29 August 2020 | New Scientist | 45Do you think science can help achieve
that sort of systemic change?
Social psychology has always been geared
towards solving these problems. The field
was created in response to the second
world war, in response to the Holocaust.
You had a bunch of researchers in Europe
who were Jewish, who fled to the US and
wanted to study obedience and conformity
and prejudice and dehumanisation.
We have had decades of research now, to
the point where we fully understand these
mechanisms I have been describing. Since
those early days, establishing shared goals
between groups has been identified as a
possible way of changing biased behaviour,
a realisation that we are all in this together.
It is kind of like the climate change problem:
we have the knowledge to fix it – it is there –
what we are missing is the political will.It feels flippant to talk about anything else,
but presumably the coronavirus pandemic
will have a big effect on how we interact
with one another.
The important concept here is disgust, which
is an emotional response that evolved to
protect our bodies from harm. Disgust hasalso been co-opted into the social domain,
particularly with regard to the pathogens
and diseases people carry. In the past, this
response might have been reserved for
people who look sick. We have now
associated that threat response with
everybody, because we have been told for
months that anyone can be contagious.
Our brains have learned this response.
But I don’t think it is going to last because
we are such intensely social creatures. As
things gradually ease up and we interact
more and more, I imagine this urge to keep
away from others will pass.Social psychology has a bit of a reputation
problem, largely because some of its most
arresting findings couldn’t be replicated
in repeat experiments. Do you think social
psychology can survive this crisis?
The replication crises are something that
hit all science, but social psychology is
everybody’s favourite whipping boy because
we study what everybody is an expert on.
We all have social cognition, so we all have
theories about why people do stuff. There
has always been this pressure on social
psychology to do better than other sciences.
What makes social psychology important is
that it is the scientific study of how we think
about others. Social psychology really values
the scientific method, so every one of these
crises actually pushes the field forward.
I think we have done a lot to address this
replication crisis. It really raised the standards
in our field. We do preregistered studies, for
example, where we design the study and it
gets peer reviewed before the data is collected.
If it gets accepted, then I collect the data and
it gets published. That lifts the pressure for
researchers to produce spectacular results.
We have done things that other fields are
still not doing, and I think it will take them
years to catch up. ❚RE
UTER
S/SIMON^ DAWSONProtests in London in June were
part of the global Black Lives
Matter movement to draw
attention to systemic racismDaniel Cossins is a features
editor at New ScientistI think bias training can work but only if it
builds that awareness, if it puts the bias in a
historical and cultural context, so that people
understand where these associations come
from, and they begin to realise how systemic
it is. That is one of the great things about the
Black Lives Matter movement compared with
what I have seen before. It’s really causing
a lot of people to ask those questions.
What is the relationship between this bias and
the systemic racism that Black Lives Matter
has shone a spotlight on?
I think the bias results from the systemic
racism. Historically, bias against black
people was a way to appease the public
so they would view slavery as civilised.
There was a tonne of “scientific” research
to demonstrate they weren’t quite human,
and there were religious arguments that
they were uncivilised. All of this painted
people of African descent as subhuman.
So it is really important to take this long
view, to understand how that history has
influenced our brain processing. It also
highlights how difficult it is to change
this systemic bias, and why you need
systemic change.