25.1: Consequences of Prejudices and Stereotypes

The harmful effects of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination are all around us. At their worst, they can lead to institutionalized discrimination, slavery, and even genocide. But milder forms of prejudice have an adverse impact every day on people all around us. They can affect every aspect of a person’s life, from their opportunities as a child to their dignity and self-esteem. They also are bad for those who hold them; going through life hating people simply because they are members of some group is not a rewarding way to live.

The catalogue of atrocities resulting from prejudice and discrimination is virtually endless. According to our best scientific estimates, several centuries ago there were ten million Native Americans living in what is now the Continental United States and Canada; by 1900 the number had fallen below 400,000. Over 4,000 African Americans were lynched in the United States from the 1880s to the 1960s. And the list goes on and on. Violent hate crimes still occur, and there are still organized groups like the Klu Klux Klan and The Proud Boys whose chief purpose is to promote prejudice and violence. To a large segment of the U.S., it felt like these groups were on the decline, but we now know they mostly left public spaces to fester on the internet. It is now commonly accepted that white supremacist movements are on rise in the U.S., and once again becoming more public (for many people, they reentered the public discourse with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017). While it can be easy to focus on these major demonstrations of racial discrimination, doing so can also lead many to ignore far more common and subtle forms of discrimination that are all around us.

Implicit Bias

A study originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine that has been replicated several times at this point, demonstrates the impact of this subtler discrimination. In the study, actors claimed to have various symptoms in clinical settings with 700 doctors. The results found that black people, particularly black women, were less likely than white people to receive proper testing for serious heart disease—even when doctors believed that the black women had just as high a likelihood of benefiting from the test. We see a similar phenomenon when we look at how doctors assess pain. African Americans and Hispanics are less likely than white patients to receive pain medication, even when they report higher degrees of pain. Few (if any) of the doctors were overtly racist. But the results of their decisions on these matters result in lower quality of life and increased likelihood of death for people of color.

So, what’s going on in these cases? These doctors, and everyone else, have implicit biases. For the most part, those of us who are not explicit bigots think that, because we reject discrimination in principle, this it means that we act impartially and in non-biased ways. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The way society is structured, a lot of bias gets engrained in how we think. A little reflection might remind you of a time when you expected a person of color to be more aggressive than they turned out to be, of your surprise that a flamboyant teacher turned out to be straight, or the way you were bothered by the assertiveness of a woman when you would have easily accepted it in a man. All of these are examples of implicit biases manifesting themselves. Most people reject the idea that they have implicit biases, even after they have been pointed out to them. The great news here is, we don’t have to fight about it. You can test your implicit biases by taking an implicit bias test. There are several tests on a variety of implicit biases (gender, race, disability, etc., at: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Critical Reasoning

Stereotypes and prejudices have many causes and meet many needs. Some of the causes involve emotions and feelings that aren’t easily affected by evidence or reasoning, and so attempts to change them will certainly require more than careful and critical thinking.

But faulty reasoning does help foster and maintain stereotypes and prejudices. Since our concern in this book is with critical reasoning, we will focus on how the fallacies, biases, uncritical use of various heuristics, and other flawed patterns of thinking studied in earlier chapters help support stereotypes and prejudices. In short, this chapter is an application of our earlier work to a very important—but very difficult—social topic.

Although it would be too much to hope that clearer thinking alone would eliminate prejudice and discrimination, it would be a step in the right direction. Among other things, it would make it more difficult to defend stereotypes with bad reasoning; it would also help us think about these topics in a way that isn’t so clouded by emotions that we don’t think about them carefully.