Page 348 - The Social Animal

330 The Social Animal

points lower than that of other Japanese. Burakumin children are ab-
sent from school more often, and their delinquency rate is much
higher than that of other Japanese children. It is still often consid-
ered taboo for a member of the burakumin to marry outside of his or
her group. They remain an outgroup defined more by social class
than by any physical characteristics. They can be identified only by
their distinctive speech pattern, which has developed from years of
isolation from other Japanese, and their identity papers. Although
their historical origins are unclear, they probably occupied the lower
rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, doing jobs other Japanese consid-
ered distasteful, until an economic depression led to their complete
expulsion from Japanese society. Now the Japanese consider the bu-
rakumin to be innately inferior, thus justifying further scapegoating
and discrimination.
It is difficult to understand how the lynching of blacks or the
mistreatment of the burakumin could be due only to economic com-
petition. There is a great deal of emotion in these actions that sug-
gests the presence of deeper psychological factors in addition to
economics. Similarly, the zeal with which the Nazis carried out their
attempt to eradicate all Jews, regardless of their economic status,
strongly suggests that their motives were not exclusively economic or
58
political, but were (at least in part) psychological. Firmer evidence
for the existence of psychological processes comes from a well-con-
59
trolled experiment by Neal Miller and Richard Bugelski, in which
white students were asked to state their feelings about various mi-
nority groups. Some of the subjects were then frustrated by being de-
prived of an opportunity to see a movie and were given a difficult
series of tests instead. When they were then asked to restate their
feelings about the minority groups, they showed increased prejudice.
A control group that did not go through the frustrating experience
did not undergo any change in prejudice.
Additional research has helped to pin down the phenomenon
even more precisely. In one experiment, white students were in-
60
structed to administer a series of electric shocks to another student
as part of a study of learning. The subjects had the prerogative to ad-
just the intensity of the shocks. In actuality, the learner was an ac-
complice of the experimenter and (of course) was not really
connected to the apparatus. There were four conditions: The accom-
plice was either black or white, and he was trained to be either