One thing I would like to see—and haven’t—in regards to opposition to prejudice is work on how to become less prejudiced. That is, how to see the person in front of you accurately, even if you’ve spent a lot of time in an environment which trained you to have pre-set opinions about that person.
Information about an individual screens off information about the group. At least it should. Let’s assume partial success, which is better than nothing. So the key is to get information about the individual. I would just try talking to them.
I guess the failure of usual anti-prejudice techniques is assuming that all opinions about a group are wrong, i.e. not a valid Bayesian evidence. (Of course unless it is a positive opinion about a minority, in which case it hypocritically is okay.) They try to remove the participants’ opinion about a group in general; usually without any success.
I would rather assume that an opinion about the group may be correct, but still, any given individual may be different than the average or the stereotype of their group. Which can easily be demonstrated by letting participants talk about how they differ from the average or the stereotype of various groups they could be classified into. For example, unlike a typical man in my society, I have long hair, I don’t like beer, and I am not interested in watching sport on TV. At this moment, the idea of “the person is not the same as (my idea of) the group” is in near mode. The next step is getting enough specific information about the other person so that the general image of “a random member of group X” can be replaced with some other data. (Depends on situation; e.g. in a group of children I would give many yes/no questions such as “do you have a pet?” and let them raise their hands; and then also they would ask questions. Each bit of information that differs from the assumption, if noticed, could be useful.)
Of course the result could be that people change their opinion about this one specific person, and yet keep their prejudice about their group. Which is an acceptable result for me, but probably not acceptable for many other people. I would reason that a partial success which happens is much better than an idealistic solution that doesn’t happen; and that accepting one exception makes people more likely to accept another exception in the future, possibly weakening the prejudice. But on the other hand, if the original opinion about the average of the group was correct, then we have achieved the best possible result: we didn’t teach people bullshit (which could later backfire on us) and yet we taught them to perceive a person as an individual, different from the average of the group, which was the original goal.
One thing I would like to see—and haven’t—in regards to opposition to prejudice is work on how to become less prejudiced. That is, how to see the person in front of you accurately, even if you’ve spent a lot of time in an environment which trained you to have pre-set opinions about that person.
Information about an individual screens off information about the group. At least it should. Let’s assume partial success, which is better than nothing. So the key is to get information about the individual. I would just try talking to them.
I guess the failure of usual anti-prejudice techniques is assuming that all opinions about a group are wrong, i.e. not a valid Bayesian evidence. (Of course unless it is a positive opinion about a minority, in which case it hypocritically is okay.) They try to remove the participants’ opinion about a group in general; usually without any success.
I would rather assume that an opinion about the group may be correct, but still, any given individual may be different than the average or the stereotype of their group. Which can easily be demonstrated by letting participants talk about how they differ from the average or the stereotype of various groups they could be classified into. For example, unlike a typical man in my society, I have long hair, I don’t like beer, and I am not interested in watching sport on TV. At this moment, the idea of “the person is not the same as (my idea of) the group” is in near mode. The next step is getting enough specific information about the other person so that the general image of “a random member of group X” can be replaced with some other data. (Depends on situation; e.g. in a group of children I would give many yes/no questions such as “do you have a pet?” and let them raise their hands; and then also they would ask questions. Each bit of information that differs from the assumption, if noticed, could be useful.)
Of course the result could be that people change their opinion about this one specific person, and yet keep their prejudice about their group. Which is an acceptable result for me, but probably not acceptable for many other people. I would reason that a partial success which happens is much better than an idealistic solution that doesn’t happen; and that accepting one exception makes people more likely to accept another exception in the future, possibly weakening the prejudice. But on the other hand, if the original opinion about the average of the group was correct, then we have achieved the best possible result: we didn’t teach people bullshit (which could later backfire on us) and yet we taught them to perceive a person as an individual, different from the average of the group, which was the original goal.