Social Xenophobia?

[Theophrastus]

For lack of time, I shall be brief in my question. Generally speaking, based upon the current state of society, in its general thought ideas, and morals, it is easy to understand how our subjective morality may lead to the development of commonly accepted ideas and principles. Almost as if an opinion, and socio- economic status of the average person, however it is even more interesting to note how this society is prone to a negative attitude towards outsiders and more importantly, those who fail to meet the norm.

It has been seen in numerous cases, from bullying, to propaganda, and assimilation, and architypes, however, I'm rather interested, why does this occur? Why is there a natural affinity, for that which is most like oneself, and a negative attitude towards those that differ? Does neurology or psychology offer any explanations, as it seems to be a recurring topic in various areas, and while I don't know very much along the topics of psychiatry and the like, I'm eager to learn. Does anyone perhaps have an explanation? (It would be most welcome!)

[Glider]

Yes. There's huge amounts of research in this area. 'Kin preference' is a major factor in this. Humans evolved to prefer (i.e. be more likely to help, feed, support, protect and so-on) members of their own family, as that provided an advantage. As the population grew, the idea of 'kin' expanded to encompass 'extended family group' and on to 'people who look like me' and on to 'people who signal in some way that they believe what I do'.

 

Humans are so prone to this that you could take any group of say 20 people in a large room. Split them in to two groups of 10 and set each group a task (even the identical task, just performed as separate groups), and within a very short space of time, each group will think the other group is rubbish at the task, is performing less well than their own group and will generally ascribe less positive attributes to members of the other group than to their own group.

 

An early study into this was the Robbers Cave experiment (Sherif, 1954).

 

This occurs simply by virtue of being arbitrarily split into two groups. When the groups are self-formed and with some identifying feature, the effects are stronger.

 

This, like many other thing about human beings, is a 'misfiring' (as Dawkins would put it), of an adaptive behavioural feature. This characteristic of humans provides huge advantage when wandering as small bands across the serengeti, but less of an advantage, and often a considerable disadvantage when living cheek-by-jowel with say, 10,000,000 other people (2007 estimate of the population of Los Angeles).

 

It takes geological time to change such characteristics and humans haven't changed much in many thousands of years. You could, if the technology existed, clone somebody from the cradle of civilisation (Sumaria, 4,000 BCE, Egypt, 3,000 BCE), and raise them in any modern city and neither they nor anyone else would know. They, and we, carry exactly the same hard-wired characteristics that our ancestors evolved and passed to on us through the hominid population bottleneck 90,000 - 120,000 years ago. In fact, it could well be that the population bttleneck was a key factor in ensuring this particular characteristic was passed on. Kin preference would certianly have been an advantage to small groups when resources are scarce.

Edited May 2, 2009 by Glider