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 foods being an example.[2]
Another example is xenophobia, or fear of outgroups. Before modern medicine, strangers were prone to carry unfamiliar pathogens that were far less dangerous to “them” (because they had adapted to them) than to “us.” Indeed, as recently as the 1500s, Europeans carried diseases such as smallpox and measles to the Americas that killed off a significant percentage of the indigenous populations who had built up little immunity to European pathogens.[3]
Thus, psychologists such as Mark Schaller and Justin Park[4] theorize that predisposition toward prejudice against outsiders evolved in our brains as part of our “behavioral immune system” to avoid disease.
Social affiliation and disaffiliation in response to parasites in the environment provide another example of our inbuilt behavioral immune system. Cory Fincher and Randy Thornhill studied familial and ingroup cohesion in regions with high vs. low parasite stress (disease from parasites such as malaria and worms). The researchers found a positive correlation between the strength of family bonds and religiosity on the one hand, and parasite stress on the other, concluding that increased “in-group assortative sociality” within families and close relatives—who share common immune traits, exposure to parasites, and hygiene practices—increased the odds of survival where parasites are abundant. In parallel, religion, which often comes with hygiene norms (e.g., avoid pork), enforces parasite avoidance behaviors, so that the survival value of religiosity increases with increasing parasite stress.[5]
A final way that xenophobia may have improved our ancestors’ chances of survival is by strengthening social bonds within in-groups. Tooby and Cosmides assert that humans, as a social species, evolved heightened sensitivities to the presence of coalitions among those around them to determine with whom they should cooperate.[6] Cooperation with the “right” group enhanced the survival chances of our ancestors, the strength of those cooperative relationships increasing when there was a distinct, competing “wrong” group.[7] Historically, leaders have gained and expanded political power by heightening concerns about threats from “outsiders,” sometimes provoking war to unify populations behind them.
So, how do we manage the downside of xenophobia?
If we’re born with xenophobic proclivities, and socialization during development reinforces those tendencies, how are we to keep animus toward out-groups from fomenting wars and toxic ethnic, religious, and political strife? How do we get rid of, or at least manage, such corrosive attitudes?
My clinical supervisor, when I was an intern, suggested the answer when he observed, “To get rid of something we must first admit we have it.” And one reason many of us don’t want to admit harboring prejudices is the stigma associated with them. Indeed, research using implicit association tests and other instruments that surface unconscious biases shows that roughly 80 percent of us have deeply ingrained unconscious biases on race, gender, age, or other group categories.[8]. The negative impact on self-esteem of believing we have biases drives us to push such attitudes deep into our unconscious.[9,10]
As one might expect from the combined influence of both nature and nurture, lack of bias is the exception, not the rule. But to protect our self-esteem, many of us deny those biases.
This may sound strange, not mention controversial, but acknowledging that bias is “normal,” given the powerful evolutionary forces that drive it, can lessen the stigma that makes us deny—consciously or not—what we really feel.
Such heightened awareness—born of accepting reality—can help us avoid letting our biases influence our behaviors. Following the logic of my clinical supervisor, paradoxically, the key to letting go of biased behaviors is to first accept that we have biased attitudes that produce those behaviors.
1. The Family Transmission of Ethnic Prejudice: A Systematic Review of Research Articles with Adolescents. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/6/236
2. Evolutionary psychology: Conceptual foundations. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268001320
3. The immunogenetic impact of European colonization in the Americas. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9388791
4. The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters) - Mark Schaller, Justin H. Park, 2011 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721411402596
5. Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality: the cases of strong family ties and heightened religiosity. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22289223/
6. Groups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War and Morality. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364739581_
7. Ingroup favoritism in cooperation: A meta-analysis. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-37732-001
8. The implicit association test: Shining a light on hidden beliefs. https://www.apa.org/research-practice/conduct-research/hidden-associati…
9. Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self esteem and stereotypes. https://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/Greenwald_Banaji_PsychRev_1995.O…
10. The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-10937-008