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Information or conditioning? A difficult question

Last weekend I listened to one of those late-night radio programs and the guest said we live in a “matrix,” like the one shown by the Wachowski brothers in their 1999 movie, forcing us to accept the illusion as reality and conditioning as to act in certain way when we face certain situations.

It is always intriguing to see that intersection of philosophy and Hollywood and I seldom pay attention or believe what they say in late-night radio shows. But I kept thinking about our own conditional (as in the famous experiments by Ivan Pavlov a century ago) when certain information or stimulus lead us to a certain response.

Perhaps that’s why several days later an incident caught my attention. I was driving to work near a school when an ambulance, sirens on, came in the opposite direction.

An African American teenager, probably student at the nearby school, was walking in the same direction as the ambulance, so he could hear the sirens, but he didn’t see the vehicle.

The teenager then did something totally unexpected. He put on the floor the backpack he was carrying, stood facing a wall, and put his hands against the wall.

The ambulance rushed away and the teenager realized the sirens he heard were from an emergency vehicle, not a patrol car. He then calmly lowered his hands, took his backpack and walked away.

This incident (which happened indeed as I described) is of great concern for two reasons. First, what kind of behaviors and responses are we teaching our minority, urban youth at schools and in the media?

How is it possible that instead of just simply ignoring the sirens or turning his head to see the ambulance this teenager immediately assumed there was a patrol car nearby and he was in trouble? Pavlov will be happy to see the level of conditioning we have today.

The incident is of great concern because it also reveals our own prejudice. Let’s be honest: we immediately think there is a reason why the teenager reacted the way he did.

With no solid information and no real reason to treat him as a suspect of a crime, we follow the stereotype and decide that a teenager of a minority group carrying a backpack is probably doing something wrong. However, there was nothing during the incident to indicate that was the case.

In other words, we are being conditioned too. In the same way the teenager of the story heard a siren, assumed it was a police car, and raised his hands, we heard a story about a minority group or about immigrants and immediately assume they should be treated as suspects of committing illegal actions.

The conditioning is so strong we do not abandon our stereotypes even when they are shown to be false, as two sociologists, Robert Sampson (Harvard) and Tim Wadsworth (University of Colorado) recently did, showing the arrival of immigrants helped to reduce crime in 459 medium and large cities around the country.

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