Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (8 page)

I fell deeply in love with Ms. Wilhelmson. In fact, we soon decided we would get married. When she brought me home to meet her mother, though, I was treated to yet another round of tribalism: My future mother-in-law desperately wanted her daughter to marry a Lutheran—and not just anyone from that sect would do. She was unhappy that her son had married a German Lutheran. She wanted nothing “less” for her daughter than a Scandinavian Lutheran like themselves. Even Martin Luther himself would not have qualified. When I went to one of the family's Christmas smorgasbords, her Svenskfolk kin alternated between speaking Swedish to one another and grousing about the “Gottdamtd Puerto-Ricans, who come to this country and don't learn to speak English.” After a few beers, I unwisely brought up the topic of ethnic tolerance, to which one of the Svenska guys responded, in a thick Swedish accent, that “Hitler had the right idea!” My future wife did not share their full array of Swedish Lutheran values, though, and we married anyway, in a Lutheran church, which again troubled my mother the lapsed Catholic.

So I have seen people make silly distinctions all my life, between different Caucasian tribes and between different Christian sects. On the other side, though, sometimes the failure to discriminate can be just as prejudicial. Consider the case of Lenell Geter. Geter was an engineer working at a research center in Dallas. News commentators were shocked when he was handed a life sentence after being convicted of robbing a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The shockingly stiff sentence was even more surprising given that there was absolutely no physical evidence linking Geter to the crime and that his coworkers had testified that he was fifty miles away at the time of the theft. There was not much of a motive, either. Why would a working engineer risk a lucrative career for a $615 stickup? But the all-white jury ignored all that, and instead trusted the testimony of the eyewitnesses, who were either white or Hispanic and who expressed strong convictions that this particular fellow was in fact the guilty party. His coworkers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought to have the evidence reconsidered, but Geter sat in prison for over a year, until police arrested another man involved in a string of similar robberies, and the confident eyewitnesses now identified the new suspect as the robber. If you look at photos of Geter and the real crook, it is surprising how different they appear. As Geter joked to my colleague Steve Neuberg, “I'm much better looking than the other guy” (and he is). But they did have a few features in common: Both were young, both were men, and (most importantly) both were black.

Geter had fallen victim to a well-known psychological bias called outgroup homogeneity. Several decades of research has revealed that most of us are a whole lot better at distinguishing among members of our own groups than among members of other groups. As with most of our habitual cognitive biases, there is an underlying functional logic
to outgroup homogeneity. We usually have more experience sorting out the members of our own groups, and it is usually a lot more important for us to make distinctions among the people with whom we interact on a daily basis. When we do interact with members of outgroups, it is often at the group level rather than at the individual level (for example, if the members of an Amsterdam soccer team are taking the train from Florence to Naples, they need only distinguish the Netherlanders from the Italians). By analogy, unless you are an ornithologist, you may not know the difference between a black-capped chickadee, a boreal chickadee, and a bridled titmouse, and if someone pointed one out, you still might see just a small chattering bird.

Are there times when it might be functionally important to be able to distinguish the members of other groups? Our research team investigated this question in a series of studies headed up by Josh Ackerman and Jenessa Shapiro. We reasoned that the typical tendency to mix up outgroup members might vanish when one of them is angry. We had several reasons for our hypothesis. For one thing, it would pay to take heed when someone near you is pissed off, because he or she might attack you. Unlike a member of your own group, who is linked to you and may even be a relative, an outgroup stranger has less to lose from doing you harm. For another, anger is very personal and particular—it typically signals a threat from one specific person (the one who is angry) to another specific person (maybe you). For a third, angry expressions are fleeting, and an angry person may try to hide those feelings, even while still thinking about hitting someone. So it is good to remember exactly which person was just flashing that angry look.

To test the hypothesis that angry expressions would erase the out-group homogeneity effect, we showed our subjects photographs of black and white men whose faces wore either obviously angry or nonthreatening, neutral expressions. To make the task more challenging, we showed our subjects each photo for only a half second while also
distracting them with an abstract painting that appeared on the screen alongside the face. Afterward, we tested our subjects to see how well they could remember the faces they had seen. The test was sort of like a police lineup: Subjects had to distinguish between the photos they had seen and another set of similar faces.

For neutral faces, we found the usual outgroup homogeneity effect. Our undergraduate subjects (mostly whites and Hispanics) were better at remembering unemotional whites than unemotional blacks, and they regularly gave false positive identifications of black faces. In other words, white people were falling prey to the “seen one, you've seen them all” problem. Something different happened for the angry black faces, however. People did not homogenize those faces at all. Instead, they were remembered as accurately as the angry white faces. In fact, when the task was especially mentally demanding—with the targets' faces being flashed very briefly alongside a distracting piece of art—the outgroup homogeneity effect was completely reversed, and angry black faces were more memorable than any of the whites.

These findings fit with the view that our brains allocate cognitive resources functionally—the mind frees up space to pay special attention to other people who might be especially pertinent to our survival or reproductive success. The reversal of outgroup homogeneity does not mean that we become less prejudiced when we are feeling threatened, only that threat makes us process information in ways that best serve our interests. Indeed, other research conducted by our team and by several different groups of researchers suggests that these same self-interested processes often boost stereotyping and prejudice.

One of Sigmund Freud's many fascinating ideas was the concept of mental “defense mechanisms.” Freud thought of defense mechanisms as tools we use to protect ourselves from anxiety. If some unpleasant
memory is upsetting to you, for example, you can defend your ego by repressing it from consciousness or by denying that the unpleasant event ever happened. One of the more interesting defense mechanisms is projection—the inclination to attribute one's own unacceptable impulses to somebody else. Consider the oft-heard claim, “I'm not prejudiced at all”—but those damned Muslims/Christians/Jews/ Protestants, they sure are!

Although Freud thought of projection as a neurotic means of protecting the self from anxiety, my colleagues and I thought that it might take other forms. In a series of studies in our labs, we examined a process we called “functional projection,” or the tendency to project feelings onto others in ways that best serve our own adaptive goals. Unlike Freudian projection, in which I see my own undesirable feelings in others, functional projection may lead me to see other people as having very different feelings from my own. So, for example, if I am feeling fear, it would be functional to perceive that other people are feeling anger, especially if those other people might do me harm. We would expect this projection process to be biased in ways most likely to further my survival and reproduction. And it ought to be a very directed process—I ought to perceive the functionally important emotion only in people likely to pose specific threats or opportunities. It might also play a significant role in prejudice.

My colleagues and I wanted to know just how functional such projection could be, and we wanted to see what got projected and who it got projected onto. To find out, we showed white students facial photographs of black and white men and women. If you were a subject, you would have first heard an elaborate cover story: that you would see pictures of other people who had been photographed after having been asked to first think about a time in their life that had caused a strong emotional reaction and then to put on a neutral facial expression to hide the emotion we had evoked. Your job would be to detect the hidden emotion in the photographs. This might seem difficult,
you would be told, but people can often subconsciously notice subtle micro-expressions on other people's faces. We would have also told you that you would do best if you based your judgments on your immediate gut reactions.

In reality, the task had nothing to do with the ability to detect emotional micro-expressions, because all the photos were handpicked to be emotionally neutral. We were really looking to see how a person's emotional states influenced what he or she projected onto the neutral pictures. To manipulate those emotional states, we showed each subject a movie clip, with the instructions to try to imagine what the main character was feeling. One clip was a scene from
The Silence of the Lambs
in which a white male serial killer stalks a white female FBI agent through a lightless basement. The scene ends with the killer, wearing night-vision goggles, reaching out to touch the woman, who is completely unable to see his hand approaching. A second clip, from
Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
, depicted a highly attractive woman on a first date with a highly attractive man. The third, control clip, from the film
Koyaanisqatsi
, consisted of time-lapsed scenes of people going up and down on an escalator, working on an assembly line, or taking part in other activities typical of modern life.

The emotions that our subjects “saw” in the photographs depended partly on what they were feeling, but also partly on the people in the photographs they were rating. Men who were shown the romantic movie clip tended to overperceive sexual receptivity, and to do this only for women who were physically attractive. Conversely, women who saw the same clip did not project sexual emotions onto the people in the photos, even when those people were good-looking men.

Functional projection processes also led to a very specific type of racial stereotyping. The subjects who saw the frightening clip did not project their own fear onto the photographs, as a Freudian might have predicted; instead, they projected anger, and only onto black men, whom those white students associated with physical threat (which we
knew from other surveys). And in another study in the same series, participants judged Arabs, and again projected not fear but anger onto the Arabs. We also measured people's implicit attitudes toward Arabs by measuring the speed with which they learned to associate positive and negative words with Arabs. In this study, only participants who had implicitly negative attitudes toward Arabs did the projecting, and they saw anger in Arab women as well as men. Instructively, this research was conducted at a time when news reports were full of stories of Arab suicide bombers, many of whom were women.

Our inclinations to use stereotypes can also be magnified not only by our internal states but also by environmental cues that amplify fear. Mark Schaller, Justin Park, and Annette Mueller, members of our team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), demonstrated how this works in a study of stereotyping in the dark. Nighttime is universally associated with evil, threat, and danger, which is not surprising: The threat of ambush is greater when you cannot see, so the evolutionary rewards of being especially wary at night can be substantial. Schaller and his colleagues wanted to see if simple darkness could trigger our use of self-protective stereotypes.

The study had two parts. First, Schaller and his colleagues measured their subjects' beliefs about how dangerous the world is, using a scale developed by Bob Altemeyer, a researcher who studies the links between personality and prejudice. It is pretty straightforward: Subjects describe the extent to which they agree with statements such as “Every day, as our society becomes more lawless and bestial, a person's chances of being robbed, assaulted, and even murdered go up and up.” Schaller's team later tested their subjects to see what kinds of emotions they would project onto neutral photographs of black or white men. They team found that Canadian students who were chronically worried about a dangerous world were more likely to see the black men in the photographs as threatening, but only when the subjects were looking at the photographs in a darkened
room. Darkness did not make the subjects more likely to express general prejudice; they did not agree more with other stereotypes, such as the purported ignorance or poverty of black men. Heightened fear simply lowered their thresholds for feeling threatened, especially by strange men from other racial groups.

These findings link up with some fascinating recent evidence on the neuroscience of prejudice. Using fMRI, a technique that directly measures ongoing brain activity, Elizabeth Phelps, Mahzarin Banaji, and their colleagues recorded white students' brain activity while they looked at photographs of black men. The researchers found that students with implicitly negative attitudes toward blacks showed high levels of activity in the amygdala (an area of the brain associated with emotional evaluation), but only when viewing photos of strange black men, not of famous ones such as Will Smith or Denzel Washington.

Mark Schaller is an interesting fellow. He spent his formative years in places like India and Africa with his father, George, a field biologist famous for his work with lions, gorillas, snow leopards, pandas, and other disappearing mammalian species now only found at the edges of human civilization. As a consequence, Mark is pretty comfortable with things that might seem extremely strange to those less adventurous folks, like me, who think of Italy or the Netherlands as an exotic destination. Mark's partner Quincy Young also had well-traveled parents, and she had spent her early childhood in Ethiopia. When Mark and Quincy's daughter was less than a year old, they not only hauled her into the Peruvian jungle on a backpacking trip but also took her to live for several months in Sri Lanka. When I expressed horror at their plan to take an infant into a third-world country, exposing her to God knows how many rare and exotic diseases, Mark just laughed.