Possible Psychological Origins of Prejudice in the Workplace

My book is about expectations and behaviors in human interactions in a career. Although I wish everyone were kind and open towards one another, I think of a career path as a mild form of personal war. War brings out the negative traits in many people. I believe that these traits are recognizable in those practicing dislikes for people of different ethnic, religious, or racial backgrounds, and they come from many similar roots. In this week’s chapter, I demonstrated that these same roots are broadly used in marketing and are likely consequences of a ‘bias’ as defined by behavioral economics.

My selection of the chapters for this week came naturally because yesterday, my son came to me with a book Barbarians at the Gate, surprised with the story of how the owner of a brick-making company that Henry Kravis wanted to buy, took him to a plant, pointed at an oven, and joked that the Nazis had burned Jews in similar ones. Antisemitism was a fact of life in the US until very recently and is gaining momentum with an unexpected audience: educated people who are not educated in this part of history. I’m Jewish, but I’ve seen enough not to take dislike of the Jews and Israel as a personal insult. Instead, I view it as an invitation to a discussion. As a citizen of the world, I would like to note that the view of the Holocaust as a purely Jewish topic, rather than a lesson for humanity, impoverishes any movement supporting human rights.

In this post, I would also like to pay tribute to Evgeniy Evtushenko, a poet who drew a spotlight to the distortion of history by a dominant group of politicians as a way to divide people and peg them against each other. In those days, the educated people in Russia joked that ‘Russia is a country with an unpredictable past.’ This funny expression reflects the essence of the revisionism of history as an ideological tool. Sometimes, this powerful tendency did look funny. I remember how back in the USSR, I received a ’B’ on an oral exam because I quoted from a previous edition of a textbook. Later I found the explanation for such a colossal effort in the axiom coined by George Orwell ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’

Evtushenko’s poem “Babiy Yar” was his crusade against distortions in history as a part of his fight for liberal values in the totalitarian society, as a rebellion against the prevailing press in the country where liberals were considered enemies of socialism (like in Venezuela and North Korea today.)

In his poem, Evtushenko called out the consorted effort to erase the memory of the murder of almost seventy-five thousand Jews in a single town near Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. As it often happens in history, Jews were the first victim of the oppressors, and later people of other ethnicities were murdered there as well. That notwithstanding after the war, the Soviets placed a garbage dump over the ground that held the bones of women and children murdered by the Nazis.

Just think of it, the Soviets — the worst enemies of the Nazis– tried to erase memories of the Nazi murders because of the state-sponsored antisemitism (as an extension of its anti-Israeli stance.) Both didn’t like it when facts contradicted their narrative because both believed that emotional perception (as opposed to factual) was the best tool to control the masses.

In those days, many preferred to treat those who didn’t repeat the official emotional outbursts called ‘truth’ (pravda) as enemies. A garbage dump over a mass grave of civil victims was a powerful symbol of how far emotions took the society from the facts; how much official media and history distorted truth.

Kosolapov, the chief editor of the newspaper, to whom Evtushenko brought the poem, asked his wife for permission to make sure she was ready for a huge sacrifice: him losing his job and the source of income. He knew he’d get fired after the publication. His wife was a war veteran. She was brave, and she agreed. None of the three were Jewish. He published it in the name of respect for humanity and fact-based history rather than because he was pro-Israeli or pro-Jewish. The next day, he was fired to protect the ideals of ‘our socialist Motherland’, the socialist Motherland that daily proclaimed that it was “the power of people, for the benefit of the people.”

The “protectors of the official history” turned out to be right to be on guard: the poem became one of the universal symbols of the fight for liberties in the USSR, the symbol for those who believed in true ideals of Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity. It is reminiscent of another episode when the fight against antisemitism consolidated liberals — the Dreyfus affair in France.

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2018/02/yevtushenko-babi-yar-from-russian.html

This is not a digression from the book unless a reader recalls that the author wants the readers to be better protected and more forgiving in the workplace. The author believed that connecting many dots helps one see the value of kindness in a holistic sense.

You live in a jungle among similar wildlife (PART 2 of the book)

It is obvious that career, as a mild modern alternative of warfare, requires a mind clear of delusions and capable of processing challenges effectively. In the next few chapters, we will be dissecting the dark side of employment without an understanding of which you won’t comprehend much of the animosity you may encounter or experience at work. We go over human interactions, the indifference of companies, and the workplace in general. We also discuss some aspects of our “I” of which we are unaware or try to ignore. In short, this is about living in Pandora’s box and those who live with us.

Chapter 4. Be Mindful of Differentiation and Precedents

The Rule of Differentiation

If you give two children identical dolls, they are likely to fight over them. If you ask why, they’ll say, “His doll’s nose is redder” or “Her doll’s dress is darker.” You see two identical, made-in-China dolls, yet somehow those children differentiate between apparently identical things.

Products and results of differentiation surround us. For instance, car companies convince adults to buy their brand, not another, by pointing out a distinguishing feature, sometimes real and sometimes not — their cars are longer, sexier, or more practical. In other words, they point out some way of pleasing others that stands out in customers’ minds. This is the process of differentiation, and it is a powerful marketing tool because it touches on a deeply rooted human characteristic. In fact, it explains many behaviors in a much broader sense. We differentiate ourselves from people who work for competitors or live in different neighborhoods or go to different churches. Moreover, differentiation is one cornerstone of our dark side. At work, you could be out of favor because you don’t dress like your colleagues or don’t root for their sports team.

If you understand that the inclination to differentiate is often irrational, you’ll have an insight into the seemingly unreasonable situations that happen in the world — and become aware of your unpleasant triggers. In Gulliver’s Travels, Blefuscu and Lilliput waged war over which end of a hardboiled egg to break at breakfast. Any tiny, even silly, opportunity to differentiate has the potential to grow into animosity or friendship. If you master this inclination, you’ll find it easier to build a personal and professional image that attracts more “likes” (as they say on Facebook.) You’ll find common ground with opponents and build on shared interests with others, however irrelevant to your professional life.

Start to manage your inclination to differentiate by noticing your reactions to people outside your immediate community. You’ll see you attribute to them some stereotypically negative traits while ignoring their personal positives. And then you see how much you overlook the negatives of people who share your love of sports or beer or political party. And once you notice these things, you’ll probably find a root in some little things which fall into the category of differentiation.

The Role of Precedents

In my days in Moscow, I frequently heard negative things about people from Central Asia. They were guest workers from impoverished countries that used to be a part of the USSR. There were many of them working low paid jobs in industries like retail and construction. They seemed to do their job without noise and spoke Russian. The Russians liked their ethnic foods. However, these people were singled out because they lived together, didn’t speak Russian among themselves, and were predominantly Muslims.

It surprised me to see how wide-spread the negative attitude toward them was because the Russians are generally nice people. Once I asked an elderly lady why she was so upset with a salesperson who was from Central Asia. She explained that a while ago another salesperson from the region sold her spoiled fruits. She continued by saying that she read of similar accidents in the yellow press, and so on. The human inclination to judge many situations based on a single notable event in the branch of science called behavioral economics is called heuristics of availability. It triggers many other distortions of rational thinking called biases. These biases are a part of human subconsciousness.

I believe that when the environment is conducive, and people are off their ethical guard, they allow single precedents and yellow press to become drivers of distrust or even hate in their psychic. What is worse, these accidents don’t need to happen to them personally. They can happen to those whom one considers to be a part of his broadly defined group. Subsequently, hate germinates in the human psyche without any check and thrives there like a weed.

In the case of that lady who didn’t look like a bad person, one precedent with a single person from only one of the nationalities that populated Central Asia was enough to badmouth millions who lived there.

Chapter 5. Delusions about Preserving Individuality in Job Settings

At work, most of us try our best, even if we dislike what we do or our employer’s beliefs. In fact, we suppress personal beliefs to do our job properly out of professional pride or because we don’t want to let anyone down or because we’re seeking success. Sometimes we do so “just because” we agreed to put on a uniform. And the following joke shows how grotesque this adjustment can be.

A man shares a recent experience with a friend:

“I was watching a horse race at the track. Suddenly, something landed on my shoulder. I looked back, and it was a saddle! I didn’t have time to utter a word before someone jumped on and dug his spurs into me!”

“What did you do?” asks his surprised friend. “I came in second!”

The Rule of the Uniform

When we put on a “uniform,” we adjust our sense of self and our behavior to fit it. Colleagues who are pleasant and well-mannered outside work become close-minded and aggressive at work. Colleagues who are promoted to controlling positions start finding fault with coworkers with whom they were friendly for years. These changes happen surprisingly quickly, as in the following story told by a friend.

‘Even though we aren’t celebrities, my wife and I were invited to walk the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival. There we were, photographers, snapping our picture and fans applauding and whistling even though they had no idea who we were. My wife and I were uncomfortable with all this attention, and our only thought was to disappear. Finally, we left the carpet and entered the building. Behind, we heard applause and whistles greeting the group behind us … and our first thought was, “Is their applause louder than ours?”

The fascinating aspect of the story is that It took thirty seconds for the narrator to “put on the uniform” of a movie star, despite his rational sense and his discomfort.

Moreover, the effect of wearing uniform clouds our perception of who we were long after we lay it aside. In the film The Reader, Kate Winslet plays the beloved of a young man in post-war Germany. She is sensual and pretty, and their relationship is satisfying — until she disappears. Years later, the young man is a law student attending a trial for class, and he finds his former beloved on trial for war crimes. She had been a guard in a concentration camp. Witnesses testified that she would select prisoners to read her books. Then she would send the human beings with whom she spent hours together to the gas chambers. On one occasion, she locked women prisoners in a burning church. On trial, she explained there was nothing she could have done in the first instance because she had to make room for newcomers to the camp. During the fire in the church where the prisoners were left for one night, she left them to burn alive to prevent disorder that would have occurred if prisoners had been freed. She admits that before the trial, she hadn’t even thought about that part of her past.

The contrast between a loving woman and a monster demonstrates that uniforms can alter people. If you discern what uniforms people wear, you’ll see what identity they adopt. It would then be easier to see their true nature under their masks to find potential allies or enemies.