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Are Prejudice and Discrimination Learned? A Comment on Stodolska

Monika Stodolska has assembled and merged several allied theoretical perspectives from psychology and social psychology with the intent to better understand, and perhaps prevent, discrimination that occurs in the context of leisure. This is a noble goal. However, what if the theories that she assembles and amalgamates are themselves fundamentally flawed? What if the reason that prevents those theories from explaining much about discrimination is that they are based on an erroneous understanding of human nature? The various theories that Stodolska cites are learning-based through socialization of one sort or another as are essentially all theories from traditional psychology and social psychology. This means that they posit that humans accumulate information in the forms of beliefs, attitudes, values, and so on, and that this information leads to the acquisition or intensity modulation of other beliefs, attitudes, and values regarding prejudice or actions such as discrimination. But what if the propensities to harbor prejudice and to practice discrimination are substantially unlearned? How would these theories and Stodolska’s reformulation of them fare? “Not well,” would be my guess. But what evidence exists for even considering prejudice and/or discrimination as being anything other than the product of learning through socialization? The paradigmatic basis for the overwhelming majority of social theorizing for the past 200 years or more has been that the human mind is a “blank slate” on which essentially any set of cultural beliefs and values can be inscribed via socialization (Gintis, 2001; see Pinker [2002] and Ridley [2003] for devastating critiques of the blank slate concept). Hence, if beliefs and values, such as those that underpin prejudice, are socialized, they can also be de-socialized. So, the belief is that we can rid ourselves of the scourges of racism and sexism as well as prejudice and discrimination against “other” ethnic groups by proper reeducation. The problem is that there is a growing body of evidence to indicate that the blank slate concept and, therefore, the theorizing that derives from it are simply wrong (e.g., Pinker, 2002; Ridley, 2003). Humans are not empty vessels to be filled over time with nothing but input from the environment. Much of the evidence for this comes from studies of identical and fraternal twins reared together and apart (cf. Clark & Grunstein, 2000; Segal, 1999). Identical, or monozygotic, twins have identical genotypes while fraternal, or dyzygotic, twins, on average, share half of their genes like non-twin siblings. The questions are if, and if so, how, genotypes and environments interact to produce people in all our behavioral glories. An example will be illustrative. Psychologist Thomas Bouchard and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota recently looked at religious fundamentalism in samples