Why I am a Universalist

Can we end prejudice by curing those who have it?

This is a guest post by Joachim Krueger, a Professor of Psychology at Brown and prolific scholar and science communicator. You can find out more about him here, including why he recently resigned as a consulting editor at Perspectives on Psychological Science and from The Association for Psychological Science. As usual, when I host a guest writer here, it is because I think the essay is worthwhile, interesting, and food for thought; it does not mean that I necessarily endorse every claim within it.

This is a slightly modified version of an essay that first appeared in Psychology Today.

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Universalists versus Particularists in Psychology

In psychology, a universalist is someone who thinks that there are general processes and mechanisms that drive human experience and behavior in whatever particular group or social category an individual belongs to. A particularist, by contrast, believes much what is interesting is moderated by context or specific to a domain. Cultures, subcultures, and even individual persons are the proper units of analysis according to this view. To the particularist, it is essential to understand the unique psychological make-up of a group (or person) in order to understand what members of that group do to others and why.

A universalist does not deny (that would be foolish) that groups differ in their beliefs and behaviors. They do so for historical or cultural reasons, power imbalances between them, and differences in the information available to them. The universalist also believes that it is these factors that give us groups that appear and smell differently can be studied and expressed in terms of general processes and mechanisms. In other words, what is interesting at the particular level can ultimately be derived from and explained in terms of general processes and mechanisms.

People who have not studied psychology, and even many people who have, have a great fondness for particularism. They believe that either there are no unversal processes or mechanisms, or if there are, they are too generic to explain anything of interest at the particular level. Observing intergroup conflicts, for example, particularists notice who does what to whom, the differences in power, and the differences in what representatives of these groups say. A particularist outlook brings the temptation to attribute these observed differences to essential differences residing in the individual members of these groups. The result is a moral worldview instead of a scientific one. Particularists see groups composed of good people and groups composed of bad people. They see victims and aggressors, the hunted and the hunters, the oppressed and the exploiters. They commit the ultimate attribution error as Tom Pettigrew (1979) once called it by failing to distinguish between the causes and the consequences of intergroup differences and conflict.

“What is Wrong with Them?”

The field of social psychology has always lived with the tension between universalism and particularism. Some of the founders hoped to build a science based on first principles and their implications (e.g., the two Allports, Kurt Lewin, Henri Tajfel), whereas others asked “What’s wrong with these (particular groups of) people?” The what's-wrong-with-them question guided many particularist attempts to understand, explain, and eliminate Anti-Semitism, Anti-Black prejudice, sexism, ageism, and other -isms. Lately, it seems that particularism is de rigeur. People (and scientists) ask ‘What is wrong with men (white people, Hutus, the Han Chinese, Hamas, Israelis, Bavarians, the Belgians, Ivy Leaguers, etc.).’ Once the question is posed this way, and a psychological rather than a historical or sociological level of analysis is sought, one looks for psychological correlates of group membership. What psychological characteristics are more common in the designated oppressor group than in presumed victim group? The most prized psychological correlates are biases and beliefs because they seem more psychological than behavior.

To illustrate the particularist project consider one bias and one belief:

The most popular bias is an implicit one, cleverly measured with the IAT, the Implicit Association Test. The IAT has become a household term and I trust you know where to find a website for self-testing. Once you discover that you are biased against, say, the Moravians, the ‘morally appropriate’ response is contrition, awe at the ingenuity of the researchers, and a resolve to eliminate your bias by whatever means necessary. Although the IAT has been shown to pick up ingroup favoritism in ad hoc lab groups, that is, although it can be used to explore universalist ideas, its popularity stems from its association with real groups. It is the members of a group, and thereby the group as a whole, that come to be seen as psychologically problematic. Implicit biases, besides being seen as morally reprehensible, are considered dangerous because they are thought to cause discriminatory behavior. Indeed, there are correlations between IAT scores and discrimination, but these correlations are small and not necessarily causal (Oswald et al., 2013). The universalist's response is that there are probably structural or historical factors, which when combined with universal processes of the psychology of social categorization, give rise to both intergroup differences in bias and discriminatory behavior.

A popular belief system is SDO, or Social Dominance Orientation. Individuals who score high on SDO endorse statements such as “Superior groups should dominate inferior groups,” or “We should not push for group equality” (Pratto et al., 2013). SDO scores tend to be higher in dominant than in disadvantaged groups (the test is written in a way that virtually guarantees it) and they are correlated with authoritarianism, conservatism and a host of other reactionary beliefs. People may believe what they want in a free society, and beliefs such as those tapped by the SDO scale are not factually wrong; they are politically and morally repugnant to those who do not share them. The question is rather whether such beliefs cause unfair or illegal behavior toward others based on their group membership. In fact they do. Kteily et al. (2011) found that SDO predicted negative outgroup affect among White college students four years later. Nonwhites were not tested. In short, beliefs like Social Dominance Orientation are more prevalent in socially dominant groups and hence contribute to the maintenance of social dominance. A universalist would see it this way and ask how certain groups became dominant in the first place.

Consider a hypothetical example. The Bohemians dominate the Moravians socially, economically and culturally, and they score higher on the SDO scale, which makes no direct reference to any specific group (the two sample items comprise half of the 4-item short scale, where the other two items are non-specific as well). Further, we find that SDO mediates the relationship between group membership (being Bohemian instead of Moravian) and oppression. The goal is to end the oppression of the Moravians by eroding the SDO among the Bohemians. This goal can be achieved if there are no other factors causing the oppression of the Moravians by the Bohemians. If, however, there are other historical or economical factors that led to Bohemian dominance as well as a higher endorsement rate of SDO, reducing SDO will not end discrimination. This is a possibility a universalist would want to check. One possibility with regard to origins is that there is a ‘natural’ or ‘random’ distribution of SDO scores across groups. That is, there are no group differences in belief. However, once one group becomes dominant for whatever historical or economic reasons, those among its members who happen to have high SDO scores, will have more opportunities to oppress others by virtue of acting on their SDO beliefs.

Leave Moralizing and Pathologizing at the Doorstep

Useful as research along particularistic lines is, it shortcuts the common humanity of the privileged and the disadvantaged. The result is an applied kind of action research (a term introduced by Kurt Lewin, a universalist) and a tendency to look for groups – and the individuals they comprise – who are at fault. Particularistic research can be divisive even if its stated intent is the opposite. Particularistic research has a tendency to pathologize the psychology of some groups. It has a tendency to moralize and antagonize groups and its members and thereby split society. Again, this is the opposite of the intended effect.

There must be a better way, and I think there is. Universalist social psychology explores the basic building blocks of our perceiving, feeling, and thinking that contribute to discriminatory intergroup attitudes and behavior in lab groups and among real groups depending on their historical/economic context. Moralizing and pathologizing can be left at the doorstep.

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References

Kteily, N. S., Sidanius, J., & Levin, S. (2011). Social dominance orientation: Cause or mere effect? Evidence for SDO as a causal predictor of prejudice and discrimination against ethnic and racial outgroups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 208-214.

Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P. E. (2013). Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105, 171-192.

Pettigrew, T. F. (1979). The ultimate attribution error: Extending Allport’s cognitive analysis of prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5, 461-476.

Pratto, F. et al. (2013). Social dominance in context and in individuals. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 587-599.

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Krueger’s postscript:

Upon reflection I sent a letter to my mentor at the University of Oregon, Mick Rothbart, to say this:

I tried to put into words a major lesson I learned in Oregon (from you!), namely that the study of specific groups of oppressors and victims is fine for what it is, but that the finest research is that which extracts general underlying principles and mechanisms. I have always borne that in mind, even when using real groups in research. The goal has always been to drill down to what is human, all too human (and not "what is wrong with the Lombards?").