The Double Edged Passion
Interestingly enough, dumping on the Jewish girl seemed to cause people's self-esteem to recover from the humiliation of the impossible IQ test. The more negatively test-takers rated "Julie Goldberg", the closer they returned to their initial baseline of self-esteem. Expressing prejudice actually restored their temporarily dented feelings of self worth. These participants would doubtless have recovered anyway, but they used prejudice as a cruel shortcut back to equanimity. The philosophy seemed to be: "if life hands you lemons, pelt them at someone until you feel better".
Recall Matthew Shepard, beaten to death by a pair of homophobic Wyomingites (State motto: "Equality")? His assailants, perhaps suffering the ill effects of a cultural squeamishness about gays, may have felt anxious. Apparently lacking the sense to see this as their own problem, they appear to have indulged in hateful action to make themselves feel better. Homophobia, then, might offer both feelings of threat and a nasty shortcut to alleviate it. The inbuilt cure is worse than the original disease.
On a more prosocial note, the boys at Sherif's camp might have used prejudice not to feel better, but to pull their groups closer together. It makes sense if you think about it. Humans have clumped together since prehistoric times for protection, and that impulse still runs strong in us, especially when we’re faced with a threat. When the United States was attacked on 9/11, there was an immediate and enormous pulling together, as people turned to each other for support. The same community bonding happened in World War II when London was blitzed, and seems to happen all too often in the Middle East as its crises come and go.
There's a twisted yet compelling logic which says that if people pull together in face of an enemy, and if pulling together is what you want, then what you really need is an enemy. When the Rattlers and Eagles first started disparaging each other, believe it or not, what they might have been trying to do was make their group more cohesive.
Why We Think We Hate
Imagine talking to one of Sherif's campers. He could probably tell you with great authority that Eagles are jerks, liars, and cheats. He would tell you that they are stupid and tricky, blithe to the contradiction between those two things. Furthermore, he would tell you (as 12 year-olds are wont), that Eagles are smelly. If some egg-head scientist interrupted that this was all really about realistic threat and attempts at group cohesion, the Rattler would probably add some choice words about the scientist too. Eagles are stupid, end of conversation.
"How do you KNOW they are stupid," the scientist might ask?
"Easy," the Rattler would say, "because they are." It's the Tupac hypothesis of prejudice; "That's just the way it is."
The egg-headed scientist would be left to claim that the Rattler just doesn’t have mental access into why he started thinking such nefarious things about Rattlers. She would be on strong ground with his claim, too. Perhaps the best illustration is with split brain patients, who have had the connection between the two halves of their brain literally chopped out (no, psychologists aren't total sadists; this was done as an early treatment for epilepsy). With these patients, you can tell one side of their brain to do something, such as stand up, and often they will do so. If you ask them why they leapt to their feet, the other side of their brain, not knowing why, will just make a reason up. "There was a draft," the person might report. "Why did I laugh? It's just a funny machine you’ve got me looking at here." Psychologists call this confabulation.
Now our Eagle-hating Rattler presumably has an intact brain, but he still might not have been aware of how the right motivational context could have rewarded his early fumblings in the direction of prejudice. But if asked, he will confabulate reasons about stupidity, jerk-ishness, and odious smells. And then he will believe them.
Why We Think We Hate - Me? Prejudiced?
Currently in North America, the predominant belief about "why we hate" is that "we don't." When asked “who are you prejudiced against?” most people respond as if the question was about their predilection for eating puppies.
Of course, most understand "prejudice," here, to be synonymous with "hating ethnic minorities," with a sideline in hating gays, and sometimes women. Christian Crandall (2002) points out that prejudice comes in a continuum, ranging from not-at-all hated groups (e.g., nurses) to very slightly disliked ones (e.g., Americans/Canadians, depending which side of the border you live on), to more openly disliked groups (e.g., prostitutes, gambling addicts), to the outright reviled (e.g., child molesters, rapists). But what about ethnic groups? Is prejudice against them dead? Adults may use more sophisticated epithets than 'smelly' (well, sometimes), but do we have more in common with Sherif's boys than we care to admit?
The last half century has seen a steady decline in racial stereotyping - or at least, the type people admit to on surveys. There is a fair bit of regional variation in this of course, with equality being more fashionable in some places than others. As part of her research, one of my colleagues asked students in Texas "what is the worst thing that could happen to you?" to which some girls wrote: "I would become pregnant by a Black man." Such a response would be considered unimaginably embarrassing at a liberal arts school in, say, Boston. This isn’t to suggest that all Texans are prejudiced or that all Bostonians aren’t, merely that the norms demanding outrage at prejudiced behavior are not equally strong everywhere.
