Title: Talk to the Elephant: How Shall We Address Prejudice? 

Pages: 29-39

Author(s): Stephen M. Ryan 

This article is open access and licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Abstract: 

Traditional approaches to prejudice in intercultural education and training treat it as a glitch in the system against which emergent interculturalists are warned. The insufficiency of this approach is clear from the ongoing struggles that all interculturalists face in dealing with their own and others’ prejudice. This paper suggests, instead, that prejudice is most helpfully seen as an integral part of human cognition. The paper draws on Kahneman’s metaphor of two minds in one brain, one fast-reacting, the other slower and more reflective, and on Haidt’s extension of that metaphor, which posits a lawyer riding on an elephant: the lawyer (slow-thinking mind) is skilled at explaining the elephant’s actions but has no control over them; the elephant (fast-thinking mind) controls how we react to the world. Traditional approaches focus on reasoning with the lawyer. The author suggests that we talk to the elephant and outlines ways of doing so.

2022 年 3 月、日本在住の様々な国の移民 40 人のインタビューを収録した「移民インタビ ューデータベース」(DIN; www.icnresearch.net )は、学習者が物理的にアクセスできな い個人と出会う機会を得ることで、異文化間の出会いを代替することを目的に開設され た。DIN の主な目的は、ナラティブ・メディスンの教育学に基づき、学習者が文化的に多 様な状況下でどのように行動し、感じるかを考える機会を提供することである。本研究 は、DIN の特徴や授業への応用について概説するとともに、私立大学の英語専攻 3 年生の 授業で DIN を試験的に導入した結果について報告するものである。エンパシー・スケー ル(共感力評価基準)と終了時アンケートが実施され、異文化の視点から物事を捉える学習 者の能力が向上していることが示された。

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Please cite this article as follows:

Ryan, Stephen M. (2023). Talk to the Elephant: How Shall We Address Prejudice? In: J. Salazar & G. Benthien (Eds.), ICLE SIG 2nd Conference Peer-Reviewed Proceedings. (pp. 29-39) Retrieved from: https://icle.jalt.org/course/view.php?id=3