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Dismantling hate

Psychologists are identifying factors that fan the flames of hostility and those that might quench them

Dismantling hate

By Kirsten Weir

January 2018, Vol 49, No. 1

Print version: page 42

10 min read

• Emotions
• Racism, Bias, and Discrimination
• Race and Ethnicity

One night in 1983, Daryl Davis, a black blues musician, was playing with a country band in an all-white Maryland bar. During a break between sets, a white man started chatting with him. "During our conversation, he said it was the first time he'd had a drink with a black man, and I asked why. He revealed he was a member of the KKK," Davis recalls.

Surprisingly, Davis's first reaction wasn't fear but curiosity. He had grown up in a military family and spent much of his youth abroad, and he attended international schools with people of all races, nationalities, and religions. It wasn't until he was 10, living in Massachusetts, that he experienced racism for the first time when bottles pelted him. Since that grim introduction, he'd been undertaking a quiet quest to answer a simple question: "How can you hate me if you don't even know me?"

Talking to the man in the bar, Davis realized, "That was the perfect time to get the answer to my question." After befriending Davis, the man eventually renounced his Klan membership. In the years since, Davis has sat down with more than 100 other Klan members and leaders, bonding with them over shared interests in music or family. He estimates that perhaps two-thirds of them have ultimately left the KKK. "I never set out to convert anybody. Initially, I didn't think they could be changed, and I just wanted the answer to my question," he says.

Davis's experience is a living illustration of contact theory in action. Formally proposed by psychologist Gordon Allport, Ph.D., in the 1950s, the theory states that contact between two groups can promote tolerance under certain conditions, such as having common goals. "If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy, you'll find you have something in common," Davis says. "If you nurture those commonalities, your skin color or who you worship matters less and less. You begin to forge a relationship. If you nurture the relationship, you begin to forge a friendship."

Identifying ways to counter hate and unite people has been given new urgency when hate groups are on the rise. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), hate groups have sharply risen over the last two decades in the United States, from 457 in 1999 to 917 this year. That spike dipped a small beginning in 2011. Still, it began to rise sharply again in 2015a trend the SPLC attributes to a presidential campaign that voiced anti-immigrant sentiments and other divisive rhetoric.

Of course, hate is not a new problem, as history has repeatedly proven. It's clear that certain social and environmental factors can fan the flames of hostility, and social psychology research can help identify those factors and suggest ways to douse the fire.

Symbolic threats

At its essence, prejudice is about believing some groups have more worth or value than others. Hostility toward a particular social group develops when that group becomes devalued compared to others, explains Ervin Staub, Ph.D., a professor of psychology, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and founding director of the university's Ph.D. concentration in the psychology of peace and violence. He says the marginalized group might be singled out because of race, religion, or socioeconomic status. Whatever the reason, "they become devalued, and it becomes part of the culture."

Certain conditions can cause prejudice and intergroup hostility to spike. A sluggish economy, for instance, can cause anxiety that leads people to believe they have to compete for their fair share. In the United States, for example, the fear that immigrants will take "American" jobs is an oft-repeated refrain despite evidence that shows the economic effects of immigration are positive overall (The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, 2017).

Whether it's racial tension in the United States or ethnic clashes around the globe, intergroup conflict generally stems from a sense of threat, says Linda R. Tropp, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sometimes those threats are material, such as access to jobs or other resources. Often, though, the threats are more symbolic.

Not everyone responds to those threats in the same way. At one end of the spectrum are people who are highly tolerant of others' differences and, at the other, are deeply prejudiced. "There are people who are extreme bigots and always will be. There's not a lot you can do but contain them," notes Susan Fiske, Ph.D., a psychology and public affairs professor at Princeton University who studies social cognition.

But many people exist somewhere in the murky middle. For those people, social norms are fundamental, Fiske adds. "Attitudes follow norms, and many people have malleable attitudes. If we have leadership that isn't promoting intergroup tolerance, it sets the norms for the rest of society," she says.

Chris S. Crandall, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas, studies those social standards. He's found that social norms can shift in response to social and cultural phenomena. In research being prepared for publication, he and his colleagues surveyed supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the days before the 2016 presidential election. Half the participants were asked to rate their feelings toward various social and ethnic groups. The other half assessed how acceptable it was to say negative things about the members of those groups.

After the election, Crandall's team re-interviewed the participants. People's personal feelings about different groups hadn't changed after the election, regardless of whom they voted for. But supporters of both candidates reported it was more acceptable to speak negatively about Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, overweight people, and people with disabilitiesgroups that Trump had disparaged during the campaign. In addition, participants reported no changes in the perceived acceptability of speaking negatively about groups that Trump had not criticized, including Canadians, alcoholics, and members of the National Rifle Association, Crandall explains.

"People work hard to suppress their prejudices," Crandall says. "What Trump's campaign has done is change a lot of people's sense of what is OK to say. The dam was holding back the water, but he's opened up the spillway."

Up close and personal

Because attitudes and norms go hand in hand, shoring up that broken dam could shift societal attitudes toward a more tolerant worldview, Crandall says. If people who behave bigotedly go to jail, lose their jobs and friends, or suffer other negative consequences, it sends a message that such sentiments aren't socially acceptable.

While social norms can shift opinion, interacting with members of other groups can also be an effective strategy. In his original description of contact theory, Allport proposed that contact between groups can reduce prejudice when four optimal conditions are present: equal status between the groups, sharing common goals, cooperation, and support from institutional authorities.

Psychologists have recently concluded that Allport's four conditions aren't required for intergroup acceptance. But they help. One essential feature is meaningful connection. Cooperating on a work project or volunteer committee will likely go further toward reducing prejudice than multiple brief interactions with the grocery store cashier.

"Contact helps reduce feelings of anxiety and threat and enhances one's capacity for empathy," says Tropp. "When we think about trying to dismantle the building blocks of hate, we have to have meaningful engagement across group lines."

Tropp, along with Thomas Pettigrew, Ph.D., of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 515 studies examining the effects of intergroup contact. They found contact reduces prejudice and increases trust and forgiveness between groups, especially when some or all of Allport's conditions are met. Contact effects aren't limited to racial or ethnic groups, they found. Meaningful contact also reduces prejudice toward people in same-sex relationships, those with disabilities, and those with mental illness (International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2011).

Davis has witnessed the effects of meaningful contact time and again. "Talking one-on-one, you see the humanity in [the other person]. You realize you want the same things for your family as they want for theirs, and it becomes hard to hate that person across the table from you," he says.

Contact with another group member doesn't only change how people feel about that individual, and it can also help shift attitudes more broadly. A study that followed white university students, for example, Miriam Northcutt Bohmert, Ph.D., and Alfred DeMans at Indiana University at Bloomington, found that when people had more interracial friendships, their endorsement of affirmative action policies increased more rapidly over four years. College students growing up in more racially diverse neighborhoods were also more accepting of affirmative action (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2015).

In-person contact isn't the only route to understanding, however. A review by German researchers Gunnar Lemmer, Ph.D., and Ulrich Wagner, Ph.D., concluded that interventions based on virtual contact could be as effective as face-to-face interventions (European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2015).

In one example of virtual contact, Joseph Walther, Ph.D., at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and colleagues showed that when Israeli Jews and Muslims interacted during an online course on educational technology, their prejudice toward the opposite group decreased (Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 52, No. 1, 2015).

A critical benefit of interacting with people from other social groups might be that it allows people to see others as individuals, not as stereotypes. And research suggests that when people recognize that not all black people or all Muslims are the same, they are less prejudiced toward those groups. In a series of experiments, Markus Brauer, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at the University of Wisconsin, and colleagues tested posters that featured Arab people of different ages, hairstyles, and clothing styles and with captions that highlighted their other personality traits (such as "optimist" or "stingy"). The people who had been exposed to the posters viewed Arab people more positively and were less prejudiced against them compared with people who regarded no poster or a control poster (Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 43, No. 4, 2013).

"In any group, there are people who are funny and boring, hardworking and lazy, honest and dishonest," Brauer says. "Ethnicity isn't a great predictor of how someone behaves, and we should promote the notion that it's hard to give them all the same label."

Creative strategies

To promote tolerance more widely, Brauer urges his colleagues to think creatively. For example, people who aren't receptive to diversity education might be more easily swayed by diversity in their entertainment. Betsy Levy Paluck, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, used educational radio programs to promote reconciliation and prevent new violence after the conflict in Rwanda (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 96, No. 3, 2009).

Recently, Brauer showed the strategy could work in the United States. His participants either watched a sitcom featuring an all-white cast or one that showed diverse yet relatable Muslim characters. Those who watched the diverse sitcom had lower implicit and explicit bias scores against Muslims. That difference was still evident four weeks after they'd watched the show (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, published online, 2017).

"If it's done right, shows with inclusive messages embedded in them can produce societal shifts," Brauer says.

He notes that writers of TV dramas frequently solicit advice about medicine and public health messages from researchers and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But psychologists aren't yet helping writers include social science messages for good. "Hollywood writers often have good intentions but don't know how to do it," he says.

Prejudice is every day, Crandall adds, but it's not immutable. "Most of us have connections to people we can influence," he says. "We have a moral duty to try."

• Where do the schemas we develop during our life span come from? What influences schema development in general?
• How can events in our life-span development impact our perspectives on diversity, equity, and inclusion?
• How can we use research in developmental psychology to understand an individual's level of prejudice?
• How have individuals in your life influenced your schema development?
• How does the concept of mental schema development apply to any of the following programmatic themes?
  • Self-care
  • Social justice
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Career connections
  • Ethics