I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.
Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.
It seems like the most common situation when you’d ignore bad vibes would be when a trait like this confuses your signals. When you identify a negative trait that “feels more obvious”, especially if it’s socially taboo to be prejudiced against (race, ethnicity/accent, LGBT-status, mental/physical disability), this can interfere with your ability to correctly interpret other evidence (including “vibes”), so that it’s very easy to overcompensate the other way.
The classic example from women’s self-defence classes: you enter an enclosed space (e.g. a lift) with a man of a particular ethnicity who makes you instantly nervous. You consider not getting in, but then think “oh, this must just be his ethnicity I’m reacting to”, castigate yourself for your prejudice, ignore the bad vibes, get in any way, and it turns out he was dodgy.
Or a neuro-atypical colleague suggests a small business venture in a manner that would normally raise red flags. You get “bad vibes”, but you interpret this as irrational prejudice against autistic behaviour traits, so you go along with it despite your vibes. Only later do you realise that your red flags were real, and your correction for prejudice was adding unnecessary noise into your decision-making.
I don’t know whether there’s evidence to back this up, but my sense is that “correction for potential prejudice” would be the major source of error here, especially among people who are more reflective.
Solution seems obvious: do not attempt to correct for potential prejudice.
If you consider the prejudice itself to be a problem (and that’s a reasonable view), then work to eliminate the prejudice. (The best and most reliable way is to get to know more people of the given category.) But regardless of whether you have already succeeded in this, don’t override your judgment (whether based on “vibes” or on anything else) on the basis of “well I have a prejudice that might be contributing to this”.
I mean, the problem of “my brain gets bad vibes too easily” is more general. Prejudice is a very common manifestation of it, but it’s something that can happen in other ways, and in the limit, as mentioned, you get bad vibes from everyone because you’re just paranoid and it isolates you. I think this is more an issue of you trying to get a sense of how good your intuition is in the first place, and possibly examine it to move those intuitive vibes to the conscious level. Like for example there are certain patterns in speech and attitude that scream “fake” to me, but it feels like I could at least try describing them.
It seems like the most common situation when you’d ignore bad vibes would be when a trait like this confuses your signals. When you identify a negative trait that “feels more obvious”, especially if it’s socially taboo to be prejudiced against (race, ethnicity/accent, LGBT-status, mental/physical disability), this can interfere with your ability to correctly interpret other evidence (including “vibes”), so that it’s very easy to overcompensate the other way.
The classic example from women’s self-defence classes: you enter an enclosed space (e.g. a lift) with a man of a particular ethnicity who makes you instantly nervous. You consider not getting in, but then think “oh, this must just be his ethnicity I’m reacting to”, castigate yourself for your prejudice, ignore the bad vibes, get in any way, and it turns out he was dodgy.
Or a neuro-atypical colleague suggests a small business venture in a manner that would normally raise red flags. You get “bad vibes”, but you interpret this as irrational prejudice against autistic behaviour traits, so you go along with it despite your vibes. Only later do you realise that your red flags were real, and your correction for prejudice was adding unnecessary noise into your decision-making.
I don’t know whether there’s evidence to back this up, but my sense is that “correction for potential prejudice” would be the major source of error here, especially among people who are more reflective.
Yeah, agree. Not sure what to do about that.
Solution seems obvious: do not attempt to correct for potential prejudice.
If you consider the prejudice itself to be a problem (and that’s a reasonable view), then work to eliminate the prejudice. (The best and most reliable way is to get to know more people of the given category.) But regardless of whether you have already succeeded in this, don’t override your judgment (whether based on “vibes” or on anything else) on the basis of “well I have a prejudice that might be contributing to this”.
I mean, the problem of “my brain gets bad vibes too easily” is more general. Prejudice is a very common manifestation of it, but it’s something that can happen in other ways, and in the limit, as mentioned, you get bad vibes from everyone because you’re just paranoid and it isolates you. I think this is more an issue of you trying to get a sense of how good your intuition is in the first place, and possibly examine it to move those intuitive vibes to the conscious level. Like for example there are certain patterns in speech and attitude that scream “fake” to me, but it feels like I could at least try describing them.