What is an Effective Way to Combat Stereotypes

So are we stuck?  Are we slaves to stereotypes?  Are they so omnipresent, then subtle, so powerful, that we have no choice only to follow where they atomic number 82?

No.  Not by whatever ways.  In that location are lots of things we can do.

Educate Yourself

I proficient first step is exactly what y’all are doing now—larn more about the problem.  Increase your sensation of racism and how to combat it.  White students at Rutgers University who completed a course on prejudice and conflict became less prejudiced (a measure of their feelings) and less stereotypical (a measure of their behavior) compared with similar students who did not take the course (Rudman, Ashmore, and Gary, 2001). It is important to annotation that the class dealt quite specifically with prejudice and conflict.  The existent benefit comes from asking difficult questions, not fugitive them.  I savour “celebrating diverseness.”  Learning about new cultures, trying new food, and commemorating new holidays broadens the mind and opens u.s. up to new possibilities.  Simply in the absence of dealing with the tough problems of prejudice and stereotyping, information technology doesn’t usually touch on the fundamental ways in which we think about people of other races and cultures.  Celebrating diverseness is fun and worthwhile, only it’s no substitute for addressing difficult questions head-on.

One of the best things to do is to follow antiracist activists and scholars on social media.

Want a good book?  Ibram Ten. Kendi, author of
Stamped from the Beginning
and
How to Exist an Antiracist
suggests these.  Time mag says these are good.  Simply don’t read merely one volume.  You need a variety of perspectives.  Look for several books written by people of different backgrounds and genders.  So many good books have been written from various organized religion perspectives, too.

Run into New People

Learning most race and racism is good.  Only it’south not enough past itself.  In that location is a huge research literature, going dorsum decades, on what happens when we institute meaningful, reciprocal relationships people from other groups (Allport, 1954).  Being in equal-status (merely
not
ascendant/subordinate) relationships with people from different backgrounds enables us to come across them as complete human beings: members of their social groups to be sure, but unique in their particular gear up of personal experiences and characteristics.  The result of this kind of contact is a pregnant drop in both prejudice and stereotyping (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006).  Compared with White children in desegregated schools, for example, White children in an all-White school are more probable to say negative things about Black children they see in a film, and are less probable to assume that Blackness and White children can exist friends (McGlothlin and Killen, 2006).

A little experience with cantankerous-racial interactions likewise reduces anxiety amongst both majority- and minority-grouping members.  Every bit information technology turns out, getting to know people from other backgrounds ordinarily goes ameliorate than we expect.  That provides additional motivation, and increased confidence, to develop a larger number of such relationships (Mallett, Wagner, and Harrison, 2011). We as well get more than empathic as nosotros acquire to care about other people and to empathise how they view the earth (Tausch and Hewstone, 2013).

Of course, how you go about getting to know people is very important.  A stance of
cultural humility
is helpful—budgeted people from different backgrounds with the same kind of respect and consideration y’all want to receive from them.

At that place are several features of cultural humility (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia, 1998), including

1. Learning to be self-aware, to sympathise our own cultural perspectives, how our social identities have been shaped, and how they, in plough, have informed our perspectives.
2. Reducing whatever power imbalance betwixt us and the other person.  This is especially important when we meet someone from a different background on our ain turf, where our social group is dominant.
3. Inbound into a common relationship in which both parties open up themselves upwardly to the other. If I’m learning things about you without revealing anything of myself in return, I’one thousand not forming a reciprocal human relationship, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you are uninterested in sticking around for more.
4. Working for institutional alter.  Because institutional policies and processes affect more people than we practise every bit individuals, cultural humility requires advocating for fair treatment throughout the organizations of which nosotros are a part.

Become motivated

Recall the old joke that it just takes i therapist to change a calorie-free bulb—but the light bulb has to want to change?  Research has shown that one way to avoid letting stereotypes control your thinking is merely to have the motivation not to be controlled.  All it takes is a little extra sensation and a little extra effort.

Stereotype researcher Patricia Devine (1989) has made a helpful stardom here—we all
know
the racial stereotypes and then common in this state, just nosotros don’t all have to
believe
them.  Stereotyping is the default option gear up by our national history, but we tin can change the setting.  We can resolve to break the bad addiction of stereotyping by determining to detect when it occurs and deciding to think a different mode.

Prof. Devine and her colleagues conducted a compelling study of how to aid people overcome their implicit biases (Devine et al., 2012).  They taught academy students 5 techniques for reducing stereotypic thinking:

• Stereotype replacement
  (learning to recognize one’due south stereotypical responses to other people, and to generate non-stereotypical alternatives to explicate that person’s beliefs)
• Counter-stereotypic imaging
  (remembering or imagining people from stereotyped groups who practice not fit the stereotype)
• Individuating
  (paying attention to other things well-nigh someone as well the stereotypes of their group–personal things that can assistance you encounter them every bit an individual, not just a group member)
• Perspective-taking
  (imagining what the world looks like through the eyes of a stereotyped person)
• Contact
  (deliberately seeking opportunities to get to know people from stereotyped groups)

These techniques are designed to assist someone break the stereotype addiction.  Just as with any bad habit nosotros want to change, nosotros need to recognize what we are doing and then substitute other, more positive, behaviors in their place.

After iv weeks of practicing these techniques, White university students showed significantly lower implicit prejudice against Blackness people, as measured past the Implicit Clan Test, a reduction that persisted another four weeks after that.  (It’southward pretty hopeful, I retrieve, to meet positive changes on such an ingrained habit in but a month.)  The participants as well indicated that they were more concerned about racial discrimination than they were before.  The students who did not receive the grooming showed no change; their bias against Black people continued as before.

It’s no fluke that business concern for bigotry proved important in this study.  When stereotypes aren’t directed at the states, they are easy to discount or ignore.  Remembering that stereotypes have consequences—that they ofttimes pb to discrimination—fuels the motivation we need to break the stereotype habit, and to substitute new, better thought processes in their place.

Get the facts

You are an off-duty police officeholder, dressed in civilian clothing, who comes across a crime.  Yous draw your gun and gear up to take activity when a uniformed officer arrives.  At the scene of a law-breaking, out of uniform, weapon drawn, you lot probably look like a suspect—perhaps at adventure for beingness shot past your fellow officeholder.

An off-duty officer in this kind of situation has been shot and killed by a uniformed officer 10 times in the U.Due south. since 1982.  Ix of those times, the officer killed was Black or Latino (Baker, May 27, 2010).

Information technology’due south not common for off-duty officers to be at the scene of a crime.  But it is common for police officers to come across people who may or may not be suspicious and accept to determine—in an instant—whether that person
is
a danger, or isin danger.  It’s life or death, and any officeholder would want to become information technology correct.  Even when people really want to do the right affair, notwithstanding, implicit racial stereotypes tin can play a role in their separate-second decision-making.

In the enquiry laboratory, as on the streets, White people are more likely to mistake a wallet or a jail cell phone for a gun if information technology is held past a Black man instead of a White man (Payne, 2001).  That’southward not inevitable, however.  Getting the facts can aid.  In one study (Plant, Peruche, and Butz, 2005), White research participants “shot at” White suspects simply when they were holding a gun (every bit opposed to, say, a cell phone).  But they “shot at” Black suspects if they were holding annihilation at all.  With practise and feedback, however, the participants learned to respond to the actual objects, not the color of the men belongings them.  With feel, they became more than accurate and less stereotypical in their judgments.  The feel even left them less likely to think about race.  When given a word-completion task, they were less likely than a control group to plow something similar R _ _ E into RACE, opting instead for Dominion or another not-racial word.  You might retrieve that spending time on a figurer looking at photos of men of different races and deciding whether they were holding a gun would take heightened participants’ sensitivities about race.  On the contrary, it allowed them to focus on the real issue—guns vs. other manus-held objects—and reduced the part of race in their thinking.

A huge report sponsored by the Establish of Medicine (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson, 2003—an outline of which is here) recommended getting the facts as i of the all-time remedies for racial disparities in health care:

Standardized data collection, still, is critically of import in the effort to understand and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare . . . collecting appropriate data related to racial or ethnic differences in the process, structure and outcomes of intendance can help to identify discriminatory practices, whether they are the effect of intentional behaviors and attitudes, or unintended—but no less harmful—biases or policies that event in racial or ethnic differences in care.

Manhattan Commune Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. authorized a report (McKinley, July eight, 2014) to come across whether New York City prosecutors were treating suspects any differently according to their race.   Prosecutors have a fair bit of latitude in deciding how to proceed with their cases, which could open the door for stereotypical decision-making.  Theleere was no racial disparity in their decisions about whether to accept a case, but there was a disparity in all the other of the steps in the process.  Relative to white and Asian suspects charged with identical offenses, Blackness and Latino suspects were less likely to have their cases dismissed, less likely to be offered affordable bail, less likely to exist offered plea bargains that avoided jail time, and more likely to be sentenced to serve time in jail at the cease of the procedure.

In response to the findings, Mr. Vance asked his employees to go through implicit bias preparation to help them identify ways to treat all suspects fairly, regardless of their groundwork–not unlike the “shoot/don’t shoot” grooming in the guns vs. jail cell phones written report.

Getting clear near the facts on the footing is essential in order to uncover personal and institutional biases that escape our notice even while shaping the social situations within which nosotros alive.  As Police Professor Cynthia Lee (2013) argues, “The effects of implicit racial bias are particularly probable to operate under the radar screen in a society like ours that views itself as mail-racial.”  If we make up one’s mind in advance that nosotros are non subject to stereotypes, nosotros eliminate all possibility of finding out whether that is actually true.

In that location are thousands of research studies on stereotypes and how to overcome them.  One expert summary, published by the Perception Institute, is called
The Scientific discipline of Equality, Book I:  Addressing Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat in Teaching and Health Intendance.

The Bottom Line:  Don’t desire to go with the flow and absorb the racist messages–and the stereotypes–of the broader society?  It volition accept a little try, but there are means to avoid existence poisoned past the smog that we breathe.