In the last essay I posted, I started a discussion around “bias”.  That is a tricky and deep topic that can’t be concluded in one paper.  So today, I want to probe a related topic that I had alluded to before:  the danger of the “defining characteristic”.  But first we have to back up a bit.  In the essay on “bias”, I mentioned our tribal history as human beings.  Not too long ago (just a few millennia) it was very rare for people to wander outside their tribe or to meet people from other tribes—at least, people notably different from their own.  If they did meet someone who looked and/or sounded different, that person was a curiosity and not to be trusted.  In fact, anthropologists have determined that tribes would grow to the size of about 150 people before they would start to splinter off.  That number seemed to be the maximum size of a group wherein all the members could know each other reasonably well.  In these numbers, deep personal knowledge not only lent a degree of trust in those around you but also created a strong sense of accountability.  If someone did not behave or perform as expected, there was no place to hide.  A bad actor was identified and dealt with quickly.

It wasn’t long, though, until this tribal format was supplanted by the development and growth of cities as we moved from nomadic to agricultural to a communal industrial society.  Now we were living in environments in which we just couldn’t know everyone well enough to develop an organic level of trust and accountability, so we developed rules and laws and governments and police and jails and all kinds of systems to address the need for “expected behaviors”.  But even within these growing cities, the population was still relatively homogeneous.

More recently, other things happened that caused a lot more “mixing” of tribes.  First, it was the availability of faster modes of travel:  ships and trains and cars and planes.  Then, the globalization of the economy—trade drives more interaction among people than anything else.  Finally, the internet has democratized the availability of information and with it the ability to spread information (both for the good and the bad).  The problem is that this mixing has occurred over such a short time span (a few hundred years) that our instincts haven’t kept up with it.  We are still trying to figure out whom we can trust and rely on!  And since we can’t take the time to definitively know so many different people, we rely on a pretty dangerous judgement technique that we don’t even realize we are using:  the defining characteristic.

What on earth do I mean by this?  If we are hardwired to trust people who look and sound like us and distrust those who don’t look and sound like us, then we instinctively judge those different from us based on whatever stereotype we have absorbed about that group.  For example, when I first meet someone who is a fairly observant Christian and/or a conservative Republican, I immediately pull back and close up.  Why?  Because a stereotype of both of those groups that has proven sadly true to me time and again is that members of those groups are anti-gay.  Now, intellectually I know it is absurd to apply that stereotype too broadly since I know many, many people from both those groups who strongly support the LGBT community and are even a part of it.  But I have experienced enough bias first hand and, even more so in the media, to convince me to make that snap judgement and require the person to prove to me otherwise.  That process works through quickly when I have a chance to develop some sort of relationship with these people.  But it probably never will be completed with chance acquaintances, store clerks, event attendees, people I see on television, etc.  So the judgement remains.  The defining characteristic that I judge them by is their religiosity or political persuasion and the assumption I make it that they are anti-gay.

If you are African American, particularly from an inner city, and your entire life you have been stopped by police repeatedly while walking or driving, or followed around stores, or been locked up for flimsy reasons AND you’ve seen the same thing happen to the majority of people like you, guess what?  You are not going to trust the police!  When I lived in Mexico, the police were not to be trusted.  Particularly in Mexico City.  My second week in the country I was robbed by a cop.  When I repatriated to the US, after only 3 ½ years in Mexico, I found myself scared to death every time I saw a cop!  I’ll bet it was more than a year before I could see a police car and not panic.  I know most cops are honest.  Maybe even most in Mexico City.  But my reaction was driven by an assumption related to a defining characteristic that I had internalized:  police = bad news for me.  And let’s take it the other way:  if you are a cop and a disproportionate number of crimes you are exposed to are committed by people who look a certain way, you are not going to immediately trust anyone who looks that way.  Is it fair to place distrust on an entire community because of the behaviors of a few? No.  Is this profiling? Yes.  Is it intentional?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  This is why community policing, whereby citizens get to know their local cops as holistic humans and vice-versa, is so important.  Break that defining characteristic assumption.

This is why words matter so much!  If all you hear about Latin American immigrants is that they are undocumented, evil, dangerous people, that’s what you will believe whenever you see someone who fits that defining characteristic.  Never mind that data clearly show that undocumented immigrants conduct crime at a lower rate than American citizens.  You will instinctively clutch your purse or wallet and your children around someone who fits that defining characteristic.  You probably will not even realize you are doing it.

I find it interesting that when a shooting or some other crime is perpetrated by someone of Middle Eastern descent, white Americans often automatically assume it is a terrorist attack.  If it’s perpetrated by a racial minority, they assume a racially motivated crime that reflects on anyone of that race.  If it’s conducted by a white guy, he’s a misguided mentally ill person.  Why does this happen?  White Americans, like all people for better or worse, use race as an initial defining characteristic and apply historic or media-driven stereotypes.  Since they are white themselves, they know that there is much diversity within their racial “tribe”, so the reason the person committed this crime couldn’t be because of the defining characteristic of race.  It must be because of something else. But we don’t apply that thinking to members of other tribes.  We apply the defining characteristic assumption. Making snap judgements based on defining characteristics happens.  We are hard wired for it to happen.   It is going to happen.  Your goal is not to stop this from happening, either in yourself or others.  Your goal is awareness that you are doing it (or pointing it out to others) and then questioning the assumptions to see if they hold true.  Take a deep breath and look for additional data.  Get to know people different from you.  Don’t trust someone just because they look and talk like you; don’t distrust someone just because they don’t.  Know that each person has their own complicated story.  Stereotypes exist for a reason:  enough people in that affinity group share certain characteristics, or did at some time.  But the stereotype doesn’t tell the whole story—not for you, not for me.  Not for anybody