this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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collapse of the old society
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My discovery about how the human cognitive system works on this some years ago has led me to the conclusion that everybody defaults to being prejudiced via this pathway - we all just assume shit about people we don't know purely based on how they look and talk - hence racism is the default.
So not being racist isn't a simple passive act of not being so, it's the active trying to stop one's natural tendency to prejudge others on how they look and prejudge entire groups of people whose "membership" is defined in our minds by things that have nothing to do with their actions or ideologies, and spotting when we do fail to stop ourselves doing it and walking back those prejudgements we made about other people.
This is why so many people who think they're not racists still go around prejudging entire groups of people, but they only do it on the positive side (ex: "Jews have Modern Values") or reserve their racism for groups against which it's not unfashionable to be racist (ex: " Muslims are violent"), when the real non-Racist posture would be to not even consider group "membership" in passing judgment, only the actions and words of the individual or ideology you're judging (so both Zionists and Islamists are violent and do not have Modern Values, because that's their ideology - something they chose, not something they were born with or into - and you can't prejudge entire ethnicities or religions based on some people in those having certain behaviours or ideologies)
Yes, we often refer it it as a heuristic because it's a mental shortcut. There are ways to counter act it, such as described in the contact hypothesis (e.g. get to know a group by having interdependence with an out group). Having a shared category with someone can also help, like being part of the same team, organization, etc.
For example, a study looked at the response rate at a sporting event when researchers approached people to participate; a black researcher and a white researcher. Under control conditions, the black researcher had a harder time getting white participants to help and to a lesser extent, vica versa. However, when they wore the same team hat, participation was close to even. The idea is, the hat showed that they belonged to the same in-group, reducting or eliminating the hesitation of participation.
I often forget author names but I can probably dig it up later. There's a lot of studies about this in social psychology since there's a general interest in getting people to stop being so damn racist, haha.