The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L. Schacter

Author:Daniel L. Schacter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780547347455
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2001-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Whistling Vivaldi

When the Black journalist Brent Staples arrived as a student at the University of Chicago, he enjoyed walking near the lakeshore at night. Staples became unnerved one evening when he noticed that a white businesswoman, suddenly aware of his presence on the street, walked away quickly and then began to run. “I’d been a fool,” reflected Staples. “I’d been walking the streets grinning good evening at people who were frightened to death of me.” Attempting to ease concern that he was stalking white pedestrians or was otherwise ill intentioned, Staples started whistling Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons to signal that he was a benign stroller. “The tension drained from people’s bodies when they heard me,” Staples recalled. “A few even smiled as they passed me in the dark.”

Staples whistled Vivaldi because his presence activated in white strangers’ memories a powerful stereotype that biased their perceptions of him: when walking on a quiet street at night, a Black man poses danger. The resourceful Staples came up with an effective method to avoid being viewed in such stereotypical—and erroneous—terms.

Stereotypes are generic descriptions of past experiences that we use to categorize people and objects. Many social psychologists think of stereotypes as “energy-saving” devices that simplify the task of comprehending our social worlds. Because it may require considerable cognitive effort to size up every new person we meet as a unique individual, we often find it easier to fall back on stereotypical generalizations that accumulate from various sources, including discussions with other people, printed and electronic media, and firsthand experience. Though relying on such stereotypes may make our cognitive lives more manageable, it can also lead to undesirable outcomes: when a stereotype diverges from reality in a specific instance—as happened with Brent Staples—the resulting biases can produce inaccurate judgments and unwarranted behavior.

The great social psychologist Gordon Allport was one of the first psychologists to recognize how the dual nature of stereotypes contributes to racial biases. While acknowledging that stereotypes help us to categorize the world, Allport held that “we often make mistakes in fitting events to categories and thus get ourselves in trouble.” In his classic 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport foresaw quite clearly the situation that Brent Staples would confront decades later. “A person with dark brown skin will activate whatever concept of Negro is dominant in our mind,” contended Allport. “If the dominant category is one composed of negative attitudes and beliefs we will automatically avoid him, or adopt whichever habit of rejection is most available to us.”

Allport’s assessment was especially prescient because research has underscored that stereotypical biases can occur automatically, outside of conscious awareness. Early evidence for this view came from experiments that activated stereotypes by presenting words too quickly to register in conscious perception (a procedure known as “subliminal priming”). After subliminal priming with words intended to activate a stereotype of “Blacks,” such as welfare, busing, and ghetto, white American students were more likely to judge an imaginary male of an unspecified race as a hostile person than when they were primed with neutral words.

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