The Neuroscience of Prejudice

Imagine a new chain restaurant comes to your town. You have heard about it but never eaten at one of its establishments. You are curious and decide to give it a try. You and your spouse wait in line on opening weekend expecting excellent food and service, but you are sorely disappointed. Your overwhelmed server is slow and rude. Your chef is a rookie and overcooks your food and forgets a special request you make. You can barely choke down the meal and almost choke again when your server rudely drops the bill at your table. If you are like most people, you and your spouse make the vow, “We are never eating here again.” Even if a future road trip takes you by another in the chain in a different city right at meal time, the impression from your first visit leads you to drive right by. One meal at one restaurant – really just one chef and one server – has defined every restaurant in that entire chain for the rest of your life.

Research that led to my book, How to Make Big Decisions Wisely, and my doctoral dissertation dove into the fields of neuroscience, persuasion psychology, and decision science. In depth scientific research in all of these fields demonstrates that most people make most decisions intuitively. As the renowned, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Daniel Kahneman labeled his best-known book on the subject, Thinking Fast and Slow, we too often use this fast thinking, impulsive, and intuitive thinking to make major decisions. In part, we do this because of the extra time and mental energy it takes to intentionally make a decision. Rather than taking into account all the data that would help us make the best decisions, we look for cues, what persuasion psychologists call heuristics. We use one small piece to make a judgement about the whole. We use one chat with a former customer to decide if we will shop at a store. We use the words we heard from our parents growing up to determine if a person’s skin color will determine their value and trustworthiness.

I believe God created us with the ability to think fast and make quick decisions because most of our decisions are routine and do not require contemplation. Should I take the next breath? Yes, if I want to stay alive. Which pedal do I push to make my car go? After thousands of car trips, I do not have to consciously remember the accelerator is on the right. The majority of the millions of decisions we make every day are best made impulsively, but, as Kahneman points out in his book, we can make some horrible decisions if we trust fast thinking too often.

Most of us do not recognize the heuristics we use or the problems they cause. So much of racial prejudice is inherited from our parents and other influential voices as we formed the metaphorical lenses we use to quickly interpret situations in our lives. Some of these lenses were formed so early and are held so deeply, we will not accept any evidence they may be in error. It is like the lenses have filters that only allow evidence that reinforces what we thought in the past it to pass through in confirmation. An individual raised to think one race was inferior to another will use a rare negative experience with someone of that race to “prove” that view was right all along even if thirty positive experiences with people of that same race happened in the same time period.

We also tend to use heuristics to lump things together to ease our evaluation and decision-making. Like the litmus paper my mother used to see if her home-canned pickles were safe to eat, we assume everything is either good or bad and one single cue in a complex situation can tell us which it is. Although this saves decision making time and effort, it is incredibly risky and fuels the prejudice that has divided humankind for generations. I cannot assume everyone in a particular career field, school, political party, nationality, or race holds all the perspectives of everyone else in the group. I also cannot assume everyone is either good or bad. Every human in history has been made in the image of God yet has also done many wrongs. (Genesis 1:26; Romans 3:23)

The problems with fast thinking and looking for embedded cues are magnified in times of unexpected, urgent stress produced by fear. Our intentionally processing prefrontal cortex shuts down in what Daniel Goleman calls an amygdala hijacking and puts us into a state of hypervigilance. The amygdala is the fastest thinking part of our brains and responds quickly in self-defense but does not process rationally. It can only draw from our embedded preconceptions and habits.

Although my hometown had few African American residents, words from my parents, my friends, and even television programs shaped my lenses and put me in a state of fear whenever I was in a neighboring city and passed a group of black men. I did not base my fear on knowing each of them as individuals. Like avoiding every restaurant in the chain after one bad experience, I used hearsay from my upbringing to judge them before I ever got to know them and the hypervigilance those preconceptions produced meant that would never happen as I tried to get away as soon as possible.

I thank God my story does not end there. At age 18 Jesus transformed me and enabled me to experience what Paul describes in I Corinthians 5:17 (NAS): “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” This new life can produce in us the change he describes in the verse before: “Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh.”

I would love to say this automatically happens, but this same apostle writes in his letter to the Romans, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2, NAS) The renewal of our minds requires our intentional effort in partnership with God’s work in us.

In my first Air Force assignment I was assigned an African American sergeant. Rather than leaning on the old prejudging lenses formed in my childhood, I intentionally sought to get to know him as a fellow human being. In fact, I learned to greatly respect him. His 16 years of active duty gave him a lot of wisdom this fresh second lieutenant was lacking. I saw his insightful hard work and dedication bear real fruit. The false cues I may have used in past years fell away.

Since then I have been privileged to get to know and love hundreds of African Americans. Each is a unique individual with unique abilities and gifts. Certainly, there are distinct elements of African American culture, but most of these can and should be celebrated. Nearly every one of the church tours I take students on features a predominantly African American congregation and that pastor is usually voted the favorite preacher of the whole trip by my students.

We are in a season in which more people than ever are willing to rethink the preconceptions they have carried. I will not allow one negative experience to serve as the judgement of all. I pray God helps us all renew our minds.