The brain takes milliseconds to create prejudices
We are human beings, that is, imperfect beings.
🏷️ Categories: Decision making and biases, Social relationships
We all try to act fairly, to be empathetic, we are trustworthy people and we would never judge someone we just met, right?
I'm not so sure.
It takes 100 milliseconds for the brain to create a prejudice
It's happened to all of us, you meet someone and within tenths you are already predicting what they are like.
It has been studied how quickly the brain jumps to conclusions. The conclusion is that you only need to see a person's face for 100 milliseconds to generate beliefs about what they are like. You might think that's not much time; let's take more. With 500 and 1000 milliseconds people are not less prejudiced, on the contrary: most felt more confident in their belief (Willis and Todorov, 2006).
First you create an impression about someone, then you act accordingly.
Why are we like this? Why do we jump to conclusions?
Human Limitations
The human brain is a prodigious machine, but with limitations.
Social interaction is so complex that the brain cannot process everything that happens (Fiske and Taylor, 1991). To avoid mental overload, the brain uses “selective attention”, that is, only paying attention to certain signals and ignoring the rest. In this way, it can analyze and categorize reality (MacRae and Bodenhausen, 2001). The good thing about this is that it allows social interaction to be agile, the bad thing is that by simplifying reality we create stereotypes (Sherman et al., 1998; Todorov et al., 2008).
On the left is what the people you interact with are really like, on the right is the information from which you create your beliefs and trust.
Humans are social beings and this behavior is enhanced in groups.
The group effect
There is a legendary social psychology experiment that shows how this behavior is innate. I'll tell you briefly:
22 11-year-old children were carefully selected to participate in a summer camp. They were all physically similar and from a similar social background. They were divided into 2 groups and for days they carried out group activities to foster bonding. Neither group knew that another group existed. After bonding, they met each other, lived together and competed in activities.
Hostilities arose instantly and even led to violence.
They held competitions where there was only one winner and he was rewarded. In this “survival” scenario, the children created a strong rivalry between groups.
Does this sound familiar?
Competition for scarce resources has always led us to fight in factions. In the face of uncertainty, we adhere to a group and trust it (Aronson et al., 2010). We must do so in order to survive. All the children's surveys had something in common: they did not trust the other group and believed that those in their own group were better.
I emphasize what I said at the beginning: They were selected to be all very similar.
They could not be better, it was simply a value judgment, a bias.
We are accumulations of circumstances
Prejudices are born from the cultural and social norms from which you were taught.
The media, education, family, the environment in which you were raised… we are the product of our environment, we imitate others and we think based on the context in which we learned (Allport, 1954; Bandura, 1977). As we grow, our beliefs can be reinforced or challenged, depending on whether we have changed our social, cultural, etc. context.
As Ortega y Gasset said: “I am me and my circumstances.”
To make it even more complex, your experiences have a lot of influence. It takes you milliseconds to label people, and if you have a bad experience with someone, you will generalize the negative to the entire group that person is part of. But there is something even worse…
Facilitation.
You might not know what I'm talking about from the psychological term "facilitation," but you've experienced it even if you're the kindest person in the world. You had a bad experience with someone and you generalize that negativity to their entire group, then you meet another person from the same group and your attitude is no longer neutral. There is a predisposition in your way of acting, there is mistrust, you don't want it to happen again.
Your mistrust cools social interaction (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) and feeds back into your belief, you'll believe that it's their thing, that the people in that group are like that. In this way you sabotage the creation of genuine relationships with different people (Stephan & Stephan, 2000) and you end up meeting up with "your own" people again, because they're not trustworthy out there.
It's too good to be in your comfort zone to go out and look for different people.
I guess in the end we just have to learn to live with our flaws.
Whenever you change your surroundings you challenge your beliefs and get a different way of thinking and doing things. Travel and mix with the local people, do some volunteer work and you will see how people who are worse off than you live, dare to meet people with ideals completely opposite to yours.
Face what is most difficult for human beings: understanding another human being.
✍️ It's your turn: Have you ever met someone who has made you break down your prejudices?
💭 Quote of the day: “Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstitions, biases, prejudices, and a DEEP tendency to see what they want to see rather than what really exists.” M. Scott Peck in The road less traveled.
References 📚
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley.
Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (2010). Social Psychology. Pearson.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition.
Macrae, C. N., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2001). Social cognition: Categorical person perception. British Journal Of Psychology, 92(1), 239-255. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712601162059
Sherman, J. W., Lee, A. Y., Bessenoff, G. R., & Frost, L. A. (1998). Stereotype efficiency reconsidered: Encoding flexibility under cognitive load. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 75(3), 589-606. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.589
Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 23–45). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Todorov, A., Mandisodza, A. N., Goren, A., & Hall, C. C. (2008). Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes. Science, 313(5785), 1625-1626.
Todorov, A., Mandisodza, A. N., Goren, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes. Science, 308(5728), 1623-1626. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1110589
Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 90(5), 751-783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751
University of Oklahoma. Institute of Group Relations, & Sherif, M. (1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The Robbers Cave experiment (Vol. 10, pp. 150-198). Norman, OK: University Book Exchange.
Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592-598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x
I get that a single experience with an "other" will initiate a mistrust based on that experience, but then if you have similar experiences with people from that same group, it will reinforce the initial bias. In a pluralistic and transient society like the U.S., it's fairly easy to meet lots of different kinds of people, depending on how much you get out into the environment. There are so many different rules of etiquette, political and religious beliefs, as well as cultural traditions and norms, though we may live in a neighborhood of like-minded people, just going to the grocery store or visiting another part of town can expose us to those "others." It's as if being a social camileon is the safest way to move around one's milieu.