People who express prejudiced attitudes often find themselves diagnosed with a mental disorder. Opposition to gay marriage is ascribed to homophobia, hostility towards immigrants and refugees to xenophobia, and criticism of Muslims to Islamophobia. The language of phobia pervades public and academic discussions of social attitudes, but you won't find these conditions in a psychiatric classification. So are they really phobias, or are they something else? Here are five reasons why we shouldn't mistake prejudice for phobia.
Phobias and prejudices afflict different kinds of people
If homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia are indeed phobias, they are very unusual examples. Phobias are irrational and excessive fears that afflict some people at higher rates than others. They are typically more common among women than men, and occur most frequently among people whose personality is high in Neuroticism, one of the five major personality factors. Such people tend to be emotionally volatile, tense, anxious, and vulnerable.
Prejudice towards gays, foreigners, and Muslims is a different story. Anti-gay attitudes are almost invariably higher among men than women. Men also tend to express more negative views of immigrants and refugees and greater hostility to Muslims. People with prejudiced attitudes do not tend to have neurotic personalities, but are low on the dimensions of Agreeableness and Openness. Prejudice flourishes among people who are cold, callous, inflexible, closed-minded, and conventional, not among those who are anxious and fear-prone.
Prejudices also vary dramatically between social groups in a way that true phobias do not. They vary by political orientation, religious affiliation, and national origin. They are collectively shared and organized phenomena, not individual pathologies.
Fear is not the dominant emotion in prejudice
Even if we accept that reactionary attitudes are not strictly phobias, it might still be argued that fear is at their root. However, the emotional signature of prejudice is much more frequently anger, contempt, or disgust. These emotions differ from fear in a variety of ways, one of which is that they all have a moral component: we experience them when we judge people to have violated rules of fairness, rightness, or purity. Fear reflects a perception of danger, not transgression. Prejudice is colored by complex moral emotions, not simple fears.
Of course, fear may play a part in prejudice. Fear of terrorism contributes to anti-Muslim sentiment, and people who are averse to gays often feel anxious in their presence. But even here, anxiety is not the dominant emotion. To see prejudice as fear is to flatten its emotional landscape and to overlook the multitude of ways in which humans can be averse to one another.
Prejudice has more to do with beliefs and values than emotions
The emotions that accompany prejudice are complex moral sentiments, and complex moral evaluations produce them. People tend to see the targets of their prejudice as posing a symbolic threat to cherished values. In the Australian context, where we recently witnessed widespread antagonism towards asylum seekers, hostility to this group was linked to a perception that they were illegitimate, opportunistic, and ‘un-Australian'. Antipathy to gays is linked to perceived violations of religious values and gender norms.
Indeed, people's values and beliefs are among the strongest predictors of their levels of prejudice. For example, prejudice is associated with a belief in traditional authority; an ideological preference for social hierarchy; a commitment to blood-and-soil nationalism; and a conviction that the disliked group is different in its essential nature or worldview. In short, prejudice is wrapped up in complex social thinking at least as much as in raw feeling.
Attributing other people's attitudes to fear is condescending
When we ascribe an attitude that we disagree with to its holder's fear we imply that we are braver than they are. Doing so confuses being unenlightened with being cowardly. Attributing social attitudes to fear also exemplifies the phenomenon of "infrahumanization", in which people reserve complex emotions for members of their own group, and grant other groups only the simpler emotions - such as fear - that humans share with "lower" animals. By implication, they are seen as more primitive than we.
For these reasons, seeing other people's attitudes as phobias is counter-productive. People accused of homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on can easily deny the accusation, first because they experience their aversion as rooted in moral principle rather than fear, and second because they bristle at the accuser's condescension. It is no surprise that people in this position feel that they are being belittled as attitudinal barbarians. The backlash that results among people who hold prejudiced attitudes - anger at the perceived arrogance and vanity of the "elites" - helps to account for the durability of those attitudes.
One prejudice should not be enlisted to combat another
Describing someone's aversion to a group as a phobia is an attempt to insult the person. Their attitudes are nothing but the symptoms of a pathology. ‘Homophobia', ‘Islamophobia' and the like would have no pejorative force if suffering from a mental disorder was not seen as demeaning. To diagnose people with these phobias is to recruit the stigma of mental illness against them.
In this respect, the supposed phobias continue an ignoble tradition of misuse of psychiatric language. "Schizophrenic", misunderstood as split personality, is still used to refer to any apparent contradiction, or even mature ambivalence, in a person's thoughts, feelings, or actions. "Hysterical" continues to be used to sneer at female emotionality. "Homophobic", "Islamophobic" and "xenophobic" should be seen in the same light - as ways of brushing aside opinions we dislike by invalidating the people who hold them.
It could be argued that none of this matters, and it's all just pointless hair-splitting over words. Perhaps calling attitudes "phobias" is harmless metaphor, not literal diagnosis. But words have consequences, and the consequences of pathologizing social attitudes are moral arrogance, invalidation, and backlash. These phony disorders close the door on dialogue. We should cure our language of them.
