Source: Science and Theology News

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Prejudice and persons

Arizona State’s Steven Neuberg explains why humans have evolved to be as much about cooperation as about competition.

By Matt Donnelly

(August 16, 2005)

Steven Neuberg takes prejudice personally. A professor of psychology at Arizona State University, he points to the deadly discrimination in Nazi Germany and his family members who suffered as a result. Neuberg’s current research interests include social values and stigma, stereotyping and discrimination, and prosocial behavior. He wrote recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that prejudices are evolved threat responses that do not always allow people to operate effectively in the modern world. Science & Theology News web editor Matt Donnelly spoke with Neuberg about his research on prejudice and altruism and why he believes humans have evolved to be as much about cooperation as about competition.

What led you to study prejudice?

I have relatives that didn’t make it out of Nazi Germany back in the ‘30s and ’40s, so there is a personal interest. But there’s also just the general value I hold regarding the importance of treating people as individuals as opposed to merely as members of groups.

How would you describe the traditional idea of prejudice?

There are a lot of definitions of prejudice. I think the one that’s most accepted now in the scientific community is that it’s the general feeling that people have toward groups and their members — that prejudice is the simple attitude, unfavorable or favorable, that people have toward groups. Many researchers also presume that these attitudes lead to behaviors we call discrimination — behaviors directed at an individual because of the group he or she belongs to.

How is your approach to prejudice different than other approaches?

One of the major classes of approach, for instance, builds off the assumption that we are prejudiced against other groups because it enables us to feel better about ourselves or our groups — that it boosts our sense of self-regard or social identity. Unfortunately, these perspectives, and others, have little to say about why we’re prejudiced against Group A but not Group B. And they tell us nothing about the particular nature of the prejudice against these groups — about, for example, whether they will be fear-based, anger-based, disgust-based or whatever.

One of the advantages of the approach that we’ve been taking is that it lends itself to making explicit predictions about the kinds of prejudices that are going to exist, the particular forms these prejudices are going to take, and the kinds of groups that are likely to be targeted by them.

Please talk a little bit more about the connection between threats and emotions.

Think about the evolution of the emotional system. It has evolved to generate very specific responses to different kinds of threats: Particular threats to the system — rapidly approaching, snarling beasts — activate specific emotions: fear. And these emotions activate different kinds of functionally-appropriate responses — attempts to escape.

These very basic systems exist in all sorts of creatures that have existed long before humans came to be and have been “exploited” by natural selection to help humans manage the threats we face as social animals. Thus, we have fear-based prejudices against groups seen to threaten the physical safety of ourselves and our groups, anger-based prejudices against those seen to take from our group, disgust-based prejudices against those seen to threaten the health of the group, and the like. In some sense, people don’t really have prejudices against groups, per se, as much as they have prejudices against the particular threats that the groups happen to be seen as posing.

Is prejudice always a bad thing?

I think prejudice is a good thing if the assessments of threat are correct. Was it a bad thing, or an inappropriate thing, for Jews in 1941 in Germany or Poland or elsewhere to be anti-Nazi? There and then, the threat was very real. To the extent that there’s an actual threat, then prejudice is often a very adaptive response to it.

Wouldn’t the most justifiable type of prejudice be centered on individuals instead of groups?

In many cases, yes. But we need to understand that prejudice is one of numerous mental/emotional “shortcuts” people employ to move through their very complex, changing social worlds. And like many of our shortcuts, it sometimes errs in individual cases.

So yes, there may be an inherent unfairness in treating any individual member of a group as if he or she’s a typical member of the group. But we also do the same kind of thing every single moment that we’re perceiving the world: We categorize new objects or events into known categories.

Think about the last time you walked into an unfamiliar room and you sat down in a chair. You never saw that object before, and yet you presumed that it would hold your weight. Why? Because you categorized it as a chair and attributed to it the features of chairs — like the ability to support a decent amount of weight. Stereotyping an individual and experiencing prejudice against him or her is the same kind of process. You categorize the person as a member of Group X and then think about her and feel toward her as you think and feel toward the group generally. Is it fair? Often not. But it’s the way the mind evolved to work.

The human system — any system — isn’t going to be perfect at assessing threat. It’s going to make mistakes. And, in particular, the mistakes it’s going to make are going to be biased toward avoiding threat as opposed to approaching threat. What this means is that objectively safe members of ostensibly dangerous groups will often be inferred to also be dangerous. It’s the risk-averse inference to make.

Is stereotyping or prejudice something we have to live with as a result of this?

The general processes of stereotyping? Yes. The general notion of being prejudiced? Yes. Particular stereotypes and particular prejudices? No. We have a propensity to stereotype people as members of groups and to have prejudices against groups that are perceived as threats.

Which groups are labeled as threatening depends an awful lot on what we’re taught and what we personally experience. What this means is that stereotypes and prejudices against particular groups can vary greatly, and can even vary greatly within the same population over time. So prejudices against particular groups are far from inevitable.

I suppose you could look at prejudice as the collective wisdom of past generations, an adaptation to help new generations understand which groups pose a greater risk?

I want to differentiate between prejudice as experienced by individuals, on the one hand, and the often long-lasting lessons taught by society, on the other. Prejudices do not exist primarily within collectives. I think fundamentally they exist in individuals, but the collective has a lot to say about which particular beliefs you’re going to hold toward different groups, and then which particular prejudices you’re likely to experience toward these groups.

Globalization is becoming a trend, and you’re having more of a mix of cultures. Do you see this as helping to break down some of these prejudices, or is it just provoking new forms of prejudice?

It’s a great question. But is globalization actually creating more mixed, heterogeneous social situations, as you imply, or is it merely bringing different homogeneous groups into contact?

Bringing groups into contact with one another under the wrong circumstances can actually makes things a lot worse. If you look at the desegregation of schools in the United States after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling, a lot of the attempted integration backfired horribly because essentially all it did was bring two groups together under entirely ill-advised circumstances that failed to reduce the perceived threats. Especially at the beginning, integration increased tensions and increased prejudices as much as it decreased them. It strikes me that much of what globalization is bringing into contact otherwise homogeneous groups, and this — in and of itself — isn’t likely to be all that good for intergroup relations.

There is an American idea that we are the melting pot. Is this notion an answer to prejudice?

I think it can indeed be an important answer. New York City may be the most diverse place in the world in terms of numbers of people from very different backgrounds coming together. In the days after 9/11, there were all these individuals of varying ancestry and customs, but what they had in common in those few days was that they became, palpably, “New Yorkers” — they had been attacked as New Yorkers. They came together as a super-tribe of sorts, partially defined by the outside, by people who wanted to hurt “us” from “out there.”

And there’s a common enemy.

That’s right. There’s this old Arab saying that goes something like “My brother and I fight, but if my neighbor comes over and picks on my brother, my brother and I fight against my neighbor. But if someone from another neighborhood comes over and picks on my neighbor, the three of us fight against him.” And so on out the expanding circle of “we-ness.” Humans of all stripes might get along great if the Martians attacked.

Is that the ultimate solution to this problem of prejudice? Martians attacking?

No. We’d just hate them and other extraterrestrial aliens.

Granted, it’s easier to melt in if you look like the people who are already here. It’s certainly easier to melt in if you adopt the language of the local people and if you adopt some of their customs, too. The more different a new group looks, and the less willing or able they are to adopt the local customs and publicly speak the local language, their circumstances will be much harder, and prejudices against them will likely be stronger.

You seem to be arguing that our evolutionary history has put us in a certain position or given us certain predispositions and that the role of society is to transcend our biology.

That might be one goal of society, although we should recognize that societies don’t tend to fight against evolved impulses as much as they tend to reinforce them. For example, although aggression is often a bad thing, and societies clearly work to minimize aggression of some sorts, they clearly encourage aggression of other sorts.

We train our young, particularly our young men, to compete at team sports, and then encourage them as warriors to either defend us or go off and fight against other groups of people — because aggression against outgroups can bring tangible benefits to ingroups. Most cultures engage in this kind of socialization, and it seems to me that they are working to support our evolved inclinations rather than to suppress them.

But societies engage in a redirection of sorts.

What society, environment, and learning do is tell us which groups we should see as threatening and thus be prejudiced against. Thus, society can also teach us that the particular threats ostensibly posed a specific group don’t exist. Society can also encourage its members to inhibit their prejudices or not to act upon them — as we do with anti-discrimination laws.

One of the other things society could potentially do is point out the errors that often occur when over-generalizing from an individual’s behaviors to the behavior of groups. Of course, just as the expression of evolved impulses is constrained by cultural experiences, the influence of cultural teachings will be constrained somewhat by people’s evolved inclinations.

There’s an interesting feature of prosocial behavior and the genetic self-interest argument: you can’t see genes. You can’t see whether someone shares a greater proportion of genes with you than does some other person. But what people can do is look at the cues of genetic overlap — cues like physical similarity and familiarity.

Over time, we evolved a tendency to help familiar folks more than unfamiliar folks. By doing so, we enhanced our “inclusive fitness”— we helped our genes that happened to also reside in the bodies of others. Interestingly, this mechanism also can lead us to help folks who actually aren’t genetically related to us but who merely look familiar to us —because we don’t pay attention to genes per se but to signs of familiarity.

You can say that’s a cynical look at helping — that we’re only helping some folks because our evolved system mistakenly thinks we’re helping ourselves — but I think it’s fascinating and absolutely wonderful that all sorts of greater good can come out of something that was designed via natural selection to be entirely selfish.

Many folks presume that the selfishness inherent in evolution means that we are, by nature, base and brute creatures. I can’t disagree more. It was this evolution that created human ultrasociality — with its wonderful far-reaching cooperation, its willingness to sacrifice for the group, it’s call that we often heed to help total strangers on the other side of the planet. Fundamentally, humans have evolved to be as much about cooperation as about competition.

Matt Donnelly is web editor at Science & Theology News.