Grudgingly I have come to accept that family is important. It’s nicer to think that the people you choose to associate with are way more important than a group of people you’re born into, but it’s just not true. There are ways in which friends matter more: they will often have similar interests so you have more to talk about, they’re more likely to understand and accept you as an individual because they’re probably similar to you anyway, they won’t try to control you or make you feel guilty because they don’t think they have any particular authority over you etc. But there’s another important sense in which family seems to win hands down. I call it the Stasi test.

I remember asking my mother as a child about how she’d react if I were suspected of murder, in particular if the evidence seemed to overwhelmingly suggest that I was guilty but I nevertheless claimed to be innocent. In other words, I wanted to know whether she would be biased towards me. She said she guessed she would “have to believe” me. This is the essence of the Stasi test.

In the Stasi test I imagine that I’m living in a “thought control” state in which certain beliefs are punishable and generally considered to be reprehensible and disgusting (or that I’m living in a society that’s even more like that than this one). Let’s say I hold those immoral beliefs and assume that everyone else sincerely considers my beliefs to be evil just like the secret police does. Think 1984. The question is this: which people could I safely reveal those beliefs to, ie. which ones wouldn’t turn me in to the secret police?

I’d like to think that some of my friends wouldn’t, although it’s hard to say which ones. Not necessarily some top slice of closest friends, because there are some pretty morally conscious people among them. They would be able to rise above their affections towards me as a friend in order to fulfil the greater good. But some close friends who generally care more about practicality, immediacy and loyalty than abstract moral values would pass the Stasi test (I am thinking of three people in particular, I wonder if they guess who they are).

But for some reason family doesn’t work like this. No matter what they thought, I just can’t see my immediate family throwing me to the wolves because of my immorality in this situation. Not only does family have this “ultimate bond” characteristic, but it’s very long-lasting and enduring: even when people have been apart for decades they will often recognise each other as family and therefore bonded. The knowledge that you share lots of genetic material with someone overrides a lot of preferences in your brain and makes you care about them and protect them.

I recognise this in myself too: hurt to people I’m genetically invested or vice-versa feels a lot like hurt to me personally. This is about as intrinsic a part of human nature as you can get.

Previously:
-a prejudice is a particular kind of belief
-some prejudices are valuable to have
-beliefs have variable accuracy and effects

Humans have a tendency to develop prejudices that are especially valuable. People who fail to develop such prejudices are constantly at greater risk from various threats and fail to identify good opportunities.

The most common prejudices about people concern age and gender. Everyone cares about them because those two things typically tell you a lot about a person. If you’re walking down the street alone at night it’s a very different sensation to notice you’re being followed by a 25-year old man than a 10-year old girl (or a 70-year old woman).

How should we evaluate these prejudices about age and gender? To people who have them they are useful. It makes you safer to be a little wary of people you don’t know who are in the age/gender group that commits almost all of the violent crime in our society (of course it’s even better to tune your prejudices more finely; eg. muscularity, drunkedness, tattoos and loudness adjust the threat estimation up). This has the consequence that people in the group in question are seen as threatening even if they’re really no more of a threat than the average person. Nevertheless, most people would probably say we’re better off with the prejudice than without it.

On the opportunity side, most businesses and individuals assume in their dealings that everyone is heterosexual. As opposed to the previous example, this prejudice has a name: heteronormativity. Why do businesses do this? Instead of printing an ad saying “buy your wife this necklace and she will have more sex with you” they could cover other possibilities too, like women who want to extract sex from men by buying them stuff, gay couples and people who like to buy nice things for themselves. They don’t do those things because they think they’re making more money by doing what they’re doing now.

Their underlying assumptions are that most people are heterosexual and that men mostly buy things for women instead of the other way around. As far as I can tell, those assumptions are actually true. This and other practices have the consequence that non-heterosexuals are made to feel weird, and it’s very unpleasant to feel that your sexuality is weird. That’s why some people think this prejudice is wrong and that you shouldn’t make assumptions about anyone’s sexuality. I sympathise with this and try to avoid making gay people feel weird (then again, I feel pretty weird myself), but I can’t make myself not know that nine out of ten people are heterosexual. Or if I can, I don’t really want to. I don’t want to make my map any worse. If I were in the jewellery business I would have to balance the goal of making money with the goal of not making people feel excluded.

In the previous cases prejudice is generally considered to be acceptable, but there are others in which it isn’t. For example, I’m pretty sure racial prejudice is a de facto part of being streetwise in many parts of the world. In the United States, black people commit more violent crime than white people (in the case of homicides by a factor of about six). That is a statistical fact that doesn’t provide any explanations as to why this should be so, but it’s true enough to make most people racists in the sense the word is widely used today. Whether they want to or not, people can’t get this out of their minds and will often react accordingly even if they intellectually believe they shouldn’t be racist. Unlike with sex/age/sexuality, many people believe it’s wrong to even know (or express) this fact because it stigmatises blacks and perpetuates the situation.

I agree that it’s not desirable to stigmatise innocent black people, just like it’s not desirable to stigmatise innocent young males in general. In general the rational thing is to judge people as individuals when you get to know them as individuals. But I don’t make it my goal not to know these things, nor do I make an effort to approach a rowdy gang of Somali youths as if it weren’t a rowdy gang of Somali youths. I don’t believe that would be so much “fighting racism” as “fighting reality”.

I am a big fan of accurate preconceptions, stereotypes and the social norms that make use of them. Example: merchants of skin care products in shopping centres don’t try to sell me anything because I’m a man. In other words, they make an assumption about me based on my sex. What are the overall effects of this prejudice? Let’s break it down by customer groups.

1. Women who are interested in skin care products. They get approached and don’t mind it. The merchants make money out of these people.
2. Women who aren’t interested in skin care products. They get approached but are bothered by it. The merchants are wasting their time here.
3. Men who are interested in skin care products. They don’t get approached, but they can always go talk to the salespeople themselves so presumably they don’t mind. The merchants lose money by not targetting this group more aggressively.
4. Men who aren’t interested in skin care products. They don’t get approached and are happy about it. The merchants save money by not targetting them.

The sizes of these groups and various other variables determine the overall profitability of the prejudice, but it’s probably positive since the skin care people do utilise it. So for them, there is a tangible benefit to having this prejudice. What about the customers? Trivially, if aggressive selling were banned altogether, nobody would be bothered by it. But barring that, this prejudice is also a net positive for the customers because it takes away the bother to group 4 and doesn’t provide bother to anyone extra.

There are those who would say of this and similar situations that the prejudice still shouldn’t exist because making assumptions based on gender is wrong. According to them it’s unfair that women who don’t want to be bothered can’t get the same deal men get. These people are essentially saying that they don’t care about efficiency for anyone else, but only about their needlessly hurt feelings. I can’t support such antisocial views.

Of course, this was a rather simple instance of a useful prejudice. An entry-level prejudice, if you like. If you still find yourself thinking “you shouldn’t be prejudiced”, there is probably no hope for you.