Oslo Mind, Language and Epistemology Network Seminar: Austin Baker, Outgroup Disfluency

Members of dominant social groups report experiencing frequent discomfort and anxiety during interactions with members of minority social groups, which can motivate avoidance and distrust. This talk will give an account of this phenomenon, which I term ‘outgroup disfluency’. My account of outgroup disfluency engages with the empirical literature on cognitive load—i.e., the amount of information that an individual is actively holding and manipulating in mind, heavily constrained by processing limitations of the working memory system. I argue that social interactions with outgroup individuals can increase cognitive load, triggering peoples’ paradigmatic experiences of outgroup disfluency. In sections 1 and 2, I’ll introduce outgroup disfluency and discuss psychological features of the phenomenon. In section 3, I’ll connect outgroup disfluency to political propaganda, arguing that certain types of propaganda are successful at influencing people to discriminate against marginalized groups because the messaging subtly motivates people to experience outgroup disfluency towards members of those groups. I conclude by discussing what I see are empirically promising interventions to outgroup disfluency, emphasizing the role of ability in de-biasing social interactions. I argue that people can learn to engage in less disfluent interactions with members of social outgroups through practice (interacting more with outgroup individuals) and/or humanizing exposure (typically through media—e.g., reading books and watching television shows and movies which humanize members of the outgroup).