We humans are very good at dividing ourselves up into groups.\u00a0 We accomplish this in a multitude of ways.\u00a0 Even within homogeneous groupings we tend to find subtle ways to carve people out.\u00a0 It is far easier however, when people vary by gender, ethnicity, race, class, neighborhood, region, nationality, religion, and\/or sexual orientation.\u00a0 For some reason we are drawn to and comforted by others that share physical resemblance, culture, attitude, values, history, important symbols, and affiliations.\u00a0 Conversely, we are threatened by those in the outgroup.\u00a0 Why is this?\u00a0 What drives us to carve out, cast away and divide our fellow human beings into camps of “us” and “them?” Is it a byproduct of socialization or perhaps a part of our nature?<\/p>\n
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I saw this very clearly growing up in a small rural town in Western New York.\u00a0 Even though we were all white middle class Christian kids for the most part, we effectively divided ourselves into camps – some actively participating in the parceling and others passively falling victim to it.\u00a0 There were the popular kids, the tough kids, the village kids, and the farm kids.\u00a0 And as we became more “sophisticated,” the parcels emerged with more universal group titles such as the heads, the jocks, the brains, the nerds, etc.\u00a0 Some kids traversed multiple groups quite effectively while others fit into no group at all.<\/p>\n
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It wasn’t until I went to college that I was immersed with young adults who parceled out their peers in even more “enlightened” ways.\u00a0 I went to SUNY Geneseo where the student body was very similar to that of my home town, again, largely a white middle class subset of New York State – but a bit more diverse geographically and religiously.\u00a0 The most striking division was imposed by students from Westchester County, Long Island, and New York City who looked at their fellow New Yorkers emanating from any location west of the Hudson River as being inferior.\u00a0 This “geographism<\/em>” was shocking to me.\u00a0 I was clearly in the inferior outgroup.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On top of that, there were sorority and fraternity groupings, valuations made by respect for one’s major, and more subtly by the size of the town one came from.\u00a0 All this being said, I enjoyed college, learned a lot, and have great respect for the institution today.\u00a0 I am not singling out any one town or university – I suspect that my experience was no different than that most kids encountered growing up.\u00a0 The point is this – we are seemingly driven to parcel ourselves.\u00a0 Even during my doctoral training in Cincinnati there was “geographism<\/em>” whereby people from Kentucky (just across the Ohio River) were cast in a relative negative light by Ohioans much as New Yorkers downcast people from Pennsylvania or New Jersey.\u00a0 On another level, think about the antipathy between cat lovers and dog lovers.\u00a0 Then there are Yankee fans and Red Sox fans (insert any sports team where fans divide themselves with similar acrimony).\u00a0 It is every where!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was very fortunate to have a mother who encouraged me to respect diversity and not to judge others by group affiliation.\u00a0 She spoke out against or talked with me privately so that I would not emulate other role models who were not so open minded.\u00a0 I have always been thankful for her influence.\u00a0 And because of her I have in maturity always tried to emulate her.\u00a0 It’s not always easy – but I do try.\u00a0 Something tells me that one’s level of prejudice is not simply a function of having a great role model or a bad one.\u00a0 This tendency is so universal and plays out in very subtle ways that are not always evidenced as explicit overt racism or sexism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Evidence, as it turns out, is increasingly supporting my hunch.\u00a0 Group prejudices are evident even in pre-vocal babies (Mahajan, 2011). This growing body of research has been supplemented by an ingenious set of studies of prejudice in nonhuman primates published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em>.\u00a0 The primary author, Neha Mahajan, from Yale University, was kind enough to share with me her paper entitled The Evolution of Intergroup Bias: Perceptions and Attitudes in Rhesus Macaques<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The researchers conducted seven different in-vivo experiments to explore whether old world monkeys, with whom we shared a common ancestor more than 30 million years ago (Hedges & Blair, Ed., 2009), evidence human-like intergroup bias.\u00a0 This preliminary work establishes that we do share this trait, suggesting that prejudice may in fact be a part of our very nature.\u00a0 It appears that prejudicial thinking has been adaptive from an evolutionary perspective or at least has been a vestigial stow away linked with some other trait that has been naturally selected.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is some danger in this notion.\u00a0 If we accept prejudice as a part of our nature, we may be more inclined to devote less effort to address it from a social perspective.\u00a0 The authors are careful to point out, however, that previous research has established that prejudices can be re-mediated\u00a0 through exposure and teaching or conversely entrenched through poor modeling.\u00a0 These results do not diminish the influence of nurture, instead the authors highlight the importance of understanding that our brains are pre-wired for prejudice.\u00a0 I have discussed human prejudice before within the context of the Implicit Associations Test (IAT)<\/a> that suggests that our biases are implicit (unconscious).\u00a0 Although implicit attributes are difficult to measure<\/a>, there is good reason to believe that we do universally, inherently, and unknowingly harbor biases.\u00a0 We must accept this and build programs upon this understanding with targeted evidenced based strategies to combat such erroneous thinking.\u00a0 It is part of who we are – and once again, evidence of how flawed the human brain is.\u00a0 Hate, bullying, homophobia, and racism – they all are part of our “monkey-brain.”\u00a0 Here’s hoping we can rise above it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n References:<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Grewal, D. (2011). \u00a0The Evolution of Prejudice: Scientists See the Beginnings of Racism in Monkeys.<\/strong><\/a> Scientific American: MIND<\/em>. April 5.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hedges, S. B., & Blair, S. (Eds.).\u00a0 (2009).\u00a0 The Timetree of Life.<\/strong><\/a> New York, NY: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mahajan, N., Martinez, M. A., Gutiezzez, N. L., Diesendruck, G., Banaji, M., & Santos, L. R.\u00a0 (2011).\u00a0 The Evolution of Intergroup Bias: Perceptions and Attitudes in Rhesus Macaques<\/a><\/strong>. <\/strong> Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em>. Vol. 100, No. 3. 387-405.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We humans are very good at dividing ourselves up into groups.\u00a0 We accomplish this in a multitude of ways.\u00a0 Even within homogeneous groupings we tend to find subtle ways to carve people out.\u00a0 It is far easier however, when people vary by gender, ethnicity, race, class, neighborhood, region, nationality, religion, and\/or sexual orientation.\u00a0 For some … <\/p>\n