PREJUDICE AND RACISMgerms are transmitted. Similarly, Carlos Navarrete at Harvard University
surveyed pregnant women and found that those in the first trimester of
pregnancy, when risk of infection is highest, expressed more in-group bias
and out-group prejudice than women in the second and third trimesters.
Fear of contamination may explain our motivation for out-group
prejudice, but the ease with which we are willing to act on this preju-
dice appears to be related to our ability to dehumanize outsiders. This
was demonstrated graphically in 2006 when the Princeton University
researchers Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske scanned the brains of students
as they looked at pictures of people from different social groups. When
the students looked at sporting heroes, the elderly and businessmen,
activity was triggered in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain
known to be associated with thinking about people. By contrast, when the
students looked at pictures of the homeless or drug addicts, activity in the
prefrontal cortex was missing ( just as it was when the students looked at
pictures of objects). Rather disturbingly, activity was instead observed in
brain regions related to disgust.
Beating racism and prejudice
The most powerful antidote to out-group prejudice, according to several
decades of research in social psychology, is meaningful, positive contact
with out-group members – an idea that psychologists call contact theory.
Research in Bradford in the UK, for example, has shown that young
white adults with more Asian friends tend to have more positive atti-
tudes towards Asians in general, see them more as individuals, and are
more trusting of them as a group. Similar findings have been reported
around the world, from Northern Ireland to India. According to the
Oxford University social psychologist Miles Hewstone, the benefits of
such contacts are that they reduce the “discomfort of strangers” and
diminish anxiety. When a person has a friend from an out-group, they
share intimacies. This “self-disclosure” helps them identify with each
other as real people experiencing the vicissitudes of human life. If
prejudice is facilitated by people seeing outsiders as somehow less than
human, then contact, it seems, has the opposite effect – humanizing
members of other social groups.
One obvious criticism that’s been levelled at contact theory is that
the causal direction could quite plausibly run in the other direction.
People with more positive and tolerant attitudes towards members of
other social groups are surely more likely to have friends from those