cues—coalitional intuitions, which are not made consciously but which
give us precise guidance about what to do. This may seem something
of a metaphysical distinction, as far as most social groups are con-
cerned. But the difference becomes crucial when social hierarchies
and dominance are involved.
This is clear in the hierarchies created on the basis of what sociolo-
gists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto call "arbitrary set distinctions,"
such as race or ethnicity. Here too there seems to be a discrepancy
between explicit concepts of social groups and intuitions that guide
behavior. Consider the explicit concepts first: That most members of
[290] minority groups are dangerous or unreliable is construed as an essential
feature of these groups by racists and deplored as lamentably unfair
stereotyping by nonracists. Both constituencies agree on one assump-
tion: that attitudes toward these social groups are based on people's
essentializing these groups. In this view, all it would take to establish
better relations would be to convince most dominant-group members
that minority people are essentially similar to them. For instance, if chil-
dren were trained to realize that people do not really behave like their
stereotypes, they would perceive the moral ugliness of discrimination.
But then Sidanius and Pratto marshal an impressive amount of evi-
dence to suggest that there is more to dominance than stereotyping,
and that the latter is a consequence rather than a cause. In fact, they
demonstrate that many dominant group behaviors not only represent
a desire to stay with one's group, to favor one's clan, but also to favor
one's group in an insidious way that maintains the other group's lower
status. Racial stereotypes are among the representations that people
create to interpret their own intuition that members of other groups
represent a real danger and threaten their own coalitional advantages.
Obviously, one possible reason for this blindness to coalitional struc-
tures is that they often conflict with our moral standards. This may
well explain why many people prefer to consider racism a consequence
of sadly misguided concepts rather than a consequence of highly effi-
cient economic strategies.^15
We should not be surprised if many social categories are both main-
tained by coalitional solidarity and explicitly construed in essentialist
terms. This is another illustration of the social magic described in Chap-
ter 7. People may have finely tuned coalitional capacities, but they do
not necessarily have access to how these work. The cues that make some
people appear reliable and others less so are computed in ways that
often escape conscious attention. In the same way, the fact that defec-
RELIGION EXPLAINED