The influence of race on the way we perceive another person is smaller than expected
Economist
In the 19th century, scientists who brought Social Darwinism to the table used to build
Evolutionary genealogies that divided the biological species Homo
Spians for different branches. Each branch was a racial group. The upper branch was
Of course the white race, to which the scientists belonged.
Modern genetics revealed how wrong scientists' perception was
goddess. There are genetic differences between people from different parts of the world, however
These differences are small compared to the differences between different living people
in the same area. The visible differences - skin color, for example - are the result
of a handful of genes and nothing else. Beneath the skin, humanity is homogenous
Stunning.
And yet, racism pervades everything. Not only whites are affected by it. Fact
This led to another biological hypothesis, that people are "programmed" in a way
some to identify a race and be racist.
Robert Kortzvan, John Tobey and Lada Kozmides, three psychologists
Evolutionists from the University of California in Santa Barbara claim that
This assumption is not reasonable. Last week they published in the journal " "
PNAS Proceedings of the National (Academy of Sciences) article
which supports an alternative hypothesis.
According to this hypothesis, racism is actually an unfortunate byproduct of
Another phenomenon: a tendency to put people into "coalition groups"; any sign
Available - the form of clothing, accent or skin color - will be recruited to place the
The details are in groups. The good news is that experiments done by
The researchers point out that such stereotypes are easily dispelled
and replaced by others. Racism, in other words, can be eliminated.
For many years, psychologists believed that when a person encounters a person who is
does not know the foreign person's characteristics are classified into three "drawers": sex,
Age and race. The assumption is that these drawers are programmed mental skills
biologically established a long time ago.
The gender and age of other people are social contexts within which they are made
Decisions all the time, so the idea of drawers evolved to
Dealing with these categories is logical. The reason for the skepticism about
The third category is that throughout most of history humans have not
were exposed to people of a different race. On the other hand, it is likely that early man paid off
To be able to distinguish between a stranger who is his ally and a stranger who is not
Ally. In such a situation, elements common to him and the stranger would have marked
You are the stranger as a friend and not as an enemy.
However, since a wrong link between markers and affiliation groups may
Being risky, one would expect access to such markers to be flexible;
To be able to get rid of them, if they turn out to be useless. following a line
This thought, Dr. Kurzvan, Dr. Tobi and Dr. Kozmides predicted that under the circumstances
where race is irrelevant to the ways in which allied groups are formed,
The prejudices will disappear, perhaps quickly.
To test this idea they used an already established psychological technique
scientifically, called "memory protocols" (confusion protocol
memory). In this procedure, subjects are shown a series of photographs of people -
In the current experiment four young men, two black and two white
- and below each character a sentence she says in a "conversation" with the character to her left (all
A "conversation" is between two people, one on each side of the computer monitor). after that
The subject is shown the sentences in random order and asked to remember who
"said" them. When the subjects attribute a certain statement to the non-character
True, the character will usually belong to the same mental group to which he belongs
Catalog the character who did "say" the sentence.
Dr. Kurzvan, Dr. Tobi, and Dr. Kuzmides used two versions of
the experiment. In the first version, the content of the conversation was the only clue to friendship
in the coalition. In the second, the people shown to the subjects wore colored shirts
different (gray and yellow).
The researchers presented four specific predictions: that race would not be "coded"
in the responses of the subjects equally in all social contexts;
that external similarity is not necessary for coding coalition membership; that marked
Randoms can take on the characteristics that a race tends to display in a prediction
coalition membership; And when that happens, the power of the racial stereotype
will decrease greatly. All these predictions turned out to be correct.
In the first experiment, where there were no visual cues regarding friendship
In the coalition, high misattribution was correlated with skin color. The attribution hall
This kind of wrong was not sweeping. Subjects attributed statements incorrectly
Also based on the side of the conversation they came from; They did it in a small amount
Two compared to the rate in which they attributed incorrect statements based on skin color.
In the second experiment the results were reversed. Given the additional clue of the color of the shirt,
The vast majority of misattribution was related to it; The racial component has deteriorated
to the point of insignificance.
The subjects were not given any explanation of the purpose of the experiment: they did not know they were
Coalitions are supposed to be sought. But they noticed them anyway. this thing
It implies that the classification of people into groups is often done according to signs
who immediately voted for membership in the group, and not based on prejudices
which determine which details should create groups. In other words, characterizations
Racials only act as convenient identification tags, and they do not click on
Discrimination buttons deep and biologically dictated.
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