Photograph by Daniela Stallinger
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The Roots of Hatred
By Sharon Begley, May & June 2004
Our brains are programmed to distrust outsiders. But are we hard-wired to hate?
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If you are mystified by the persistence of racism, even among seemingly
intelligent people, Jared Diamond has a story for you. Imagine, says the
University of California, Los Angeles, biologist, that you lived in the
Paleolithic Period when small bands of hunter-gatherers were roaming the world.
Usually, each group kept to its own turf. But just suppose, perhaps pushed by
hunger or curiosity, you crossed the invisible line marking the limits of your
group's territory. "Should you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in
the forest, of course you would try to kill him or else to run away," says
Diamond, who conducts his fieldwork in the wilds of New Guinea. "Our
modern custom of just saying hello and starting a friendly chat would be
suicidal."
Those early humans who acquired an unconscious, instantaneous way to
recognize and classify strangers—and to treat them with great suspicion,
or worse—were more likely to live and reproduce. Their children inherited
this instinct, and it spread throughout early human populations. Their evolving
brains learned to automatically classify people as either "one of us"
or "one of them."
Studies suggest that our brains still have this protective
programming—a psychological need to divide people into groups.
Unfortunately, one of the most pernicious examples of this inborn trait, and
certainly among the most persistent, is racism. Might we be programmed from
birth to hate people with a different skin color? Scientists today are working
hard to solve this mystery, and they are coming up with some startling new
answers to these questions: why and whom do we hate? While our need to
categorize people is inherited, it seems, we may be more innately colorblind
than was previously thought.
That may seem like a surprising finding, given the color-conscious society
we live in. In 21st-century America, most people still view one another through
the prism of race. Skin color often determines who's a member of our
religious group, our neighborhood, our office clique, our school or social
club—and who isn't.
The stubborn persistence of racism in modern culture has led social
scientists, neurobiologists, and evolutionary psychologists to take a hard look
at why—with all the differences between humans we could choose to focus
on—the human mind seemingly insists on classifying others primarily by
race and specifically as white, black, or Asian, as studies find. One of those
scientists was Mahzarin Banaji, now an experimental psychologist at Harvard,
who in the late 1990s, with Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington,
developed the Implicit Association Test, which attempts to lift the curtain on
people's unconscious attitudes and feelings about race.
The premise of the experiment is that unconscious stereotypes operate
without deliberate thought but can powerfully affect behavior, preferences, and
judgments. The test (try it online) measures how quickly people associate positive or negative
words ("glorious," "evil," "failure,"
"love") with a photo of a black face or a white one. The more
automatically your mind links "horrible" to a black face or
"love" to a white one, the faster you press a key. If the task
requires you to quickly link "failure" to a white face and your mind
rebels, your responses will be slower.
In the years since Banaji and Greenwald crafted this test, the findings have
held steady. About seven out of 10 white people show unconscious racial
prejudice, including those who claim to be bias-free. The test has shown that
many Americans—especially white and Asian—"have an automatic
preference for white over black," as the scientists put it. How automatic?
Even an ethnic-sounding name can elicit prejudice. "It is surprisingly
easy to get people to develop a false memory that a person named Tyrone is a
criminal," Banaji says.
In subsequent experiments, however, Banaji found that if our tendency to
group people is automatic, it's also highly emotional. Peering inside the
gray matter of her subjects, Banaji discovered that when shown photos of black
faces, whites who showed unconscious prejudice on the Implicit Association Test
had increased activity in the amygdalae, a pair of little, almond-shaped
structures deep in the brain that register fear and anger. Interestingly, the
subjects didn't have this negative reaction when they viewed faces of
well-liked black Americans, such as Bill Cosby. Their brain activity was
revealing the effect of cultural learning, Banaji suspects.
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While these negative emotional responses were deeply rooted in the brain,
they may not be indelible. "It is only due to the memory of recent
historical events that the groups we 'naturally' see are black and
white," argues Michael Shermer, whose new book The Science of Good and
Evil explores the biological and evolutionary roots of morality and ethical
systems. He believes that the racism detected by Banaji's tests reflects
something our minds have learned, not something our brains were hard-wired with
at birth. There is no reason classification has to be based on skin color,
Shermer notes. Instead, the brain should seize on any characteristic, any
marker, that could indicate a distinction between one group and another.
"If everyone looked like Tiger Woods," says Shermer, "we'd
simply find other ways to divide people up." Perhaps eyebrow shape would
then be the dividing characteristic.
It's not difficult to find real-life examples that support Shermer's
theory. Northern Ireland's Catholics hate its Protestants, and vice versa.
Atrocities between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda or Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo
didn't erupt from recognition of racial differences but rather for
religious and political reasons.
People are more likely to automatically classify one another by sex
and age than they are by race.
In fact, people are more likely to automatically classify one another by sex
and age than they are by race, says evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban of
the University of Pennsylvania. Humankind hasn't been out of Africa long
enough, he says, for our brains to evolve the wiring that lets us see race in a
way that's as fundamental as whether someone is, say, a young girl or an
old man.
Thus, linking the origins of racism to early humans could be misleading.
"These different groups of early humans almost never came into contact
with one another, so there would be little opportunity to evolve a
classification system that grouped people by race," Kurzban says. Indeed,
they may never have encountered someone of a different race. "In
prehistoric times, even our enemies looked like us," Kurzban says.
"There was no evolutionary pressure for brains to instantly classify
people into 'members of my race' and 'the enemy.' "
The latest research in human genetics further weakens the case for innate
racial bigotry. Standard racial categories as we define them, more geneticists
are concluding, have no biological validity. Yes, there are obviously genetic
differences between the smaller groupings called biological
populations—say, between a member of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria and a
Lapp from northern Scandinavia, for instance. But the genetic differences
between racial groups of white, black, and Asian are less than the
differences within any one of these major groups. This means that you
are more genetically similar to many people outside your race than to many of
those within it.
Kurzban recently conducted a study that offers convincing evidence that race
is not a basic classifying factor. He and colleagues at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, had 200 volunteers look at 24 photos of basketball
players on a computer screen. Each player pictured belonged to one of two teams
that had recently brawled, Kurzban told the volunteers, and they were all
wearing identical jerseys. Paired with each photo was a sentence that a
particular player had uttered during the rumble. The volunteers' test: look
at all 24 photos and, as each sentence was flashed on the screen again, recall
who said it.
When the subjects got it wrong, their mistakes were telling. When they
attributed a sentence to the wrong player, their incorrect choice was usually a
person of the same race as the player who actually said it. It was as if they
were thinking, I don't recall who said it, but it was definitely a white
guy.
Next, they viewed photos of the same players, but each was wearing either a
gray or yellow jersey. Once again, the misattributions fell along color
lines—but this time it was the color of the player's jersey, not
skin. The volunteers had quickly made the mental switch to classifying people
by a more logical sign of a group: the color of their uniforms.
"Despite a lifetime's experience of race as a predictor of social
alliance, less than four minutes of exposure to an alternate social world was
enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race," the scientists
concluded. Race can quickly be overridden as a factor if people see a more
immediate basis for a coalition, such as the color of a team jersey. "The
human mind is very flexible," Kurzban says. "It dynamically evaluates
situations."
So, while it appears that we are hard-wired from birth to view the world in
terms of "us" versus "them," the evidence shows that we can
reprogram our brains to come up with new definitions for who we view as
"us" and who we view as "them." One way to stop our brains
from perceiving race as a meaningful way to categorize people is to mimic the
conditions of these experiments. Namely, to mix it up at work and play, so
"my group" includes people who look different from "me."
This has never been easy. But at least we can strive for a society that treats
all men and women as equals, knowing there is nothing in the human psyche that
makes racism inevitable.
Sharon Begley is the science columnist of The Wall Street
Journal.
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