To a large extent, our motivation to overcome our biases depends on implicit social norms, which we assimilate from a variety of sources. Sometimes we find them in the environment; people are more likely to litter in a dirty place than in a clean one, for instance. We also find them in the behavior of people we respect, or who occupy positions we respect. If someone in a powerful position acts in a certain way or expresses a certain view, we implicitly assume that those actions and views are associated with power, and that emulating them may be to our advantage. As a result, while our biases may be slow to change—they’re based on long-standing stereotypes, and we have been learning them since birth—our norms can shift at the speed of social life. We might think of anti-Semitism as stemming from deeply rooted beliefs, and, in some sense, that’s true, but the expression of anti-Semitism depends on highly changeable facts about our social environment. [...]
The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think. In the United States, one way to study that effect is to examine the decisions of the Supreme Court, a universally acknowledged source of authority. In a study in the September, 2017, issue of Psychological Science, Paluck and Margaret Tankard, of the rand Corporation, look at the change in American attitudes toward same-sex marriage before and after the Supreme Court decision that established it as a constitutional right, in June, 2015. In the months before the decision, Paluck and Tankard surveyed people in cities all over the country; they then repeated the survey after the decision was announced. They found that, while personal opinions on same-sex marriage hadn’t shifted in the wake of the ruling, people’s perception of others’ opinions had changed almost immediately. Americans, whether liberal or conservative, thought that their fellow-citizens now supported same-sex marriage more than before, even though, in reality, the only thing that had changed was the ruling of a public institution. The impression created by the ruling was that “more Americans currently support same-sex marriage, and that even more will support it in the future,” Paluck said. [...]
Last year, Kevin Munger, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, found a novel way to test this hypothesis. He created Twitter bots that would speak out against racist harassment by automatically tweeting at users who had previously tweeted anti-black slurs. All the bots were made to appear male, but they varied along other dimensions: they were either white or black, and they had either few followers (that is, not much of a perceived influence) or many. Munger found that one particular group was able to shift behavior: white men who appeared to be influential. After receiving just one admonishment from such a user (for example, “Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language”), people significantly reduced their use of slurs over a period of two months.
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