The world is moving towards equality – races, religions, age groups. It is all the more curious that, deep down, most of us continue to be not very tolerant.
A new study by psychologists at the University of Virginia has revealed the subconscious desire of any person to build a clear hierarchy in his head *. Not only do we subconsciously perceive our racial and religious affiliation as the most correct – we do not forget to arrange other races and religions in a certain order of significance and attractiveness.
“People from groups with relatively low social status readily admitted that their group did not have authority,” says study leader, psychologist Jordan R. Axt. “At the same time, regardless of status, each of them felt the greatest commitment to their own group. We wanted to understand how this dual attitude – on the one hand, you realize that your social group does not have much authority, on the other hand, you remain committed to it – will manifest itself in the dimensions of the conscious and subconscious assessment of others.
Ekst and his colleagues analyzed data from thousands of study participants who were given a short test on attitudes towards different races, religions and age groups. The first task of the test asked participants to choose epithets for images of faces belonging to different racial types. The adjectives offered to choose from had both positive (“pleasant”, “wonderful”, “excellent” person) and negative (“disgusting”, “unpleasant”, “terrible”, “frightening”) coloring. The intention of the scientists was as follows: due to the fact that the test participants will have a little time to build associations, they will choose those that are characteristic of them subconsciously – even if consciously a person is ready to criticize his own logic, forcing himself to deny that a representative of another racial type seems to him aggressive, vulgar or narrow-minded. Thus, test participants will give out their true thoughts, and not those that they were inspired by upbringing and culture.
The fact that the results turned out to be not exactly politically correct (in terms of the number of positive epithets each participant put his own race in the first place) was only the first surprise for the researchers. Much more surprisingly, most of the participants in the experiment had roughly the same hierarchy of ratings for different races: whites got the most flattering ratings, followed by immigrants from Asia, African Americans, and finally Latin Americans. That is, for example, African Americans built a hierarchy like this: African Americans, whites, Asians, Latinos, and Asians – Asians, whites, African Americans, Latinos. The same effect was observed in the results of the test on the assessment of various religions: in the first place for each was his own religion, but on average the hierarchy was such – Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism, and finally Islam.
But the age groups, in contrast to race and religion, did not demonstrate a special commitment to the number of years lived: for example, the elderly did not at all believe that their peers were mostly decent people, and people of mature age were more inclined to trust the faces of adolescents and young men than those born around the same age as themselves. However, here, too, a hierarchy emerged: children received more than other positive epithets, followed by representatives of the youth, middle age, and, finally, the elderly.
An important observation, confirmed during testing, was that the bulk of the participants gave completely different conscious and unconscious assessments of races, religions and age groups. The explanation offered by the organizers of the experiment is as follows: “Our conscious assessments are connected with our personal attitude towards other people. But unconscious assessments can arise from self-identification, as well as from stereotypes that are widespread in society, says Ekst. “And even though we may not agree with these stereotypes, they nonetheless shape our position on these issues.”
Let us add on our own behalf that the alternative explanation that can be given to this fact is exactly the opposite – people consciously reproduce the politically correct ideas implanted by society, but subconsciously make their own assessments, which are based on their personal experience.
According to the authors of the study, its results make it possible to make a significant contribution to the discussion about which social groups people feel the highest commitment to – to their own or to those that are higher in status. “Unlike most scientific discussions, the answer is both,” says Ekst.
* Psychological Science, July 2014. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/07/30/0956797614543801.abstract