Can race be erased.pptx

Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides: “ Can race be erased? ” PNAS 2001 ? Question: does the simple act of categorizing individuals into two social groups predispose humans to discriminate in favor of their in-group and against the out-group ? ? Studies have confirmed that this behavior is remarkably easy to elicit: people discriminate against out-groups even when they are assigned to groups temporarily and anonymously by an experimenter who uses dimensions that are trivial . ? Throughout human history, intergroup conflict has focused on categorization between us and them. ? Selection may have favored the cognitive machinery for automatic encoding of an individual ’ s sex and age, but the same process for race is unlikely to have evolved ? Our typical ancestral individual would almost never encounter individuals ically distinct enough to classify as a different “ race ”? Their hypothesis: coalition encoding is as fundamental as sex encoding and age encoding, and more fundamental than race encoding Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides: “ Can race be erased? ” PNAS 2001 Hypothesis: ? Automatic and mandatory encoding of race is a byproduct of adaptations that evolved to detect coalitions & alliances ? Hunter gatherer societies lived in bands and neighboring bands frequently came into contact with each other ? Computational machinery designed to detect coalitions should be sensitive to two factors: ? Patterns of coordinated action ? Cues that predict an individual ’ s political allegiances Predictions ?#1: Race per se will not be encoded across all social contexts and with equal strength ?#2: Shared visual appearance is not necessary for coalition encoding ?#3: Arbitrary cues other than racial appearance can be endowed with the same properties as race sometimes has by linking them to coalition membership Predictions (cont …) ?#4: Strength of race encoding will diminish by creating a social context where ? Race is no longer a valid c