Prejudiced? It Depends on Your Perspective
Jul/28/2011 08:18 Filed in: Prejudice
The past 25 years of research into the scientific unconscious has documented just how susceptible the mind is to prejudice. Simple exposures to stereotypical beliefs rapidly alter the mind's evaluative mechanisms such that it will automatically generate a negative evaluation of any member of a different social group in question. However, a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that simply altering our perspective -- mentally putting ourselves in another person’s shoes -- can significantly reduce our unconscious biases.
In this work, participants watched a video depicting either a black or white individual having a negative interpersonal experience in a store. Some were then asked to imagine what this person thought and felt during the event. When they next completed a measure of nonconscious bias, those who had engaged in the perspective taking exercise showed a significant decrease in the readiness of their minds to automatically generate a negative evaluation toward African-Americans. A second study confirmed that simple perspective taking is the central ingredient -- the same pattern emerged without watching the video but by simply having participants imagine the thoughts and feelings of a generic African-American.
A big question with this type of research, of course, is do these changes in the mind's automatic evaluations actually translate into behavior. Here, it appears they do. In a final experiment, the researchers had participants engage in the perspective taking exercise before taking part in a short conversation with an unfamiliar African-American woman. Those who had engaged in perspective taking were not only rated by the woman, who was not aware of whether they had done the exercise, as more pleasant interaction partners, but also evidenced many more positive nonverbal cues toward her. Such cues often provide a valid measure of the mind's intuitive evaluations of interaction partners.
A big question with this type of research, of course, is do these changes in the mind's automatic evaluations actually translate into behavior. Here, it appears they do. In a final experiment, the researchers had participants engage in the perspective taking exercise before taking part in a short conversation with an unfamiliar African-American woman. Those who had engaged in perspective taking were not only rated by the woman, who was not aware of whether they had done the exercise, as more pleasant interaction partners, but also evidenced many more positive nonverbal cues toward her. Such cues often provide a valid measure of the mind's intuitive evaluations of interaction partners.
