Abstract
The last two decades have seen the development of a body of literature in evolutionary psychology that seeks to attribute negative attitudes to ethnic and racial minorities and other outgroups to an evolved behavioral immune system (BIS). It hypothesizes that disgust sensitivity, which evolved as protection against pathogen threats, also triggers reactions to cues that are not viscerally disgusting, such as people with unfamiliar features, and thus can explain prejudice toward members of these groups. Such an explanation seems to limit the influence of education, public policy, and rhetoric on those attitudes. Our conceptual analysis shows that this is not the case. Existing hypotheses about why the BIS would be triggered even in the absence of visceral disgust elicitors suggest that general unfamiliarity or atypicality act as cues for this hypersensitive threat detection system. This implies that the impact of the BIS must depend on the cultural and societal context in which people learn not only what is disgusting but also what is typical. The social context of personal interaction with mass media representation of and political debate about immigrants consequently needs to be considered as a decisive factor for any effect of the BIS on attitudes and behavior toward ethnic and racial outgroups. The BIS is therefore not a separate or even superordinate explanation of prejudice, compared to those coming from the social sciences. We conclude that it can offer valuable insights into processes of stigmatization and prejudice, once the role of social learning in the developmental unfolding and activation of psychological mechanisms is taken seriously.
Highlights
Why do people have a propensity to exclude or otherwise discriminate against certain groups of other people? Evolutionary approaches to stigmatization assume that the tendency to exclude individuals with certain characteristics results from psychological mechanisms that evolved by natural selection because they solved specific problems faced by our human ancestors (Kurzban and Leary, 2001)
By placing the concept of the behavioral immune system (BIS) in the context of arguments from both evolutionary psychology and sociology, we show that its contribution to understanding prejudice against ethnic outgroups is not a separate or even superordinate explanation to those focusing on social context
The theoretical premise of this work and its suggested policy implications is that the hypersensitive BIS reacts to cues of physical and cultural unfamiliarity, which leads to false-positive identification of pathogen threats, resulting in an unconscious disgust reaction that leads in turn to avoidance and rejection of the people perceived to carry the threat
Summary
Why do people have a propensity to exclude or otherwise discriminate against certain groups of other people? Evolutionary approaches to stigmatization assume that the tendency to exclude individuals with certain characteristics results from psychological mechanisms that evolved by natural selection because they solved specific problems faced by our human ancestors (Kurzban and Leary, 2001). Any effect of the BIS on attitudes and behavior toward ethnic and racial outgroups is mediated by the social context of personal interaction with mass media representation of and political debate about immigrants.
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