Book Titles

Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group.

Because we are not irrational or mean-spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s the other groups’ negative feelings we need to suppress.

Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories.

As soon as people have created a category called us… they invariably perceive everybody who isn’t in it as non-us.

Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity, and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles rattling around in a random universe.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism… aids survival by strengthening your bonds to your primary social groups and thus increasing your willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them.

By persuading ourselves that they are unworthy… we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them.

Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it.

Prejudice justifies ill treatment we inflict on others, and we want to inflict ill treatment on others because we don’t like them. And why don’t we like them?… Because we need to feel we are better than somebody.

Our greatest hope of self-correction lies in making sure we are not operating in a hall of mirrors in which all we see are distorted reflections of our own desires and convictions.