Page 354 - The Social Animal

336 The Social Animal

while they were underground and complete segregation while they
were above ground. How can we account for this inconsistency? If
you truly hate someone, you want to keep away from him; why asso-
ciate with him below ground and not above ground?
Pettigrew suggested that the answer is conformity. In this case,
the white miners were simply conforming to the norm that exists in
their society (above the ground!). The historical events of the South
set the stage for greater prejudice against blacks, but it is conformity
that keeps it going. Indeed, Pettigrew believes that, although eco-
nomic competition, frustration, and personality needs account for
some prejudice, the great majority of prejudiced behavior is driven by
slavish conformity to social norms.
How can we be certain that conformity is responsible? One way
is to determine the relation between a person’s prejudice and that
person’s general pattern of conformity. For example, a study of inter-
racial tension in South Africa showed that those individuals who
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were most likely to conform to a great variety of social norms also
showed a higher degree of prejudice against blacks. In other words,
if conformists are more prejudiced, prejudice may be just another
thing to conform to. Another way to determine the role of conform-
ity is to see what happens to people’s prejudice when they move to a
different area of the country. If conformity is a factor in prejudice, we
would expect individuals to show dramatic increases in prejudice
when they move to areas where the norm is more prejudicial, and to
show dramatic decreases when they move to places characterized by
a less prejudicial norm. And that is what happens. In one study,
Jeanne Watson found that individuals who had recently moved to
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a large city and had come into direct contact with anti-Semitic peo-
ple became more anti-Semitic themselves. In another study, Petti-
grew found that, as southerners entered the army and came into
contact with a less discriminatory set of social norms, they became
less prejudiced against blacks.
The pressure to conform can be overt, as in the Asch experiment.
On the other hand, conformity to a prejudicial norm might simply
be due to the unavailability of accurate evidence and a preponderance
of misleading information.This can lead people to adopt negative at-
titudes on the basis of hearsay. Examples of this kind of stereotyping
behavior abound in literature. For example, Christopher Marlowe’s
play The Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of