Why escaping from the mental effects of racial stereotypes is harder than we thought
Ernest Reid
Science and Technology Editor
In the 21st century, racism isn’t just a moral problem, it’s a cognitive one too. One philosopher argues sets of racial categories affect the way we know things. And, as a result, we suffer “epistemically”.
In short, racial categories make us dumber.
Tamar Szabó Gendler, chair of Yale University’s Department of Philosophy, argued these epistemic costs of implicit racism last week. She was on campus as part of the Cognitive Science Speaker Series.
Dr. Gendler says having a society structured by race makes it impossible for citizens to be fully rational and anti-racist.
Today, a person can have completely sincere egalitarian and anti-racist beliefs. However, because they still live in a culture with racial categories, Gendler argues they also know about racial stereotypes.
Egalitarian people will still have racial stereotypes in their “conceptual repertoire”. They know that if they don’t believe that “minority = ‘x’”, they know many other people believe it.
Knowing that a stereotype exists but not endorsing it is enough to create a bias, Gendler argues.
Information about racist cultural associations is still available to people, and that availability passively activates the stereotypes in interactions.
“Having an association is having an association,” the philosopher says, whether or not you think it’s yours or somebody else’s.
Even anti-racist activists cannot escape from the cognitive effects of stereotypes. By being aware of and counteracting racial stereotypes, networks of associations are reinforced.
Gendler quotes civil rights
activist Jesse Jackson as an example. “There is nothing more painful to me,” Jackson says, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then [I] look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
“We build up clusters of associations which are activated automatically by the environment,” Gendler argues. “The presence of anything associated with a stereotype will activate trained associations.”
Encountering or thinking about a member of a category activates an alief. They can have an innate response to a member of another racial group. These responses (often) cannot be rationally controlled and they can run against our explicit beliefs.
The philosopher compares it
to setting your watch five minutes fast. You know the watch is faster but it still motivates you: “all your other systems over which you don’t have cognitive control activate.” Racism and xenophobia tap into the same mental processes.
We can’t avoid the mental role of categories either, she assures. They are not optional. Categories and stereotypes are tools the mind uses to operate in an incredibly complex world. The stereotype allows us to navigate a world that “exceeds our cognitive capacities.”
Just as we use categories to make sense of the physical world, Gendler says, we use categories to make sense of the social world.
This is problematic because studies have shown labelling causes attention deficits. When we interact with the world and make categories, we will have a tendency to identify congruent information and skip over incongruent information.
When we interact with strangers in the social world, different categories can form. People can identify strangers as a member of a similar in-group or an alien out-group.
Categorizing others as in-group/out-group affects the how we process visual information, Gendler says. She warns that we take in less information when interacting with a member of an out-group.
When you identify someone as a member of an out-group, she says, you’re using up cognitive resources. You have fewer “information slots” to separate the individual from the group.
Our minds are designed for cross-group similarities, says Gendler. They are not “optimal for individuation.”
This has major implications. Classifying the world in racial categories reduces the amount of specific information available for you, Gendler argues. This means your accuracy about the world and individuals is significantly reduced.
“You’re unable to take in [specific] information about individuals you encounter…You’re unable to perceptually take on information that might be valuable to you.“
These costs hold equally well for any stigmatized category—ability, sexuality, or gender.
Gendler says she wrote about racial inequality because her claims would be taken more seriously.
“Had I written about women,” she goes on, “I would have experienced much more resistance.”
She smiles, as pockets of men nervously laugh in the room.
Race is a case study for a problem that’s much more general in cognitive science, Gendler says, and the epistemic costs apply to other minorities. Stereotypes will continue to affect us, she says, whether we think we believe them or not.
