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Opening Minds
Teaching a diverse class about prejudice sends Associate Professor of Psychology Nancy Brekke’s research in new directions.

By Lindsay Beller

Nancy Brekke stands outside of Hotchkiss Hall, where she has taught a class about prejudice that has caused her to reexamine how the field of psychology looks at the issue. (Photo by Chip Williams)

When Associate Professor of Psychology Nancy Brekke began teaching the class Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination in 1995, she didn't realize how much she would learn in the process. The class drew a diverse group of students from all disciplines who wanted to understand more about their own identities and cultures. But they struggled with theoretical models that failed to take their differences into account, like ethnicity, race, gender, age, religion, disability status, and sexual orientation.
 
"It was clear that most people in the field were talking about prejudice in a fairly monolithic kind of way," Brekke recalls. "They viewed groups as very interchangeable. So they would say, I'll do my study and this time we'll evaluate blacks and then we'll evaluate women and then Latinos."
 
But that made little sense to her students, who didn't see themselves as so generic. Brekke realized that general psychological theories about prejudice needed to consider their differences. She also recognized that psychologists focused their studies more on race, gender, and ethnicity than many groups who were targets of discrimination, such as people with disabilities.
     
The classroom experience made Brekke realize how narrowly the field of psychology looked at prejudice and helped inform her decision to write a book with husband and colleague Professor of Psychology Sergio Guglielmi Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination about the origins, consequences, and potential ways of eliminating stereotypes and discrimination. "The book reflects that emphasis and realization that itís instructive not to treat all of these groups as if they are generic minority groups," she says.
     
Brekke is not the only psychologist who came to this understanding. Within the last decade — particularly since September 11 when attitudes toward Muslims and Middle Easterners changed —psychological research on prejudice has exploded tremendously, says Brekke, who is part of that shift. Recent research "reflects growing interest in and concern about multiculturalism and the realization that the country has become increasingly diverse," she says.
     
Her interest in the intersection of psychology and social justice developed as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota after experiencing a problem common to many undergraduates — she didn't know what major to declare. When a letter from the university required her to pick one, she chose psychology because she was taking a lot of classes in the subject at the time. Indecision turned into awareness that she had found her calling. She started to work with a faculty member who introduced her to the idea that psychology could relate to social justice issues in the real world.
 
Brekke's research on prejudice picked up from there with a focus on the intersection between psychology and the law. Her early research examined how jurors' stereotypes and misconceptions of rape victims lead them to question a victimís credibility and later examined how expert witnesses influence juries.
 
As she looked at these issues, public opinion polls continued to show drops in certain types of prejudice. "Since the '70s you can see dramatic drops in how much overt racism and sexism people are willing to express, and we are seeing some drops in recent years in how negatively people view variations in sexual orientation," Brekke says.
     
Despite this promising trend, Brekke says there is a growing realization that as prejudice against one group decreases, it transfers to other groups, like people with disabilities. For example, since the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, Americans are more likely to say they admire individuals with disabilities but also resent the special accommodations those individuals might receive in the workplace. This example helps illustrate what has happened since psychologists began broadening their approach toward researching prejudice. "Theories are more complicated which makes solutions more complicated," she says. "On the other hand it reflects reality. The reality is that people's attitudes toward other social groups are very complex."
     
This is a major theme in her book — that there is no silver bullet to stop prejudice. In more than a decade of teaching the class, she has incorporated other themes that reflect shifts in how psychologists study this issue. For example, she emphasizes the need to take an interdisciplinary approach by considering how political, cultural, and historical factors shape stereotypes. She also advocates the need to examine group differences — long considered a taboo subject among psychologists — like whether men and women are inherently different or whether their differences are the product of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.
 
Her students have lively debates about these issues that carry over into their lives, underscoring another major theme in the book: the need to link abstract theories with real life issues and events. Brekke helps her students make those connections by requiring them to attend several diversity-related events throughout the semester. These have made an impact. One student from last spring's course wanted Brekke to e-mail her about upcoming events while others told her they used knowledge from the class to help them plan diversity-related activities on campus.
 
Brekke has continued to learn as well. "I've found that working on the book has helped me to better engage students in the course material and has enhanced students' ability to apply the course material to their own lives," she says. 

Lindsay Beller is the editor of Spectrum.