THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYolds recognize other people this way and begin to show increasing bias
towards others who look like they do – for example, choosing to play
with another child of the same, rather than a different, skin colour to
themselves (they also show a preference for other kids of the same sex,
similar age and who have a similar accent).
By the age of nine children are already attempting to appear racially
colour-blind – a sign, perhaps, that they’re aware of the inappropriateness
of their underlying biases. Evan Apfelbaum showed this by using a game
reminiscent of Guess-Who? Children were presented with photos of forty
people who varied according to four key dimensions, and their task was to
find out with as few yes/no questions as possible which one of the photos
the researcher had in their hand. The nine- to ten-year-olds actually
performed worse at the task than the eight- to nine-year-olds, because they
avoided asking questions about race.
THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF RACISM
It would have been highly unusual for our distant ancestors to encounter
a person of a markedly different skin-colour. However, it would prob-
ably have been useful for them to use visual cues – clothing perhaps, or
symbols – to identify quickly whether another person was from the same
or a different group. No doubt the salience we give to racial appearance
today is an unfortunate extension of this once-useful habit. However, as
well as being morally dubious, it is clearly a mistake for us to continue
to do this. Modern research shows that a person’s racial background
is an unreliable indicator of their underlying traits – there’s far more
genetic variation between members of the same racial group than there
is between members of different racial groups.
Underlying our unfortunate tendency for out-group prejudice is the
emotion of disgust, which probably first evolved as a way to protect
us from contact with potentially toxic substances such as faeces and
rotten meat. The biologist Marc Hauser thinks that evolution may have
co-opted this emotion and applied it to social behaviour. In the same
way that disgust helps keep outside of us those things that are best not
ingested, it may similarly motivate us to avoid contact with outsiders –
people who are not members of our tribe.
Why should we have evolved a tendency to reject outsiders in this way?
One theory gaining popularity is that we have a behavioural immune-
system. This refers to behaviours that have evolved as a way of avoiding
contact with parasites. It’s likely that our ancestors used an outsider’s