How Prejudices Are Learned
“I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.”
Prejudices are learned. We are born tabula rasa and write our unique personal chronicle from personal experiences. For example, newborns are totally helpless and unable to even recognize their mother, but will eventually learn the language they were raised in, and accept the values and beliefs they were taught. We may have different individual potentials and capacities, but within those limitations, we accumulate a unique database of memories, knowledge, skills, opinions, and prejudices. There is a saying that “Children are sponges – they are going to absorb whatever is around them, so we need to be intentional about what surrounds them.” In general we can classify learning into two broad categories – associative learning and conscious learning. Associative learning may be out of our awareness, and explains how prejudices are learned. Conscious learning, or traditional effortful learning, encompasses didactic teaching, mentorship, or learning by watching and copying.
Associative Learning
Associative learning, or conditioned learning, is known to occur in all members of the animal kingdom. We infer connections between events or things that occur close together or occur repeatedly. Within this broad category, there are several subcategories that require explanation.
Repetition
People tend to accept things that are repeated enough times, and we tend to remember things learned by repetition longer than things we only heard once. If some events are repeatedly paired, people associate the events being together, like bread and butter. A current example is the repetitive statements that former-President Trump makes.
On one hand, enough repetition could make one believe something is true. For example, if you believe in Trump and listen to his repetitive claims, you accept what he says is the truth. However, repetition has another side. If we think Trump lies, then we think everything he says is a lie, and you ignore what he says (habituation). The Aesop fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” warns that people will also turn their back on you when you really need them. As a Tennessee saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning leads to an association between an neutral stimulus and the feeling attached to an unconditioned stimulus that automatically leads to a strong reaction. A stimulus is anything we react to like a person, object, image, situation, or event. An unconditioned response is the autonomic stress reaction triggered by the unconditioned stimulus. This general stress response is an autonomic response, or physical sign, that we feel stressed or threatened. The common signs are increased blood pressure, heartrate, sweating, etc.. With conditioning, we learn to have the autonomic response whenever we see the formerly neutral stimulus. We no longer need a real threat to experience the stress response anymore. (See Figure 1)
In regard to racial prejudice, if we are conditioned to think a different race is threatening or bad, it leads to hatred and fear and self-protection. Because these beliefs seem pervasive across generations, they have been institutionalized into racism and social injustice. Reinforcers of this visceral association are miseducation, the media, and attitudes of people we trust, like family and friends. Once an association has been made, it only requires intermittent reinforcement to continue. We tend to look for and choose information that reinforces our prejudices (selective attention). It does not take a real life experience to generate this learned fear once it is learned.
Operant Conditioning
Operant conditioning or instrumental conditioning is a method of shaping behaviors through rewards or punishments. This is what is often referred to as the carrot and stick approach to learning. You get rewarded for doing the desired behavior or right decison and punished for doing the undesired behavior or decision. This approach also underlies cognitive behavioral therapy. An example might be CBT-I (CBT for insomnia) where a desired behavior is going to bed at the same time every night and waking at the same time every morning within a 10 minute window of time. The reward is success in staying on schedule, better sleep, and praise from whoever is monitoring you. If you don’t do it, the punishment is disappointment in yourself, no praise, and no improvement in sleep.
False Associations
The problem of associative learning is that we don’t always know if the pairing we learn is a chance occurrence or real. All we know is that two things occurred at about the same time.
The best protection against acting on false associations, i.e., prejudice, is to be aware of signs of bias. We might feel uneasy or anxious, sense that something is not right, act out of character, or seem unreasonable. Awareness of the signs will hopefully make us question our belief.
General Considerations for Associative Learning
- For instrumental learning, think of positive reinforcers to shape behavior. Negative reinforcement, like criticizing someone for their beliefs or threatening them, is not a good motivator for change.
- For classical conditioning, learning does not require conscious attention. Political correctness is a good thing even if the goal is showing common courtesy to each other to avoid acting inappropriately.
- Be aware if where you got your information.
- Our family and friends may not be right. They unconsciously manipulate us to reinforce their beliefs and discourage support of opposing views. Don’t take everything leaders, advisors, sages, and teachers say without question. No one is always right.
- Social media, TV, magazines, newspapers, and books influence us a lot. Question the truthfulness of information. Even research articles are given grades for the type of evidence, quality of data, and strength of recommendations it is based on.
- Always be aware that associations may not be true. “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by the majority.” – Booker T. Washington
