“Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts..”
―E.B. White
The word prejudice means to pre-judge. The human brain is designed to use prejudice as a shortcut. With pre-built prejudices, we can form opinions, make assumptions, and take corresponding action without wasting our limited mental and physical energy evaluating and investigating every situation individually.
Prejudice is a great feature when it comes to things like, “Don’t eat the red berry, your friend ate the red berry and threw up for two days.” That seems like a good prejudice to have, right? Unless your friend actually had the stomach flu and falsely correlated the berry to their illness. Now what happens when someone else comes along and tells you the red berries are a source of an essential, beneficial vitamin that will solve some health problem you have. Who are you going to believe? The answer will depend on a number of factors… the credibility of the new source, how much you trust and believe your friend’s account, how desperate you are to fix your health issue, whether the new source is selling the berries or giving them away, etc. It’s complicated.
We all have prejudices (aka biases, partialities, mindsets). Sometimes those prejudices are based on actual lived experience, more often they’re based on hearsay — attitudes and perceptions we’ve heard from others.
Problems arise when our pre-judged response doesn’t agree with the facts. Now we have to choose between our prejudice (which is often connected to our identity and our sense of self-esteem) and actual information, and that requires mental exercise. When we’re tired, hungry, scared, emotional, or otherwise not operating on the highest level of our mental faculties, we’ll almost always cling to our prejudice, even when it flies in the face of every fact.
That’s why facts don’t change opinions or alter perceptions very well. In our modern world of continual distraction and demand for our attention, we don’t have the time or energy to evaluate something — to THINK about it — before a reaction is demanded.
“I saw it on the internet/heard it on the radio/watched it on TV, therefore it must be true.”
“My friend’s aunt’s neighbor told me that happened, it must be true.”
“I heard about it from __________, it must be true.”
All of those statements are false. It doesn’t matter where you read it, heard it, saw it, that doesn’t make it true. It could be true, or it could be false. It could be partially true. Even eyewitness accounts are frequently found to be untrustworthy because humans are wildly individualized. Descriptions of people and events are filtered through whatever biased lens we’ve been given.
So where does that leave us? There’s a Russian proverb Ronald Reagan used in reference to nuclear disarmament: “Trust, but verify.” That’s a good rule to apply. Even though you may trust (or want to trust) the messenger, verify the information anyway. If it can’t be verified, or if there’s so much confusion surrounding it you’re left reeling, ask yourself: Will this matter to me a year from now? Do I have any control over this situation either way? If the answer is no, to either question, set the thing aside and move on with your life. If the answer is yes, be patient and keep looking for accurate, factual information.
