PSYCH MATTERS: Moving beyond racism at Iowa State

Overview of Editorial Series

The Department of Psychology would like to build a more welcoming climate for racial/ethnic minority students, staff and faculty at Iowa State.

One way in which we would like to demonstrate our commitment to reducing racism and discrimination is this editorial series.

For the next several months, educational pieces on the psychology of racism and personal stories written by various faculty and students will be shared. Last week, we heard from Veronica Middlebrooks, a senior majoring in Biology. Veronica shared some of the challenges she faced as a woman of color, coming to college at Iowa State after growing up in Chicago.

The next three pieces will provide some basic scientific background on interpersonal relationships and intergroup relations from a social psychology perspective on stereotyping and prejudice.

The fourth will provide data from a 20-year study of African-Americans in Iowa and their experiences of racism that was conducted by researchers at Iowa State. The next two pieces will allow readers to hear about the journeys of a faculty member and a graduate student as they have navigated issues of power and privilege over their lives. The final set will be personal stories from undergraduate students of color, describing their experiences at Iowa State.

This series was edited bv Stephanie Carrera, graduate student in psychology and Carolyn Cutrona, professor and chair of psychology

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In this three-part series, we plan to cover the basic scientific background on interpersonal relationships and intergroup relations from a social psychology perspective on stereotyping and prejudice.

To begin, imagine a chair. What did you imagine? Did it have four legs? A back? A pair of arm rests?

Now, imagine a bird. Did it have wings? Can it fly? Does it sing?

In both cases, you imagined a specific example of a category of objects (chairs and birds). We learn to categorize all types of objects in our environment, sometimes through direct teaching — as when a parent points to an object or a picture of an object and says “chair” or “bird;” sometimes indirectly by watching someone interact with an object, such as sitting on a chair. We learn what different categories of objects are like, their visual and physical characteristics, what they’re used for, whether we like them or not.

With practice and experience we automatically associate a whole host of meanings and inferences about the category, to the point that these meanings and inferences occur so quickly and automatically that we are not aware that we have made any associations and inferences. We become aware of our automatic inferences about a category or object when faced with a glaring exception, such as a bean bag chair or penguin.

Several points emerge from consideration of the human propensity and capacity to categorize objects. First, categorization is a necessary human cognitive process. As infants become more knowledgeable about their environment, they begin to understand it, improve their ability to interact with it and become able to control some aspects of it. As they begin to recognize faces, especially faces of their caretakers, emotional reactions become tied to that recognition, and they begin to have a direct impact on the caretaker’s behavior by their own facial expressions.

Second, awareness (conscious processing) is not necessary for categorization to take place. Third, the automatization of categorization processes is a useful aspect of categorization. It frees up working memory to pay attention to novel and important aspects of one’s environment. If you had to consciously think about all your furniture every time you entered it (trying to recall what a chair or bed is for), you couldn’t accomplish anything else.

Fourth, sometimes our automatic categorization processes lead us to make mistakes. Sometime we mis-categorize objects (penguins as fish), or we overgeneralize the function of a properly categorized object (sitting on a fragile antique museum chair). Usually, such errors are relatively minor, not very costly, and are a small price to pay relative to the great gain we receive by freeing up cognitive resources to allow us to pay attention to novel and important features of our current situation.

Fifth, such automatic learning and categorization processes operate on much more complicated sets of events and objects than furniture or animals. For example, chess players learn about specific types of attacks and defenses. Chess masters have learned them so well that they can glance at a board mid-game and automatically identify what each player has done and is attempting to do. All expertise has these characteristics.

Humans easily learn about and become “experts” on specific people and categories of people, such as family, friends, old people, college students, University of Iowa students, enemies, Americans, football players … the list is endless. From the moment we are born, we learn to categorize people.

Learning to categorize people is usually a useful aspect of being human. Evolutionarily, the ability to quickly judge people — as friends or foes; in-group members or strangers; sources of food, friendship and support versus threats to one’s life or property — was very important. These learning and categorization processes are hard wired into us. However, this does not mean that we are helpless automatons, preordained to behave in primitive ways based on automatic categorical beliefs or feelings. We have a sophisticated thoughtful system that can override primitive impulses, and can learn to change the content of our “automatically” generated and activated categories.

Here is a good time to pause for some definitions that will be useful in our further discussions. Stereotypes can be thought of as the “cognitive” or the “belief” aspect of categories of people. Some examples of stereotypical beliefs common in the United States include: Asians are good at math; Blacks are lazy; Whites are racist; Muslims are violent; professors are absent-minded; women are helpful; blondes are stupid.

We close this article with a few additional facts. (1) Stereotypes sometimes have a grain of truth in them. For example, Asian-Americans and Asians tend to score higher on math tests than do other races. There are multiple valid reasons for this, mostly having to do with culture and practice/effort, but those reasons are irrelevant for our present purposes. (2) Some stereotypical beliefs are more accurate than others. For example, in my youth I recall hearing a sports announcer voice a then-common race-based belief that Blacks in America were over-represented in professional sports because of an extra tendon in their feet, a totally false belief. (3) Even stereotypes that have a grain of truth can be harmful.

This is true for at least two reasons. First, within any stereotypical category of people there is a wide range of characteristics — some white men can jump, some Latina/o Americans are excellent scientists, some women are great fighter pilots. Second, stereotypical beliefs tend to lead to inappropriate behaviors toward members of the stereotyped group. If your automatic expectation concerning a young black male approaching you on the street is one of danger, you may automatically display emotional and behavioral cues that appear defensive and apprehensive, cues that alert the other person to be wary and suspicious of you. You then interpret the wariness and suspicious behavior as confirming your expectation of hostility, which further increases your stereotyped behavior.