Prejudice, Stereotypes, Discrimination, Emotion and Obedience

1A lesson in a small-town classroom

On 5 April 1968, the day after the American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the teacher Jane Elliott walked into her class of eight-year-olds in Riceville, Iowa, in the United States. She told them that blue-eyed people were cleverer and better behaved than brown-eyed people. Brown-eyed children had to wear a collar, sit at the back and wait for second helpings at lunch. Within hours, blue-eyed friends were mocking brown-eyed friends, and children who had been told they were inferior made more mistakes in their reading drills. The next day she reversed the roles, and the pattern reversed with them.

Elliott later repeated the exercise with many classes and with adults. Her classroom was not a controlled experiment, but it shows in one day the three things this lesson separates: a belief about a group, a feeling towards it, and unequal treatment of it.

21. From belief to action

The three are linked but not identical. A person can hold a stereotype without acting on it, and discrimination can happen through rules even when no individual feels prejudice, for example a job advert that requires an accent “like a native speaker” when the job does not need it.

32. Hearing a stereotype: the matched-guise studies

In 1960 Wallace Lambert and colleagues in Montreal, Canada, recorded bilingual speakers reading the same passage once in English and once in French. Listeners did not know they heard each speaker twice. They rated the same person as more intelligent, better looking and more dependable in the English “guise” than in the French one, and French-speaking listeners did so too. The matched-guise technique has since been used in many countries and languages, and it repeatedly finds that listeners judge character from accent and language alone. It shows that stereotypes can be triggered by how someone speaks, not only by how they look.

43. Measuring discrimination in the real world

In a field experiment published in 2004, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent about 5,000 invented CVs in response to job adverts in Boston and Chicago. The CVs were identical in quality, but some carried names common among White Americans (such as Emily or Greg) and others names common among African Americans (such as Lakisha or Jamal). The first group received about 50% more calls for interview. A 2017 review by Lincoln Quillian and colleagues, combining 28 similar field experiments since 1989, found no fall in hiring discrimination against African Americans over 25 years. Because many separate studies agree, this is one of the better-replicated findings in the area.

54. Emotion: the fuel of prejudice

Prejudice is not cold thinking; it runs on emotions such as fear, anger, disgust and contempt. That is why propaganda attacks feelings. Before and during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, extremist media called Tutsi inyenzi (“cockroaches”), a word chosen to make listeners feel disgust and to deny their victims’ humanity. Psychologists call this dehumanisation: describing a group as less than human, which weakens the empathy that normally stops people from harming others. Positive emotions also spread between people: warmth, admiration and shared pride in a common goal are among the forces that reduce prejudice.

65. Obedience in a hospital

In 1966 the psychiatrist Charles Hofling arranged for a stranger calling himself “Dr Smith” to telephone 22 nurses on night duty in American hospitals. He asked each nurse to give a patient 20 mg of a drug called “Astroten”, saying he would sign the order later. The box stated that the maximum daily dose was 10 mg, hospital rules forbade orders by telephone, and the nurses had never heard of “Dr Smith”. Even so, 21 of the 22 were stopped on the way to give the drug (it was in fact a harmless sugar pill).

In 1977 Steven Rank and Cardell Jacobson ran a similar test with 18 nurses, but with a familiar drug (Valium) at three times the usual dose, and with colleagues nearby to consult. Only 2 of the 18 complied.

Figure 1. The same kind of order, two very different results. Changing the situation (a known drug, colleagues to ask) changed obedience.