It is the walk through the Maine pines to show the children the hand-drawn pictures that is one of the most memorable of my undergraduate experiences.
I was a psychology major at Bowdoin College in Maine conducting a senior research study on children’s capacity to stereotype. A previous experiment, done by much more proficient researchers than myself, had found that if children were shown pictures of men and women engaged in tasks that were inconsistent with the gender’s stereotype, children would recall those pictures in a way that reinforced the stereotype.
So, show kids a drawing of a woman fixing cars, children would remember it days later as a man fixing cars. Show them a drawing of a man ironing and kids would remember it as a woman.
I found the study shocking, and I wanted to see just how confused kids could become in this way, especially Maine kids with little diversity in their midst. We were investigating something called “schemas,” the units humans use in their own minds to categorize and understand information. I hired a fellow student to draw similar pictures of white people and black people engaged in a myriad of tasks, some consistent with stereotypes, others not.
White people sat at business meetings, but also shined shoes and pushed brooms. Black people were boxers and dishwashers, but also pilots, doctors, and hockey players. The results offered a bittersweet reward — we found the children’s schemas for race were as strong as they were for gender. They switched the information around to match their stereotypes of what occupations black and white people did and gave high ratings to their confidence in their answers.
Sixteen years later, I found myself looking at a placemat we had purchased for my own young children. On it were pictures of the 43 presidents of the United States, and for fun we tried memorizing their names and faces. There they were, all those white men with names like John, William, Herbert and George. Next year you will be able to buy a stunningly different placemat.
Elections do have consequences. Some shatter our schemas. Consider, for a moment, the number of exposures each American has had to the schema for president. From the history books of one’s youth to the simple glance at a coin in one’s pocket, these countless experiences have served to reinforce our schemas.
Never mind that in our heads we knew it was technically possible. Schemas have little use for the hypothetical. When Barack Obama’s victory feels surreal, not because of his party affiliation and commanding win, but because of his ethnicity and non-European name and its inconsistency with the stereotype of the position he has earned, it is a wonderful moment. It is the feeling of our schemas stretching.
This is the same process by which racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, anti-Semitism and the like begin to dissolve when people with such views interact with the targets of their antagonism and find them to be humans, and good ones, after all. The information doesn’t fit the destructive schema, and as such, the schema demands to be modified.
From time to time I have trained psychologists and the general public on issues regarding racism and written on the subject only to discover it is difficult to change people’s minds with lectures, and it is nearly impossible to change their schemas with arguments, no matter how well-articulated. Experiencing something holds that distinction, which is why seeing Obama’s image and his self-described “funny name” preceded by the title “president” will change us in ways we do not yet understand.
I sometimes daydream about walking through those Maine pines again to that same, small elementary school to show similar children hand-drawn pictures. Perhaps my children are among them. Perhaps yours.
Do you remember seeing a president? I ask.
Yes.
Was that person black or white? Black.
How confident are you that you saw that?
Very.
Rick Ginsberg is a psychologist who has a private practice in Denver. He was a Colorado Voices contributor in 2001.
