We tend to think of prejudice as just being about sexism, racism, and classism. But could this be too narrow a view? LSE professor Paul Dolan argues many of us practice a subtler kind of discrimination—beliefism—where we judge people's entire character on the basis of a single opinion. In an age of culture wars and social media echo chambers, beliefism fuels division and moral certainty. But if we learn to recognize it, Dolan argues, we can begin to build tolerance for those we most disagree with.

“Some of my best friends are black.” This was a phrase used by white people until a decade or so ago against accusations of being racist. It had the opposite effect. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. I think it’s fair to say, all else equal, that a white person with black friends would be less racist than a white person with no black friends. Having black friends is a behavior that signals relatively more tolerance than having no black friends at all. As the Japanese proverb says: “When the character of a person is not clear, look at their friends.”

If you’re not convinced, consider the beliefs of someone’s friends. Would you conclude that someone who only had friends with the same set of beliefs was less tolerant than someone who had friends with different beliefs? If you surround yourself only with people who share similar views to you, then you are, by definition, discriminating against those who disagree—this is beliefism. This can have adverse spillover effects. An employer may pass a perfectly good candidate over for a job, for example, because they find out that they hold different views about an issue that the employer cares about (abortion, say) but which is unrelated to the employee’s prospective productivity at work.

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There is no moral value to the claim that some of my best friends are racist.

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Beliefism spillovers have been shown to impact various aspects of economic behavior. For example, in Ghana, around the time of the 2008 elections, taxi riders were asked to hail a cab and relay an opening script in their ethnic mother tongue to begin the negotiation. The rider and driver learn one another’s ethnicity through language and accent and infer partisanship based on the typical nesting of ethnic groups in parties, just as they would in everyday life. The results showed that the cabbies were inclined to accept lower fares from passengers who shared their political affiliation while demanding higher prices from those who supported opposing parties.

Logically, there is no difference between racism, sexism, classism, beliefism or any other “ism” in this regard. Clearly, we can quite legitimately choose to be intolerant of people who are themselves intolerant. And we are certainly under no obligation to be friends with someone who is racist—or beliefist. There is no moral value to the claim that some of my best friends are racist. But when we use someone’s (different but not abhorrent) beliefs on one issue to completely dismiss them, and all their other beliefs, we are guilty of using a tiny fraction of information about that person to judge their whole character.

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