Prejudice from an evolutionary perspective

Prejudice can be considered from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary psychologists posit that our psychology, e.g. emotion and cognition, has not been uniquely isolated from the forces of evolution. Although there is psychological variation among individuals, the majority of our psychological mechanisms should be adaptations designed specifically to solve recurrent problems, many of which were social in nature, in our evolutionary history. To balance the costs and benefits of sociality we must be able to recognize and functionally respond to threats and opportunities (see James J. Gibson), and our errors in judgment should be biased toward minimizing costs to reproductive fitness. Our implicit responses to others result from the activation of functionally specific adaptations to motivate action, either to take advantage of opportunities, avoid or confront threats. The valence—positive or negative—of those responses can be measured using implicit association tests. Unconscious, negative reactions are often referred to as prejudice, but these prejudices are much more contextually rich than simple, positive or negative affect, and often involve discrete emotions, which likely represent unique adaptations to motivate functionally distinct actions. Our evolved biases toward minimizing fitness costs may have implications for the function and/or malfunction of stigma, prejudice, and discriminatory behavior in post-industrial societies. Some common biases (sex, age, race) are discussed.

According to James J. Gibson, a founder of ecological psychology, humans perceive their environment in terms of affordances. Different animals and objects afford different actions. These affordances are context-dependent. For instance, the same trait may afford both costs and benefits depending on the bearer, the social and environmental contexts, and the relative affordances or vulnerabilities of the perceiver. Although affordances are relative, they are invariant given the same context and provide strong selective pressure for adaptations to recognize and functionally respond to both threats and opportunities. For a review of the application of ecological theory to social perception, see McArthur and Baron (1983).

In their Error Management Theory (see also Adaptive Bias), Martie Haselton and David Buss suggested that judgments about opportunities and threats, in cases of uncertainty, should consistently err toward minimizing potential costs to reproductive fitness. Smoke detectors have often been used as an analogy for how threat mitigating adaptations should function. Smoke detectors are designed to be overly-sensitive to the presence of smoke so that they don’t fail to respond in case of an actual fire. For this reason, they often give false alarms. However, if smoke detectors are too sensitive, we are likely to either turn them off or become desensitized to their warnings. Adaptations should function similarly, erring on the side of caution. False alarms may be common, but overall costs are minimized.

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