January 27, 2025
Heterogenius
Why and How to Stop Dividing People into Us and Them
By Alfie Kohn
How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future?
– Audre Lorde
Even as a child I was puzzled by people who wanted to hang out only with those who were very much like themselves. I was particularly put off by defiant defenses of such tribalism, such as when parents urged their kids to date and marry someone of their own ethnic background. Come to think of it, I had a similarly negative reaction to single-sex schools and to special classes for the “smart” kids.1
It’s obvious now that I lay these reactions out side by side, but it took awhile to connect the dots. What I was recoiling from was homogeneity. It seemed straightforward to me — and, after many years of conversation, reflection, and research, still does — that living, playing, learning, and working with people who are different from ourselves is more productive, less artificial, and likely to help us become better people.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you sometimes find yourself seesawing between optimism and pessimism about the prospects for our species, this very issue might well serve as the fulcrum: Will we succumb to or transcend the temptation to “stick with our own kind”?
*
That temptation doesn’t come out of nowhere, of course. Ironically, one thing we humans have in common is a tendency to notice what we don’t have in common with everyone. We start out by categorizing people and identifying with those who seem similar to ourselves. That easily leads to stereotyping out-group members. Yes, it’s “possible to have in-group loyalty and attachment in the absence of conflict with out-groups,”2 but a world divided into Us and Them can quickly become a world of Us versus Them. A daunting collection of social science research illuminates the (sometimes unconscious) dynamics of prejudice, discrimination, and even dehumanization.3
At first pass, one might even reach the gloomy conclusion that tribalism is unavoidable — just a part of “human nature.” Fortunately, carefully designed studies have challenged that assumption:
* Three-month-old babies looked longer at faces of their own race, but this “preference for own-race faces was observed only in infants living in predominantly homogeneous own-race environments, and not in infants who experienced intensive cross-race exposure.”4
* Children often prefer to socialize with those they regard as similar to themselves. But kids who attended diverse preschools were more likely to have friends of different ethnic backgrounds by the time they were in first grade, which, in turn, led them to have less racial bias in third grade. Nor is this limited to early childhood: White college students who were randomly assigned Black roommates were significantly more likely “to have personal contact with members of other ethnic groups after their first year.” And these outcomes matter because, as other research shows, heterogeneous friendships are effective at reducing prejudice.5
* Residential desegregation in itself doesn’t cure racism. Indeed, Whites are more likely to express racist attitudes when Blacks move into their neighborhoods. But meaningful contact among people of different races or backgrounds can overcome prejudice. In fact, prejudice tends to decline when people live in an area where others participate in positive intergroup interactions, not just as a function of their own activities. And those who live in diverse neighborhoods are also more likely to help others in need.6
* An increase in immigration — something that’s going to escalate as the climate emergency worsens — often triggers ugly prejudices and support for racist political movements. But those outcomes aren’t inevitable. A recent series of worldwide studies concluded that “inclusive…integration policies that render immigrants more equal to natives,” with new arrivals given the same legal, political, social, and economic rights as existing citizens, “reduce xenophobia [anti-immigrant prejudice] among natives.”7
In short, as one psychologist assured us, “There is nothing inherent in any distinction between human beings that compels us to see others as they.” Researchers have subsequently confirmed that cultural, legal, and educational systems can be constructed to overcome tribalism.8 How we’re socialized — or, in the case of adults, resocialized — makes all the difference.
*
The idea of minimizing homogeneity has a great deal to recommend it even on a biological level. Genetic diversity allows for adaptation to a changing environment. Species diversity makes for more robust ecosystems. Plant diversity (for example, through crop rotation) protects against pests and disease. Even nature, in other words, seems to be saying “Mix it up!”
As for human interaction, the experience of being in a heterogeneous group not only attenuates tribalism but can enhance performance on various tasks. Social psychologist Adam Galinsky put it this way: “Diversity increases creativity and innovation, promotes higher quality decisions, and enhances economic growth because it spurs deeper information processing and complex thinking…[whereas] homogeneous groups run the risk of narrow mindedness and groupthink (i.e., premature consensus) through misplaced comfort and overconfidence.”9
The question of what can and should be done to maximize heterogeneity of various kinds comes into particularly sharp focus when we consider what happens in schools.
The idea of segregating kids on the basis of age can be traced back to nineteenth-century Prussians, who justified this practice in the name of efficiency. (To get a sense of how contrived this arrangement is, ask yourself how often you, as an adult, spend time only with people who are exactly your age — and whether that would make sense.) While teaching everyone together, from the youngest to the oldest, usually happens only out of necessity, in rural one-room schoolhouses, even moderate versions of multiage groupings can yield a range of advantages.10 Unfortunately, some educators experiment with these possibilities only in order that kids who have mastered a given curriculum unit, regardless of how old they are, can be taught together. Openness to age-based heterogeneity, in other words, may just be a way to achieve ability-based homogeneity.
But does it make any more sense to separate students on the basis of their academic proficiency? In practice, tracking doesn’t respond to differences in what children can learn so much as it creates differences in what they will learn. Those permitted to take honors or gifted classes typically receive the kind of enrichments that would benefit just about any student. Homogeneity based on putative ability — which usually just means standardized test scores — is detrimental in all sorts of ways, according to research: It cements inequities into place, increasing the dropout rate for those relegated to the lower groups while adversely affecting the self-esteem of those in the higher groups. “Countries that…use the least amount of grouping by ability are those with the highest achievement” overall, and the benefits of detracking are enjoyed by “students across the achievement range.” As a bonus, “when educators reduce or eliminate experiences that highlight ability differences, student misbehavior tends to decrease.”11
Designing instruction for kids with widely varying skills can be challenging, to be sure, but the idea that it’s easy to teach homogeneous groups requires us to overlook the significant differences among kids even in classrooms where everyone is supposed to be at the same level.12 (Plus, even if homogeneity were more efficient for test preparation, that doesn’t mean it helps to promote meaningful learning — a very different objective.13)
These considerations also apply to students with special needs and challenges. A fair amount of data exists to support the heterogeneous approach known as mainstreaming, although much depends on the details of implementation — and, of course, on the criteria used to judge the effects. But segregating such students tends to be even more problematic. And it matters why, not just how, such a policy is put into practice. Inclusion is a value worth embracing in its own right, something that can benefit all students rather than just a way to help certain kids — or, worse, a way for a school district to save money.14
For an even more extreme form of segregation, consider the practice of separating students by gender. The idea of educating girls separately may reflect an understandable desire to offer them opportunities that boys seem to usurp, or to free students from the social pressures of coed environments. But the reality of sexism in the classroom and in peer relations presents us with two options: We can tackle the problem head-on or we can try to bypass it by keeping boys and girls apart.
Putting aside the fact that single-sex schooling hasn’t been associated with better academic outcomes for boys or for girls,15 some proponents of teaching male and female students separately (or differently) have made exaggerated claims about biologically based differences, even invoking baseless theories about male versus female brains.16 But even if boys and girls really were from different planets, why would that argue for segregating them? Why not embrace heterogeneous learning environments where they can learn with, from, and about each other?
Indeed, shouldn’t such heterogeneity start when children are very young? Emphasizing gender differences — think of the way toys are designed and marketed — creates an Us-versus-Them world in ways that are gratuitous and unsettling. Is the practice of having young children line up by gender (for example, to leave the classroom) any more appropriate than having them line up by race? And why greet a class by saying, “Good morning, boys and girls”? Not surprisingly, when teachers do and say such things, preschoolers then tend to act in more gender-stereotyped ways and are less likely to play with those who aren’t the same gender as they are.17
Where race is concerned, meanwhile, most Americans probably would describe themselves as supporters of integration. But there’s a bundle of qualifications attached to that generalization18 — and, in any case, the reality is that segregation remains the norm in much of our society. This is true with respect to housing — “most Americans still live in racially segregated neighborhoods”19 — and, even more strikingly, education. Contrary to what most people assume, the proportion of students who attend schools that are mostly segregated by race, at least in the country’s hundred largest districts, has actually increased (from already high levels) by a whopping 64 percent over the last three or four decades.20
School segregation is due to several factors: the persistence of residential segregation, the fact that courts are less willing to impose and enforce desegregation orders, and the embrace by conservatives of privatization through “school choice.”21 Yet we seem to have become inured to it. Even our language serves to camouflage its existence: As Jonathan Kozol drily observed, what we call a “diverse” school often means one attended almost exclusively by Black and Latino students.22
Seventy years ago, a very different Supreme Court from the one we have now drew from social science findings to declare that separate is inherently unequal — a conclusion, incidentally, that has been replicated in recent research. But as Richard Kahlenberg reminds us, “Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills…there’s also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy.” And one effective way to promote acceptance is to educate students in diverse schools and classrooms – from early childhood all the way through college.23
That distinction between schools and classrooms is important, by the way. The practice of tracking or ability grouping typically has the effect of segregating students by race within a school building, with minority kids disproportionately assigned to basic and remedial classes while White and Asian kids are overrepresented in honors and Advanced Placement classes. Beyond the inherent injustice of this fact, social contact and friendships across racial groups, which help to reduce prejudice, are less common in schools that track.24
Even at the classroom level, however, diversity is not sufficient (even though it is necessary). Mere proximity doesn’t always produce harmony or even tolerance. Animosity and resentment may persist in a multiethnic learning environment if students “have no experiences with diverse interactions at home” or if “classroom norms do not support cross-group relationships.”25 The prospects aren’t good, for example, if they’re expected to spend their time learning apart from each other (stranded at separate desks and taught that helping is cheating), or, worse, made to compete against each other (with the result that everyone else comes to be seen as an obstacle to one’s own success).
If, by contrast, classrooms are structured so that students of different colors and cultures regularly learn in small cooperative groups, then they’re more likely to accept, socialize with, and care about those who are different from themselves.26 Cooperative learning comes in many flavors, some more satisfying than others,27 but one variant, the “jigsaw” method, is particularly suited to this objective. Its inventor, social psychologist Elliot Aronson, asks teachers to divide up a unit of study and assign one section to each student in a group (while making it clear that everyone is responsible for learning all the material). Not only do students tend to learn more effectively as a result, but they come to feel more positive about their peers, including those of different races and ability levels. Self-esteem also improves as each participant realizes that everyone else is depending on them.28
In addition to this sort of structured independence, teachers can offer activities whose primary purpose is to encourage — and help students get better at — understanding other people’s points of view. This can promote cross-ethnic friendships above and beyond the effects of cooperative learning.29
In sum, heterogeneity as a result of desegregation and detracking is a vital first step for overcoming tribalism, but the odds for success are even better if we take advantage of that diversity by helping students to depend on one another and to reflect on how the world looks to people from different backgrounds.
*
The potential benefits of heterogeneity are just as evident in workplaces as in classrooms.30 But the same cautions apply there as well: People who have been socialized to think tribally, to view those in out-groups with suspicion, and to adopt racist and sexist attitudes, will not be instantly transformed as a result of more exposure to those they view as Others. Indeed, a newly diverse work environment may result in more stereotyping and conflict. That’s why there needs to be meaningful interaction: structured interdependence, with deliberately diverse small groups working toward common goals — as well as activities designed to promote perspective taking and dialogue. Call it “guided heterogeneity.”
Yet even this qualification may need to be qualified. In writing about the chilling effects of dehumanization, and pondering what it would mean to rehumanize those whom we view mostly as different from ourselves,31 I’ve come to suspect that even the guided version of heterogeneity can take us only so far. We may also need to reduce the salience of group membership in how we define ourselves.
Specifically, that means looking in two directions at once: affirming the uniqueness of each individual and the humanness that all of us share. Each of these emphases can offset the tendency to identify primarily with, and feel loyalty to, a certain group — or to see others that way. Yes, that person over there may be one of Them, but she is also someone who is distinct from others of her gender, race, ethnic background, nationality, etc. And she is also a person — just like me, just like all of us.
I should immediately add that the moral as well as practical implications of identifying with a group are very different depending on whether we’re talking about a dominant or subordinate group. It’s a hell of a lot easier for White people like me to experience ourselves just as individuals; in a racist society, only some of us have the luxury of not thinking about race.32 But shouldn’t the ultimate goal be for everyone to enjoy that luxury?
To see people more as individuals than as group members not only affirms what is distinctive about each person, which I take to be an intrinsic good, but also offers a powerful antidote to tribalism. In the bulleted items at the beginning of this essay I reviewed studies showing that exposure to, and positive interactions with, people from other groups can reduce prejudice. Now I want to add that emphasizing uniqueness rather than group membership can have even more salutary effects.
For example, research has shown that the amygdala, a part of the brain involved with perceptions of fear and threat, may become aroused when people are shown other-race faces. But that doesn’t happen if they’ve first been prompted to think about the people they’re looking at as individuals with their own tastes and preferences — in other words, not as members of a group at all.33
At the same time, hatred of those in out-groups is also less likely to germinate when people are seen more as simply human than as members of any subset of humanity. They are Others in some respects, sure, but when you come right down to it, they, like me, worry about their aging parents and ponder their own mortality. They bristle at being controlled. They catch cold. They savor a good meal. They fall in love.
This is much more than a clichéd call for brotherhood. It’s a deeply subversive challenge to various ideologies, including nationalism and religious exclusivity. It’s an invitation to locate ourselves in widening circles of care. In the words of psychologist Leon Eisenberg, someone whose “concerns extend beyond family and beyond nation to mankind has become fully human.”34
That’s a message that children need to hear — and to see modeled for them — by the adults in their lives: a commitment to inclusiveness whose implication is that there is no future in tribalism, no justice in “just us.” Every day our kids should watch us encounter and talk about others in a way that highlights how those people are not alien beings; they’re like us with respect to the things that matter — and, at the same time, their qualities can’t be reduced to membership in any category.
Minimizing an “Us and Them” construction of the world is a long-term challenge. In the meantime, to the extent that we continue to think in terms of group membership, let’s at least make sure that our children — and we ourselves — don’t spend our days mostly with people from our own group.
NOTES
1. It took me longer to question a different sort of homogeneity found in academic environments — namely, how history is over here and English is over there, how we must put away our math books and pick up our science books. There’s nothing inherent in the idea of knowledge that requires what Alfred North Whitehead called the “fatal disconnection of subjects.” My own undergraduate and graduate degrees are interdisciplinary, and I eventually came to realize that organizing learning by problems rather than subjects — starting with a question and then drawing from whichever disciplines are helpful for exploring it — can make sense for K-12 education as well. I’ve written a bit about the artificiality of erecting walls between academic fields (see The Schools Our Children Deserve [Houghton Mifflin, 1999], pp. 68, 148-50), but anyone interested in a practical model of interdisciplinary teaching for younger students should begin with James Beane’s superb book Curriculum Integration: Designing the Core of Democratic Education (Teachers College Press, 1997).
2. Marilynn B. Brewer, “The Importance of Being We,” American Psychologist, November 2007, p. 733.
3. For a summary of social stereotyping and prejudice — what they consist of and how they take root — see Rebecca S. Bigler and Lynn S. Liben, “A Developmental Intergroup Theory of Social Stereotypes and Prejudice,” in Advances in Child Development and Behavior 34 (2006): 39-89.
4. Yair Bar-Haim et al., “Nature and Nurture in Own-Race Face Processing,” Psychological Science 17 (2006), p. 162.
5. Lasting effects of diverse preschools: Larissa M. Gaias et al., “Diversity Exposure in Preschool,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 59 (2018): 5-15. College students: Johanne Boisjoly et al., “Empathy or Antipathy? The Impact of Diversity,” American Economic Review, December 2006: 1890-1905; quotation from p. 1891. A similar effect was found in Scott E. Carrell et al., “The Impact of College Diversity on Behavior Toward Minorities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 11 (2019): 159-82. Effectiveness of heterogeneous friendships: Kristin Davies et al., “Cross-Group Friendships and Intergroup Attitudes,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15 (2011): 332-51.
6. Racist attitudes: Marylee C. Taylor, “How White Attitudes Vary with the Racial Composition of Local Populations,” American Sociological Review 63 (1988): 512-35. Meaningful contact: Ulrich Wagner et al., “Prejudice and Minority Proportion: Contact Instead of Threat Effects,” Social Psychology Quarterly 69 (2006): 380-90. Where others participate…: Oliver Christ et al., “Contextual Effect of Positive Intergroup Contact on Outgroup Prejudice,” PNAS 111 (March 18, 2014): 3996-4000. Effect on helpfulness: Jared Nai et al., “People in More Racially Diverse Neighborhoods Are More Prosocial,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114 (2018): 497-515.
7. Judit Kende et al., “Policies and Prejudice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 123 (2022): 337-52.
8. The quotation is from Harvey A. Hornstein, Cruelty and Kindness (Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 125. Nearly half a century later, we have empirical confirmation that “social group distinctions are…not exclusively determined by pre-existing and salient social categories…The sense of belonging to a specific social category can indeed be shifted by the demands of the situation or environment, such as requiring new ways of defining the in-group” (Maddalena Marini and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Us and Them: Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Intergroup Behavior,” in Sergio Della Sala, ed., Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience, 2d ed. [Elsevier, 2021], p. 510, 514).
9. Adam D. Galinsky et al., “Maximizing the Gains and Minimizing the Pains of Diversity,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2015), pp. 742-43. This is true with respect to diversity not only in race and gender but also in people’s professional backgrounds. Thus, someone assembling a team to tackle a complex real-life problem wouldn’t “hire people whose résumés score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would…build a team of people who bring diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills.” Indeed, “even within a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team….Optimal hiring depends on context. Optimal teams will be diverse” (Scott E. Page, “Why Hiring the ‘Best’ People Produces the Least Creative Results,” Aeon, [undated]).
10. For example, see Diane E. McClellan and Susan J. Kinsey, “Children’s Social Behavior in Relation to Participation in Mixed-Age or Same-Age Classrooms,” Early Childhood Research and Practice 1 (1999); and Nancy Mann Jackson, “Breaking the Age Barrier in K12 Schools,” District Administration, November 20, 2018.
11. Cements inequity into place: See, for example, Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track, 2d ed. (Yale University Press, 2005). Increases the dropout rate: A large study of ninth graders conducted by North Carolina researchers is described in Eric Sparks et al., “Dropouts,” Educational Leadership, February 2010: 46-9. Effects on students in high groups: See the studies mentioned in Marjorie Seaton et al., “Earning Its Place as a Pan-Human Theory,” Journal of Educational Psychology 101 (2009), p. 403. “Increased success from detracking…”: Jo Boaler, What’s Math Got to Do with It? (Penguin, 2008), pp. 107, 111. Less misbehavior: Eric Toshalis, “Five Practices that Provoke Misbehavior,” Educational Leadership, October 2015, p. 36.
12. Many different skills and capabilities are involved in learning a given subject, and they aren’t always highly correlated. In an English class, for example, a student who reads with exceptional fluency may not excel at understanding symbolism. A student who has trouble organizing her ideas may nevertheless write extraordinarily creative stories or poetry. And so on.
13. Pressure to raise scores on high-stakes tests, which was exacerbated 25 years ago by the No Child Left Behind Act, led many schools to resort to more tracking. In particular, “incentive systems establishing separate [test score] thresholds for each racial/ethnic subgroup…can generate perverse incentives for districts to segregate their students” (Walt Haney, drawing from the research of Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger, in “Lake Woebeguaranteed,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 10 [May 6, 2002], p. 3). All students lose out from less heterogeneity, but none more than students relegated to low-level classes — one more example of how vulnerable populations suffer the most from top-down, test-driven accountability mandates. See, for example, Deborah Meier et al., Many Children Left Behind (Beacon Press, 2004) and the work of groups like FairTest.
14. Most studies that focus only on the academic impact of mainstreaming provide support for its use, although concerns have been raised recently (as well as rejoinders to those concerns) about the methodology of some of that research. In any case, such discussions are largely confined to effects on standardized tests, which measure what matters least, intellectually speaking. For more on the idea that inclusion is valuable in its own right — or at least vital for achieving aims that transcend academic achievement — see Mara Sapon-Shevin, Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms (Beacon Press, 2007). Another useful resource: Richard A. Villa and Jacqueline S. Thousand, Creating an Inclusive School, 2d ed. (ASCD, 2005).
15. The results of a rare random-assignment study “consistently indicated no differences between students in single-sex versus coeducational middle schools in mathematics and science performance” (Erin Pahlke et al., “The Effects of Single-Sex Compared With Coeducational Schooling on Mathematics and Science Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology [2013], p. 451). Some of the same authors conducted a meta-analysis comprising 184 separate studies of 1.6 million students. They found “little evidence of an advantage of single sex schooling for girls or boys for any of the outcomes.” In fact, the better a study was, the less likely it was to find any benefit. See Erin Pahlke et al., “The Effects of Single-Sex Compared With Coeducational Schooling on Students’ Performance and Attitudes” Psychological Bulletin 140 (2014), p. 1064.
16. With respect to most meaningful psychological and other educationally relevant characteristics, males and females are much more similar than different. (The differences within each gender are far greater than the average difference between genders.) That conclusion was confirmed by a review of dozens of meta-analyses by Janet Hyde, one of the most respected experts on this subject — and then again, with an even broader array of characteristics, in a review by University of Rochester researchers. In Hyde’s words, “You never hear a good, modern neuroscientist say the brain is hardwired” for gender differences. See also Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender (Norton, 2011); Lise Eliot, Pink Brain, Blue Brain (Houghton Mifflin, 2009); Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, Same Difference (Basic, 2005), and Gina Rippon, Gender and Our Brains (Pantheon, 2019).
17. Lacey J. Hilliard and Lynn S. Liben, “Differing Levels of Gender Salience in Preschool Classrooms: Effects on Children’s Gender Attitudes and Intergroup Bias,” Child Development 81 (2010): 1787-98. This, of course, is not a call to deny the existence of gender, but an invitation to question the (often unthinking) tendency to emphasize its salience, the result being that children see themselves and one another primarily through that lens.
18. For example, see Lawrence D. Bobo et al., “The Real Record on Racial Attitudes,” in Social Trends in American Life, ed. Peter V. Marsden (Princeton University Press, 2012); and Laura Meckler et al., “70 Years Later, 1 in 3 Black People Say Integration Didn’t Help Black Students,” Washington Post, May 17, 2024. Obviously people who endorse the ideal of integration don’t always favor affirmative action or desegregating their own children’s school. Nor does support for racial diversity always extend to class-based diversity. (Some affluent liberal Whites seem happy, even proud, to have Black kids in their children’s classrooms….as long as those kids’ parents are doctors or professors.) Most troubling is the fact that, at this writing, one of our two political parties — the one that currently controls the presidency, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, and 24 state legislatures outright — has mounted a sweeping assault on DEI programs and has done so not because of concerns about how some such programs are implemented but because it repudiates the very ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
19. Tracy Hadden Loh et al., “The Great Real Estate Reset,” a 2020 publication by the Brookings Institution. Also, it’s important to note that residential segregation does not just reflect choices made by individuals; it has long been buttressed by government policy. See, for example, Richard Rothstein, “The Myth of De Facto Segregation,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 2019: 35-38.
20. See the data reported in this Smithsonian magazine article. For a survey demonstrating that most people incorrectly believe the trend is toward less segregation, see Meckler et al., op. cit.
21. Charter schools are somewhat more likely to be segregated than regular public schools, while voucher programs began in order to foster segregation academies where white families could avoid desegregated public schools. See Kathryn J. Edin et al., “Segregation Academies Show Us the Ugly Side of Vouchers,” Daily Beast, November 24, 2023; Jennifer Berry Hawes et al., “Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South….,” ProPublica, May 18, 2024; and Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight (Princeton University Press, 2007), e.g., pp. 170-71. Moreover, they appear to be having the same segregating effect going forward: See Halley Potter, Do Private School Vouchers Pose a Threat to Integration?, (Century Foundation, 2017).
22. This semantic sleight of hand is analogous to how female college students used to be called “coeds,” which of course is short for “coeducational.”
23. Kahlenberg is quoted in Elizabeth Weil, “Teaching to the Testosterone,” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2008, p. 87. Examples of research on the effects of diverse schools and classrooms: Heidi McGlothlin and Melanie Killen, “How Social Experience Is Related to Children’s Intergroup Attitudes,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40 (2010): 625-34; Adam Rutland et al., “Interracial Contact and Racial Constancy,” Applied Developmental Psychology 26 (2005): 699-713; The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms (Century Foundation, 2019); and Stephen B. Billings et al., “The Long-Run Effects of School Racial Diversity on Political Identity,” Working paper 27302, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2020 (which found, interestingly, that White students who had been assigned to attend schools with more minority students were significantly less likely to register as Republicans years later). Regarding higher education in particular, see Patricia Gurin et al., “Diversity and Higher Education,” Harvard Educational Review 72 (2002): 330-66.
24. Vladimir T. Khmelkov and Maureen T. Hallinan, “Organizational Effects on Race Relations in Schools,” Journal of Social Issues 55 (1999): 627-45.
25. Christia Spears Brown and Jaana Juvonen, “Insights About the Effects of Diversity,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 59 (2019), pp. 77, 75.
26. “School integration can in fact reduce prejudice among students from different groups, but simply placing these students together isn’t enough to get them to see each other as individuals and shed their prejudices. We must also try to help them share common goals, on which they must cooperate to succeed; ensure that they’re treated as equals and have positive, noncompetitive interactions with one another; and feel like their cross-group relationship has the support of authority figures…Our biases are not so hardwired after all, given the right social engineering.” These conclusions of researchers Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp are summarized here in Susan T. Fiske, “Look Twice,” Greater Good, Summer 2008, p. 17. Also see Pettigrew and Tropp, “A Meta-Analytic Test of Integroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (2006): 751-83.
27. See chapter 10 (“Learning Together“) of my book No Contest: The Case Against Competition, rev. ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
28. Elliot Aronson and Diane Bridgeman, “Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 5 (1979): 438-46.
29. In a study of Palestinian and Israeli fifth graders, the positive effects of such instruction in perspective taking lasted longer than the effects of cooperative learning: Rony Berger et al., “Comparing Effectiveness and Durability of Contact- and Skills-Based Approaches to Prejudice Reduction,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 59 (2018): 46-53. More generally, perspective taking “by majority group members decreases stereotyping, reduces racial bias, increases recognition of racial discrimination, and promotes smoother interracial interactions. Perspective taking also allows people to anticipate and integrate others’ interests and priorities with their own to produce higher quality and mutually beneficial decisions” (Galinsky et al., op. cit., p. 745; citations omitted).
30. A study that relied on data from more than 500 companies found that those with greater racial and gender diversity had higher-than-average profitability and market share, a finding that held up even after taking other variables into account. “Despite the potentially negative impact of diversity on internal group processes, diversity has a net positive impact on organizational functioning….Growth and innovation depend on people from various backgrounds working together and capitalizing on their differences. Although such differences may lead to communication barriers and group conflict, diversity increases the opportunities for creativity and the quality of the product of group work” (Cedric Herring, “Does Diversity Pay?”, American Sociological Review 74 [2009], p. 220). Note that conflict, per se, is not always counterproductive: “Cooperative conflict” can provide what one pair of experts called “friendly excursions into disequilibrium.” (For research on this topic relevant to workplaces, see the writings of Dean Tjosvold.)
31. See my book The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life (Basic Books, 1990), especially chapters 4 and 5. An excerpt from that book relevant to this discussion is available here.
32. “We cannot talk meaningfully about racial identity without also talking about racism…Why do Black youths, in particular, think about themselves in terms of race? Because that is how the rest of the world thinks of them” (Beverly Daniel Taum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, rev. ed. [Basic Books, 2017], pp. 78, 133).
33. Mary E. Wheeler and Susan T. Fiske, “Controlling Racial Prejudice,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 56-63.
34. Leon Eisenberg, “The Human Nature of Human Nature,” Science, April 14, 1972, p. 127.
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