My colleague, Roy Baumeister, raises interesting issues in his
recent post regarding the contemporary study of
prejudice. Specifically, he argues that researchers are missing the boat by probing this year's presidential election for signs of racial prejudice, when instead they'd be rewarded more by exploring the more overt, less ambiguous forms of partisan prejudice practiced by both Democrats and Republicans.
In the interest of full disclosure, I've blogged on both types of prejudice as it relates to the election this year. I've written about the ways in which our political perceptions operate in a top-down manner, as party affiliation (or even affiliation within a party) often dictates how we see the facts on the ground, as opposed to any sort of objective perception guiding broader preferences and allegiances. I've also written about the potential role of racial prejudice in the election, here and here among other posts.
So I read Dr. Baumeister's post with keen interest. And I certainly agree with his general premise that partisan politics provides an excellent case study in traditional intergroup prejudice. But I was a bit taken aback by this passage:
"But I think my colleagues are missing the boat, at least if their goal is to understand the nature and operation of prejudice. They spend huge amounts of time and effort studying anti-black prejudice among American whites. This, surely, is one of the least typical prejudices in the history of the world, overlaid as it is by conflict, denial, guilt, political correctness, and other compromising pressures."
This idea of "typical" confuses me a bit. Sure, if we use as a reference point the grandiose "history of the world," then indeed anti-Black prejudice among American Whites is but a drop in the proverbial bucket of intergroup bias. Of course, so, too, would be the Democratic/Republican divide of recent memory. So by that token, it seems inconsistent to refer to the racial form of prejudice as atypical while citing the importance of another very context-specific manifestation of intergroup bias.
But I assume that he is making a more general point here. Namely the one that later closes his post, that most prejudices are of the more "open and avid" variety. And, his argument goes, this renders the more covert, ambiguous, and maddeningly-difficult-to-pin down racial form of prejudice an aberration that may be attracting more of our attention as researchers than it merits. Perhaps.
However, I'd propose that this is precisely why racial prejudice (and to a large extent, bias along lines of gender, sexual orientation, and other social categories) is so important to study and such a provocative topic for those of us who do so. Because we know quite a bit about the open and avid varieties of intergroup bias, about the nature and operation of straightforward, unabashed prejduice. We have for a while, since the days of Allport, since the Robber's Cave study, among others. These are biases to which individuals will often confess, with origins that are readily understood. I'm less convinced than my colleague that there are myriad pressing empirical questions on this count that we foresake by turning to racial bias.
Shoot, I'm a Yankees fan living in Boston. So I don't even have to wait for an election year to experience, as both victim and perpetrator, this potentially more "typical" type of overt animus. (You all remember the Yankees and Red Sox, right? The teams that used to win the American League before hell froze over in Tampa last week? But I digress...) In short, I'm not convinced that a prejudice being "typical" necessitates it being the boat ride that all researchers should want to catch.
Indeed, racial prejudice is a different animal, as Dr. Baumeister suggests. But this is what makes it so fascinating and worthwhile to study, in addition to the obvious societal benefits of better understanding the antecedents and consequences of this form of bias. All of the "conflict, denial, guilt, political correctness, and other compromising pressures" cited by my colleague need not be viewed as obstacles to our ability to study true, unfettered prejudice. We know a lot about that type of bias already. No, these factors are not obstacles, but rather precisely the issues that intrigue many who conduct this research. These are the forces that have shaped the fascinating work going on right now on implicit forms of bias, that have led to the burgeoning literature on interracial interaction. That people who believe themselves to be fairminded so often still harbor and exhibit such biases is a fascinating proposition for behavioral scientists to tackle.
So Dr. Baumeister's post raises many interesting issues, and will, I'm sure, spark healthy discussion. He's always had a keen eye for the big pictures in our discipline, not the least of which in my mind has been social psychology's unfortunate migration away from studying actual behaviors and conducting the types of studies that initially drew many of us to the field in the first place. This is advice I try to heed in my own research. But I'm not convinced that exploring racial forms of prejudice is "missing the boat." Not at all. Particuarly for those seafarers who think that unchartered waters have a great deal to teach us.
