Think Again

Founder: That’s such a Capricorn thing to say.
Me: I think I’m a Leo. I’d love to find out what evidence would
change your mind.
Founder: So my partner has been trying for as long as we’ve been
dating. He’s given up. There’s nothing that can convince me
otherwise.
Me: Then you’re not thinking like a scientist. This is a religion for
you.
Founder: Yeah, well, maybe a little.
Me: What if you’d been born in China instead of the U.S.? Some
evidence just came out that if you’re a Virgo in China, you get
discriminated against in hiring and also in dating. These poor
Virgos are stereotyped as being difficult and ornery.
*
Founder: So in the West, Adam, that same discrimination happens
to Scorpios.
Although the founder started out resistant to my argument, after
considering how she might hold different stereotypes if she lived in China,
she recognized a familiar pattern. She’d seen an entire group of people
mistreated as a result of the positions of the sun and the moon on the day
they happened to enter the world.
Realizing how unfair discrimination based on zodiac signs was, the
founder ended up jumping in to help me build my case. As we wrapped up
the conversation, I offered to do a follow-up discussion on the science of
personality. More than a quarter of the company signed up to participate.
Afterward, one of the participants wrote that “the biggest takeaway from
this chat is the importance of ‘unlearning’ things to avoid being ignorant.”
Having grasped how arbitrary their stereotypes were, people were now
more open to rethinking their views.
Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms: widely
shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them, we often
discover that they rest on shaky foundations. Stereotypes don’t have the

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structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re more like a tower in the
game of Jenga—teetering on a small number of blocks, with some key
supports missing. To knock it over, sometimes all we need to do is give it a
poke. The hope is that people will rise to the occasion and build new beliefs
on a stronger foundation.
Can this approach extend to bigger divisions among people? I don’t
believe for a minute that it will solve the Israel-Palestine conflict or stop
racism. I do think it’s a step, though, toward something more fundamental
than merely rethinking our stereotypes. We might question the underlying
belief that it makes sense to hold opinions about groups at all.
If you get people to pause and reflect, they might decide that the very
notion of applying group stereotypes to individuals is absurd. Research
suggests that there are more similarities between groups than we recognize.
And there’s typically more variety within groups than between them.
Sometimes letting go of stereotypes means realizing that many
members of a hated group aren’t so terrible after all. And that’s more likely
to happen when we actually come face-to-face with them. For over half a
century, social scientists have tested the effects of intergroup contact. In a
meta-analysis of over five hundred studies with over 250,000 participants,
interacting with members of another group reduced prejudice in 94 percent
of the cases. Although intergroup communication isn’t a panacea, that is a
staggering statistic. The most effective way to help people pull the unsteady
Jenga blocks out of their stereotype towers is to talk with them in person.
Which is precisely what Daryl Davis did.