Page 342 - The Social Animal

324 The Social Animal

Fischhoff’s experiments reveal that most of us are terrific Monday-
morning quarterbacks: After we know the outcome of an event, the
complex circumstances surrounding its occurrence suddenly seem
crystal clear; it seems as if we knew it all along, and if asked to pre-
dict the outcome, we could have done so without difficulty. But this
is an illusion.
In an interesting set of experiments, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman and
her coworkers demonstrated the power of the hindsight bias in in-
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creasing subjects’ beliefs that rape victims were responsible for their
own victimization. Participants in this experiment read accounts of a
date between a man and a woman who had met earlier in a college
class. The accounts were identical except for the concluding sen-
tence, which for half of the participants read,“The next thing I knew,
he raped me,” but for the other half read, “The next thing I knew, he
took me home.” After being advised to disregard their knowledge of
the actual outcome of the date, participants were then asked to pre-
dict the likelihood of several possible outcomes, including the one
they had read. Even though the events leading up to the outcome
were exactly the same in both versions of the story, participants who
read the rape outcome were more likely to predict that the rape
would occur than were those who read the “take home” outcome.
What’s more, participants exposed to the rape scenario tended to
blame the woman’s behavior—such as letting the man kiss her—for
the negative outcome of the date. The implications of these findings
are unsettling. To understand and empathize with a victim’s plight,
we must be able to reconstruct events leading up to the victimization
from the victim’s point of view. But, as we have seen, it is all too easy
to forget that—unlike us—victims did not have the benefit of hind-
sight to guide their behavior.

Causes of Prejudice

What makes people prejudiced? Is prejudice inevitable? Evolution-
ary psychologists have suggested that all animals favor genetically
similar others and are wary of genetically dissimilar organisms, even
if the latter have never done them any harm. In their view, preju-
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dice is built in, a biological survival mechanism inducing us to favor
our own family, tribe, and race and to fear or dislike outsiders. On