Confronting Prejudice – Not so Easy

Theoretically, it is a good thing to confront someone who is making prejudiced remarks, practically, many people don't do it. As people think that confronting a prejudiced remark often happens in a conflictual situation, they would rather be quiet and passive. Scientists at Stanford University carried out a study and found out that when people are targets of prejudice, they are more likely to speak if they believe that the others' personalities can change.

One of the researcher's experiments consisted in telling students who were all ethnic minorities and/or women, that they were going to discuss college admissions with another student over the internet. During the instant messaging, the student who was actually a researcher, made a prejudiced remark. He said that he thought he needed to be overqualified for college “because of the whole diversity admissions thing…so many schools reserve admissions for students who don't really qualify the same way.”

the participants that spoke up were those who thought personalities can change. Another two experiments with more serious bias remarks had the same results. The study is published in the Association for Psychological Science's journal, Psychological Science.

Aneeta Rattan, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who co-wrote the study with her advisor, Carol S. Dweck says: “Many people think of situations where confronting of prejudice happens as conflict situations. But if confronting of prejudice is an expression of belief that people can change, to me it suggests that there's profound hope in that act as well.”

Rattan also points out that the law implicates that if the bias was all that bad, then the victim should have confronted it. “In the law, speaking up in the moment is very important in terms of whether people can bring lawsuits and the strength of their claims, especially in sexual harassment law,” she said. “Maybe our standards should not start with the idea that all people want to speak up - it may depend upon their beliefs about personality,” she added.