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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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In February 1999, four New York City police officers were on patrol in the Bronx when
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they saw a young black man standing on a stoop. They thought he looked suspicious. When they
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pulled over, he retreated into the doorway and began digging in his pocket. He kept digging
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as the police shouted at him to show his hands; a few seconds later, the man, Amadou Diallo,
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a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was dead, hit by 19 of the 41 bullets that the
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police fired at him. What Diallo was reaching for was his wallet. He was going for his ID
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as he stood on the steps of his own apartment building.
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Diallo’s story, and the officer’s fatal pre-judgment of him, is recounted in Malcolm Gladwell’s
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2005 bestseller Blink. Gladwell, and the social psychologists whose
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work he draws upon, explores Diallo’s case as an example of that grey area between deliberate
00:46
violence and an accident, propagated by non-conscious, or implicit biases.
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The officers did discriminate against Diallo, but the prejudice they acted on may have been
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driven by something more subtle than simple hatred.
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And that’s an important thing to think about. Yes, there are lots of overtly bigoted people
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and policies at work all over the world, but what we’re interested in today is the more
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insidious, non-conscious automatic bias, and how it can affect our behavior.
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The fact is, our implicit biases affect the way we relate to others in a very real way.
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Our race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation can make the difference between
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whether we get a job or not, a fair paycheck, or a good rental, or whether we get randomly
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pulled over or shot and killed for reaching for a wallet.
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In the last two episodes, we’ve examined how we think about and how we influence one another,
01:33
but social psychology is also about how we relate to one another.
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Like what factors might cause us to help another person, or harm them, or fear them? What are
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the social, and cognitive, and emotional roots of prejudice, racism, and sexism, and how
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do they shape our society? These are some of the aspects of ourselves that are the hardest
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and most uncomfortable for us to explore, which is why they’re so important to understand.
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We’ve all been unfairly judged in our time, and let’s not pretend that we haven’t done
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our fair share of uninformed judging too.
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Like it or not, prejudice is a common human condition.
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Prejudice just means “prejudgment.” It’s an unjustified, typically negative attitude toward
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an individual or group. Prejudicial attitudes are often directed along
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the lines of gender, ethnic, socioeconomic status, or culture, and by definition, prejudice
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is not the same thing as stereotyping or discrimination, although the three phenomena are intimately related.
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People may distrust a female mechanic. That’s a prejudicial attitude, but it’s rooted in
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a stereotype, or over-generalized belief about a particular group.
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Although it’s often discussed in a negative way, stereotyping is really more of a general
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cognitive process that doesn’t have to be negative. It can even be accurate at times.
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Like, I have the stereotype that all crows have wings, injuries and birth defects aside.
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And that happens to be true.
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But on the negative end, your prejudice against female mechanics may be rooted in some inaccurate
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stereotype about women’s skills with a socket wrench.
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And when stereotypical beliefs combine with prejudicial attitudes and emotions, like fear
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and hostility, they can drive the behavior we call discrimination.
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So a prejudiced person won’t necessarily act on their attitude. Say you believe in the
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stereotype that overweight people are lazy. You might then feel a prejudiced distaste
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when you see someone who appears overweight.
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But if you act on your prejudice, and, say, refuse to hire them for a job or don’t let
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them sit at your lunch counter, then you’ve crossed over into discriminating against them.
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The former apartheid system of racial segregation in South Africa, the Nazis’ mass killing of
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Gypsies, Jewish people, and other groups, and centuries of bloodshed between Protestants
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and Catholics, are all extreme examples of violent prejudice and discrimination.
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The good news is that in many cultures, certain forms of overt prejudice have waned over time.
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For example, in 1937 only 1/3 of Americans said that they’d vote for a qualified woman to
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be president, while in 2007, that figure was up to nearly 90 percent.
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But of course more subtle prejudices can still linger.
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In the past, we’ve talked about dual-process theories of thought, memories, and attitudes,
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and that while we’re aware of our explicit thoughts, or implicit cognition still operates
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under the radar, leaving us clueless about its effect on our attitudes and behavior.
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In the same way, prejudice can be non-conscious and automatic. And I mean it can be so non-conscious
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that even when people ask us point-blank about our attitudes, we unwillingly or unknowingly
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don’t always give them an honest answer.
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Do you think that men are better at science the women? Or that Muslims are more violent
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than Christians? Or that overweight people are unhealthy?
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Our tendency to unwittingly doctor our answers to questions like these is why we have the
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implicit association test, or IAT. The test was implemented in the late 1990s to try to
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gauge implicit attitudes, identities, beliefs, and biases that people are unwilling or unable to report.
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You can take the IAT online and measure your implicit attitudes in all kinds of topics,
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from race, religion, and gender to disability, weight, and sexuality. It’s basically a timed categorization task.
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For example, the age-related IAT looks at implicit attitudes about older vs. younger
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people. In it, you might be shown a series of faces, old and young, and objects, pleasant
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and unpleasant, like pretty flowers vs. a pile of garbage.
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You’re then asked to sort these pictures, so you’d press the left key if you see a young
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face or a pleasant object, and press the right key if you see an old face or an unpleasant
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object. That’s the stereotypic condition. Your keystrokes correspond to stereotypical
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pairs; in this case, associating good stuff with youth and bad stuff with older age.
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Then the test asks you to do the same thing in a counter-stereotypic condition, pressing
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the left key if you see a young face or an unpleasant object and the right key if you
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see an old face or a pleasant object.
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The core of the test is your reaction time. Are you faster at sorting when you’re working
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with a stereotypical pairing than you are with counter-stereotypical pairings? If that’s
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the case, even though you may think you’re unprejudiced, you’ve got an implicit association
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between youth and goodness, which, as you might guess, may have some implications about
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how you think and act toward older people.
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The test is widely used in research, and contrary to what some critics think, it’s surprisingly
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predictive of discriminatory behavior in all kinds of experimental settings.
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So that’s one way to measure subtle, implicit prejudice. But obviously, overt prejudice
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is far from dead. That’s why discrimination studies are prominent in social psychology
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research, and they can also predict, sometimes with scary accuracy, how discrimination might
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show up in broad social patterns, like wage inequality and job opportunity gaps.
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For instance, the 2012 Yale study led by social scientist Corinne Moss-Racusin demonstrated
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that science faculty across the country systematically discriminated against female science students.
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In a double-blind study, a representative sample of science faculty members were asked
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to hire a fictional student applicant for a lab-manager job.
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When the applicant’s name was Jennifer, instead of John, they viewed her as less competent,
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were less likely to hire her, offered her less money, and were less likely to mentor her.
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And this prejudice was even exhibited by women faculty members.
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And that’s an important point. People on both sides of the stereotype tend to respond similarly,
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with the subjects of prejudice themselves often holding the same stereotypical implicit
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attitudes or engaging in the same discriminatory behavior.
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So when we say that stereotypes are pervasive, we mean pervasive.
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Now it’s all too easy to hold up examples of how people are prejudiced, but the real
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root of the issue is why they are.
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Here are a few possibilities:
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For one, prejudices can come up as a way of justifying social inequalities. This happens
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when people on both sides of the power and wealth spectrum start believing that people
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get what they deserve, and they deserve what they get. This is called the just-world phenomenon.
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Prejudices can also be driven by the “us vs. them,” or as social psychologists often call
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it, the ingroup-outgroup phenomenon. Whether you’re in a soccer stadium, or the political
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arena or school lunchroom, or, you know, in the comments of this video, dividing the world
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into in-groups and out-groups definitely drives prejudice and discrimination.
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But an in-group identity also gives its members the benefits of communal solidarity and a
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sort of safety in numbers. This in-group bias, or tendency to favor your own group at the
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expense of others, is powerful, even when it’s totally irrational. One common social
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psychology exercise on in-group favoritism involves dividing a class into two arbitrary
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groups, say, those wearing sneakers and those not wearing sneakers. Each person sits with
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his or her group and is told to list differences between themselves and the opposing group.
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The lists usually start out pretty tame, but become more strident as they grow longer. Eventually,
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you have sneaker-wearing kids saying that they’re just smarter than the people without
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sneakers. The kids who don’t have sneakers say that the other kids are trashy and low-class.
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Soon enough, each group has inflated itself and derided the opposing group, even though
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the division between the two was essentially meaningless to begin with.
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Little exercises like this illustrate the power of any ingroup-outgroup distinction
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in creating conflict between groups, and that brings us to the psychological nature of conflict itself.
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History is littered with examples of how the us vs. them mentality has fueled violence
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in warfare, which is exactly what we’ll be talking about next time.
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Today, you learned about how prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination affect how we interact
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and relate to one another. You learned how prejudice can often be non-conscious and automatic
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and how tools like the Implicit Association Test help reveal and measure it. We also looked
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at the implications of the ingroup-outgroup phenomenon, and how it can lead to strong
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in-group bias that often turns aggressive.
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This episode of Crash Course Psychology was sponsored by Shane Barr, whose young adult
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sci-fi adventure book, Reset, is available on Amazon.
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Thanks for watching, especially to all of our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course
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possible. To find out how you can become a supporter or lead sponsor like Shane, just
09:28
go to Subbable.com/CrashCourse.
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This episodes was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
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is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor and sound
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designer is Michael Aranda, and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.