Two Articles Supplementing Two Principles
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We are having guests for lunch, so I do not have much time to write today. To keep you busy, here are selected parts of two magazine articles, the first about the Baha'i principle of elimination of prejudice, the second on the promotion of education. The first discusses the apparent paradox that prejudice is both natural, wired in to our brains and it is therefore universal, yet we are expected to eliminate it. This article suggests that prejudice is even beneficial, to a certain degree, in certain situations.
The second article discusses an even more puzzling paradox in religion, the fact that most of the members of a congregation or other faith group are, from a purely human point of view, far more educated and have better credentials than the Founders of their Faith. Yet, from a spiritual point of view, the qualifications are reversed. Strange as that seems, the same thing is true with teachers (A students) who teach students (mostly B students) how to go out work for C students. My only question is, where do we D students fit in? We have to be somewhere!
"Are we born prejudiced?" by Mark Buchanan, New Scientist,
(From issue 2595 of New Scientist magazine,
.... the human tendency to judge others in the crudest terms - race, religion, ethnicity, or any arbitrary marker - has not been consigned to the history books, no matter how much we might wish it were so. Somewhat disturbingly, scientists now suggest that this is not really surprising because such prejudice is part of human nature.
If they are correct, then the roots of group animosity and hatred run very deep indeed, which may be depressing news for those trying to make a difference in ethnic or sectarian hotspots from
"We shouldn't treat prejudice as pathological just because it offends us," says anthropologist Francisco Gil-White. "If we aim to transcend ethnic strife, we would be wise to understand the role that perfectly normal human psychology plays in producing it."
Psychologists have long known of our proclivity to form "in groups" based on crude markers, ranging from skin colour to clothing styles. Think of inner-city gangs, Italian football supporters, or any "cool" group of stylish teenagers.
"Our minds seem to be organised in a way that makes breaking the human world into distinct groups almost automatic," says psychologist Lawrence Hirschfeld of the
Many experiments confirm this, and show that we tend to favour our own group, even when that group is just an arbitrary collection of individuals.
In 1970, for example, a team of researchers led by psychologist Henri Tajfel of the University of Bristol, UK, randomly divided teenage boys from the same school into two groups, and gave every boy the chance to allocate points to two other boys, one from each group. This could be done in different ways - some increasing the combined total for both recipients, and others increasing the difference between the two. The boys consistently chose options of the latter kind, favouring recipients from their own group. Experiments like these are enough to convince Tajfel and others that if you put people into different groups, call them red and blue, north and south, or whatever, a bias towards one's own group will automatically emerge.
This in itself does not make us racist. In fact it may not be such a bad thing: research published last year suggests at least one useful function of our groupist tendencies. Political scientists Ross Hammond of the Brookings Institute in
People in
What happened then, they discovered, was that agents of each particular colour began to gather together. At first, a few groupist agents of the same colour might find themselves together by chance. Within such a group, cooperative interactions lead to good outcomes, causing others nearby to copy their strategy, swelling the group. In the model, Hammond and Axelrod found that strongly ethnocentric groups of different colours came to fill the world, at the expense of others. Anyone who did not follow the groupist strategy tended to suffer. Even someone ignoring colour - and remember colour initially signified nothing about an agent's behaviour - would also get wiped out. In short, once people begin to act on colour, it comes to matter. What's more, it turns out that the overall level of cooperation is higher in this world where there is in-group favouritism than in a world where agents are colourless. "Ethnocentrism is actually a mechanism for generating cooperation, and one that does not demand much in the way of cognitive ability," says
Axelrod and Hammond are well aware that their model is a far cry from the complexities of real-world racism. Still, it is interesting that colour prejudice emerges even though colour has no intrinsic significance. Modern genetics has dispelled the naive notion that racial divisions reflect real biological differences. We know that the genetic variation between individuals within one racial or ethnic group is generally much larger than the average difference between such groups. As in the virtual world, race and ethnicity are arbitrary markers that have acquired meaning. But you won't get far telling Blacks and Hispanics in the racially charged areas of
"Race doesn't matter because it is real," says historian Niall Ferguson of
What's more, this misconception seems to be deeply ingrained in our psyche. For example, Hirschfeld found that by the age of 3 most children already attribute significance to skin colour. In 1993, he showed a group of children a drawing of a chubby black child dressed up as a policeman, followed by photos of several adults, each of whom had two of the three traits: being black, chubby and dressed as a policeman. Asked to decide which person was the boy as a grown-up, most children chose a black adult even though he was either not overweight or minus a police uniform.
"Kids appear to believe," says Hirschfeld, "that race is more important than other physical differences in determining what sort of person one is."
By the age of 3 most kids already attribute significance to skin colour
More recent brain imaging studies suggest that even adults who claim not to be racist register skin colour automatically and unconsciously. In 2000, a team led by social psychologist Allan Hart of
Does this mean that our species has evolved to see the world in terms of black and white? Not necessarily. After all, our ancestors would not normally have met people whose skin was a different colour from their own: neighbouring ethnic groups would have looked pretty much alike. So, it's possible that our tendency to classify people by colour might simply be a modern vice, learned early and reinforced throughout our lives - even, paradoxically, by anti-racist messages. That seems unlikely, however, when you consider our attitudes to ethnicity. In fieldwork among Torguud Mongols and Kazakhs, neighbouring ethic groups living in central Asia, Gil-White investigated ideas of ethnic identity to find out whether people link it more with nurture (a child being brought up within a group) or nature (the ethnicity of biological parents). The majority of both groups saw ethnicity as a hidden but powerful biological factor, unaffected by someone being adopted into another group.
"They perceive the underlying nature as some kind of substance that lies inside and causes the members of an ethnic group to behave the way they do," he says. Like race, ethnicity has no biological significance, yet this is exactly how we perceive it.
Many researchers now believe that we have evolved a tendency to divide the world along ethnic lines. For example, anthropologist Rob Boyd from the
That might explain why we tend to divide the world into groups and why we use ethnic differences and skin colour as markers to help us do this. It even gives a rationale for in-group favouritism. But what about out-group animosity? Is prejudice part of the whole evolved package? Gil-white believes it is. He argues that within any group of people sharing social norms, anyone who violates those will attract moral opprobrium - it is considered "bad" to flout the rules and benefit at the expense of the group. This response is then easily transferred to people from other ethnic groups.
"We're tempted to treat others, who are conforming to their local norms, as violating our own local norms, and we take offence accordingly," says Gil-White.
As a result we may be unconsciously inclined to see people from other ethnic groups not simply as different, but as cheats, morally corrupt, bad people.
Natural but not nice
"I think all this work refutes those naive enough to believe that if it weren't for bad socialising, we would all be nice tolerant people who accept cultural and ethnic differences easily,"
says Daniel Chirot, professor of international studies at the
Being biologically primed for racism does not make it inevitable
Besides, if ethnocentrism is an evolved adaptation to facilitate smooth social interactions, it is a rather crude one. A far better way to decide who can be trusted and who cannot is to assess an individual's character and personality rather than to rely on meaningless markers. In today's world, that is what most of us do, most of the time. It is only when it becomes difficult to judge individuals that people may instinctively revert to the more primitive mechanism. Hammond and Axelrod argue that this is most likely to happen under harsh social or economic conditions, which may explain why ethnic divisions seem to be exaggerated when societies break down, as a consequence of war, for example.
"To me this makes perfect sense," says Chirot. "Especially in times of crisis we tend to fall back on those with whom we are most familiar, who are most like us."
Knowing all this, it may be possible to find ways to curb our unacceptable tendencies. Indeed, experiments show how little it can take to begin breaking down prejudice. Psychologist Susan Fiske from
In new experiments, however, she was able to reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the pictures, such as, "What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?" Just one such question was enough to significantly raise activity in the mPFC. "The question has the effect of making the person back into a person," says Fiske, "and the prejudiced response is much weaker."
It would appear then that we have a strong tendency to see others as individuals, which can begin to erode our groupist instincts with very little prompting. Perhaps this is why, as Chirot points out, ethnocentrism does not always lead to violence. It might also explain why in every case of mass ethnic violence it has taken massive propaganda on the part of specific political figures or parties to stir passions to levels where violence breaks out.
If the seeds of racism are in our nature, so too are the seeds of tolerance and empathy. By better understanding what sorts of situations and environments are conducive to both, we may be able to promote our better nature.
Do grades really matter?; A growing body of evidence suggests grades don't predict success -- C+ students are the ones who end up running the world,
(Sarah Scott, Macleans,
<http://www.macleans.ca/education/postsecondary/article.jsp?content=20070910_109139_109139>
Ancaster billionaire Bob Young is glad to have been a C student. "Good students figure out how the system works so they can excel within the system," he says. "As for those of us who didn't figure out how the system works, we became bank robbers or entrepreneurs. That's what makes a lot of us poor students into successful people. Typically, our success does not come from working within the system. It comes from reinventing the system."
So there's hope for the C+ student in high school. "The truth is that many indifferent students do extremely well in business because the set of skills required to be a good student does not match the set of skills to be a success in the world," says Michael Thompson, a University of Chicago-trained psychologist and co-author of the bestseller, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. He likes to quote the old line: "School is a place where former A students teach mostly B students to work for C students." It may be an overgeneralization, but it has "more truth than educators are comfortable with," he says.
As a psychologist, Michael Thompson spends a lot of time talking to anxious parents in
Consider what psychologists have learned about motivation or drive. Successful people, Harvard psychologist David McClelland found back in the 1960s, are driven, to a greater or lesser extent, by three needs: one is individual achievement -- to start a business or make a million dollars or win a Nobel Prize, for example. The second is relationships, and the third is power. The significance of each depends on the personality you were born with and the influence of parents. But memorizing the "Six Reasons for World War I" in history class is not likely to tap into the powerful urge to make millions or wield power or lead people. That curriculum might not even appeal to future professors. So a student might be bored and unmotivated in class, but then, once he discovers something that fires him up, work so hard that he becomes a resounding success.
Drive is crucial. Without it, even the most brilliant kids will fall short of expectations. Rena Subotnik noticed this when she checked up on 210 graduates of
These sorts of people share traits that are rarely appreciated in the classroom, according to
Some schools are getting it. In
Meanwhile,
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