25.4: Discrimination

When prejudice is widespread, it can lead to pervasive, even institutionalized, discrimination. Just fifty years ago in many parts of the United Sates, African Americans were required by law to sit at the back of the bus, use separate water fountains, and attend separate schools from those used by white students. And they were treated this way simply based on their membership in this group. We teach this in schools as if it were ancient history, but you likely know people who passed on an opportunity to fight in the civil rights movement.

Overt vs. Institutionalized Discrimination

We have already worked our way through a discussion of overt prejudice and discrimination, as well as the subtler phenomena of implicit bias. Even still, we have another significant component of discrimination to address – institutionalized discrimination. Remember, with overt discrimination, bigots are intentionally trying to cause harm and injury, and with implicit biases, people have unconscious expectations that result in discriminatory or prejudicial behavior. When we discuss institutionalized discrimination, we move past individuals and look at the way society itself allows for biased and unequal treatment. A helpful way to think about this is as a feedback loop – a root cause of implicit bias is institutional discrimination, but implicit biases make institutional discrimination worse.

While institutional discrimination happens in all sectors of society, it is best seen in law enforcement. Much of modern policing relies on what is known as pretext stops. A pretext stop is when a police officer stops you for a minor violation (tinted windows on your car, cruising, loitering) not because they necessarily want to enforce that particular town/city code, but because they want justification for questioning you further because they suspect something more criminal is going on. If you’ve heard about policing policies like ‘stop and frisk’ or ‘broken window’ they are built on pretext stops. The problem is, we are not all subject of pretext stops equally. Because the process starts with an officer’s desire to question someone, any biases they have, implicit or overt, influence the decision. As a result, people of color, especially males, are subject disproportionally to pretext stops. Very few police officers are thinking about harassing people because they are black, but that is often the result. To their eyes, white teens loitering looks like play, and black teens loitering looks like gang activity. A white man driving a BMW looks like normal business and a black man doing the same thing looks like theft. This institutional discrimination explains the data we see when, for instance, we look at drug use vs drug arrest rates. Black people are 2.7 times more likely to be arrested for drug related offenses, yet white people are more likely to use drugs (and both groups are equally likely to sell them). This is where the feedback loop comes full circle. Because people of color are arrested at higher rates, they are more likely to be viewed as criminal, and as a result, they continue to be the more likely subject of pretext stops in the first place.

In-groups vs. Out-groups

An in-group (“us”) is a group that a person belongs to (or wants to belong to), and identifies with. We are all members of a variety of in-groups, from small social clubs or cliques to being citizens of an entire country. Out-groups (“them”) are groups we don’t belong to, and don’t identify with. The less we identify and sympathize with a group, or the more we dislike it, the more “out” it is. What’s in and out depends on who you are. One person’s in-group (e.g., the Ku Klux Klan) will be many others people’s out-group.

There are various reasons why people identify with groups, including the fact that it helps foster and maintain self-esteem and a social identity. But whatever the exact causes, people think about their in-groups and outgroups in different ways. Discrimination is often based on long-smoldering resentment that goes back many centuries. Race is the most obvious, though not the only, example in the United States. Elsewhere it is religion: in Northern Ireland, it is Protestants vs. Catholics; in India, Hindus vs. Muslims. In India, there are also divisions between castes. In Africa, there are tribal hatreds like those in Rwanda between the Tutsis and Hutus. And gender and sexual orientation evoke discrimination almost everywhere. In Asia, for example, there are 76 million missing women—76 million fewer women than there should be, given the very nearly equal birth rates of males and females. This results from the fact that women in many societies are valued less than males, and so they receive less food, worse health care, and fewer resources generally.

Discrimination Can Be Easy

Studies show that discrimination against out-groups increases when times are hard, when money, jobs, or food become scarce. But it is also sobering to realize that prejudice and discrimination can spring up quickly, almost spontaneously, in a wide variety of situations.

In Chapter 23, we saw how quickly the guards in the Stanford Prison Study came to see their prisoners as almost subhuman. We also saw that even young children are not immune. Remember Jane Elliott’s third-grade class in Riceville, Iowa (23.1)? One day Elliott informed her students that brown-eyed children were smarter and better than blue-eyed children and so they should be treated better. The brown-eyed students were accordingly given various privileges and the blue-eyed students were subjected to rules that called attention to their new, inferior status.

Before the end of the day, the brown-eyed students were banding together and discriminating against their blue-eyed former friends; they fought with them and ostracized them. Meanwhile the blue-eyed students became angry, sullen, and withdrawn. The next day the roles were reversed.

Years later, many of the students felt that the experience had taught them things about discrimination that they would never have learned otherwise. If something like this can happen in a single day among friends, one can only imagine the effects of being treated like the brown-eyed children year after year in a setting that is never—unlike Elliott’s experiment—"called off.”

The Minimal Intergroup Discrimination Effect

Many studies show that we have a strong tendency to identify with groups, even when they are arbitrarily formed and short-lived. Groups formed based on meaningless or trivial criteria are called minimal groups, and this identification is known as the minimal intergroup discrimination effect. Once someone becomes a member of a group, they will tend to favor that group, even when the group is formed arbitrarily, as when students are randomly assigned, based on coin flips that they all observe, to one of two groups.

If a group member is then given a chance to divide rewards between members of their own group and the other group, most show marked in-group favoritism. This occurs even when they do not know the other members of their own group, will not get any of the rewards they are distributing to them, and their fellow group members cannot reward them in return. The mere membership in a group is often enough, without any selfish motives or long-term identification, to produce in-group bias. It is enough to make us like members of our group more and to treat them better.