Page 349 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 331

friendly or insulting to the subject. When the black accomplice was
friendly, the subjects administered slightly less intense shocks to him
than to a white accomplice; when he insulted them, they adminis-
tered far more intense shocks to him than to the white student. In
61
another experiment, college students were subjected to a great deal
of frustration. Some of these students were highly anti-Semitic; oth-
ers were not. The subjects were then asked to write stories based on
pictures they were shown. For some subjects, the characters in these
pictures were assigned Jewish names; for others, they were not.There
were two major findings: (1) After being frustrated, anti-Semitic
subjects wrote stories that directed more aggression toward the Jew-
ish characters than did subjects who were not anti-Semitic; and (2)
there was no difference between the anti-Semitic students and the
others when the characters they were writing about were not identi-
fied as Jewish. In short, being insulted or frustrated is more likely to
channel aggression in a specific direction—toward an out-group
member.
The laboratory experiments help to clarify factors that seem to
exist in the real world. The general picture of scapegoating that
emerges is that individuals tend to displace aggression onto groups
that are disliked, that are visible, and that are relatively powerless.
Moreover, the form the aggression takes depends on what is allowed
or approved by the in-group: Lynchings of blacks and pogroms
against Jews were not frequent occurrences unless they were deemed
appropriate by the dominant culture or subculture.
I used the past tense in the preceding sentence because it is com-
forting to believe that extreme forms of scapegoating are a thing of
the past. But in the past two decades events have taken place that
have caused many of us a great deal of consternation. For example,
when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, we were momentarily en-
couraged as all of Eastern Europe gained its freedom. Unfortunately,
in much of the region, this new freedom was accompanied by in-
creased feelings of nationalism, which have, in turn, produced addi-
tional prejudice and hostility against out-groups. In the Balkans, for
example, intense nationalism led to eruptions of hostility throughout
the region—most notably, in Bosnia. The same is happening cur-
rently in Iraq as the Shiites and Sunnis are engaging in sectarian vi-
olence once prohibited by Saddam Hussein’s repressive dictatorship.
Moreover, As Erwin Staub has noted, 62 all of the recent genocidal