Page 328 - The Social Animal

310 The Social Animal

serve to justify relegating women to traditional stereotyped roles in so-
ciety. The researchers believe that benevolent sexism is “a particularly
insidious form of prejudice” because, lacking a tone of hostility toward
women, it doesn’t seem like a “prejudice” to men—nor to many
women, either.

Feeling Versus Expressing Prejudice Because most of us
recognize that prejudice is generally frowned upon, we take pains to
avoid doing or saying things that would appear biased. But the effort
to suppress what we really feel can be mentally taxing. Thus, when
our cognitive resources are depleted—if we are tired, angry, stressed,
distracted, or inebriated—prejudice may leak out. (Mel Gibson’s
drunken tirade against Jews is a perfect example.) We may also ex-
press our prejudices in small ways that we have little control over,
even when we are not tired or drunk. Sometimes, unflattering im-
ages of other groups pop into our heads and unconsciously influence
our thoughts and behaviors. My guess is that this is what happened
to the people who wrote the captions about black hurricane victims
in New Orleans; their unconscious biases guided their perceptions
and suggested “looting” as an appropriate caption for blacks, but not
whites.
Christian Crandall and Amy Eshleman suggest that most peo-
ple struggle with the conflict between their urge to express prejudice
and their need to maintain a positive self-concept (as someone who
is not a bigot), both in their own eyes, as well as the eyes of others.
However, as we have seen, it requires energy to suppress prejudiced
impulses. Because we are programmed to conserve mental energy, we
are attracted to information that justifies our prejudices. Once we
find a valid justification for disliking a group, we can express preju-
dice without feeling like bigots—thus avoiding cognitive dissonance.
As Crandall and Eshleman put it, “Justification undoes suppression,
it provides cover, and it protects a sense of egalitarianism and a non-
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prejudiced self-image.” For example, suppose you dislike gay men
and lesbians and are inclined to deny them the same rights that het-
erosexuals enjoy, but you are suppressing those feelings and actions
because you want to preserve your self-image as a fair-minded per-
son. How might you avoid the expenditure of all that energy sup-
pressing your impulse? As a justification for the expression of
anti-homosexual thoughts and feelings, many people have used the