The Ash Twins Blog

Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides (2001) write,

Previous studies have established that people encode the race of each individual they encounter, and do so via computational processes that appear to be both automatic and mandatory. If true, this conclusion would be important, because categorizing others by their race is a precondition for treating them differently according to race. Here we report experiments, using unobtrusive measures, showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. The results show that subjects encode coalitional affiliations as a normal part of person representation. More importantly, when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime’s experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.

That racism is eradicable should give heart to multiculturalists and to members of groups that have historically been targets of discrimination. On the other hand, minority individuals oftentimes gain much meaning in their lives from their race, and even reify the importance of race through establishing and joining clubs founded on race. Kurzban et al’s findings suggest that these pro-race groups foster racism by encouraging the categorization of individuals by race.