Jun 3, 2016 05:59 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/does-evolution-ex...o-refugees
EXCERPT: [...] Homo sapiens sapiens – modern humans – have been extant for a whisker of time, something like 200,000 years. Societies evidencing urban development and complex social and cultural structures have been around for less time still, roughly 10,000 years, or 5 per cent of the duration of our subspecies’ existence. Our evolutionary past, on the other hand – the period during which psychological mechanisms developed to keep our forebears on their bipedal toes until they had perpetuated their genes – stretches back millions of years. What this means is that the brain that allows humans to write code for iPhone apps is, in many ways, the same prehistoric brain that is finely honed to meet the challenges of daily life on the savanna.
Thus, present-day humans must grapple with legacy systems. These are cognitive routines that were highly adaptive and useful in another time, but that have since become outmoded, clunky and sometimes detrimental – yet they cannot be dumped or overwritten because they underlie basic functions of the human machine. One of these legacy systems relates to forming coalitions with other humans.
Various experiments demonstrate that people feel an almost irresistible urge to form and react to groups – to both consciously and subconsciously identify self and a select cohort of others as part of an ‘in-group’, with the rest belonging to ‘out-groups’. Just what is required for a group to form can be trifling, and the mechanism is evident in our youngest selves. Six-month-old infants prefer strangers who speak their native language in their native accent. Ten-month-old infants are most likely to accept a toy when it is offered by someone who speaks their native language. And five-year-old children are more likely to choose to befriend same-race children when the target children are silent, but it turns out that accent trumps this bias: children are more likely to choose to befriend children of other races who speak in their native accent than those of the same race who speak in a foreign accent.
Children and adults alike are psychologically drawn to sameness over difference due to a legacy system that evolutionary psychologists call ‘threat detection’. [...] Compared with the present, life in prehistoric times was violent, short and without second chances. There were no courts or police to mediate conflict, no hospitals to treat illness or injury, and no legacy other than one’s genes. It paid dividends to always over-estimate, and never under-estimate, a potential threat. Even our primate relatives show evidence of evolved distrust of minor differences. [...] What’s more, it takes relatively little to trigger the instinct.
[...] This helps to explain one of the most common misperceptions about prejudice: that negative attitudes toward those who are different from oneself is mostly about race. It turns out that is false. When humans and their ancestors evolved, it was not in proximity to different races, but to others similar in appearance to themselves. Instead, readily discernible markers of difference included things such as accent, vocabulary, customs, markings, tools, accoutrements and hides. These would have triggered their threat management systems: mental routines that identify and impel a response in the face of threats to resources, values or morals; threats to sexual dominance; and threats to one’s person through violence or disease.
To put this in the context of reactions to refugees in the 21st century, Neuberg explains that ‘we make our best guesses about others’ intentions and those guesses are rational’ in light of our evolutionary history.’ Humans from outside coalitions would have looked and sounded and acted a little different, and ‘would have been more dangerous than members of our in-groups in terms of per capita contact, so we would be wary of them. We’re wary of them still.’ Thousands of years after humans began to form complex political units, we remain efficient and zealous recognisers of difference. And it is difference that many people see and hear when they turn on the news and encounter refugees fleeing Syria, Somalia or Afghanistan – be it difference in how those people look, talk, eat or pray, and even in how they arrive.
Few Westerners who travel long distances choose to do so by foot or boat – and certainly not by traipsing through muddy fields, or boarding overcrowded wooden fishing vessels and cheap rubber dinghies. Exacerbating that are the images of brown-, black- and olive-skinned people who are distressed, confused, exhausted, bedraggled and sometimes angry. These markers build on differences already inferred through language, religion, ethnicity, culture and ideology.
Few groups engender so many markers of difference as refugees. As Neuberg points out: ‘All those cues come together and activate the threat-management systems, and altogether make immigrants and refugees a perfect storm for prejudice.’ Perhaps the most striking aspect of pushback against refugees in Germany, Australia, the US and any number of other countries is how many people in the fray see themselves and their society as compassionate, tolerant and hospitable. In fact, it’s not uncommon in the West for first- and second-generation citizens – themselves the children and grandchildren of refugees – to object to further intakes of refugees and immigrants....
EXCERPT: [...] Homo sapiens sapiens – modern humans – have been extant for a whisker of time, something like 200,000 years. Societies evidencing urban development and complex social and cultural structures have been around for less time still, roughly 10,000 years, or 5 per cent of the duration of our subspecies’ existence. Our evolutionary past, on the other hand – the period during which psychological mechanisms developed to keep our forebears on their bipedal toes until they had perpetuated their genes – stretches back millions of years. What this means is that the brain that allows humans to write code for iPhone apps is, in many ways, the same prehistoric brain that is finely honed to meet the challenges of daily life on the savanna.
Thus, present-day humans must grapple with legacy systems. These are cognitive routines that were highly adaptive and useful in another time, but that have since become outmoded, clunky and sometimes detrimental – yet they cannot be dumped or overwritten because they underlie basic functions of the human machine. One of these legacy systems relates to forming coalitions with other humans.
Various experiments demonstrate that people feel an almost irresistible urge to form and react to groups – to both consciously and subconsciously identify self and a select cohort of others as part of an ‘in-group’, with the rest belonging to ‘out-groups’. Just what is required for a group to form can be trifling, and the mechanism is evident in our youngest selves. Six-month-old infants prefer strangers who speak their native language in their native accent. Ten-month-old infants are most likely to accept a toy when it is offered by someone who speaks their native language. And five-year-old children are more likely to choose to befriend same-race children when the target children are silent, but it turns out that accent trumps this bias: children are more likely to choose to befriend children of other races who speak in their native accent than those of the same race who speak in a foreign accent.
Children and adults alike are psychologically drawn to sameness over difference due to a legacy system that evolutionary psychologists call ‘threat detection’. [...] Compared with the present, life in prehistoric times was violent, short and without second chances. There were no courts or police to mediate conflict, no hospitals to treat illness or injury, and no legacy other than one’s genes. It paid dividends to always over-estimate, and never under-estimate, a potential threat. Even our primate relatives show evidence of evolved distrust of minor differences. [...] What’s more, it takes relatively little to trigger the instinct.
[...] This helps to explain one of the most common misperceptions about prejudice: that negative attitudes toward those who are different from oneself is mostly about race. It turns out that is false. When humans and their ancestors evolved, it was not in proximity to different races, but to others similar in appearance to themselves. Instead, readily discernible markers of difference included things such as accent, vocabulary, customs, markings, tools, accoutrements and hides. These would have triggered their threat management systems: mental routines that identify and impel a response in the face of threats to resources, values or morals; threats to sexual dominance; and threats to one’s person through violence or disease.
To put this in the context of reactions to refugees in the 21st century, Neuberg explains that ‘we make our best guesses about others’ intentions and those guesses are rational’ in light of our evolutionary history.’ Humans from outside coalitions would have looked and sounded and acted a little different, and ‘would have been more dangerous than members of our in-groups in terms of per capita contact, so we would be wary of them. We’re wary of them still.’ Thousands of years after humans began to form complex political units, we remain efficient and zealous recognisers of difference. And it is difference that many people see and hear when they turn on the news and encounter refugees fleeing Syria, Somalia or Afghanistan – be it difference in how those people look, talk, eat or pray, and even in how they arrive.
Few Westerners who travel long distances choose to do so by foot or boat – and certainly not by traipsing through muddy fields, or boarding overcrowded wooden fishing vessels and cheap rubber dinghies. Exacerbating that are the images of brown-, black- and olive-skinned people who are distressed, confused, exhausted, bedraggled and sometimes angry. These markers build on differences already inferred through language, religion, ethnicity, culture and ideology.
Few groups engender so many markers of difference as refugees. As Neuberg points out: ‘All those cues come together and activate the threat-management systems, and altogether make immigrants and refugees a perfect storm for prejudice.’ Perhaps the most striking aspect of pushback against refugees in Germany, Australia, the US and any number of other countries is how many people in the fray see themselves and their society as compassionate, tolerant and hospitable. In fact, it’s not uncommon in the West for first- and second-generation citizens – themselves the children and grandchildren of refugees – to object to further intakes of refugees and immigrants....