Hello again. All right, we're going to continue talking about prejudice. And I want to make a really important point through an experiment we're going to talk about today. And that point is this. Yes, stereotypes play a role and that whole notion of having a false impression of some, for example, race or gender or whatever can make somebody act prejudicial. But, there's a whole lot more to prejudice than just stereotypes. In fact you can create prejudice essentially out of nothing. And that's what a really fascinating experiment from Sharif performed in the 1950s shows. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Let's get at it. All right, Week 6, Lecture 7. So I've entitled this Competition, Ignorance, Fear and Prejudice. Boy doesn't this sound like an uplifting lecture? [LAUGH] I think it'll be a cool lecture. It makes a really, really interesting point. To start off, we have to talk about this distinction that psychologists often draw between what are called in-groups and out-groups. Now, it's a very general term. In this case, these guys would all be part of an in-group. They would be part of the Batman group, I guess. But he's not really part of this group. He's separate from this group. Now, you can imagine a group of Spidermen too. And if there were a group of Spidermen, then he would be in that group. And he would be in the in group of Spidermen but for these guys, he would be part of their out group. So really, you can think of a group as people that share a religion, share a hobby, share a gender, share a choice of musical styles, some musical style they like, whatever. But the claim is that other people who share that with you are part of your In-Group and people that don't are part of your Out-Group. Now, here's a really important part, or thing that comes along I guess with In-Groups and Out-Groups if you just think about. So, let's imagine for me, an in group that I'm part of, I like to play guitar, so an in group I'm part of is guitar players and bands let's say. And so these are people I hang around with and get to know pretty well. As result, you know it's exactly that point, I get to know them. I hang around them, I interact with them. I learn how they will behave In response to certain things or certain behaviors of others. And I ultimately learn a very comfortable way of behaving with my in group, behaviors that I can emit that I think will be rewarded, that they will like, and that will make me a valued member of that in group. While I'm getting to know my in group, there could be other groups out there that I am not getting to know. This is where the ignorance comes in. There could be a group of flute players that I don't hang around with. Let's do that classical musicians, they tend to hang around with each other. I am more a rock kind of guy I hang around with rock people. So now if I suddenly find myself in a room full of classical musicians. I might feel uncomfortable I might feel like I don't really know what these people talk about, and I don't really know how to behave in ways that might offend them or not offend them. And I don't know how they will react to things, because i literally have no experience with them. So that ignorance reads a little bit of fear anxiety and discomfort. You really are not sure you are not comfortable around them and you have this hint of worry that maybe you will say something that'll make somebody upset. Or maybe they will behave in some way that you won't understand and interpret correctly. Okay, now this could just as well be a Caucasian person with a bunch of Asian people if they had very little knowledge of Asian people, and so they might feel really uncomfortable. It's a little of what you might feel if you ever travel to a very different culture and you have that sense of I'm not sure how to behave appropriately. That kind of notion. So, that comes along with in-groups and out-groups and that fear, that worry about not knowing, not understanding that group, not knowing how they behave, and maybe even having some misconceptions about how they behave, some false stereotypes, that can make us distrust members of that other group. And that distrust can turn into prejudicial behavior. So all of this was exemplified really well by a paper, experiment by Muzafer Sherif. This was done in the mid 50s and it's centered around a place called Robber's Cave. Essentially the experiment went like this. There were a bunch of children coming for summer camp. About 22 I think were coming for summer camp. They tended to be a pretty homogenous group. They were like white kids with a Protestant upbringing, relatively high intelligence, relatively high performing. They were about 5th grade by the way so 10 years old, 10,11, 12 years old. And they were very really similar to one other in terms of cultural backgrounds and such. What Sharif then did, is randomly assign them to two groups. So, when they came in, one kid was put in one group, the other kid was put up in another group. These groups were going to be put up in separate lodges. And a bunch of other things were going to happen and I'll tell you about in a moment but let me stress this random assignment again. Because this children are randomly being assigned to one group or the other, there is no difference like if we think of that stereotyping, it's not that we have all of one race in one group In a different race than another or all of one culture in one different culture or all of one gender in one in a different than the other. This kids are all, for all intents and purposes, they're the same kinds of kids in both groups. So, there shouldn't be any prejudice based on any of those other kinds of factors we talked about, skin color, background, any of that. These guys are very similar. And yet, Sharif thought he could make them essentially act prejudicial towards one another. How did he do this? Well there were a number of stages to his experiment. So first he randomly assigned the children to these two groups. Now in Stage 1, each group hung around themselves a lot. So start to think of these now as in-groups, and they were given some tasks to do as groups. So specifically they were supposed to first of all come up with a name of their group. And those two groups ultimately became known as the Eagles and the Rattlers. Like rattle snake's rattlers. So that was, you may have heard every now and then in popular culture you may hear people refer to the eagles versus the rattlers and usually they're talking about this specific experiment when they're doing that. Each group created a flag, a sort of logo for their group and they did a bunch of activities within their cabin. And the idea here was to form strong with in-group ties. So the kids got to know each other in their group, but they didn't get to know the other group. The groups were kept separate. So they end up with one group they get to know pretty well and this other group. So let's say I'm an eagle. I get to know the eagles quite well. I get to know how to behave, everything I told you about before. I know what jokes they find funny, what jokes they don’t find funny and slowly I start just start telling the right kind of jokes, doing the right kinds of behavior. But there’s this other group out there and I’m not sure what they're doing. They're creating a name, they created a flag, they're hanging out together, but I don't get to interact with them, and so I don't get to know them. So that's Stage 1. We're all set up. Now we get Stage 2. Stage two involves competitions. So it's summer camp, after all, but in this case, they didn't just go canoeing, for example, they would have a canoe race. Or they would have the little races races, or steal the flag kind of games, or various competitions of that sort, and it was set up so that it was always the eagles versus the rattlers. So there would be an eagles team in every competition, and there would be a rattlers team in every competition and they would be constantly pitted against one another. That's the competition. So we have this in-group out-group dynamic we've set up. Now we've added in competition. That seems to be all it takes to produce prejudice. Okay, and that's evidence by this graph here from the actual study. What we have here is basically an analysis of the comments that the children made about members of their own group or members of the other group, and whether those comments were unfavorable or favorable. Were they saying nice things or nasty things? And what you see is for the cross-groups, the out-group here. So the dotted line means this is an eagle talking about a rattler, and this is a rattler talking about an eagle. But in both cases you see when they are talking about the out group they are using a lot of unfavorable terms. Not many favorable terms and this is especially true. The opposite is especially true with the in group. Okay, with the in-group they almost saying nothing negative about members of their in-group, almost everything they say is positive. So they're very positive towards their in-group, which I guess you could say is okay. But this is the little scary part that the in-group that they start to say nasty things about people on that other team. And they start to talk about them in derogatory terms, they start to act prejudicial, like we're better than they are. Now, okay, you sent your kid to summer camp and this is what some guy does to them, he creates prejudicial behaviors? Well, there were other measures of prejudicial behaviors they found too, and they actually got to a point with this experiment where they thought, this worked better than we thought. Better, but better meaning we've produced prejudice. Even without any difference of skin color anything like that. What are we going to do now? Well stage three was meant to look at, once you created prejudice, how can you try to eliminate it? And what stage three involved, was having groups join forces to defeat a common enemy. So literally, they say okay, we have this separation going on, this competition going on were not going to start hanging around together in fact we have some problem with the camps so for example, we have an issue with water. We're going to need to get more water to the camp. And we're going to need to build certain contraptions and do things to make this happen. So the lack of water became a common enemy, something they both needed. And so they had to work together to get it, and they continue to do these sort of tasks with the children. Producing challenges that they had to answer together and as that happens, so let me parse this for you a little bit. This is similar to what we were looking at before, but this is really their friendship choice. So at the end of Stage 2, if you ask them who they were friends with, they were massively friends with their own group not very much with the other. And that's true of the rattlers over here and that's true of the eagles. But once we got them working together and doing things together that bias still holds. They still stuck mostly with the group they knew. But you see these outgroup choices going up. They're staring to like some of the kids in the other group, especially the rattlers are starting to like some of the eagles, but even the eagles are starting to like some of the rattlers. Maybe the rattlers are just not as likeable. [LAUGH] Who knows? But you're seeing a little bit of this change of dynamic, a less prejudicial behavior. This is the same sort of thing plotted in a different group. This is about the best friends. So before these cooperative activities were introduced, you see that best friend choices from the other group were very low. So very few eagles picked rattlers as their best friend. And vice versa, but as they started to work cooperatively, now we bump these up to 20 at 35%. So we're getting much higher rate of somebody having a best friend in their out group. Okay, what does this say? Well, what it's really saying is, if you want to defeat prejudice, you have to defeat the ignorance and the best way to defeat the ignorance is to have the prejudicial groups interact with one another. Have them get to know each other. Once you get to know that group that you're a little worried about, you usually find out there's nothing to worry about. That, yeah they behave a little differently. Maybe they dress a little differently, maybe their customs are a little different. But underneath it all, they're more similar than different. And as you get to know people, let's say of another culture, another race, you begin to realize more and more with experience that there really is no need to fear. And once you've learned the right way to behave around those groups, that worry goes down, the discomfort goes down, the distrust goes down and the prejudicial behavior goes down with it. Okay, this has been echoed in a number of other studies that have also, for example, looked at people giving prejudicial remarks, kids giving prejudicial remarks against the disabled. But once they, if you asked them to work with a disabled student for awhile, and the more they got to understand what it was like to be a disabled child, the less prejudicial they would act towards them. So, education, experience tends to be the best enemy of prejudice. Now, of course it's not gone. As I understand it, when the kids left this camp they still preferred their own group over the other one. It's not like it was totally eliminated. But at least it shows the path to doing that. Okay, so more things for you to find out more. I couldn't find actually a good video on the Robber's cave experiment itself. Which is a little surprising it's gotta be there somewhere. But I did find a couple of things and this one especially you'll find fascinating. But let me begin here, Roots of discrimination. What this is, is an academic style talk. I thought you should see this. This is the way, if we have a guest speaker at the university, this is the way they give a talk. And this guest speaker's at Simon Fraser University, I think he's one of their faculty, and he's talking about to the roots of discrimination. So he will go through, in a relatively, maybe a 40 minute lecture, a lot of the issues that we've been talking about. But he'll bring them together in a good way. So a nice way to bring them all together. This one is just fascinating. You have to watch this video. It's from the 50s. It's a teacher, I almost she can't believe she did what she did. But she was wanting to teach her students about prejudism. And so she wanted them to feel what it was like to be prejudice against. And so some of her children had brown eyes, some of them had blue eyes. These were all white caucasian kids in sort of 1950s America. But she started to say, you know what, we're going to favor certain people on certain days. Maybe originally it was those with the brown eyes are better than people with blue eyes, and she made people with blue eyes wear something to show that they had blue eyes. And she kept pointing out every time a blue eyed child did something a little less than intelligent, and she kept praising the brown eyes every time they did something good. And really pointed it, like wow. And she kept saying brown eyes really are smarter. Brown eyes really are more polite, etc. And then she reverses it the next day. She reverses the discrimination around so that every child felt what it was like to be both favored, and a non-favored based only on some physical characteristic they have no control over, the color of their eyes. And it really is fascinating, really makes you think. There's also a version of this done on adults, which you'll find linked after you look at this. I would check that out too, because it's really fascinating to see adults put in that same situation. So check that out, really worth checking out. I couldn't find a good video on the Robbers Cave Experiment, however I did find a couple of good websites devoted to it. One that kind of walks you through, to some extent both of them walk you through. So, if you're interested in more details about how everything went down in the Robbers Cave Experiment, you'll find them there, okay? So check that out. By the time you're done, I think you will have a much better sense of the underpinnings of prejudicial behavior. And for me, I find it really useful, because as much as we all want to say we're not prejudicial in any way. Again, the roots of prejudice come from a lack of knowledge about some outgroup, and anytime we don't know an outgroup very well, it's very natural for us to feel uncomfortable. So it's not necessarily, the very basic part of prejudism isn't that you're an evil person, it's that I have no schemas. It's like someone's thrown me in some weird restaurant where I don't know how things work. And I don't want to make a fool out of myself, and I don't feel uncomfortable, and I don't like this weird restaurant. That's the basis of prejudism. It's a natural reaction to a lack of experience and lack of knowledge. And so it's good to kind of think of it that way, because then we can think about how to defeat it. In general and specifically within ourselves. All right, so lots to think about there. We've been talking about a lot of dark topics, so I figured for the last lecture this week, I would turn to the psychology of attraction. Something a little more upbeat. See you there, bye bye.
