Which apple is your eye drawn to fastest in this image?
My guess is, the red apple. 🍎
In a sea of green apples, it’s the one red one that sticks out.
One reason that you see it so quickly is that our brains are wired to detect and attend to distinctive and salient stimuli—objects that differ and stick out from other things in their surroundings.
I have a story that illustrates how this phenomenon relates to people and can lead to inaccurate inferences due to stereotyping.
It occurred during my years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
One day, I took a walk with an out-of-town professor who was speaking at the university. We were chatting and strolling down State Street, a busy pedestrian thoroughfare in downtown Madison with storefronts, restaurants, and plenty of shoppers and street musicians.
As we walked down State Street, from the Capitol building to the university, we also passed several people who were asking for money. When we arrived on campus, my colleague, who was White, said to me, “It’s a shame there are so many homeless Black people asking for money. The city should do something to help them.”
I’d walked down State Street countless times prior to that day. I knew the street well, and I knew that, in reality, of the dozen or so people who were asking for money that day, only a couple of them were Black. The vast majority of them were White.
So, where did this idea of “so many” Black homeless people come from?
My colleague’s brain jumped to the red apple.
Madison is a predominantly White city. The majority of people you meet anywhere there are White and, as it turned out, the same was true of the unhoused population on State Street. There were many more White people asking for money than Black people.
But those Black people were like the red apples in this image. Because they were fewer and farther between, they stood out to my colleague. He noticed them more than he noticed the others who looked more like the majority of people around him.
Why is it important to point this out?
Because my colleague made what’s called an “illusory correlation.” In other words, he made an erroneous assumption about the relationship between two things based on the extent to which they stood out in his memory.
But this isn’t about my colleague—it’s something we all do.
These correlations, or assumptions, can lead us to create or buy into stereotypes, which can feed biases.
And in the case of Black people, other people of color, and women, when White people in power hold these biases, it can (and does) lead to policies, beliefs, and actions that drive limiting, and even detrimental, life outcomes.
Like I said, we ALL do this. We all notice the red apples. But sometimes we need a reminder to right-size our perceptions and notice all the apples—the green ones too.
#SocialPsychology #Antiracism
