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thy neighbor.” Mom had not been to Mass for over a decade, since divorcing my shiftless Mick of a father and marrying a Protestant, so I didn’t expect her to be narrow-minded. And the fact that she was a mildly liberal Democrat who had worked on John F. Kennedy’s campaign also led me to expect tolerance from her. But she commented disapprovingly, “Douglas, I can’t believe you’re dating a Jewish girl!”
    I spared the Jewish grandparents and my erstwhile Catholic mom some grief, because I started dating another one of my coworkers, a strawberry blonde whose last name was Wilhelmson.
    I fell deeply in love with Ms. Wilhelmson. In fact, we soon decided we would get married. When she brought me home to meet her mother, though, I was treated to yet another round of tribalism: My future mother-in-law desperately wanted her daughter to marry a Lutheran—and not just anyone from that sect would do. She was unhappy that her son had married a German Lutheran. She wanted nothing “less” for her daughter than a Scandinavian Lutheran like themselves. Even Martin Luther himself would not have qualified. When I went to one of the family’s Christmas smorgasbords, her Svenskfolk kin alternated between speaking Swedish to one another and grousing about the “Gottdamtd Puerto-Ricans, who come to this country and don’t learn to speak English.” After a few beers, I unwisely brought up the topic of ethnic tolerance, to which one of the Svenska guys responded, in a thick Swedish accent, that “Hitler had the right idea!” My future wife did not share their full array of Swedish Lutheran values, though, and we married anyway, in a Lutheran church, which again troubled my mother the lapsed Catholic.

A Failure to Discriminate
    So I have seen people make silly distinctions all my life, between different Caucasian tribes and between different Christian sects. On the other side, though, sometimes the failure to discriminate can be just as prejudicial. Consider the case of Lenell Geter. Geter was an engineer working at a research center in Dallas. News commentators were shocked when he was handed a life sentence after being convicted of robbing a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The shockingly stiff sentence was even more surprising given that there was absolutely no physical evidence linking Geter to the crime and that his coworkers had testified that he was fifty miles away at the time of the theft. There was not much of a motive, either. Why would a working engineer risk a lucrative career for a $615 stickup? But the all-white jury ignored all that, and instead trusted the testimony of the eyewitnesses, who were either white or Hispanic and who expressed strong convictions that this particular fellow was in fact the guilty party. His coworkers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought to have the evidence reconsidered, but Geter sat in prison for over a year, until police arrested another man involved in a string of similar robberies, and the confident eyewitnesses now identified the new suspect as the robber. If you look at photos of Geter and the real crook, it is surprising how different they appear. As Geter joked to my colleague Steve Neuberg, “I’m much better looking than the other guy” (and he is). But they did have a few features in common: Both were young, both were men, and (most importantly) both were black.
    Geter had fallen victim to a well-known psychological bias called outgroup homogeneity. Several decades of research has revealed that most of us are a whole lot better at distinguishing among members of our own groups than among members of other groups. As with most of our habitual cognitive biases, there is an underlying functional logic
to outgroup homogeneity. We usually have more experience sorting out the members of our own groups, and it is usually a lot more important for us to make distinctions among the people