The Domesticated Brain (29 page)

Judging a book by its cover

One inevitable problem of joining and identifying with groups is that we generate stereotypes that influence our judgements about and attitudes towards others. Stereotypes are assumptions that we make about all members of the same group. The problem is that stereotypes lead us to jump
to conclusions that are unfair. Consider the following story about a surgeon and the unexpected shock they get one day at work:

A father and his son were involved in a car accident in which the father was killed and the son was seriously injured. The father was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and his body was taken to a local morgue. The son was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and was immediately wheeled into an emergency operating theatre. A surgeon was called. Upon arrival, and seeing the patient, the attending surgeon exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, it’s my son!’

How can that possibly be? If the father is dead, then how can he be the surgeon? Is there some subplot or paternity mix-up? Maybe it was the stepfather who was killed. Around half of us who read this are at a loss to explain the scenario.
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Why are most of us so slow to realize that the surgeon is actually a woman – the boy’s mother?

As Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman addressed in his bestseller,
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow,
we have two modes of thinking.
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One is fast and automatic that occurs without intention or effort. When we make these rapid decisions about people, we quickly pigeonhole them based on the stereotypes we hold. The other type of thinking is more slow, controlled and reflective. This allows for us to consider exceptions to the rules. However, we tend to rely on the rapid process of judging people rather than defer to the more considered evaluation of others, especially when we are put on the spot. For most of us, the stereotype of a surgeon is of a white male and, having reached that decision about his
identity, we find it really hard to consider that the surgeon might be female.

Rapid pigeonholing does not bode well for racial prejudice. In one speeded response task
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adult participants earned money by ‘shooting’ an assailant on the screen if they were perceived to be holding a gun but punished if they were holding a camera. Of course, they made some mistakes but these were revealing. Participants were more likely to judge that a picture of a black male holding a camera showed him holding a gun instead, whereas a white male holding a gun was typically judged to be holding a camera. This was true irrespective of whether the person making the decision was white or black. Our society has become contaminated with stereotypes that we promiscuously apply out of context. This kind of stereotyped thinking is not trivial and can have fatal consequences if the one making the decision is an armed police officer.

A brain that seeks patterns in the world generates stereotypes. Our brains do this for good reasons. We build models of the world that enable us to interpret it more quickly and more efficiently. The world is also complex and confusing, so the models we build help to make sense of it. Speed, effort and efficiency mean that a stereotyping brain is going to be better adapted to deal with situations that require important decisions without the luxury of contemplative thought. Not that we have a choice. We cannot avoid building these models of the world because all experiences are filtered through the mental machinery that generates categories – summaries of our experience that chop the world up into meaningful chunks. Categorical processing is found throughout the animal kingdom, indicating that brains have evolved
to seek out patterns and group them together. This happens in the brain all the way up the nervous system, from simple sensations to complex thoughts. Depending on the ecological niche a species occupies, it may only be sound and vision, but for contemplating humans it also includes judging the social groups we think others belong to and all the stereotyping that grouping entails.

Person categories refer to different classes of individuals we encounter – rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief. Each one of these categories takes many forms in terms of information, such as what they look like, how they speak, how they think and what they do. No one member is likely to tick all the boxes of the category to which they belong, but they are going to be more like each other in the same category in comparison to those from outside the category. When an individual is identified as belonging to a group, we assume they share the characteristic traits attributed to that group. This is because categories are networks of related concepts that are automatically triggered.

Another problem with pigeonholing people is that stereotypes are difficult to overcome. We accept them even when we have no evidence to either support or contradict them. We willingly accept the testimony of others because stereotypes strengthen the in-group/out-group division by attributing negative attributes to members outside our group and positive ones to our own members. We assign generalized characteristics to all members of an out-group and yet maintain that our group has much more individuality. Finally, we seek out evidence that confirms stereotypes rather than look for exceptions.
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In a cognitive exercise known as
confirmation bias
, we select those aspects of an individual’s behaviour that are consistent with our stereotype and conclude that they are typical.

Take the case of women drivers. Have you noticed how many bad women drivers there are? That, of course, is a negative stereotype that widely circulates in the West. In 2012, the mayor of Triberg, a small town in Germany, announced the opening of a new car park that had provision of a dozen ‘woman only’ spaces that were extra-large, well lit and near the exits.

Are women really such bad drivers? Experiments typically report superior spatial skills in males,
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which are used to justify the claim that women are really bad at parking. However, the story is somewhat different in the real world. In the UK, the National Car Parks company conducted their own covert study
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of 2,500 men and women using their sites and found that on average females were better at parking than males and that included the infamous reverse parking. This real-world analysis shows that women are better drivers and yet the UK Driving Standards Agency report that female drivers are more than twice as likely as males to fail their driving test on the reverse-parking manoeuvre. Are they better or not?

Females may have inferior spatial skills than males on computer lab tests, but it is probably the stereotype that women are bad at parking that is responsible for their failure on this component of the driving test. When women are reminded that males are better at maths, they perform worse in a subsequent maths test compared to women who are not primed with the stereotype.
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The same effect was observed for African Americans who were simply reminded of their ethnicity by stating it at the beginning of an IQ test.
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Those who wrote their race performed less well than other black students who were not reminded of the stereotype. So when it comes to parking under the scrutiny of the driving inspector, women may have a crisis of confidence and ‘choke’ in their performance. Simply giving women encouragement makes them more confident and improves their performance. The problem of stereotyping and why it is wrong, aside from the inequalities it creates, is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bad to the bone

When it comes to thinking about others, there is a real tendency to make judgements that appeal to a deeper sense of identity. As if there is something inside people that makes them who they are. This belief explains some surprising attitudes.

Would you willingly receive a heart transplant from a murderer? Under these life-or-death circumstances, I expect most people probably would, but they would be reluctant. Given a choice of organ transplantation from either a morally good person or someone who is bad, we prefer the Samaritan over the sinner.
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It’s not simply that one is evil. Rather, there is a real belief that our personality would be changed. In 1999 a British teenager had to be forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared that she would be ‘different’ with someone else’s heart.
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She was expressing what is a common concern, namely that someone else’s personality
can be transferred through organ transplantation.
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It is not uncommon for transplant patients to report psychological changes that they attribute to characteristics of the donor but there is no scientific evidence or mechanism that could explain how such a transfer could happen. There is a much more likely explanation that comes down to the way that we reason about others.

Psychological essentialism
is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviours of category members. Even as children, we intuitively think that dogs have a ‘doggie’ essence, which makes them different from cats, who have a ‘catty’ essence. There are, of course, genetic mechanisms to explain the difference between dogs and cats, but well before mankind had made the discoveries of modern biology, people thought in terms of essences. In fact, the Greek philosopher Plato talked about the inner property that made things what they truly were. Even though individuals may not be able to say exactly what an essence is, there is a belief that there is something deep, internal and unalterable that makes an individual who they are. In this sense, it is a psychological placeholder to explain membership of one category as opposed to another.
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Child psychologist Susan Gelman from the University of Michigan has shown that psychological essentialism operates in young children’s reasoning about many aspects of the living world.
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By four years of age, they understand that raising a puppy in a litter of kittens will not make the puppy grow up into a cat.
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They understand that while a stick insect may look like a stick, it is really an insect.
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Both
children and adults expect animals to maintain their identity even if external superficial features are changed. They increasingly learn to go over and beyond outward appearances when judging the true nature of things.

This explains why adults are reluctant to receive organ transplants from those that they perceive as bad. Children also develop this essentialist view. When asked about whether they would be changed by a heart transplant, six-to seven-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, thought that they would become either more or less mean and either more or less smart, depending on the psychological level of the donor.
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Essentialism develops well into adulthood when it comes to categorizing others into different social groups.
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The Nazis under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels were expert at producing propaganda that demonized the persecuted as inferior, but such indoctrination was not necessary. As soon as we make a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, people assume the contrasts are intrinsic, fundamental and incommensurable – they are essentially different. By adopting an essentialist perspective, we are evoking a deeper level of justification for our prejudice. We do not want to touch them. We want to keep our distance. We are making judgements about their core features because they are ‘bad to the bone’. The extent to which we think of ourselves and others as possessing qualities that define who we are is a mark of our essentialist bias – a prejudice operating early in our development but one that appears to strengthen as we grow older. Psychologist Gil Diesendruck has been studying essentialist
reasoning in children raised in Israel from different groups: secular Jews, Zionist Jews and Muslim Arabs. He found that by the time they are five years old, children already use category membership to make inferences about other children’s personalities based on prejudice which strengthen as they grow older.
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Eventually, essentialism becomes enshrined in the moral codes that keep people segregated. In biological reasoning, essentialism is a useful way of categorizing the world but it is one that can be easily corrupted by those who have a prejudicial axe to grind. What is remarkable is that humans seem trip-wired to generate these distinctions and hold them without any reasonable evaluation. There is something very automatic about group membership and one of the best examples of this rapid processing is when we suddenly become aware that we have been excluded.

Social death

One day, psychologist Kip Williams from Purdue University was out walking his dog in the park when he was accidentally hit in the back with a Frisbee. He picked it up and flipped it back to the two men who had been playing, and, to his surprise, they tossed it back to Williams. Soon, he found himself enjoying an impromptu game of Frisbee with two strangers. However, this newfound friendship was short-lived. After a minute or two, the two strangers resumed passing it between themselves without any explanation or goodbyes. Williams felt hurt. He had been excluded.

What shocked Williams was his automatic reaction to this innocuous event, the pain of rejection, and how fast it kicked in. It was a humiliating experience but one that gave him a great idea. He went on to develop a computer simulation called
Cyberball
, where participants play a game in which a ball is tossed back and forth on a screen between two other playmates. Just as in his Frisbee experience, the computer includes the player for varying amounts of time and then unexpectedly excludes the player. At this point, players feel rejected. Not only that, but they feel physically hurt, which registers in the pain centres.
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When adults played Cyberball in a brain scanner and they were excluded, their ACC, the region associated with physical pain, was activated. Their feelings were really hurt. But it also hurts to hurt others. Using the same paradigm, a recent study has shown that being forced to ostracize others is upsetting too.
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People who were instructed to ignore others that they had just been playing with felt bad. We don’t like to be made to ignore others.