Joy Arbor

Hi, there! I know it’s been a long time. I haven’t really blogged since 2018. Much has happened since then, for all of us, for the world. Out of the gazillion changes since then, one good one for me is that I teach leadership and ethics again. This antigenocide/antiprejudice material, or leadership and ethics, or whatever you want to call it, has been uppermost in my mind lately. I have studied a lot as well. I feel I may have something to say. My last blog was optimistic about how we could intentionally increase our sense of connection and potentially reduce prejudice from home through imagination (imagined contact) and lovingkindness…

I am so excited because I’ve found research that suggests two evidence-based exercises we can use to reduce our prejudice and increase our connection to others – by using our imaginations!!! The first is through what psychology researchers call imagined contact theory. So let’s back up a bit. In 1954 Gordon Allport put forth the intergroup contact hypothesis, which said that contact between groups reduces prejudice.  According to Miles and Crisp (2014), there have been over 500 studies that confirm that intergroup contact does reduce prejudice (p. 4). But depending on contact to reduce prejudice is fraught with problems, especially in the many places in the US that are highly…

I first came to study the psychology of genocide and racism because I wanted to understand my grandfather, a German Jew who himself had experienced anti-Semitism in 1930s Germany, right up to his leaving with Youth Aliyah to emigrate to Palestine in January 1939. It boggled my mind that a person who had himself experienced prejudice and who had seen the extreme suffering that prejudice can lead to (in the Israeli Army, he had the job of training survivors from Auschwitz and other death camps as soldiers) was not a champion of human rights. Instead, he was prejudiced against Palestinians, Arabs, Germans his age or older (though that I could…

A fair amount of research has been done on the heroic helpers of the Holocaust, people who endangered their lives to rescue Jews, to see what characteristics led to their helping and what differentiates them from the many others who stayed passive bystanders – or even became perpetrators. In “The Psychology of Rescue,” psychologist Ervin Staub (2015) states that interviews with Holocaust rescuers and the people they helped indicate that many rescuers had one of the following kinds of moral inclination: empathy, the emotional response to the suffering of others; prosocial value orientation, which is a sense of caring “combined with a feeling of responsibility for the welfare of other…

In my earlier Language Matters blogpost, I focused on dehumanization  and how we name specific groups of people. Other aspects of language are also important, especially when considering the lessons of genocide and racism; today we’ll focus on euphemistic labeling. We use euphemisms – seemingly “nicer” words to describe actions – quite often. Mostly, we think using these “softer” or “nicer” words are less harsh and will spare someone’s feelings. We might say “correctional facility” rather than “prison,” “put to sleep” rather than “euthanize,” and  “let go” or “downsized” rather than “fired.” The oddest euphemism to me in terms of politeness is when we say “passed over” or “passed on”…

Last week an activist friend of mine was discussing the actions of a white supremacy group in her town on her Facebook feed. Another person, whom I don’t know, commented that at a recent progressive organizational meeting they had determined that the best way to address white supremacy groups and people was to ignore them. While this progressive group may have their reasons for ignoring racist actions and groups – I didn’t get to hear the group’s reasons – the psychology of genocide and the bystander effect suggests that ignoring and remaining silent about racist speech and actions is not only misguided, but detrimental to the cause of antiracism. Ervin…

Some people believe that the language we use doesn’t matter, especially when it comes to groups of people. I’ve heard people I love call Chinese people “Chinks” (for example) and when I protested that such a word was racist, they say, “Oh you know I’m not really racist. It’s just a word. You know what I mean.” Actually, I don’t. One of the main ways we have to communicate what’s going on in our heads and hearts is through language. Accuracy is important so we can understand one another as best we can. Inaccuracy leads to problems in understanding. If you use a racist word to describe a group of…

Us-them thinking is a psychological tendency involved in genocide and racism. In Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, social psychologist James Waller (2007) explains that empirical and experimental research demonstrates that when groups form, members experience the boundaries of the group as meaningful, dividing people into in-group members and out-group members (p. 174). This division into “us” and “them” occurs even when the principle organizing group membership is not that meaningful. (Researcher Henri Tajfel has studied these tendencies in “minimal groups,” where complete strangers were divided into groups using arbitrary and trivial criteria.) Separating people into in-groups and out-groups leads to four documented effects. One is…

It’s ironic to be starting this blog with social dominance orientation (SDO). SDO is, according to Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, and Malle (1994), “one’s degree of preference for inequality among social groups” (p. 741) or “the extent to which one desires that one’s in-group dominate and be superior to out-groups” (p. 742). A person with high SDO favors ideologies and policies that enhance hierarchy and diminish equality while those with low SDO favor ideologies and policies that diminish hierarchy and promote equality. According to Pratto et al, “SDO was strongly correlated with our anti-Black racism measure in every sample.. . .These results, using rather different racism measures, are consistent with the…

Happy July 1st and welcome to my blog! I am passionate about investigating and countering racism and other kinds of us-them thinking that divides people. This blog is about genocide and racism and the lessons from both we can use to make ourselves less racist and our society more equitable. I’ve been reading about – and teaching – the psychology of genocide and unethical behavior for over a decade. I think that seeing racism in comparative perspective with genocide leads to some insights. For example it was only when I started thinking about the US in comparison with South Africa and Rwanda that I realized the US has not engaged…