BY LYDIA R. DIAMOND

20172018SEASON

SEPT 3 - 24

CONTENTS2... Data, News, and Stereotyping - By Zoë Golub-Sass3... An Interview with Playwright Lydia R. Diamond - By Charles Haughland4... Inside the Brain: Researchers Delve into the Subconcious - By Charles Haughland5... On Prejudice & the Brain - By Susan T. Fiske7... Glossary

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Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 2

In the digital age, we are force-fed data every second of every day. Fragmented chunks of information rock our brains–phones buzz, computers ping, and some of us even have watches that bark when it starts to rain. The world is ever changing, as it always has been, only we now have more access to it. And now that we can see it faster, we respond faster, and those responses trigger more responses–the constant 24-hour news cycle meets our demand for more information with more journalism. We are fed data. And, if lucky, fragmented analysis.

Arguably, the most efficient way to deliver news is through numbers. Cold, hard, data. This is how we tally the severity of injustices and gauge how well we’ve done with our social justice advocacy. Numbers and statistics affirm our advocacy but not our humanity. We may post an irate response on Facebook or tweet our disgust. Maybe we mention it over dinner, or, if time permits, text our state rep, and then call it a day. But an hour later there is a new crisis.

In a recent Atlantic article, How Intelligence Leads to Stereotyping, NYU psychology Professor Jonathan Freeman argues, “Individuals who had a greater capacity for abstract reasoning experienced more contact with out-groups, and more contact predicted less prejudice.” This might seem like an obvious conclusion. The more you get to know the “out-group” or the “other,” the more likely you are to realize how un-“other” they actually are. But before we close the books on this conclusion, we must ask ourselves what type of contact is essential to truly rewiring our brains.

No, we cannot meet every person in the world, but we can begin to see people as people, not as data points, anomalies, and objective problems. An effective way to do that is through storytelling and art. Why is a Munch painting more evocative than a New York Times headline? Why do we return to the classics, to Homer, Shakespeare, and Arthur Miller?

We understand our own humanity–ours and the “other”–through paint, sound, film, and any medium that tells a story. The theater, es-pecially, brings story to life. It demands that we willingly suspend our disbelief, and with it, leave behind the armor of our group affiliations.

In the meeting of these fictional people, we are asked to participate in the humanization of a stranger, of someone who might not look like us. A good play cracks open the why of human behavior using tiny details of daily life. It reminds us that we are capable of empathy, love, and even justified hatred. In the age of big data and information overload, we must find pockets of humanity where we can rewire our brains and open us to originate and embrace social change.

DATA, NEWS, AND STEREOTYPING

by Zoë Golub-SassKTC Artistic Fellow

Jake Lee Smith as Brian in Smart People

Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 3

Charles Haugland: Can you talk about the spark of this play?

Lydia R. Diamond: My hus-band was reading an article by Susan T. Fiske, a neuro-psychologist at the forefront of the science around brain imaging and race. My hus-band said, “I think this is go-ing to blow your mind,” and

indeed it became the inspiration for the play. Cambridge (and to some degree, Harvard) was where I lived, and so where the play ended up living.

It’s been a long process. I was trying to write a play about race, in real time–at a time when that topic was shifting more than I’d witnessed in my lifetime. Seismic shifts. I began writing the play in 2007, and then the presidential election happened. Watching Obama run and watching the way the climate shifted around him changed the play. I am a person who spent much of her artistic career exploring the social nuances of race. In interviews, people started asking, “What do you be-lieve now that we are post-racial?” So…the national landscape around race shifted every five minutes, making the writing of the play a delicious challenge.

CH: What is (or was) your reaction to ‘post-racial,’ the buzz-word of 2008?

LD: At best it’s a fallacy. The conversation makes me crazy, and I haven’t been in very many places where I have had conversation with people of color who don’t agree with me. It feels like the most dismissive and dangerous shrug off of a phenomenon that has not gone away; how can you be post-ra-cial in a society proven to have huge economic disparity between races? And attitudinally? (A crude example: Fox vs. MSNBC.) I’m not a political scientist. I am sure those more studied than I could make dramatically compelling arguments to the contrary. Fine. But in the psyche of people of color, we run into prejudice and feel like, “Look, here it is. There it is again. It’s right here. It just hit me in the face,” and in my ex-perience, some white people respond with, “I really think you are exaggerating and seeing it through a lens that is perhaps skewed.” In this play, I was interested in exploring a character compelled to say, “It’s real, let’s move one.”

CH: What else attracted you to creating the character of Bri-an, the researcher in Smart People?

LD: I wanted to write a play about a white man who passion-ately felt that he had discovered a key to the phenomenon of racism in America, a conversation that overshadows all of us, that we’ve inherited and can’t figure out how to fix. Whether people are on the side of “Everybody, get over this. It’s done. Stop talking about it” or on the side of “There is still so much inequality,” the conversation is part of the fabric of our society. So when I started, what interested me was exploring the re-verberations of this character speaking the unspeakable in his professional and personal life.

CH: The play is a “what if ” scenario–what if someone like Brian could prove this, what would happen. While it’s heavily based on real neuroscience and research, it goes further than the real scientists have in projecting a conclusion onto the data. How did you build the science side of the play?

LD: When I started, I didn’t even know neuroscientists were looking at how different places in the brain respond to race. I was familiar with sociologists and psychologists and their studies around race, but I was frightened and inspired by those in the hard sciences taking on this work. Yet I was also encouraged that there were a lot of people across the sciences who were, in earnest, trying to work it out, and I could see very clearly–especially because I was looking at it as a layper-son–the places where it was exciting, because the work was being done, and frightening because of the ramifications of the work. And I saw the gaps which no scientist or academic would dare venture into.

CH: What conversations do you hope your play will spark?

LD: I’d like to think that everybody in this play has as much to lose as everybody else, and everybody is equally welcome in the conversation. I wanted the play to premiere here in Boston in order to share it with an audience of people that are gunning for this play to be good and have done nothing but support me. But it is important that the play feel like an invitation to all of us to own the conversation. We can laugh and not feel uncomfortable, because we know that we are all equally uncomfortable (and because it is funny, I can’t help it); it is why we go to the theatre–to laugh, and squirm, and be challenged and affirmed.

An Interview with Playwright

lydia r. diamondby Charles Haughland Original Dramaturg, Smart People

Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 4

“In modern America, we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons, and orcs,” social commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in a New York Times essay. “We believe this even when we are actually being racist.” Coates is commenting directly on a 2012 incident in which renowned actor Forest Whitaker was profiled as a shoplifter in a New York deli, but he also draws from this disturbing episode a larger point about the way Americans rush to distance themselves from overtly biased actions while denying their connection to the system that creates that ideology in the first place.

Though Coates arrives at his point as a cultural historian, his argument mirrors discoveries in the the sciences over the last twenty years that have uncovered the mental processes that create and perpetuate racial prejudice. For most of the 20th century, researchers and theorist viewed racism as a patholo-gy, focusing on radical expressions of racial hatred. In recent decades, however, our understanding of racism has shifted to the way in which most of us make tiny decisions every day that may express unconscious bias. Neuropsychologist Susan T. Fiske writes, “Our own prejudice–and our children’s and grandchildren’s prejudice if we don’t address it–takes a more subtle, unexamined form. People can identify another person’s race, gender, and age in a matter of milliseconds. In this blink of an eye, a complex network of stereotypes, emotional preju-dices, and behavioural impulses activates.”

Social psychologists Samuel Gaertner and Jack Dovidio coined the term “aversive racism” to describe the behaviour of people who outwardly espouse egalitarian beliefs about racial equality but who exhibit signs of underlying bias; their theory has been supported by dozens of experiments that examine the contexts of hiring, helping strangers, and jury deliberation, among others.

Playwright Lydia R. Diamond began writing Smart People when she learned of efforts to combine sociological hypotheses about racial bias with more definitive evidence from the fields of neuroscience and brain imaging. Particularly influential to Diamond was neuropsychologists Fiske and Lasana T. Harris’s 2006 study “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroim-aging Responses to Extreme Outgroups,” which considered how our brains process “outgroups,” or sets of people held in low regard by modern society, such as the homeless and drug addicts. The study showed that, in an experimental setting, subjects reacted to drug addicts with the same revulsion as one might at a disgusting object, rather than use the parts of their brain that are connected to evaluating human beings. Fiske and Harris approach these results with a sense of caution, only

drawing limited conclusions about their direct evidence. But as they note in their study, “group dehumanization is as old as the U.S. Constitution,” alluding to the three-fifths compromise on slaves and representation.

At the heart of neuroscientists’ study of bias is finding ways to separate subconscious beliefs from self-reported ones. Scientists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, authors of the recent book Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People, developed a procedure called Implicit Association Test. Their measure, available online for the public to try at implicit.har-vard.edu, provides a glimpse at our brains’ automatic reactions to different groups of people. The test looks at how quickly we sort different groups; for example, do we subconscious-ly associate men with careers in science or as leaders? “IAT test-takers are often surprised by unexpected results,” Banaji and Greenwald write. “Some gain a new sense of self-aware-ness as they discover associations that were previously hidden. Some admire the simplicity of the IAT’s method at unearth-ing something inside their mind of which they had no prior knowledge. And some are incredulous–they don’t believe that test could possibly be producing valid results. A minority of first-time takers of the IAT express hostility toward the test, which appears to be ‘accusing’ them of harboring an objec-tionable bias–a reaction we understand and which which we sympathize.”

Banaji and Greenwald are quick to point out that implicit racial bias is different than overt racism, and researchers are building on their work now to look at ways we may be able to rewire our brains to create new sets of assumptions and con-nections. Any progress will be slow; meta-analysis published in Personality and Social Psychology Review in 2005 showed that implicit associations toward black Americans have remained generally constant in recent decades even as the outward civil rights picture has changed drastically, and a 2010 study suggested that the early years of President Barack Obama’s first terms had little effect on implicit associations about African Americans as revealed by the IAT.

Though studies like these are inspiration for the central char-acter’s research in Smart People, the play imagines a world in which the character can prove a larger, more controversial hypothesis. His findings are not the subject of Smart People, but one of its metaphors for the process of seeing and being seen and for the stake we all share in cultural conversations about race, gender, and class. The play’s desire for a unified field theory of racism echoes a cultural desire to find common ground on the question, a starting point from which we all can move forward.

Inside the

Researchers Delve into the SubconsciousBRAIN:

by Charles Haugland, Original Dramaturg , Smart People

Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 5

on prejudice“They are bigots;you are, maybe, a little biased sometimes;I, of course, am accurate.”

[how to conjugate an adjective across three persons]

Most people think they are less biased than average. Just as we can’t all be better than average, though, we also cannot all be less prejudiced than average. What’s more likely: all of us harbor more biases than we think we do. Social neuroscience suggests that most of us don’t even know the half of it. A twen-ty-year eruption of research reveals exactly how automatically and unconsciously prejudices operate. As members of a society with egalitarian ideals, most Americans have good intentions, but our brains and our impulses all too often betray us. That’s the bad news from the ‘decade of the brain.’

But the good news, from the current ‘decade of behavior,’ pro-vides solutions. Individual values and organizational commit-ment can override our worst impulses. Getting information, however, is the necessary first step, and we now know a lot more about bias, both blatant and subtle, with the aid of the social sciences and neurosciences.

The first thing to understand: modern prejudice is not your grandparents’ prejudice. Old fashioned racism and sexism were known quantities because people would mostly say what they thought. Blacks were lazy; Jews were sly; women were either dumb or bitchy. Modern equivalents continue, of course. Look at current images of immigrants. But most estimates place such blatant and empirically wrongheaded bigotry at only 10 percent of citizens in modern democracies. Blatant bias does spawn hate crimes, but these are fortunately rare (though not rare enough). At the least, we can identify the barefaced bigots.

Our own prejudice–and our children’s and grandchildren’s prejudice, if we don’t address it–takes a more subtle, unexam-ined form. People can identify another person’s apparent race, gender, and age in a matter of milliseconds. In this blink of an eye, a complex network of stereotypes, emotional prejudices, and behavioral impulses activates. Why? Because the culture puts them in our brains. That’s how they become so wide-spread and automatic. These kneejerk reactions do not require conscious bigotry, though they are worsened by it.

How do we know this happens? In our own lab, for exam-ple, we dug up dozens of images of societal groups who were identifiable in an instant: people with disabilities, older people,

homeless people, drug addicts, rich businessmen, and Amer-ican Olympic athletes. Our research participants agreed that they evoked the respective pity, disgust, envy, and pride pre-dicted by our theory. We then slid a different group of partici-pants into the fMRI scanner to observe their brains’ responses to these evocative photos. Within a moment of observing the photograph of an apparently homeless man, people’s brains set of a sequence of reactions characteristic of disgust and avoid-ance. For neuroscience wonks, the activated areas included the insula, which is reliably implicated in disgust toward nonhuman objects such as garbage, mutilation, and human aste. Notable, the homeless people’s photographs also failed to activate other areas of the brain that are reliably involves when-ever people think about other people or themselves (dorsome-dial prefrontal cortex). In the case of the homeless (and drug addicts), these areas simply failed to light up, as if people had stumbled on a pile of garbage.

We were surprised, not by the distinct disgust but by how easy it was to achieve. These were photographs, after all, not smelly, noisy, intrusive people. Other researchers have seen that even dull yearbook photographs of black or white young men can trigger the brain’s amygdala; these emotion-alert areas activate in many whites to pictures of unfamiliar black faces, as if they are prepared for fear in particular.

Even outside of social neuroscience, social psychologists have documented people’s instant unfortunate associations to out-groups–those groups not their own. Whether they differ on age, ethnicity, religion, or political party, people favor their own groups over others, and they do so automatically. We have always had codes: PLU (people like us), NOKD (not our kind, dear), the ‘hood, the man. Every culture names the ‘us’ and the ‘not-us.’ This much appears to be human nature.

This all too human comfort with the familiar and similar is probably hardwired through people’s affinity for their in-groups. In order to survive and thrive, people need to belong with accepting others. Attachment matters. Babies do not do well when only their physical needs are met; adults’ cardiovas-cular and immune systems fail when they are isolated; morality tracks social connectedness. Historically as well as currently, we are motivated to belong with others, to understand things as they do, to feel in control of our social encounters, to feel social self-esteem, and to be able to trust those nearest us. All this is easier when other people resemble you.

To survive in the rest of the world, people demand, like the sentry in the night: ‘Who goes there? Friend or foe?’ People

& the brainby Susan T. Fiske, Neuropsychologist

Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 6

need to know right away who is on their side and who means them harm. According to our research, people’s minds set up simple algorithms: If competitor for scarce resources, then not friend. Thus, not nice, not warm, not trustworthy. If in-group or ally, then friend, and presumably, warm and trustworthy.

Status also has immediate significance for social survival. After ‘friend or foe,’ one needs to know the other’s rank. Status implies competence and the ability to enact intentions for good or ill. If high-status, then competent–one had best pay atten-tion to this person. If low-status, one can ignore the incompe-tent other without much cost.

The friend-foe, able-unable judgements yield four kinds of people in the world–not the proverbial two. Able friends are people like us (middle-class), are our cultural ideals (Olympic athletes, astronauts), and are our close allies (for Americans, the British and the Canadians). In most instances, these are our in-groups; we feel pride and admiration. Even people who are not themselves middle class, for example, typically identify with middle-class ideals.

The Others come in three kinds. Two of them provoke intense ambivalence and, with it, mixed messages. We pity those coop-erators who cannot enact their intentions–those seemingly too disabled, deficient, or decrepit (remember, we are dealing in stereotypes here). Pity is a mixed emotion. Pity communicated paternalistic, top-down aid, coupled with neglect. This is the likable but disrespected quadrant of societal space.

Conversely, in the respected but disliked quadrant dwell those at least as fortunate as ourselves: high-status competitors. Grudgingly viewed as competent, but resented as neither warm nor trustworthy, the elicit envy, again a mixed emotion. Envy says, “The other has something that I wish I had, and I will take it away if I can.” Respect combined with dislike is a volatile mix. It predicts going-along-to-get-along, but also at-taching and fighting when the chips are down. Envy is directed at high-status people not like oneself: rich people all over the world and, in the United States at this time, Asian and Jewish people. Also, no doubt, members of the American Academy.

The fourth quadrant is unequivocally bad: both disliked and disrespected. Low-status others who try to compete (but fail), exploitative parasites–they are stereotyped as neither nice nor smart. They elicit, more than any other category, both disgust and contempt. They are alternately neglected and attacked. And these are the people whose photographs lit up the insula and failed to light up the social areas of the brain.

People have a tendency to think that biology is destiny. But just because we can correlate impulses in the brain with certain prejudices does not mean we are hardwired to hate drug ad-dicts and homeless people. In the racial neuroscience studies, for instance, amygdala (emotion-related) reactions correspond to other indicators of prejudice. So people who are more prej-udiced by other measures show more amygdala response. But the levels of response vary by individual. And the alarms in whites’ amygdalas do not go off to familiar black faces. Like-wise, they grow accustomed to faces with repeated exposure. So prejudiced response vary a lot, depending on the interplay between perceiver and target. The most important lessons of the latest biologically inspired social research point to the complexity of the interactions

between biology and the environment. Take amygdala-race results. We find that they evaporate as soon as people consid-er what vegetable the pictured person might like for lunch. Similarly, our latest data indicate that the dehumanization of homeless people and drug addicts can be altered by the same task, guessing what they would like to eat, as if one were run-ning a soup kitchen. A long line of our previous research indi-cates that putting people on the same team helps to overcome prejudices over time.

The environment can interact with human nature for good or ill. People put under stress, provocation, peer pressure, or authority sanction will enact their prejudices in the worst ways. We have seen this in hate crimes directed at homeless people, homosexuals, and all ethnicities; and we have argued that these processes underlie prisoner abuse in settings such as Abu Ghraib.

Learning to deal with difference is hard. Generating enthusi-asm for differences is even harder. Yet our message is essential-ly optimistic. If we recognize prejudice’s subtle yet inexorable pressures, we can learn to moderate even conscious prejudice. People will always gravitate toward the familiar and similar, but they can expand their boundaries, if sufficiently motivated. And this is the substance of social science married to neurosci-ence._______________________

Susan T. Fiske, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2005, is a professor of psychology at Princeton University. She is the author of “Social Cognition” (1984), the third edition of which is forthcoming, and “Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychol-ogy” (2004). She is also the editor of “The Handbook of Social Psychology” (with Daniel T. Gilbert and Gardner Lindzey, 1998) and “Confronting Racism: The Problem and the Response” (with Jennifer L. Eberhardt, 1998).

Author(s): Susan T. Fiske Source: Daedalus, Vol. 136, No. 1, On Nonviolence & Violence (Winter, 2007)

Stereotype Content Model

Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 7

Dr. Josef Mengele was the chief doctor of Auschwitz where he tortured prisoners under the guise of genetic and racial medical research.

GLOSSARYAn Enemy of the People (1882) was written by Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. The play centers around a doctor who exposes a water contamination and the local politicians who exile him in order to protect local economic interests.

The Clark Doll Study was conducted in the 1940s by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The subjects of the study were black children between the ages of 3 and 7. Each child was seated before four dolls–two had black skin and black hair, two had white skin and blond hair–and responded to various requests about the dolls. The majority of the children assigned positive qualities and expressed preference for the white dolls. The findings of the study brought to light how severe ramifications of racism and segregation are on a child’s identity and self-es-teem.

Dr. Kenneth Clark testified before the The Supreme Court in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Clark’s work was cited in the court’s unanimous decision to overturn the ruling of separate but equal from the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Portia of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is the wife of Brutus, a conspirator against Caesar. Though she only appears in the play twice, she is famous for her strength and devotion to her husband.

Saddity is slang to describe someone who is snobby.

The 7 Requests of The Clark Doll Study:1. Give me the doll that you like to play with best.2. Give me the doll that is a nice doll.3. Give me the doll that looks bad.4. Give me the doll that is a nice color.5. Give me the doll that looks like a white child.6. Give me the doll that looks like a Negro Child.7. Give me the doll that looks like you.

“Requests 1 through 4 were designed to reveal preferences; requests 5 through 7 to indicate a knowledge of ‘racial differences’; and request 8 to show self-identification.” - Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children by Dr. Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark.

Audience Guide: Smart People-Page 8

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