Letters to the Editor
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Familiarity does not breed contempt in this case
It only makes sence that the experience you have with someone will lead you to trust or not trust them. Since your first experience is with your mother, who will likely be the same color as you and provide you with a possitive experience, you will trust her. The next person you have experience with will likely be a father, or grandmother, both likely to be of the same color. Now one needs to ask, is prejudice developed on the basis of hate, or love? Since hate is the problem, we need to ask what it is about differences that causes hate. As for solving the problems of people grouping together and excluding others... white against black, black against white, gay against straight, straight against gay and so on... where the bonding agent is trust, the goal of eliminating these mono groupings will be frustrated. The goal needs to be to build trust between groups. That will involve looking at what it is we are all competing for and how to foster cooperation to acheive those goals.
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We're prejudiced, now what?
Is this an innate property that only white people seem to be burdened with? I have seen too many studies in which black children are asked to choose their "favorites" among a bunch of dolls of various "races"--only to see results in which the white dolls appeared to be the favored ones. If prejudice is indeed the result of genes rather than social conditioning, it certainly doesn't seem to cut in all directions. Is it possible that the pro-white bias of entertainment and news media, along with family and educational institutions, lead children of all races to believe that whites are smarter, more beautiful, safer, etc., thereby short-circuiting the functioning of the gene in nonwhites, while enahancing its effect on whites?
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@ hollyh
Thanks for the comment. Your comment should be moved to the front page to provide a deeper understanding of the material.
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Underlying Weakness
Detection of a difference, no matter how innocent, is enough to result in ethnocentric strategies.
This is the key to the methodology, and its underlying weakness as a social model. Robert Burton is not entirely correct in saying that the model's agents had no preprogrammed knowledge of, or preference for, ethnocentrism — they had the one big one, that we all already know about, which is the idea of there being a difference worth noting to begin with.
Consider for a moment the range over which racial definitions have wandered in the course of history. Imagine if in the middle of the Axelrod-Hammond experiment all the red agents and all the blue agents agreed to set themselves to "purple" instead, and resume execution of the model's algorithm — a rough approximation of what has happened to the idea of "white" in America over the past century. Or, conversely, a separatist movement splits every fifth "green" off into a "blue," and the game plays on from there.
That is how race works, and that fluctuation of definition is the missing cultural factor that Burton seems to despair of finding.
So let's not get too excited about the neuroscience. I would be surprised to learn that the amygdala does what it does independent of cultural signification, or a lack thereof.
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No News Here
As with any computer simulation, the outcome is dictated by the input ... including the instructions for changes. hollyh has the analysis just right: no other outcome was possible.
What amazes me is that so few of the people creating these simulations have any understanding of simple probability, much less the necessary consequences of their own instructions.
Nor is it news that human beings once were - and still are - animals living in discrete environments. We have all the same basic survival instincts of monkeys. The only thing making humans distinct is the pre-frontal cortex, which allows us to reason and choose non-instinctual behaviors. It's far easier not to think, so it's no surprise that all people tend toward superficial distinctions and strategies.
The news that's missing is that bias is innate to human animals, but so is the ability to overcome foolish and self-destructive prejudices.
The good news is that humans are slowly learning - over centuries - to use their pre-frontal cortex and stop acting like a bunch of monkeys.
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Has anyone done this?
Ask for 50 American kids about 8-9 months old so that they're mobile but not too mobile - split evenly among the most obvious racial markers - Black, White, Asian, Brown?? - put in a room with a big mat and lots of toys - a nice shiny happy safe place and let's see what they do.
Parents are behind glass walls watching the kids. Leave them there for 30mins to an hr. Watch and record.
Probably wouldn't prove a thing, but I like to know what happens.
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Response to McCamy Taylor
The ideas you expressed are intriguing to me as a Buddhist - Western and Caucasian. It occurred to me years ago that the area of historical Buddhism, after its decline in its birthplace, India, where it had always remained a minor religion in terms of adherents, and a slight abortive spread westward, coincides to a remarkable, if not absolute, degree with the distribution of the Mongoloid race - as opposed to the surrounding non-Buddhist people of the Caucasoid and Austroloid races. Can there be a mental disposition toward a non-dualistic religion that has as its focus an ontological realization, not a deity, and can it have some connection with a common racial inheritance? As far as environmental perturbations, you should be interested to learn that East Asia was relatively little affected by the Ice Ages by virtue, primarily, of its distance from the center of cold and glaciation - Greenland - not the Arctic. This also explains the region's unparalled temperate floral diversity.
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Methodolgy problem for the fMRI
It was done with adults who were already prejudiced. Does exposure to prejudice CAUSE the brain to learn to act like that?
Only by doing fMRIs on infants will we know. The adult study tells us that prejudiced people have more activity in that part of the brain.
The irony is that without people of another race around, people act THE EXACT same way to people who look EXACTLY like them in response to class or religion. Northern Ireland's violence acts "racial" in that sense, and will give the same response in the brain. People will use any excuse to create an "other" if that is what their society demands.
Kids are TAUGHT as young as three to notice racial differences, byt the way. There's no evidence that infants recognize race at this point.
I'm not convinced racism is innate by this article. And I thank hollyh for her wonderful discussion of the model.