Fixing Fear-Driven Racial Bias

Racial bias is caused by natural cognitive biases that all of us have.

Availability Heuristic

“How much should you worry about hurricanes, nuclear power, terrorism, mad cow disease, alligator attacks, or avian flu? And how much care should you take in avoiding risks associated with each? What, exactly, should you do to prevent the kinds of dangers that you face in ordinary life?”—Nudge by Cass Sunstein & Richard Thaler.

Most people, liberals and conservatives alike, rely on accessibility, salience, and availability. They will overestimate risks where examples are easier to come to mind, where the cause of death is vividly and easily imagined. People will overestimate the probability of a tornado as being much higher than it is, and then underestimate (by a factor of 20) the frequency of asthma attacks. People will put in great efforts to oppose nuclear power because of its risks, and then do absolutely nothing to protect themselves against the far greater risk of dying of stroke.

Generalization & In-Group/Out-Group Biases

Side note: I did my honors senior thesis on in-group/out-group biases as applied to facial recognition.

The ability to generalize to a group from individual examples is an invaluable part of your cognitive system. Without it, we’d be pretty useless. Imagine if every time you got into a new car you had to relearn how to drive it as if you had never driven a car before. It is even more invaluable that we are able to do this socially. By being able to assume a general set of assumptions about what people are like, we free up our time and abilities to figure out what it is about the individuals close to us that really do make them unique. If we had to start over from scratch each time, socializing would be almost prohibitively arduous and overwhelming.

We have, however, neither the time nor ability to do this with every individual we come across, particularly in urban and densely populated environments. That task is prohibitively arduous and overwhelming. So we stick to figuring out a handful of people—-our coworkers and bosses, our friends, our family. We give up on the rest, because there is not enough time in the day. And we all have implicitly agreed to this. We don’t expect people outside these circles to really know us, and they don’t expect (and, in fact, might not even welcome) efforts to get to know them either.

This allows stereotypes to blossom.

For my senior thesis, I studied the other-race effect, which is the phenomenon where people have a hard time recognizing other-race faces in comparison to how well they do recognizing in-race faces.** Researchers have been able to recreate this effect between individuals of the same race separated by artificial group classifiers. They’ve found this in individuals who are told that the faces they are shown in the learning stage of the experiment belong to individuals who go to a rival college, or who belong to a different personality type (Red vs. Green) as determined by a (secretly fake) personality test administered at the beginning of the experiment. We don’t even pay attention enough to be able to recognize people who we have just been told differ from us in some way.

Decades of social psychology research has demonstrated that people are way more likely to generalize from the actions of one individual to the entire group if that individual is a member of an out-group rather than an in-group. So, for example, if someone comes across one person from that rival school who is a jerk, that person is far more likely to conclude that everybody at that rival school is a jerk, but if someone across a person from his/her own school, that person will only conclude that that specific person is a jerk. Everybody does this to some extent.

Applied to Segregation, Fear, and Race.

For people who go through most of their lives without substantial exposure to people of other races, their in-group will most definitely be defined by that person’s race. They have had their entire lives to allow stereotypes to accumulate without any counterexamples.

To members of this community, when a White person commits an atrocious crime, they do not even process it as a crime by a White person. As a member of their own in-group, they will process the crime as a crime by an individual, not as an individual who is a member of a group. It’s not Jimmy, a White person, who committed a violent crime. No, that’s Jimmy, Jimmy committed a violent crime, Jimmy is such a terrible person.

Some Black Americans are dangerous. And that is, unfortunately, all that is enough to make people who have never had any substantial exposure to Black Americans fear all Black Americans. It doesn’t matter whether a Black American is more or less likely to commit crime than other racial groups. It doesn’t matter if most are peaceful, productive members of society.

Only a few examples are enough to trigger generalization and the availability heuristic.

Imagine you’re in a spooky deserted forest in the middle of nowhere and you’re carrying a gun and there are myths/rumors that it’s haunted by dangerous scary things that kill really quickly. You hear a sound, and something moves towards you quickly. What do you do?

A not unsubstantial portion of people (particularly those who scare easily) will shoot at it. If 15 seconds later they realize they’ve just killed a gentle & majestic unicorn, they’ll probably feel a lot of emotions, but if somebody later accuses them of being biased against unicorns they are probably not going to react well.

The outrageousness, of course, is that (unarmed) black teenagers are not unicorns in spooky, deserted, rumoured-to-be-haunted forests. But the problem is that to the average Caucasian police officer in Ferguson, Missouri or Fox News anchor, they are just as scary. The even more tragic part is that this fear is not driven by evil, it is driven by unconscious cognitive systems that all of us have.

A grad student at my undergrad, Sophie Lebrecht, conducted fascinating research that showed that you can actually reduce implicit biases (stereotypes) of racial groups by training people to recognize other-race faces. (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004215). Basically, if you teach people to view individuals of another race as individuals to tell apart, then they will stop having stereotypical views of that race.

These tragedies are happening because these armed police officers are genuinely afraid. It is being condoned and perpetuated because the surrounding White community is afraid. You cannot reason with fear. You cannot tell somebody that his/her fear is unreasonable; the only way to overcome fears is to face them and have nothing negative happen. Phobias are extreme examples and hey, we still find that the most effective way to treat phobias is to have the person face the fear (and that telling them the fear is unreasonable still doesn’t work).

No matter how many times you tell a child there are no monsters in the closet/under the bed, it won’t make a difference. For those of you who had this childhood fear, you didn’t grow out if because your parents told you it was stupid or just because you got older. Many of us who had this fear eventually grew out it because night after night we went to sleep in the dark, and woke up without a monster eating us. If you knew of even one story of one classmate who was eaten by a monster hiding in the closet/under the bed in the dark, you’d never sleep in the dark again. If it wasn’t a classmate but instead a story posted on an unreliable blog on the internet, most of you would’ve gotten past it, but those more prone to fear would still be keeping the nightlight business fairly profitable.

Some of us rather rational people still retain phobias because we didn’t face them. To give some easy examples, I still won’t even touch dead spiders because for my entire life family members and friends have taken care of them for me. I can’t even tell you what I’m afraid of, exactly, because I understand rationally that a dead spider can’t do anything to me, but every time I even try I get so overwhelmed with fear that I just can’t do it. Conversely, I used to be terrified of flying, but 7 years of going to college/law school on the opposite side of the country from home forced me into taking so many cross-country flights with enough frequency that now I have no fear at all, even when terrible turbulence hits.

If we want people to stop being afraid of Black Americans, 2 things need to happen:

1) We need to find a way for fearful White Americans to interact with Black Americans with nothing of interest happening.

2) We need to find a way for fearful White Americans to view Black Americans as individuals rather than members of the social group, Black Americans.

For clarity, the nothing of interest happening is the easy part, it’s the getting them to interact part that has been hard. I’m not sure exactly how to do this (training individuals in other-race facial recognition? Cross-racial Scrabble tournaments???), but I’m pretty sure that the accumulation of decades of social science research suggests that this is the only way.

Discussions of race with academic words like privilege etc. among liberals is fine, but it will never work when crossing the political divide. Theoretical rational discussion won’t calm fear.

Is it unfair that Black Americans have to put up with this? Absolutely it’s unfair. Efforts shouldn’t have to be made for White Americans to not fear Black Americans. It’s offensive, and insulting, that this is the case. That doesn’t change the fact that it is, however, how it is. So I’d like to encourage my fellow Americans to discuss this—how, exactly, can we calm this fear?

A first step involves reframing this as an issue of racism. Put more finely, it’s not. Racism, as defined by Wikipedia, is “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” While this sort of racism does exist, it is not the driving force of modern day problems in race-relations.

This is an issue, to put it technically, of an error in a cognitive system that is disparately impacting how people process data of people belonging to a race.

Possible ideas include implementing a facial training program similar to that used in the study above. Implement it as training for the police. Implement it as part of our K-12 education. Instead of telling the police that they’re racists, offer training to help increase their accuracy in assessing risk/threat. For those that demonstrate that they don’t have this error, congratulate them. For those that do, encourage them to keep practicing.

We’re trying to fix a system error in cognitive processing. It’s a bug; let’s fix the bug together.