Letters to the Editor
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We need neuroscience to tell us this is innate?
How about plain ol' logical deduction?
Hypothetical situation - a kid is looking out his car window at a passing farm, points and says "look, mom... doggie." The mother corrects the child and says "no, that's a cow." She might add "cows say moo" or "cows are our spiritual superiors," but mostly, the kid is - on his own - subconsciously comparing what he knows about dogs to what he sees in the cow. His brain might assume that all cows live on pastures. Or it might conclude that all cows are brown. Or both. And more. But the brain has made patterned decisions based on previous information and new information, and this is precisely how we all learn until our brains are developed enough to start thinking logically.
Which brings us back to race. I remember, as a youngster, seeing a black man for the first time in the store, pointing to him, and saying "Look, Dad, Isiah Thomas!" Now, according to my father, the man looked nothing like Isiah Thomas, and he had to correct me. But my five-year old brain thought "black man = Isiah Thomas." And this same process, to a continually smaller and smaller degree as we age, continues. Our brains spot patterns and notice trends (msot wrod pzuzels wrok uendr tihs pcipnlrie), especially when those have been pointed out to us ahead of time (such as the classic double picture of a young lady/old woman) - very useful in most arenas, not so much in trying to avoid subconscious racial profiling.
So what I'm getting at is that, yes, it's neuroscience (unless our consciousness resonates on some level outside of our brains), but it seems ridiculous to me to claim that we have a "racial center" of our brain when the patterning that occurs in human learning easily explains this trend.
Jeez, the last thing we need is a group of human guinea pigs unable to identify other peoples' faces because overzealous scientists and media spurring them on mistakes the human "face recognition and processing" area for some sort of "magic box of prejudcial mystery."
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Yeah, not rocket science
All you have to do is randomly divide a bunch of eight-year-olds in a summer camp into two teams, or put them on two different vans on their way to a field trip, and WHAMMO! you've got an "US" versus a "THEM."
"There's the green van! Pass it! Go faster! We'll beat 'em! Go BLUE VAN! We're number one!" Loyalty to one's own group has immediate, obvious survival advantage, and is obviously deeply programmed into our brains.
GO RED SOX! YANKEES SUCK!
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Something I've Been Curious About Actually
When I was in college, it was customary to help out the grad students in psych by participating in their studies. It was also an easy 5 or 10 points in psych classes. So what the heck.
Anyway, I did one that was on face recognition by race. We were shown faces and our reaction times judged. I forget how, but somehow or other, our preferences by various racial features was judged. The study found that almost everyone preferred their own stated race.
Except me. I was the outlier. I preferred American Indian faces, just barely, to White faces and I preferred White faces just barely over Asian Faces.
At the time I was completely and utterly unaware that I'm half-American Indian.
So I think maybe there's something to the theory that we're wired for recognition of our own "group" so to speak. I don't think it's all skin color though, which seems to be the end-all-be-all of race determination to a lot of whites. And it makes me wonder about all of us mixed-race people out there, how we pattern recognize. And then too, after all, race is pretty socially determined in our country, it isn't really based on good biological determinants.
I mean you could argue that someone whose ancestors primarily came from Asia would make the person's race Asian or if someone's ancestors cam primarily from Africa then they would be African American, but that isn't exactly how it works.
And now I'm wondering how someone with a heritage similar to Tiger Woods would test out. . .
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Somebody actually had to tell feminists
that they were biased against men.
what does that say?
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Stranger bias might have conferred a selective advantage---during an ice age 10,000 years ago.
I am not really surprised by these studies, because nature does not do anything without a reason. The ability of large groups of people to delude themselves that another large group of people are not really human and therefore they do not deserve to be treated as human beings could come in handy in catastrophic environmental/ecological conditions. The ones that comes to mind first are the series of ice ages that swept through Europe in relatively modern times. If hunter-gatherers suddenly saw their food sources dwindle and saw strangers from the north descend upon their lands in search of food, it might have been survival of the most clannish.
Worse yet, in extreme cases of food shortage, the group that was able to overcome the natural aversion to cannibalism might be the one that survived the sudden change in conditions, until it could establish a new, stable food source. Archaeologists have found evidence of cannibalism in the cave dwellings in stone age Spain. What if the the ease with which Northern Europeans left their home countries during the age of Exploration to travel the world, conquer and kill natives while telling themselves that these native peoples were not, in fact, human beings of the same type as themselves, was a remnant of old ice age survival adaptations. What if moral/religious dualism of the type which has caused so many holy wars (Christian and Muslim and most recently Jewish) sprang into being in ancient Persia, because people in that part of the world battled wave after wave of modern man and Neanderthal moving south from frozen Europe, and they developed a philosophy which said "There is light (good) and there is dark (evil), and if we can just kick those evil people back to where ever the hell they come from, we will be sitting pretty again."
Have these neurological studies been performed on subjects in Asia? Many people in the East have such an ingrained aversion to European or western style dualistic moral thinking that I have always assumed that humans in that part of the world must have evolved through mutual cooperation to a much greater extent than people in the west. Show someone in Asia Western style black-white moral thinking, and chances are they will object to the notion that you can label one person or group of people as necessary and another as superfluous. This could be taught, but can you really teach someone non dualism so thoroughly if they are not already predisposed to it by nature? Or, look at it another way. Maybe Buddhism evolved in India, because the Indians needed it, being subject to wave after wave of conquest, but it survived in the East, because the East was its natural home.
I don't know much about stone age ecology and environmental conditions in the East. If early man lived in more stable, temperate climates in Asia, this would confirm my suspicions.
Whatever the reason some people evolved with the ability to tell themselves that some populations are not human and therefore do not need to be treated compassionately, we now live in a world in which murder is possible on a massive scale, and a world war can annihilate all life on the planet. George W. Bush's eyes may gleam when he talks about WWIII, but that kind of berserker attitude lost its relevance with the last European ice age.