Cultural Behavior Is the Behavior of the Prejudiced Toward the Hated Group

This past weekend, I listened to a recent episode of The Hidden Brain radio show titled The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases. The following are my excerpts from the program: 

"In places where implicit bias is higher than average, police shootings of minorities are also higher than average…. 

Unconscious biases are the unconscious attitudes we have in our minds that shape the ways we interact with the world.

 Implicit bias is like the smog that hangs over a community. It becomes the air that people breath. Or, as Harvard Psychology professor Mahzarin Banaji might say, “the thumbprint of the culture is showing up in the minds of the people living in that community.”…

 When you look at Google search terms in aggregate, it can tell you with great precision which areas will see the most hate crimes….

 When a problem has spread within a community, when it has become part of the culture, you can’t fix it by simply focusing on individuals.

 In Mahzarin’s view, you can’t easily erase implicit bias because you can’t erase the effect of the culture when people are living day in and day out in that same culture….

 We can overcome our stereotypes by exerting cognitive control over these biases…. They might be able to exert control – to use cognitive resources to avoid showing stereotypic bias in their decisions, but, when those resources are compromised, they can’t do it and they can be compromised in a variety of ways…. While you can’t train people not to have unconscious bias, you can do things to make it less likely that people will be effected by their bias…. Giving people an opportunity to stop for a second to make a decision consciously and deliberately can reduce the effect of implicit bias….

 Individuals can do their part to limit the effects of bias on their behavior, but if you want to fix the bias itself, that takes the whole village….

 Liberal black judges get reversed more often than liberal white judges…. It’s one thing to appoint people of color, but for diversity to actually take root and flourish, the entire ecosystem has to embrace the newcomers and their ideas. If it doesn’t, diversity ends up being mostly about optics.”

 This is extremely important information which is based upon the research by Mahzarin Banaji, Eric Hehman, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Joshua Correll, and Maya Sen.  

As set forth above, there is a relationship between implicit bias and hate crimes.  

While hatred against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity is not a crime, it is a bias. In fact, that’s the distinguishing feature of a hate crime.  

 The following is the FBI’s definition of a hate crime:

"A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a 'criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.' Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties."

While hatred against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity isn’t a crime, it is carefully taught.

“Prejudice is not inherited; it is learned, first from parents and then from an ever widening circle of people and institutions ranging from relative to schools. One of the pioneer scholars of racial prejudice, Gordon W. Allport, found that children can learn bigotry in two basic ways: by adopting the prejudice of their parents and other family members and from the cultural environment, or by being raised in such a way that they acquire suspicions, fears and hatreds that sooner or later focus on minority groups. But the learning of prejudice is a complicated matter for children and it takes a long time.”

The teaching process involves stereotyping because we’re talking about hatred of entire groups. And, as set forth above, that is an aspect of implicit bias.  

Stereotype is defined as "A widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing."

Kenneth Cloke, Director of the Center for Dispute Resolution and President and co-founder of Mediators Beyond Borders explains "How to Stereotype" as follows: 

• "Pick a characteristic
• Blow it completely out of proportion
• Collapse the whole person into the characteristic
• Ignore individual differences and variations
• Ignore subtleties and complexities 
• Ignore our common humanity
• Make it match your own worst fears
• Make it cruel."

The definition of culture set forth in Live Science includes religion and is explained as follows:

"Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. 

The Center for Advance Research on Language Acquisition goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization. Thus, it can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group.  

'Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and a million other things,' Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London, told Live Science....

 No matter what culture a people are a part of, one thing is for certain, it will change."

Notice that it’s referring to a cultural behavior as how a particular culture behaves toward others. This is consistent with the information set forth in the article from which the excerpt on prejudice was taken. That article refers to a the behavior of the prejudiced person toward the hated category.

Because religious leaders can and do carefully teach their followers to hate, social science researcher Brene’ Brown says the following:

“A faith community can choose to be a place of hurt or healing. That is a binary. Those are the only two choices. There is no neutrality. That's it. If you're not healing, then you are hurting.”

In their article titled Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate that was published in the Harvard Business Review, Bryan Walker and Sarah A. Soule said the following: 

“The dominant culture and structure of today’s organizations are perfectly designed to produce their current behaviors and outcomes, regardless of whether those outcomes are the ones you want. If your hope is for individuals to act differently, it helps to change their surrounding conditions to be more supportive of the new behaviors, particularly when they are antithetical to the dominant culture.”

Again, they are referring to the behaviors of the members of the dominant culture toward minority groups, which is why they referenced the 1960s civil rights movement and the recruitment of “members through the strong community ties formed in churches.”

Unfortunately, however, that’s far easier said than done for the following reason set forth by the Pew Research Center:

“For America’s most ardent liberals and conservatives, polarization begins at home.

In what may seem like stereotypes come to life, a new Pew Research Center study on political polarization finds that conservatives would rather live in large houses in small towns and rural areas — ideally among people of the same religious faith — while liberals opt for smaller houses and walkable communities in cities, preferably with a mix of different races and ethnicities….

There are similarly deep ideological divides in the importance placed on racial and ethnic diversity and living near those who share one’s religious faith. Majorities of consistent liberals (76%) and those who are mostly liberal (58%) say living somewhere with a mix of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds would be important to them; far fewer conservatives (20% of consistent conservatives, 32% of mostly conservatives) say this. (This ideological pattern is nearly identical when the analysis is limited to non-Hispanic whites.)

At the same time, conservatives place more importance on living in a place where many people share their religious faith. A majority (57%) of consistent conservatives say this is important to them, compared with just 17% of consistent liberals.”

So, as long as religions and religious leaders choose to be places of hurt by carefully teaching their followers bigotry, prejudice and hatred, we find ourselves in a “Catch-22”, which is defined as follows:

“A dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions.”

And, what’s worse, when these religious leaders and their followers are elected or appointed to political office, including judgeships, they bring their implicit biases with them.

As explained above, “we can overcome our stereotypes by exerting cognitive control over these biases…. They might be able to exert control – to use cognitive resources to avoid showing stereotypic bias in their decisions, but, when those resources are compromised, they can’t do it and they can be compromised in a variety of ways.”

Cognitive relates to "the mental process involved in knowing, learning, and understanding things." 

The first question involves the degree to which those involved in government have come to know, learn, and understand their implicit biases, if any. The second involves whether or not they have any interest in consciously and deliberately reducing the effect of implicit bias. The third question involves the degree to which their cognitive resources have been compromised.

Our cognitive resources can be compromised through fear and anxiety, among other things. And, don’t forget that an aspect of carefully teaching bigotry, prejudice and hatred involves “being raised in such a way that they acquire suspicions, fears and hatreds that sooner or later focus on minority groups.”

Meanwhile, as explained in The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases, “when a problem has spread within a community, when it has become part of the culture, you can’t fix it by simply focusing on individuals…. Individuals can do their part to limit the effects of bias on their behavior, but if you want to fix the bias itself, that takes the whole village.”