When prejudice is worse than bad

Everyone has prejudice. And… we like them. The reason, I believe, is simple: prejudice is convenient.

Daniel Willingham has shown in his book ‘Why students don’t like school’ how thinking is demanding. And that, in spite of our ability to do so, how we suck at it. Prejudice helps you ‘save’ thinking. In a given situation that would demand ‘reasoning’ to solve a problem, to save energy and information processing, your brain will try to ‘remember’ the solution of a problem, avoid thinking.

Due to our tendency to ‘categorize’ stuff (brilliantly described by Leonard Mlodinow in ‘Sublimnar’) it is easy to fall in the temptation to put all similar ‘problems’ in he same category and tchan-tchan: you built a prejudice.

Age brings experience and that is a good thing, but also consolidates prejudice. This is because of something called ‘confirmation bias’ that Francis Bacon had already described in the XVI century: we tend to remember all our good decisions (right solution to a problem) and forget the bad (wrong solutions).

New generations lack experience but are unbiased by old prejudices and thus are open for different perspectives and changes in the world around us.

In a simple world, in which finding food and shelter, as well as escaping predators, were our main concerns, prejudice could have helped you make better and faster (life saving) decisions. However, in a complex world like the one we live today, where we have to create solutions for sustainable development, clean energy, food safety, democracy and equality; at the same time that we have to fight poverty, hunger, disease and war; we cannot afford the drawback in efficiency, productivity and innovation brought by prejudice.

Fighting prejudice has never been so urgent. 

John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox in Palo Alto, said that “In a world of increasingly rapid change, the half life of a given skill is constantly shrinking”. Some say it has passed from 30 to 5 years. That explains why for one generation older than us, learning was a one-off: what they learned at the university was going serve for the rest of their lives. They could afford at least some prejudice. But nowadays… we simply can’t. And I’m not hopeful that new comers, that will already be outdated when they leave the university, could be different (they are still being educated by a ‘prejudiced’ generation).

Considering that our life expectation is expected to rise to 120-150 years very soon, prejudice may become our biggest struggle for a better life in a better planet. 

I have several reservations to John Mayand Keynes, but agree to him when said:  “The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones”

Published originally on LinkedIn on January 2016