Researchers ID The Roots Of Racism
Tension and suspicion between groups—whether based on racial, ethnic, religious, or some other difference—fuel much of the world's violence. From the enduring feuds of the Middle East and Northern Ireland, to the vicious raids of South Sudan, to the gang warfare that plagues American cities, even to bullying in schools and skirmishes between fans of rival sports teams, much of the conflict we see today erupts because “we” are pitted against “them.”
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Some of the prejudice behind these conflicts is not conscious: Your fear spiked in that dark alley before your conscious brain had even registered the young man's skin color. This prejudice apparently stems from deep evolutionary roots and a universal tendency to form coalitions and favor our own side. And yet what makes a “group” is mercurial: In experiments, people easily form coalitions based on meaningless traits such as preferring one painter over another—and then favor others in their “group,” giving them more money in games, for example. “In arbitrarily constructed, meaningless groups with no history, people still think that those in their ingroup are smarter, better, more moral, and more just than members of outgroups,” says Harvard University psychologist James Sidanius.
A wide and deep literature has explored these innate biases in the 40 or so years since they were first discussed. Now researchers have begun to ask why humans are apparently primed to see the world as ingroups and outgroups. What factors in our evolutionary past have shaped our coalitionary present—and what, if anything, can we do about it now?
Several avenues of research are probing the origins of what many psychologists call ingroup love and outgroup hate. Researchers are testing the implicit biases of young children and even primates, and devising experiments to ratchet bias up and down. Evolutionary researchers are trying to parse the group environments of our ancestors and are debating just how big a selective pressure came from outgroup male warriors. “The origin of all this is the all-consuming question of the past few years,” says Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji.
For many researchers, our cruelty to “them” starts with our kindness to “us.” Humans are the only animal that cooperates so extensively with nonkin, and researchers say that, like big brains, group life is a quintessential human adaptation. (In fact, many think big brains evolved in part to cope with group living.) Studies of living hunter-gatherers, who may represent the lifestyle of our ancestors, support this idea. Hunter-gatherers “cooperate massively in the flow of every imaginable good and service you can think of,” says anthropologist Kim Hill of Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, who has studied hunter-gatherers for 35 years. “Anything you need in daily life, the person next to you will lend you: water, sticks for firewood, a bow and arrow, a carrying basket—anything.”
Thus the group buffers the individual against the environment. “Our central adaptation is to group living,” says psychologist Marilynn Brewer of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “The group is primary.”
When the ingroup is loved, by definition there must be a less privileged outgroup. “One can be expected to be treated more nicely by ingroup members than by outgroups,” as Brewer put it in a seminal 1999 paper. “It is in a sense universally true that ‘we’ are more peaceful, trustworthy, friendly, and honest than ‘they,’” she wrote.
The targets of outgroup prejudice vary from culture to culture and over time—Sidanius refers to them as “arbitrary set” prejudices. In Sri Lanka, it may be Tamils; in Northern Ireland, Catholics or Protestants; in India, the Untouchables. Fiske notes that the world over, the greatest prejudice is often aimed at people without an address, such as gypsies and the homeless. Whoever the target, we have a psychological system that prepares us to “learn quickly, in whatever cultural context we're in, what are the cues that discriminate between us and them,” says psychologist Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada.
This doesn't mean that prejudicial behavior is inevitable, Schaller says. “These prejudices tap into very ancient parts of our minds, and it's happening at a very quick, automatic level,” he says. “But we have recently evolved parts of our brains that allow us to engage in slower, more rational thought. When I experience that fear in a dark alley, it may take me another half-second for a more rational thought to kick in, but I'll get there, if I have the motivation and means to do so.”