
the brain

“They are bigots;
you are, maybe, a little biased sometimes;
I, of course, am accurate.”

[how to conjugate an adjective across
three persons]

Most people think they are less biased
than average. Just as we can’t all be bet-
ter than average, though, we also can-
not all be less prejudiced than average.
What’s more likely: all of us harbor
more biases than we think we do. So-
cial neuroscience suggests that most
of us don’t even know the half of it. A

Susan T. Fiske, a Fellow of the American Acad-
emy since 2005, is professor of psychology at
Princeton University. She is the author of “Social
Cognition” (1984), the third edition of which is
forthcoming, and “Social Beings: Core Motives
in Social Psychology” (2004). She is also the co-
editor of “The Handbook of Social Psychology”
(with Daniel T. Gilbert and Gardner Lindzey,
1998) and “Confronting Racism: The Problem
and the Response” (with Jennifer L. Eberhardt,
1998).

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Prejudice &
the brain

How do we know this happens? In
our own lab, for example, we dug up
dozens of images of societal groups
who were identi½able in an instant:
people with disabilities, older people,
homeless people, drug addicts, rich busi-
nessmen, and American Olympic ath-
letes. Our research participants agreed
that they evoked the respective pity, dis-
gust, envy, and pride predicted by our
theory. We then slid a different group
of participants into the fmri scanner to
observe their brains’ responses to these
evocative photos. Within a moment of
observing the photograph of an appar-
ently homeless man, people’s brains set
off a sequence of reactions characteris-
tic of disgust and avoidance. For neuro-
science wonks, the activated areas in-
cluded the insula, which is reliably im-
plicated in disgust toward nonhuman
objects such as garbage, mutilation,
and human waste. Notably, the home-
less people’s photographs also failed to
activate other areas of the brain that are
reliably involved whenever people think
about other people or themselves (dor-
somedial prefrontal cortex). In the case
of the homeless (and drug addicts),
these areas simply failed to light up, as
if people had stumbled on a pile of gar-
bage.

We were surprised, not by the dis-
tinct disgust but by how easy it was to
achieve. These were photographs, after
all, not smelly, noisy, intrusive people.
Other researchers have seen that even
dull yearbook photographs of black or
white young men can trigger the brain’s
amygdala; these emotion-alert areas ac-
tivate in many whites to pictures of un-
familiar black male faces, as if they are
prepared for fear in particular.

Even outside of social neuroscience,
social psychologists have documented
people’s instant unfortunate associa-
tions to out-groups–those groups not

their own. Whether they differ on age,
ethnicity, religion, or political party, peo-
ple favor their own groups over others,
and they do so automatically. We have
always had codes: plu (people like us),
nokd (not our kind, dear), the ’hood,
the man. Every culture names the ‘us’
and the ‘not-us.’ This much appears to
be human nature.

This all-too-human comfort with the

familiar and similar is probably hard-
wired through people’s af½nity for their
in-groups. In order to survive and thrive,
people need to belong with accepting
others. Attachment matters. Babies do
not do well when only their physical
needs are met; adults’ cardiovascular
and immune systems fail when they are
isolated; mortality tracks social connect-
edness. Historically as well as currently,
we are motivated to belong with others,
to understand things as they do, to feel
in control of our social encounters, to
feel social esteem, and to be able to trust
those nearest us. All this is easier when
other people resemble you.

To survive in the rest of the world,
people demand, like the sentry at night:
‘Who goes there? Friend or foe?’ Peo-
ple need to know right away who is on
their side and who means them harm.
According to our research, people’s
minds set up simple algorithms: If com-
petitor for scarce resources, then not-
friend. Thus, not nice, not warm, not
trustworthy. If in-group or ally, then
friend, and presumably warm and trust-
worthy.

Status also has immediate signi½cance

for social survival. After ‘friend or foe,’
one needs to know the other’s rank. Sta-
tus implies competence and the ability
to enact intentions for good or ill. If
high-status, then competent–one had
best pay attention to this person. If low-
status, one can ignore the incompetent
other without much cost.

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Note by
Susan T.
Fiske

The friend-foe, able-unable judgments
yield four kinds of people in the world–
not the proverbial two. Able friends are
people like us (middle class), are our
cultural ideals (Olympic athletes, as-
tronauts), and are our close allies (for
Americans, the British and the Canadi-
ans). In most instances, these are our
in-groups; we feel pride and admira-
tion. Even people who are not them-
selves middle class, for example, typi-
cally identify with middle-class ideals.
The Others come in three kinds. Two

of them provoke intense ambivalence
and, with it, mixed messages. We pity
those cooperators who cannot enact
their intentions–those seemingly too
disabled, de½cient, or decrepit (remem-
ber, we are dealing in stereotypes here).
Pity is a mixed emotion. Pity communi-
cates paternalistic, top-down aid, cou-
pled with neglect. This is the likable but
disrespected quadrant of societal space.
Conversely, in the respected but dis-
liked quadrant dwell those at least as for-
tunate as ourselves: high-status com-
petitors. Grudgingly viewed as compe-
tent, but resented as neither warm nor
trustworthy, they elicit envy, again a
mixed emotion. Envy says, “The other
has something that I wish I had, and I
will take it away if I can.” Respect com-
bined with dislike is a volatile mix. It
predicts going-along-to-get-along, but
also attacking and ½ghting when the
chips are down. Envy is directed at high-
status people not like oneself: rich peo-
ple all over the world and, in the United
States at this time, Asian and Jewish
people. Also, no doubt, members of the
American Academy.

The fourth quadrant is unequivocal-
ly bad: both disliked and disrespected.
Low-status others who try to compete
(but fail), exploitative parasites–they
are stereotyped as neither nice nor
smart. They elicit, more than any other

category, both disgust and contempt.
They are alternately neglected and at-
tacked. And these are the people whose
photographs lit up the insula and failed
to light up the social areas of the brain.

People have a tendency to think that

biology is destiny. But just because we
can correlate impulses in the brain with
certain prejudices does not mean we
are hardwired to hate drug addicts and
homeless people. In the racial neuro-
science studies, for instance, amygda-
la (emotion-related) reactions corre-
spond to other indicators of prejudice.
So people who are more prejudiced by
other measures show more amygdala
response. But the levels of response vary
by individual. And the alarms in whites’
amygdalas do not go off to familiar black
faces. Likewise, they grow accustomed
to faces with repeated exposure. So prej-
udiced responses vary a lot, depending
on the interplay between perceiver and
target.

The most important lessons of the lat-
est biologically inspired social research
point to the complexity of the interac-
tions between biology and the environ-
ment. Take the amygdala-race results.
We ½nd that they evaporate as soon as
people consider what vegetable the pic-
tured person might like for lunch. Simi-
larly, our latest data indicate that the de-
humanization of homeless people and
drug addicts can be altered by the same
task, guessing what they would like to
eat, as if one were running a soup kitch-
en. A long line of our previous research
indicates that putting people on the
same team helps to overcome prejudices
over time.

The environment can interact with
human nature for good or ill. People put
under stress, provocation, peer pres-
sure, or authority sanction will enact
their prejudices in the worst ways. We

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have seen this in hate crimes directed
at homeless people, homosexuals, and
all ethnicities; and we have argued that
these processes underlie prisoner abuse
in settings such as Abu Ghraib.

Learning to deal with difference is
hard. Generating enthusiasm for differ-
ences is even harder. Yet our message is
essentially optimistic. If we recognize
prejudice’s subtle yet inexorable pres-
sures, we can learn to moderate even
unconscious prejudice. People will al-
ways gravitate toward the familiar
and similar, but they can expand their
boundaries, if suf½ciently motivated.
And this is the substance of social sci-
ence married to neuroscience.

Prejudice &
the brain

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