I often read the weblog Sepia Mutiny, and today there was a post about a pair of men flying while brown. They were pulled off the plane and their bags were sent ahead. It was a big foul up. Now, here is the kicker: the men were wearing “traditional” South Asian clothes and skull caps and one of them was reading the Koran. This scared the crap out of a flight attendent. Now, I pointed out that dressing likes this was likely to scare the crap out of people on a plane, so it is a really idiotic modus operandi for a terrorist, so the response was probably irrational. Frankly, the people you really have to be scared of look like me, “normal” and “assimilated” in appearance men who try and blend in before we blow up in your face (I’m saying “we” figuratively). Nevertheless, the human mind isn’t primed toward game theory or mathematical probability. We don’t have Bayes’ theorem hardwired into our brain, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have shown. Though I am pretty sure that the probability of a brown skinned man who is Muslim being a terrorist who is going to blow up the plane is higher if that man is not bearded with a skull cap, I am pretty sure people simply can’t help but be more unnerved by the bearded with skull cap individual. The vague outline of the logic is like so:
A) Muslims are more likely to blow up planes than non-Muslims
B) Bearded with skull cap individuals are more Muslim than those who are clean shaven
C) So being more Muslim, they are more likely to blow up planes
The human mind has rough & ready heuristics that trigger reflexive responses, and we find them incredibly compelling in a given moment (if this wasn’t so, credit card companies and marketers would be shit out of luck). To some extent the assocation between very Muslim looking men and terrorism is going to be subject to the same issue as the Muller Lyer illusion, you know rationally the the state of affairs, but your brain keeps popping out different results. The way to change behavior and dampen irrational biases is not to tell people that they are bad, or they have “learned wrong,” etc. That is like lecturing people on the threats of obesity caused by fatty food, and expecting that to do the trick. Rather, you need to give people mental tools, or educate them in a deep way in regards to specifics as opposed to general platitudes.
Instead of general non-discriminatory principles and exortations, it might be practical to give airline employees quick primers on South Asian ethnology so that one can quickly discern religious origin by name. Additionally, a basic outline of probabilities would probably help at least dampen the emotional fires that will inevitably get triggered by the bearded-while-flying.
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