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Racism is not hard-wired
Racism is not hard-wired into the brain and a little coalition-building can help people lose their racist tendencies, researchers have found.
Racism is not hard-wired into the brain and a little coalition-building can help people lose their racist tendencies, researchers have found.
They said their findings offer hope for ending conflicts based on an "us and them" mentality as it relates to race.
A simple, four-minute experiment could make people forget their notions of race, at least for a little while, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Robert Kurzban of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara reported.
"Social psychologists had found that it seemed no matter what you did, people would categorise others by their race," Cosmides said in a telephone interview.
"They were trying really hard to get people not to categorise people by race and they weren`t having any luck and they were getting really depressed by this."
But Cosmides said while it makes sense that people should have evolved to notice sex and age, there was no reason to think recognising race was important to survival. Genetic researchers say "race" does not show up in the genes and humans are highly interbred.
"It didn`t make sense to us that the mind would be designed to automatically encode race," Cosmides said.
Kurzban said the group set up an experiment in which people were asked to watch two racially integrated basketball teams have a conversation on a computer screen.
"The participants` task was to remember who said what," Kurzban said. They did not know why.
But Kurzban said in most cases, if people get two strangers mixed up, they are more likely to mix up a black person with another black person, white with white and so on. Bureau Report
They said their findings offer hope for ending conflicts based on an "us and them" mentality as it relates to race.
A simple, four-minute experiment could make people forget their notions of race, at least for a little while, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Robert Kurzban of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara reported.
"Social psychologists had found that it seemed no matter what you did, people would categorise others by their race," Cosmides said in a telephone interview.
"They were trying really hard to get people not to categorise people by race and they weren`t having any luck and they were getting really depressed by this."
But Cosmides said while it makes sense that people should have evolved to notice sex and age, there was no reason to think recognising race was important to survival. Genetic researchers say "race" does not show up in the genes and humans are highly interbred.
"It didn`t make sense to us that the mind would be designed to automatically encode race," Cosmides said.
Kurzban said the group set up an experiment in which people were asked to watch two racially integrated basketball teams have a conversation on a computer screen.
"The participants` task was to remember who said what," Kurzban said. They did not know why.
But Kurzban said in most cases, if people get two strangers mixed up, they are more likely to mix up a black person with another black person, white with white and so on. Bureau Report