What one classroom experiment—and decades of psychological research—can teach us about prejudice, identity, and the human need to belong. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Across the United States, grief, anger, and confusion followed. Cities erupted in protest, while many Americans struggled to understand how a leader devoted to nonviolence could be murdered because of...
Racism often presents itself as certainty, but beneath that certainty lies one of the oldest psychological strategies for making a complicated world feel controllable. Few subjects generate stronger emotions than racism. Discussions about race often become polarized before they truly begin, with one side emphasizing historical systems of inequality and another insisting that racism is simply...
