THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY“colour-blind” can backfire. This was demonstrated by Michael Norton
at Harvard Business School by having white participants play an identi-
fication game (similar to the one used by Evan Apfelbaum with children)
with black participants. The participants had before them 32 photos of
people: half were male, half were female; half were old, half were young;
half were black, half were white and so on. On each turn, the participants
had to identify which one of these 32 people their playing partner was
currently looking at, by asking as few “yes/no” questions as possible.
Crucially, those white participants who avoided using race as an identi-
fying factor not only performed less well at the task, they also made less
eye-contact with their partner and were perceived to be less friendly by a
pair of judges who watched a recording of their behaviour.
COMBATING HOMOPHOBIA
Most psychology research into prejudice has been focused on racism,
but of course, members of any social grouping can be victimized in
this way, and one of the most inventive anti-prejudice interventions by
a psychologist relates to homophobia. At Brock University in Canada,
Gordon Hodson asked heterosexual students to imagine landing on a
planet that’s populated by aliens who look exactly like humans, but who
don’t allow any public displays of affection, live in same-sex housing
and reproduce by artificial insemination. The idea was that this would
provoke heterosexual students into imagining what it’s like to be
homosexual, without realizing that’s what they were doing – thereby
overcoming any resistance they might have had to this prospect.
The participants also answered questions about how they would cope
with life on the planet and maintain their lifestyles. They also shared
plans for how to behave romantically in secret and how to identify other
humans. Afterwards, this alien intervention group were more able to take
the perspective of homosexuals than were control participants who had
attended standard anti-homophobia lectures, and this in turn was asso-
ciated with more empathy towards people who are homosexual, a greater
tendency to think of homosexuals and heterosexuals as all belonging to
the same category (that of being human), and ultimately to more positive
attitudes towards people who are gay. Promisingly, these advantages –
compared with the control group – were still evident a week later.