I Study Prejudice
Do I, as a white man, have anything to say?
This is another guest post by Joachim Krueger, a Professor of Psychology at Brown and prolific scholar and science communicator. You can find out more about him at his first guest post here; his second post at Unsafe Science can be found here. This is a slightly modified version of a post that first appeared at Psychology Today. New but relevant here, is that Professor Krueger was born in Germany.
By Joachim Krueger
Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish. —Phil Zimbardo, inviting us to wonder if he would have felt better had he been beaten up for being Italian.
Nazi! Nazi! —Local youths greeting me cheerfully outside of Toluca
Dismissing Ideas Because Those Who Present Them are White
A Lost Opportunity
A little while back, in the early days of the replication crisis in psychology and the hand-wringing over significance testing and p values, a graduate student approached four professors, asking them if they would present their views at a panel discussion. She had given this careful thought, and she approached faculty members she felt had relevant material and thoughts on the matter. This was shaping up to be a great moment for academic learning as lived experience: In-the-moment, spontaneous, honest, and without a syllabus. Then a female colleague announced she wanted to join the panel as a fifth member. This was wonderful news, but perhaps too late. We heard that the event was canceled. The four presenters all being white males did not sit well with—I am not sure with whom. I felt that a great learning opportunity had been missed, and I realized that my gender, in conjunction with the gender of my colleagues, had stimulated certain perceptions and judgments, that, from where I was sitting, felt discriminatory, damaging, and personally as well as professionally offensive. I did nothing besides grumble.
A Real Conversation-Stopper
More recently, I participated with a presentation on implicit bias in a lunch event at a federal district court. The room was full of members of the legal community, from the State Attorney General to interns. There were many white males, but also a reassuring degree of gender and ethnic diversity. A colleague and I reviewed and discussed psychological data pertaining to prejudice and discrimination. We presented data from a sample of methods, but focused—as requested—on evidence obtained with the implicit association test (Krueger, 2019a,b). We also reviewed some critical assessments of the method’s validity. These assessments were rather troubling, and we reported that even the advocates of the IAT no longer recommend that the test be used as a diagnostic instrument to uncover hidden racism within individuals. We then spent a considerable amount of time reviewing options for the legal community to improve the racial fairness of its procedures and outcomes. We particularly focused on social psychological elements of group deliberation and "shared cognition," which we think are most promising.
We received many questions, and the discussion was lively. Then, Boom! A long preface to a question I don’t even remember included the observation that the presentations were given by two white males. The question's text and tone made it clear that the intent of this rhetorical flare was dismissive, as if we had defended prejudice. Or does noting problems with an instrument measuring prejudice amount to the same thing? Do we want a society in which discrimination and disadvantage is studied only by those who experience it, perhaps on the view that only they truly understand? I am inclined to reject this idea. I would rather worry that in such a society, research findings would always struggle to find broad acceptance. As in the court and in the jury room, we need diversity among those who do the research. Indeed, I would be troubled if all students of prejudice were white males, but this is certainly not the case. To see if there is a troubling bias or imbalance, there is no substitute for looking at larger patterns—a point I emphasized in my presentation. Objecting to having two white males giving presentations is, on the face of it, a rhetorical and, as it were, a microaggressive maneuver. It is better to focus on the substance. This is as true in the courtroom as it is in the classroom.
How I stumbled into the Study of Prejudice
It started in graduate school at the University of Oregon in the 1980s. My first study failed to show a gender stereotype effect I was confident I would find. I then proceeded to vary the strength of the stereotype and the strength of the person-specific (or ‘individuating’) information. Both matter (Krueger & Rothbart, 1988). At some point, individuating information overwhelms the stereotype, which is good news. Personal characteristics and behavior do affect impressions and judgments. And so it is with implicit bias. As we get to know people, we show less unfair, race-driven, implicit associations (Rubenstein, Jussim, & Stevens, 2018). Again, this is good news.
Over the years, I revisited gender stereotypes several times, but also studied race bias in the U.S. (Krueger, 1996) and xenophobia in Germany (Aydin, Krueger, Frey, Kastenmüller, & Fischer, 2014). Other studies were designed to understand the effects of social categorization with minimal bases, as when groupings are created in the laboratory (DiDonato, Ullrich, & Krueger, 2011). Like many of my colleagues in social psychology, I have followed the lead of pioneers such as Gordon Allport or Henri Tajfel, who understood that prejudice and stereotyping are often intertwined with ordinary perceptual and cognitive processing. This is a very different view than the idea that prejudice and stereotyping are kinds of diseases that can be eradicated without changing anything else. For better or for worse, reality requires more flexible and nuanced strategies. Finding and refining them has kept us busy.
The German Experience
And why should I be engaged with this work as a white male? Is not anything I write tainted by privilege? This is a charge I can reject but cannot refute. To be refuted, it is much too nebulous. But I can say this: The German experience across the generations of my grandparents, my parents, and my own cohort offers a lot of material of the most dramatic type. Indeed, the landmark work on the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), which began with the need to understand Anti-Semitism, turned out to have tremendous influence on the entire discipline. I work as a link in a chain of those who try to understand intergroup perception and behavior, with all the good and the bad and the human we can find in it.
References
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Aydin, N., Krueger, J. I., Frey, D., Kastenmüller, A., & Fischer, P. (2014). Social exclusion and xenophobia: Intolerant attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 17, 371-387.
DiDonato, T. E., Ullrich, J., & Krueger, J. I. (2011). Social perception as induction and inference: An integrative model of intergroup differentiation, ingroup favoritism, and differential accuracy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 66-83.
Krueger, J. (1996). Personal beliefs and cultural stereotypes about racial characteristics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 536-548.
Krueger, J. I. (2019a). The decline of implicit bias. Psychology Today Online. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-among-many/201906/the-decli…
Krueger, J. I. (2019b). Implications of implicit bias. Psychology Today Online. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-among-many/201906/implicati…
Krueger, J., & Rothbart, M. (1988). Use of categorical and individuating information in making inferences about personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 187-195.
Rubinstein, R. S., Jussim, L., & Stevens, S. T. (2018). Reliance on individuating information and stereotypes in implicit and explicit person perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 75, 54-70.
You are too kind and self-questioning, Professor Krueger. It goes to your credit as a person and as a scholar. That you even entertain this question, "Do I, as a white man, have anything to say?" is testimony to your willingness to engage even the forces of obscurantism. Those who, without valid arguments or not willing to make the effort to find any, use an extracurricular trump card. It was done, you know, broadly and efficiently in other times and places. Scientists who questioned the Ptolemaic cosmography were accused of heresy, and silenced. The "he's a Jew" trump card was very popular in Nazi Germany. The ideologues have their goals, but the opportunist mass is quick to follow where some advantage for them may manifest through playing such cards. Academia was never above it.
And the problem with prejudice, is that we stand on a divide. There is a push, in today's culture, to completely dismiss the concept of common humanity and present the world as a battlefield of groups categorised by strict and shallow identities which (despite all the talk on intersectionality) are believed antithetical and forbidden to ever mingle and truly communicate. This push is a bid for power (because, much though Derrida was a bloated fraud, the entirety of his epistemological tools can perfectly be used against his present forgetful heirs), and not even by the supposedly disadvantaged groups, but by the increasing number of convenience activists who speak in their name and have the grit and tools to sway the credulous and well intentioned to follow their lead.
In the case of academia, to suppress rivals and competition and advance one's scholarly and institutional standing. In the case of politics, to push through rules that will allow more and more hooks to silence opposition. In the case of business, to pour money into a nearly infinite number of mainly ineffective training programmes aimed at enriching the programme's personnel and at instilling a creed that will in turn continue to feed the need for such training.
The entire ideological system works on grievances on one hand (which will attract almost everybody at one stage, because it is hard to find someone who has never been victimised in some respect), and a promise of salvation through dogmas on the other (another attractive thing, as it excuses people from having to think and question in unexpected ways). It is for all intents and purposes a proselytising lay religion. Like all such religions, it aims to become universally accepted and to annihilate opposition.
And another thought. The entire race thing, posed in the way it is posed in the US -- and bleeding, unfortunately, over all the English speaking countries, because of the reality of cultural hegemony -- is a peculiarly American curse. I do not know how much it stands out from within, but to an external eye it is blatant... this race concept based on skin colour comes directly from the racist past of the United States, it is a crude slaver mentality category that does not contemplate ethnicity or culture but a broad, vague phenotype by which to divide human beings into groups, always superior vs inferior.
The Europeans with pale skin are not the same "race". For over two millennia we talked of race to mean peoples with common background, culture, usages, and vague similar looks, all these together. One reads the texts up to the 18th century: the French are called a race, and so the English, and the Welsh, the Scots, the Germans, the Dutch and the Flemish. The same all over the continent: a thousand races, whose looks are the least distinguishing trait.
And Africans are not the same race either. Go tell that to Hutu and Tutsi and see where you end. One of my mates at Oxford was the son of a Zulu prince; he used to laugh when we spoke of racism (granted, it was the 70s), saying that he would take a white devil any time over a lowly Xhosa, and blamed the apartheid for having given power to a race, the Xhosa, whom his people considered inferior.
Populations all over the world entertain prejudices, and racial prejudices, according to their history and tradition. To overcome these, the tools of modern anti-western-anti-racism are not going to work. But they make for a lot of righteous claims that only remove the chance for discussion and the hope to find solutions, which can never be easy or one-sided.
The entire discourse today hinges on a concept of race that is the one developed during the 19th century and perfected by the theorists of Nazism. I am amazed that this does not get brought up more often. Perhaps it is another of our beloved taboos.
Prof Krueger was not just edited out but targeted for elimination started years ago, and culminated in what can only be described as a putsch..