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# Decreasing Prejudice by Increasing Discrimination

## Details

**Authors** Langer et al

**Year** 1985

**Publisher** Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

**Discipline** Sociology

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.113) 
10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.113

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

Explores mindfulness and identity/other relationships

### What they found (results)

The most mindful group ("deviant" slides/mindfulness treatment) showed the least avoidance.

## Commentary

### In short

Teaching the children to be “mindful,” or to be aware of the Distinctions they were making, had a benefit regardless of the content of the lesson they were being taught. The effect of identity-other Distinctions can lead to long-term marginalization of the “other” and that awareness of the identity-other structure of Distinctions can dampen our marginalizing tendencies.

### In more detail

Langer et. al. 1985 wanted to understand the “mindfulness” (aka distinction-making) about groups of people by examining the psychological borders that structure thought through discussions of past and future, inside and outside, and self and other. Experiments conducted with 47 sixth graders, demonstrated that teaching children to be “mindful,” or to be aware of the Distinctions they were making, had a benefit regardless of the content of the lesson they were being taught. He did this through 40 minute sessions in class on mindfulness over 5 days. The students were shown slides either of “normal” people, or of handicapped people (handicaps included confinement to a wheelchair, blindness, deafness, and having only one arm). Which slides students were shown was randomly assigned. The students were then given booklets with questions designed to invoke either high or low levels of distinction making. There were four sets of questions: Set 1 consisted of professional skills questions; Set 2 of situational skill questions; Set 3 of explanations for events questions; and Set 4 of role-flexibility questions. A professional skills question (set 1) was asked each day; for this question the subjects were shown a photo of a person doing a job (ex: newscaster) who was either able-bodied or handicapped.

7 Similar to categorization involves Perspective to frame under what conditions the item belongs to class, Relationships between items in the class, Part-whole Systematizing in order to group the class, and Distinction-making at the boundary of the class.

The high-mindfulness group was asked to list 4 reasons why a person would be good at their job, and 4 reasons why they wouldn’t be, while the low-mindfulness group was asked to find only 1 reason. For Set 2, subjects were presented with a problem (person in a wheelchair and driving a car) and they were asked either "how" it might be solved (high-mindfulness group), or whether it "can" be solved (low-mindfulness group). Set 3 involved looking at an image and providing an explanation for what was happening (multiple for high-mindfulness and single for low-mindfulness). “In the fourth and final set of questions, asked on the last two days, we asked the high-mindfulness groups to consider several aspects of one role, whereas the low- mindfulness groups were asked to consider only one.” And on day five, they began testing whether the children would choose to avoid a handicapped person. They were first shown a picture of three children and asked if they wanted to go on a picnic with one of the children. They were then shown a picture of three children, one of whom was handicapped, and asked if they wanted to go on a picnic with the handicapped child.

**Patterns it shows** D

**How to cite this** Langer et al (1985). Decreasing Prejudice by Increasing Discrimination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.