How Blue Lights Helped Me to Face Unconscious Prejudice

I once complained to a friend about a group of loud children that were utilizing some space near my office for an after school program (supervised, of course).  These kids were LOUD.  And not only that, I found that I was continually expecting a fight to break out because not only were they LOUD, they were, at least to my ear, aggressive towards one another.

No fight ever broke out, and they eventually relocated to a facility a little further from my office.  

I mentioned this to a friend of mine who made an interesting observation.  They said that children who came from lower income or broken home situations tended to be louder.  For a long time I noted that this did in fact seem to be true.  I would observe these loud children here and there and think, "They must be from a lower income family or a broken home."

Then, last night, I ran into a nearby K-Mart (few and far between, I know).  It was about 30 minutes before they closed and I was looking for a particular item.  There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire store.  7 of those people were a group that was so loud that there wasn't any place in the store you could go to get away from their conversations.  Even walking down the toilet paper and paper towel aisle didn't dampen the sound.  

When I saw them, my friend's observation came back into my head.  And as I thought that almost unconscious refrain, "They must be from a lower income family or a broken home," it hit me: maybe they were just loud. 

At that moment I also realized that this particular observation, true or false, had a particular side effect.  By thinking that loud children came from a broken home or lower income families, I was without any thought at all placing loud children into a stereotype.  If I were to write it out as a philosophical equation, it might look like this:

Children who are loud come from lower income homes.  

I hear loud children.

Therefore, they must come from a lower income home.

It follows, but it has at it's heart a fallacy which is that it overstates the case.  I know children who are loud that do not come from lower income families or broken homes.  Therefore this syllogism cannot be true.  It is a false reading of the situation and it leads to me dumping any loud child into a category that also disposes me to a particular prejudice about them that may or may not be true.

My friend's observation might be accurate, but to use it as a rule is to paint a whole lot of people with a wide, wide brush.  That is what I was doing.  I realized last night that this advice had (rather unconsciously, I would again add) predisposed me to think particular ways about particular people.  In realizing that fact, I also realized that I had some unconscious opinions about people that were being reinforced by my friend's observation and I was running with it when I shouldn't, nor should I have allowed it to be the operative norm on which I sized up people.

For me it was a realization that try as we might, we all allow ourselves to sum up and judge people and their character and background without much information at all.  Or, perhaps more to the point, we size people up in a matter of seconds with criteria we might not even be aware we are using.  

So next time you find yourself making conclusions about people at the periphery of your shopping experience, stop and ask yourself exactly why it is you have come to that particular conclusion about that person or group.  You might be surprised.  And you might also begin to wonder just how other people are sizing you up.

Especially if you are really loud.