Are We Hard-Wired to Be Xenophobic? |
Animosity toward out-groups can be a product of upbringing.
Racial and other biases are a product of evolutionary survival pressures.
We can counter our biases by accepting them, then consciously stopping them from influencing our behavior.
At every level of society, there are “us” vs. “them” divisions. Cliques abound in high schools, and high schools themselves compete against rival high schools. People in Indiana tell derisive Kentucky jokes, and in Kentucky, they tell Indiana jokes. Charles Duhigg, author of Habit, observed, “Companies aren’t families, they’re battlefields in a civil war.”
I went to UC Berkeley and am burdened with deep-seated negative attitudes toward all things Stanford, just as Dodger fans are generally unfriendly—at baseball games at least—to Giants fans.
Republicans and Democrats often can’t get along, and even within political parties, there are numerous factions with prolific infighting.
Then of course, we have racism, sexism, ageism, body shaming; the different ways we slice and dice "us vs. them" are endless.
Research on the origins of prejudices reveals that parental and cultural attitudes and beliefs play a strong role in the emergence of prejudice in children.[1]
But is there more to “Us vs. Them” than our upbringing and socialization? Evolutionary psychologists say there is.
The survival value of xenophobia
Evolutionary psychologists, such as Tooby and Cosmides, argue that we are born with certain behavioral traits that helped our ancestors survive and that the slow process of evolution has preserved in modern humans ingrained traits that are better adapted to the world of 200,000 years ago than today, our unhealthy preferences for sweet, calorie-rich........