Welcome to Nerdology! I am Attila: biologist, researcher, and please, this is not a political discussion, it's about human dignity. Today we will understand where racism comes from.
Imagine you did not know dogs existed and first meet one. Then you discover that it: licks, likes to play, play with balls or kindling wood, it does not like when we grab its queue, and it can bite if it gets nervous. When you meet other dogs, you will not have to learn all that again.
Our brain shortens paths by creating categories, and uses a representation of what kind of all dogs have in common, creating a stereotype. And we do it with everything in the world: objects, animals, situations and even people. That categorization is important for understanding the world.
Who has learned that long, legless and scaly animals were poisonous and should be avoided survived more than those who tried to test whether all snakes are venomous or not. similarly, if you are lost in an unknown place, you will ask for information from people in the category you think to be more informed, like police officers, or local residents, but not children, for example. Movies, comics, games, and the media in general, work using these categories to make the story more familiar.
In another word, making 'clichés'. The Russian villain with a German accent, the Asian who knows how to fight, the evil character with black clothes, the barbarian, or brute and stupid and several other clichés that make us more familiar with the story. The problem happens when we assign values, behaviors, emotions, or attitudes to a stereotype without justification.
And it is from this point that the prejudice arises. "jokes with Portuguese" only work for us (Brazilian) because we already have a stereotype, hypotheses about how they behave, for which we seek confirmation. Those jokes will not be funny to a Russian or an Inuit, they have other stereotypes of which they make fun.
As we already explained on the episode about polarization, and as Rupert Brown explains in: "Prejudice: It's Social Psychology," when we categorize groups, we tend to exaggerate the difference among them and ignore the difference within each group. On a study from 1963, two researchers from Oxford University showed volunteers straight lines of various sizes, with a difference of 1cm. No one had trouble to judge which ones were bigger or smaller, but when they grouped the same smaller straight lines as type A, and the larger lines as type B, people began saying that type A lines were much smaller than type B.
Sometimes, stereotypes are so strong that we reinforce our expectation, As Robert Rosenthal and Eleanor Jacobson demonstrated in a 1965 study. They invented an "intelligence test", then randomly selected a group of students and told the teachers that they were from the "high expectations" group, who had taken the best grades in the test after a year, they applied real intelligence tests on the students, and they found out that those marked as smarter actually were better at the test, which led the authors to conclude that the students felt more confident, and the teachers paid more attention to those that were already expected to be better. People's performance and motivation are directly linked to the stereotype in which they fit in.
While living in small societies, the notion that we were part of a group that should be favored, and that the other groups should be harassed, was valuable to our evolution, we even notice that creation of stereotypes and biased behavior appear very early in our development. Do as Megan Patterson and Rebecca Bigler, from University of Texas: divide a preschool class in those in blue uniform and those in red uniform, and in a short time they will treat themselves by favoring the classmates of the same uniform, discriminating against others on a principle of segregation regardless of whether the teachers made any distinction based in the uniforms. And if teachers treat different colors differently, students' segregationist behavior becomes even stronger.
At age of only 6 months, babies are already able to recognize gender and ethnicity of people, and until the age of two and a half years, kids already attribute behavior to certain groups, like boys or girls, and prefer to interact with children of the same group they identify themselves, like those of the same language and accent, as Andre himself has already shown. 3 years old children are able to recognize and they prefer the groups that are most privileged by society. Even though they are created by parents who are not racist nor do racist comments, and independent of one's own ethnicity, 3 or 4 years old children already think that white dolls are more beautiful and better behaved than black dolls.
This happens because part of children's development is done by observing and learning from the world they see around them. Just as the accent they develop is that of the society in which they coexist, and not the parents' accent, a racist society breeds racist children. When one of the few black people on TV was this: [image of Globeleza] a black journalist may be unacceptable to some.
Therefore, teach children that racism happens, and that people are discriminated against because they belong to certain groups, works much better than closing ours eyes and not commenting on it. Prejudice is a behavior that appears naturally, and recognizing that it exists is the first step to get over it. Even science is a little guilty and has already been used to justify the concepts of race and hypothetical white superiority.
The curious thing is that today we know that not only the genetic differences within ethnic groups may be greater than among them, but also that the European peoples reproduced with another species of hominids: the Neanderthals. and inherited part of their genome. And the Asian people reproduced with other hominids: the Denisovans, that is, the most genetically human humans are the African peoples.
Do not forget to like and share this video, subscribe to our channel to fight against prejudice, and see you next Thursday :) Thanks again to the professor of cognitive psychology André Souza. This Nerdology was offered by Nerdstore, which has been invaded by Marvel ™ products, your nerds! Pillows, picture frames, notebook trays with light, aprons, sleeping masks, mugs, cups, aluminum bottles, squeezes, frames with light, up to the neck-strap cushion!
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