Written by James Heumann

In my last column I talked about aspects of ethics that relate to our prejudices, and I promised to this week talk about a corner of psychology that offers help on how to reduce prejudices. To review, deontology is the study of our moral duties to others, and virtue ethics talks about morally good habituated ways of thinking and acting. Deontology is one of the main ways of justifying the basic human rights that pretty much everyone agrees about. These human rights include one’s right to be free from discrimination based on morally irrelevant facts about oneself.
But acts of discrimination are motivated and encouraged by unfairly prejudicial thoughts. We all have many prejudices; in fact, we evolved so as to use prejudices to simplify the complex world in ways to help us survive and thrive. I have a prejudice against great white sharks that they’re dangerous.
I’m pretty happy about that.
In modern life, we still simplify – we categorize – things in the world based on various differentiating cues (e.g. physical cues and, also, among humans, cultural cues such as language and clothing). We acquire these categories in various ways, which include experience with a small set of individuals that is generalized to the entire category/class, and cultural messages about that class, transmitted as stories from parents and others or through the media. When what we’re categorizing is human individuals, we often wind up with unfair prejudices.
But we humans simply don’t want others to assume things about our moral or other status based on irrelevant facts about our group membership; instead, individuals should be judged by the content of their (individual) character (to quote Martin Luther King Jr.), and the way to judge that is by the actions of the individual.
Now, I’m not advocating an attempt to purify one’s thought , and saying that being truly ethical requires never thinking unfair thoughts. No, we are held morally responsible for our actions, not our thoughts, and with good reason. Many (most?) of our thoughts are automatic, triggered by cues based on past associations, both cognitive and emotional. Sometimes, I’m like “where the hell did that come from?” Know what I mean? So, the morally key ability is the ability to notice [emotional self-awareness] and restrain [emotional self-control] emotional impulses and deny and contradict thoughts that come into our minds, and to act on different things instead, based on moral principles and emotionally-related abilities like empathy [primal empathy] and compassion [concern] for others (in the square brackets are my connections to the emotional and social competencies listed below; ignore them for now).
But maybe, like me, you find yourself with some prejudices that are just unacceptable to you. There are some prejudices you may want to reduce, to put less of a load on your self-control at any given moment, as it tries to restrain unfair impulses.
What you want to do is de-habituate the vicious (i.e. vice-ious) prejudice, and instead cultivate a virtue that will make it your first impulse, instead, to treat people in ways that tend to conform with your moral principles.
Here’s where we get to a mention of a connection to a certain (small) approach in psychology, one that talks about personal ‘competencies’. The concept of ‘competencies’ comes from David McLelland, Harvard Business School professor of psychology, who used this term to refer to desirable capabilities possessed by top-performing employees; as a result, competencies-based hiring was implemented by major firms starting in the 1970s. Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and journalist of neuroscience who wrote Emotional Intelligence in 1996, later coauthored the 2001 book Primal Leadership and used McLelland’s language to draft a list of leadership competencies. He revised this list in his 2006 Social Intelligence to be applicable to people’s lives generally (not just to leadership settings). Here, he lists 17 competencies under the domains, “Self-Awareness,” “Self-Management,” Social Awareness,” and “Social Facility.” Goleman sees a few competencies as especially important: emotional self-awareness, self-control, primal empathy and concern (maybe I’ll discuss these more in a future column).
According to Goleman and his coauthors in “Primal Leadership,” the best way to build competencies is to engage in a program of “Self-Directed Learning,” which should especially include building into your everyday life activities wherein you learn the theory related to a personal competency you want to improve, practice behaving in the new, desired manner, and feedback and encouragement from others on how well you’re doing. Think of it as similar to the model of having a personal trainer at the gym; the trainer makes progress much more likely and rapid.
It seems to me that, if you wants to become less prejudiced in a certain morally unacceptable way – if you wants to overcome such a moral vice – you must first understand it’s only a very gradual process. Then, you could start by getting to know ‘head facts’ about the group you are currently prejudiced toward – facts that correct your old way of thinking. One source of this on campus might be ‘anti-oppression’ training, such as that usually offered to new volunteers by certain organizations on campus like GRC-GED, OPIRG, or the Peak (though never just take information uncritically; no one is infallible).
If possible, you could build into your life regular experiences that will intellectually and emotionally contradict your old, vicious way of thinking. For example, this could include volunteering or working with different people of that group. But, be careful not to tokenize any such person, expecting them to be your teacher on ‘what it’s like’ to belong to the group – your prejudices are your own responsibility, and that person didn’t sign up to be your trainer. You can also look for other ways to empathize more with members of the group, such as relevant literature by members of the group, or relevant films. And, if possible, you could look for ways to get regular meetings with someone competent to give you confidential feedback about your evolving thoughts and feelings along the way (perhaps a close friend or therapist). But all this you’d have to ‘own’ as a project you’re pursuing for your own sake (hence ‘Self-Directed Learning’).
So, that’s my current mind on a very personal issue: how to become less prejudiced. If it don’t sound fast, that’s probably ‘cause it ain’t. So, like the rest of us, you’ll have to use self-control along to way to prevent your prejudices from leading you to act in a discriminatory way. But that’s part of being human. The good news it seems possible to slowly change the inside.

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