Prejudice by Omission

Much of the study of prejudice in psychology is concerned with understanding how and why people tend to put themselves into separate groups based on innumerable characteristics or motives. The reason we engage in such research is that we have learned that when people are in groups, they very often develop an adversarial mindset of “us vs. them” (hence the name of our blog). This happens even when people are randomly assigned to different groups on the basis of no shared commonality (what we refer to as "minimal groups"), such as group A vs. group B. If you’re in group A, you tend to favor your other group A members in competitions or other decision-making processes. Thus, one might say that we seem to be predisposed to think about people in terms of groups, in terms of us vs. them. Evolutionary theorists might argue that is the adaptive product of eons of natural selection, whereby those humans who banded together in groups were more likely to survive, mate, produce offspring that were safe to grow up and pass on their genes, and so on.

Not only do we seem to automatically group people, but we also very quickly and early in life show that we can group inanimate objects. Again, from an evolutionary view, it makes sense that we would learn to do this, since it keeps us from having to “reinvent the wheel,” so to speak, every time we confront something that looks like a chair. We develop cognitive templates and heuristics to help us process information quickly to allow us to see our environment and quickly ascertain what the objects in the environment are, what group of objects they belong to, and what the function of the object likely is.

Out of that fundamental tendency to categorize our environment, we run into problems when we try to categorize people. People are messy. When we observe a chair, we know it has similar features and functions to all chairs. But people aren’t like that. All people who wear glasses aren’t bookworms. All people who are short don’t have a “Napoleon complex.” And so on. Grouping people leads to stereotyping (beliefs – positive and negative – about the characteristics associated with a group) and oftentimes prejudice (negative feelings directed toward a person based on their group membership) against that group.

With that precis about human cognition and how it contributes to stereotyping and intergroup prejudice as a backdrop, let us now discuss another way that stereotypes and prejudice manifest that perhaps you may not have thought about. Specifically, I (Nelson) am talking about the way that a majority in a culture can essentially ignore groups that may not have political and economic power or equality, and in doing so, put the less-powerful group “out of the consciousness” of the culture, decision-making, and thoughts of those in power.

In a fascinating line of research, Fryberg (Fryberg & Eason, 2017; Fryberg & Townsend, 2008) makes the argument that our understanding of prejudice only tells half of the story. Specifically, most of the prejudice research we read about in textbooks and elsewhere talks about behaviors, thoughts, and feelings committed by one group against another group. Fryberg and colleagues term these acts of commission. But, equally important are acts of omission, in which one group actively ignores another group from the public discourse. In so doing, the other group doesn’t have a “seat at the table” or is “under the radar” of public consciousness simply because they aren’t written about or talked about by more powerful groups that dominate a culture. In so doing, a very powerful, pernicious form of prejudice and discrimination is taking place against that less powerful group.

This process can apply to any intergroup interaction, but Fryberg focused on the treatment of Native Americans in the United States. Fryberg’s research found that:

“…reports suggest that Native Americans are killed by police (Males, 2014) and are victims of violent crime (usually perpetrated by out-group members, Rosay, 2016) at disproportionately higher rates (given their population) than other racial groups. Nonetheless, because people are largely unaware of this information, Native Americans are rarely part of the discussions on police brutality or violence” (Fryberg & Eason, 2017, p. 557).

From the first moment Europeans stepped foot in the “new country,” Native Americans have been the subject of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination (not to mention untold violence, murder, and war) (Foxworth & Boulding, 2022). To detail the mistreatment (putting it mildly) of Native Americans in the U.S. would take much more space than this blog post has, but it also isn’t the purpose of this post to get into that amount of detail. Rather, I want to highlight that the way that Native Americans in particular have been left out of the conversation by mainstream artists, writers, policy-makers, employers, physicians, educators, and legislators has had a detrimental effect on the well-being of Native Americans. This omission type of prejudice is just as strong and insidious as acts of overt commission of prejudice and discrimination, but in some ways may be even worse.

Fryberg and Eason (2017) suggest that omission types of prejudice, by their nature, are harder to notice and therefore harder to eradicate. One example of how the powerful can dominate the culture’s discourse and “erase” a people is the holiday built around the explorer Christopher Columbus. Columbus has been long celebrated as the navigator who "discovered" America, and as such, the U.S. has a special holiday to celebrate this accolade. However, America was already populated by a people – Native Americans – so it wasn’t an unoccupied land free for the taking and settling. But Europeans did it anyway with devastating force. Following the subjugation of Native Americans in the U.S. by the Europeans, their existence and stories in the dominant culture faded into the background or were shoved off the radar altogether. Five hundred years after the arrival of Columbus, an effort was made to reclaim that holiday for the Native Americans, to bring awareness to their plight, with the redesignation of Columbus Day to be called “Indigenous People’s Day.” In 2021, President Biden proclaimed October 11^th to be Indigenous People’s Day.

Fryberg’s research on omission types of prejudice is an important aspect of the way one group can overpower another group and, in so doing, keep them under the thumb of the powerful group by keeping the less powerful group out of the consciousness of society. It is important to recognize this type of prejudice and call it out whenever you see it. We may have a natural inclination to categorize things, and even people, but that does not mean that just because people divide up the world into “us” and “them,” the term “them” deserves less respect. People in all groups deserve an equal voice in the culture and conversation of society.