Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

Person categories refer to different classes of individuals we encounter – rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief. Each one of these categories takes many forms in terms of information, such as what they look like, how they speak, how they think and what they do. No one member is likely to tick all the boxes of the category to which they belong, but they are going to be more like each other in the same category in comparison to those from outside the category. When an individual is identified as belonging to a group, we assume they share the characteristic traits attributed to that group. This is because categories are networks of related concepts that are automatically triggered.

Another problem with pigeonholing people is that stereotypes are difficult to overcome. We accept them even when we have no evidence to either support or contradict them. We willingly accept the testimony of others because stereotypes strengthen the in-group/out-group division by attributing negative attributes to members outside our group and positive ones to our own members. We assign generalized characteristics to all members of an out-group and yet maintain that our group has much more individuality. Finally, we seek out evidence that confirms stereotypes rather than look for exceptions. 56In a cognitive exercise known as confirmation bias , we select those aspects of an individual’s behaviour that are consistent with our stereotype and conclude that they are typical.

Take the case of women drivers. Have you noticed how many bad women drivers there are? That, of course, is a negative stereotype that widely circulates in the West. In 2012, the mayor of Triberg, a small town in Germany, announced the opening of a new car park that had provision of a dozen ‘woman only’ spaces that were extra-large, well lit and near the exits.

Are women really such bad drivers? Experiments typically report superior spatial skills in males, 57which are used to justify the claim that women are really bad at parking. However, the story is somewhat different in the real world. In the UK, the National Car Parks company conducted their own covert study 58of 2,500 men and women using their sites and found that on average females were better at parking than males and that included the infamous reverse parking. This real-world analysis shows that women are better drivers and yet the UK Driving Standards Agency report that female drivers are more than twice as likely as males to fail their driving test on the reverse-parking manoeuvre. Are they better or not?

Females may have inferior spatial skills than males on computer lab tests, but it is probably the stereotype that women are bad at parking that is responsible for their failure on this component of the driving test. When women are reminded that males are better at maths, they perform worse in a subsequent maths test compared to women who are not primed with the stereotype. 59The same effect was observed for African Americans who were simply reminded of their ethnicity by stating it at the beginning of an IQ test. 60Those who wrote their race performed less well than other black students who were not reminded of the stereotype. So when it comes to parking under the scrutiny of the driving inspector, women may have a crisis of confidence and ‘choke’ in their performance. Simply giving women encouragement makes them more confident and improves their performance. The problem of stereotyping and why it is wrong, aside from the inequalities it creates, is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bad to the bone

When it comes to thinking about others, there is a real tendency to make judgements that appeal to a deeper sense of identity. As if there is something inside people that makes them who they are. This belief explains some surprising attitudes.

Would you willingly receive a heart transplant from a murderer? Under these life-or-death circumstances, I expect most people probably would, but they would be reluctant. Given a choice of organ transplantation from either a morally good person or someone who is bad, we prefer the Samaritan over the sinner. 61It’s not simply that one is evil. Rather, there is a real belief that our personality would be changed. In 1999 a British teenager had to be forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared that she would be ‘different’ with someone else’s heart. 62She was expressing what is a common concern, namely that someone else’s personality can be transferred through organ transplantation. 63It is not uncommon for transplant patients to report psychological changes that they attribute to characteristics of the donor but there is no scientific evidence or mechanism that could explain how such a transfer could happen. There is a much more likely explanation that comes down to the way that we reason about others.

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviours of category members. Even as children, we intuitively think that dogs have a ‘doggie’ essence, which makes them different from cats, who have a ‘catty’ essence. There are, of course, genetic mechanisms to explain the difference between dogs and cats, but well before mankind had made the discoveries of modern biology, people thought in terms of essences. In fact, the Greek philosopher Plato talked about the inner property that made things what they truly were. Even though individuals may not be able to say exactly what an essence is, there is a belief that there is something deep, internal and unalterable that makes an individual who they are. In this sense, it is a psychological placeholder to explain membership of one category as opposed to another. 64

Child psychologist Susan Gelman from the University of Michigan has shown that psychological essentialism operates in young children’s reasoning about many aspects of the living world. 65By four years of age, they understand that raising a puppy in a litter of kittens will not make the puppy grow up into a cat. 66They understand that while a stick insect may look like a stick, it is really an insect. 67Both children and adults expect animals to maintain their identity even if external superficial features are changed. They increasingly learn to go over and beyond outward appearances when judging the true nature of things.

This explains why adults are reluctant to receive organ transplants from those that they perceive as bad. Children also develop this essentialist view. When asked about whether they would be changed by a heart transplant, six- to seven-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, thought that they would become either more or less mean and either more or less smart, depending on the psychological level of the donor. 68

Essentialism develops well into adulthood when it comes to categorizing others into different social groups. 69The Nazis under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels were expert at producing propaganda that demonized the persecuted as inferior, but such indoctrination was not necessary. As soon as we make a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, people assume the contrasts are intrinsic, fundamental and incommensurable – they are essentially different. By adopting an essentialist perspective, we are evoking a deeper level of justification for our prejudice. We do not want to touch them. We want to keep our distance. We are making judgements about their core features because they are ‘bad to the bone’. The extent to which we think of ourselves and others as possessing qualities that define who we are is a mark of our essentialist bias – a prejudice operating early in our development but one that appears to strengthen as we grow older. Psychologist Gil Diesendruck has been studying essentialist reasoning in children raised in Israel from different groups: secular Jews, Zionist Jews and Muslim Arabs. He found that by the time they are five years old, children already use category membership to make inferences about other children’s personalities based on prejudice which strengthen as they grow older. 70