Humans are by nature prejudiced. However, the word prejudice conjures up negative images in most of our minds. When you read my title, you probably wanted to answer no, because we have been taught that prejudice is inherently wrong, and clearly there are a number of prejudices that are abhorrent; race and religion, spring immediately to mind.
Unfortunately prejudice is natural within people. You can be prejudiced about your sports team, thinking that all teams are worse than yours. I support a soccer team called Luton Town FC. We are prejudiced against our local rivals, Watford FC. I remember working with clients in Milwaukee and naively asking them if they watch the Chicago Bears! They nearly threw me out of the office (joke). They all supported the Packers. Prejudice exists in Customer Experience as well.
Psychologist Paul Bloom discusses our natural prejudice in his TED talk, “Can Prejudice Ever be a Good Thing?”
Bloom explains the role prejudice plays in all of our lives. There are some points he makes in the video that I think warrant a closer look, particularly as they relate to Customer Experience.
Prejudice is a natural thing.
Bloom asserts that prejudice is natural. To paraphrase what he says in the TED talk, we have experiences with things and people in the world that fall into certain categories and we can make judgments about novel instances that occur later that fall into these categories. In other words, our experiences make it so we can make judgments on future experiences.
Bloom quotes William Hazlitt, British writer from the eighteenth century:
“Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room, nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstance, no what to feel in any relation to life.”
I couldn’t agree more with Bloom and Hazlitt. We all have memories that shape our future judgments. These are critical to survival in some cases, i.e., when we remember the story of a pedestrian being struck in a crosswalk, we learned to look both ways before crossing the street.
We have the same judgments at a much more mundane level as well. These judgments are our subconscious at work, interpreting the situation and creating an emotional reaction. We sometimes call it a gut instinct. It’s this gut instinct, also known as our subconscious, that tells us when we see an alley that has no light, lots of graffiti and broken windows that this is an area that we either need to leave or continue through with caution.
Subconscious or gut instincts affect our decisions about Customer Experiences as well. Our subconscious is what tells us when we are having a poor experience with a company this time, we are likely to have a poor experience again in the future. Our gut tells us that we should end this relationship now before it happens again.
We like to belong to a group.
Humans naturally like to create groups that have similar characteristics. We like to have a sense of belonging and identity to our groups, which causes us to begin comparing our group to others. Comparing groups creates an “Us Versus Them” mentality.
Bloom gives several examples of this, but the one I found most amusing was that babies do this as well. In a study out of Yale (by Bloom’s wife), babies are presented with two puppets, one that prefers green beans, and one that prefers graham crackers. Most babies prefer graham crackers to green beans, and so prefer that puppet to the one that likes green beans. It goes further than that, however, because babies preferred even more the puppets that punished the other puppets for liking green beans. This example is both cute and unsettling…
Our customers are like babies in this way. They like to be part of the group. Look at the Harley Davidson Customer as an example. They live and breathe the brand. It’s more than a motorcycle—it’s a lifestyle choice! They consider themselves a different group. Some think they are superior to other motorcycles and their riders, often using derogatory terms to describe others, . There is a similar rivalry between Apple and Microsoft users, perpetuated by the ad campaign in the early 2000s.
Customers like to belong to groups—as long as it’s the better one. Everyone wants to be a cool, friendly, thoughtful, handkerchief-bearing Mac over the bumbling, dumpy looking, wimpy PC.
Stories help change our natural prejudice.
We make judgments based on our prejudice based in emotions. These emotions, however, can be swayed. We do this by telling stories.
Bloom describes how telling a story can appeal to our empathy that helps us to gain perspective of the other. He uses the example of how Abraham Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe that her book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped start the Civil War. Lincoln was joking, of course, but the humor comes from the truth of his words. Stowe created empathy for the plight of slaves with her novel by helping readers to see the world through a slave’s eyes. The empathy for slaves that Stowe created with her book was a catalyst for change for the whole society.
I also believe in the power of stories. They are important to your organization to help create an emotional relationship with your brand. They are also effective in getting your point across to the audience when you are a keynote speaker. I use stories all the time when I am consulting with clients on Customer Experiences. Many times I hear that our stories of past cases make my clients feel more comfortable adopting change into their culture and organization as they are trying to design a new Customer Experience.
We are all prejudiced, but it isn’t all bad.
Bloom talks about how prejudice is part of a duality we all have. We have emotions that create instincts and “gut feelings” that affect our judgment and actions. At the same time, however, we have reason that helps us use rational deliberation to help us plan and govern our actions.
We can use reason to accelerate and nourish our emotions as occurs with empathy, or staunch them when they are dangerous or damaging to a situation. The negative connotation to the word prejudice is associated with the times when reason did not staunch the damaging emotions that prejudice can evoke.
We all have prejudices that are formed of experiences and are the best predictors for our instinctual emotional reactions in the future, for good or ill. Using our natural propensity for prejudice to help evoke the proper emotions in a Customer Experience is a great strategy for building loyalty and branding for your organization.
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Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging keynote speaker. To read more from Colin on LinkedIn, connect with him by clicking the follow button above or below. If you would like to follow Beyond Philosophy click here
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