Tolerant bobos and prejudiced workers ?
Toward a sociology of prejudice-based nonverbal discrimination in public places:
the Roma in the Paris metro
Martin Aranguren
Symposium “La fabrique des discriminations : acteurs et processus”
Alliance pour la Recherche sur les Discriminations ARDIS
November 6 2014
Background
It is commonly accepted that discrimination is disadvantage due to some
illegitimately ascribed trait such as race, age, sex, nationality, religion, or handicap.
On the other hand, prejudice can be defined as a hostile attitude or emotional
readiness to reject. Racial prejudice, for example, is antipathy based on a racial
criterion. Prejudice thus provides a possible mechanism of discrimination via group
ascription: I am disposed to reject members of group X; I ascribe you to group X; I
reject you (however subtly). Discrimination is observable in differential behavior.
Prejudice is observable in the emotional quality of that differential behavior.
The general aim of this research is to begin to develop a sociology of prejudicebased discrimination as it naturally occurs in public places on a day-to-day basis. The
ambition is to cumulate the descriptive advantages of statistical approaches to
discrimination with the explanatory power of experimental research on prejudice.
Prejudice-based discrimination in public places is a phenomenon inherent in the
interaction between, for example, passers-by in the street, fellow passengers in
public transportation, or users of a bench in a park or square. Encounters in public
places involve discrimination when one of the participants refuses to “give” what he
“owes” the other by virtue of the norms that govern the social setting. The word
“respect” conveys what is at stake, including the (implicit) expectation of some
degree of social immediacy or distance between the participants. Too much
immediacy between strangers may fail to express respect. But too much distance, in
the sense of expressed avoidance and withdrawal, may produce the same effect.
The present proposal focuses on discriminatory distance in public places: “normal”
amounts of social immediacy or distance that we grant some and refuse others for no
other reason than their perceived social identity and the differential states of
readiness that these perceived identities elicit in us. It is important to note that the
discriminator need not be aware of their emotionally selective concessions and
denials. It is also possible, and probably frequent, that the discriminated perceive the
unfavorable treatment and respond in kind.
Much of what we communicate in public places is expressed through nonverbal
signals. To begin with, face-to-face conversation obviously includes accompanying
nonverbal behaviors. Sociologist Erving Goffman1 called encounters such as face-toface conversations “focused interaction”, which he distinguished from “unfocused
interaction”. Unfocused interaction usually refers to patterns of nonverbal
communication between strangers, e.g. the rapid exchange of glances by means of
1
Goffman, E. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New
York: The Free Press.
which passers-by signal “civil inattention” to one another in the street. Nonverbal
behavior is thus present in all forms of face-to-face interaction. But most importantly
for this project, it is the main channel for communicating discriminatory immediacy or
distance through silent signals such as body posture, orientation and degree of
relaxation.
However, it may be thought that discrimination of this kind is rather minor as
compared to disadvantages in access to housing, employment or education. Why
bother studying nonverbal discrimination in public places?
Justification
Students of intergroup antipathy observe that public morals in Western democracies
have evolved in such a way that the overt expression of race- and gender-based
prejudice has become socially undesirable. As a result, at least in some social circles
individuals are increasingly motivated to avoid appearing to self or others as
prejudiced. In this historical context, it is difficult to assess to what extent selfreported measures of prejudice reflect individuals’ evaluative dispositions or rather
their motivation to conform to political correctness.
To avoid the problems posed by traditional self-reports, since the 1990s
experimental social psychologists have been developing indirect or “implicit”
measures of racial attitudes2. The most well-known techniques are the “priming”
procedure and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Interestingly, whenever the
promoters have to justify the ecological validity of these “implicit” techniques, they
invoke significant correlations between the measures they provide and those that can
be derived from the observation of nonverbal behavior in interracial interaction3. The
underlying assumption is that some nonverbal behaviors escape deliberate control as
much as participants’ responses in a priming procedure or IAT do.
If in the present historical context the study of prejudice requires measures other
than self-reports, and nonverbal behavior fournishes the validity criterion for
alternative techniques such as priming and the IAT, why not measure prejudice
directly from nonverbal behavior? In order to measure prejudice, using nonverbal
behavior in public places presents several advantages. First, nonverbal behavior in
general often operates below awareness and voluntary control, and thus provides a
more faithful index of prejudice than self-report (although some individuals know and
control their nonverbal signals better than average, e.g. professional actors). Second,
it can be documented through field studies with high ecological validity, which is the
weak point of laboratory studies. Third, impersonal interactions in public places
involve highly stereotyped social roles and settings that facilitate replication and
comparison in ways that allow for a quasi-experimental designs. Dealing with
nonverbal behavior in public places thus nicely cumulates some of the advantages of
experimental research with the unrivalled ecological validity of field studies.
Specific objectives:
2
Petty, R., R. Fazio, and P. Briñol. 2012. Attitudes: Insights from the New Implicit Measures. New
York: Psychology Press; Wittenbrink, B., and N. Schwarz. 2007. Implicit Measures of Attitudes. New
York: Guilford Press.
3
Fazio, R., J. Jackson, B. Dunton, and C. Williams. 1995. “Variability in Automatic Activation as an
Unobtrusive Measure of Racial Attitudes: A Bona Fide Pipeline?” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 69 (6): 1013–27; Dovidio, J., K. Kawakami, C. Johnson, B. Johnson, and A. Howard.
1997. “On the Nature of Prejudice: Automatic and Controlled Processes.” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 33 (5): 510–40.
1) To measure prejudice-based nonverbal discrimination in public places against the
Roma4.
2) To relate these measures of nonverbal discrimination to the demographic and
socioeconomic characteristics of nonverbal discriminators.
Differential immediacy and relaxation as expressions of prejudice
The significance of discriminatory nonverbal discrimination in public places lies in
the fact that it provides faithful, valid and comparable measures of prejudice, insofar
as these behaviors express felt antipathy or, in other words, an emotional readiness
to reject. But how to measure nonverbal discrimination?
Albert Mehrabian5, one of the pioneers in the systematic study of nonverbal
communication, coined the summary term “immediacy” to refer to one set of
measures that he found to relate to the positive attitude of a communicator toward his
addressee. Signals of immediacy constitute one of the most developed areas in the
field of nonverbal communicaton6. These are: touching, distance, forward lean, eye
contact, and body orientation. Mehrabian found that distance, forward lean and more
direct body orientation are associated with more positive attitude.
Thus immediacy indexes can be used to detect nonverbal discrimination in public
places. Less forward leaning and less direct body orientation, for example, usually
communicate a more negative attitude toward the addresse. All things being equal, if
an individual can be found to lean forward less and adopt a more indirect body
posture in the presence of a recognizable member of group A (e.g. a Black) than in
the presence of a recognizable member of group B (e.g. a White), this is an
indication that the individual likes less or evaluates more negatively members of
group A than members of group B. In other words, this is an indication of prejudice
against members of group A.
My own basic research on emotions in crowded public places provides additional
indexes of evaluations and tendencies to act. Passengers of the Delhi, New York City
and Paris subways were found to display the same facial movements to express that
their personal space has been intruded by another passenger7. All things being
equal, the incidence of these expressions can be used to determine whether we feel
more “intruded” by co-present members of group A than by co-present members of
group B.
Methodology
4
In using these folk ethnonyms the project does not endorse the belief on an objective basis
(biological, linguistic, territorial, etc.) for the social groups they designate. Ethnic groups are
subjectivistically conceptualized as a content of experience.
5
Mehrabian, A. 1972. Nonverbal Communication. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
6
Cf. Knapp, M., J. Hall, and T. Horgan. 2014. Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction.
Wadsworth, Ohio: Cengage Learning.
7
Aranguren, M. and S. Tonnelat. 2014. “Emotional transactions in the Paris subway : combining
naturalistic videotaping, objective facial coding and sequential analysis in the study of nonverbal
emotional behavior.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. DOI 10.1007/s10919-014-0193-1; Aranguren, M.
submitted. “Nonverbal interaction patterns in the Delhi Metro: interrogative looks and play-faces in the
management of interpersonal distance.” Interaction Studies. Aranguren M. and S. Tonnelat. in
preparation. “Emotional transactions in the New York City subway.”
The metro fournishes a useful setting for observing nonverbal discrimination
expressive of prejudice in public places and collecting demographic and
socioeconomic data. Although not numerous, some published studies have
previously investigated race-related differential treatment in public transportation8.
The material environment, the duration and rhythm of the metro ride, and the marked
stereotypy of the interactions that take place between passengers offer opportunities
for introducing quasi-experimental manipulations in the field.
Procedure. The method takes inspiration in field experiments conducted in the US in
the 1970s seeking to measure differences in helping behavior as a function of the
race of the target. In this paradigm actors with different characteristics (e.g.
recognizable as Black or White) stage situations in which they are ostensibly in need
of help. The observed probability of receiving help is interpreted in terms of the
differential characteristics of actors. The logic is similar to that of testing paradigms,
with the difference that here discrimination does not regard recruitment but the
provision of help between strangers. However, in its present use the experiment does
more than measure help vs. absence of help. It also measures the quality of the
helping behaviors, in particular the emotional tone with which help is provided, as
expressed through subtle nonverbal behaviors of immediacy.
A male Romanian citizen in his late 20s that self-identifies as Rom and resides in a
slum in the suburbs of Paris participated as the actor in this field experiment. The
author of the present text provided the second actor. The trials took place in
platforms of the Paris métro between the morning and the evening rush hours. The
actors’ script, which was exactly the same for both of them, consisted in first
approaching a standing passenger that was presumably waiting for the next train.
After a polite opening, the actor asked for directions for reaching a station. The
experimenter had chosen a station that ranks between those with the least ridership
figures in the parisian subway, so as to make it unlikely that the passenger had a
ready-made answer. If the passenger did not express willingness to help, the actor
mentioned the line of the station. If this prod proved uneffective, the actor specified
the district (arrondissement) of the station. If neither of these prods motivated the
passenger to help the actor, the latter initiated a polite closing of the exchange and
moved away in the platform. In most cases, however, passengers did offer help after
the first or the second prod. Typically, they suggested approaching a metro map
displayed on the station’s walls. The actor then unfolded a portable metro map that
he was carrying. The passenger searched and found the station and then explained
the actor how to reach it.
The actor thanked the passenger, but instead of closing the conversation he asked
the passenger to estimate the amount of time that the itinerary would take. In the
face of the reply, the actor invariably found (with visible regret) that he would be late
for his job interview. He then complained that he had forgotten his cell phone at
home and asked the passenger to borrow his or hers to let the employer know that
he was late for the interview. If the passenger refused to lend the cell phone, the
actor initiated a polite closure and moved to some other sector of the platform.
8
Maines, D. 1977. “Tactile Relationships in the Subway as Affected by Racial, Sexual, and Crowded
Seating Situations.” Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior 2 (2): 100–108 ; Poutignat,
P., and J. Streiff-Fénart. 1995. “Catégorisation Raciale et Gestion de La Co-Présence Dans Les
Situations «  Mixtes  ».” Cahiers de l’URMIS, no. 1.
In the first version of the script, after getting the directions the actor asked for change
and showed a one-euro coin on the palm of his hand.
Each actor has so far conducted about 15 such interactions. The Rom actor used the
cell phone variant in about ten of them, whereas the other actor used exclusively the
coin variant. In spite of the humble volume of date, some patterns seem to stand out.
As the staged situations involve speaking in French, and both actors speak French
as a second language with a perceptible accent, it was assumed that they were both
categorized as foreigners. But were they treated in the same way?