Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (9 page)

Mark once had Paul Rozin—a researcher well-known for his studies of food preferences and disgust—over for dinner. As they were eating a salad from Mark's garden, they discovered a large and colorful beetle on one of their plates. Paul, who coined the term “omnivore's dilemma” to describe the tension between needing to find new foods and being disgusted by them, jokingly challenged Mark to eat it. So Mark picked up the beetle, put it in his mouth, and gulped it down.

This is all to say that Mark is not the kind of person who is easily put off by things that might disgust others. Most other people, however, are precisely that kind of person. In fact, Mark and his colleagues Jay Faulkner, Justin Park, and Lesley Duncan have observed that most people's minds equate “foreign” with “disgusting,” and often associate foreigners with disease vectors, such as rats and lice. Ancient Romans equated foreigners with detritus and scum, for example, and during the recent genocide in Rwanda, Hutus referred to Tutsis as cockroaches. When I was growing up in New York, I often heard people justify their prejudices against Puerto Ricans and blacks with accusations that “those people” actually preferred living in unclean conditions. Ironically, I often heard those accusations from people whose own great-grandparents had been demonized in the same way.

This sort of bigotry may once have been functional. A strange person would have been more likely than someone from the local village to carry a disease against which our ancestors had no defense. So avoiding strangers might have helped avoid the latest version of smallpox, plague, or swine flu. If you have read Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
you know that many more Native Americans were killed by European diseases than by European guns. Of course, all evolved inclinations involve trade-offs. Our ancestors exchanged goods with members of other groups and often found mates from outside their own villages. Because total isolation means forgoing opportunities as well as dangers, Schaller and his colleagues reckoned that disease-avoidance
mechanisms should be flexible. Glaring symptoms of illness or news of an epidemic would probably be enough reason to shun a stranger, as would one's own personal vulnerability to disease (for example, pregnant women who are carrying developing fetuses pay an especially high cost if they catch a disease). Otherwise, though, Schaller and his colleagues reckoned that it would not pay to be a xenophobe.

People vary in the extent to which they feel vulnerable to disease. Some people, like my friend Schaller, feel their immune system will take care of them and do not worry about someone else's slurping from their drinking glass or a stranger shaking their hand. Schaller and his colleagues developed a psychological scale to measure that sense of vulnerability. I scored high on the test, and when I took it, I was reminded of Schaller snickering at me during a dinner at a Chinese restaurant when I made a grimacing request that people not dig into the communal plates with their saliva-sodden chopsticks.

To examine the links between felt vulnerability to disease and prejudice, Schaller and his students asked Canadian students their attitudes about allowing an immigrant group into Canada. Sometimes the immigrants were described as coming from places UBC students might be likely to regard as unfamiliar and foreign, such as East Africa, Sri Lanka, or Peru; other times the students, who are mostly of European and Asian descent, were told that the immigrants were from more familiar countries in Europe or Asia. Repeatedly Schaller found that students who viewed themselves as chronically susceptible to disease were more xenophobic toward the unfamiliar groups than they were toward Europeans or Asians from more familiar countries.

Schaller's team also conducted a pair of experiments to see if priming subjects to worry about disease could affect their opinions on immigrants. Some subjects viewed pictures related to disease (such as images of bacteria on human hair and dirty kitchen sponges). The control group saw photos evocative of accidents in everyday life (such as having a radio fall into a bathtub). Then the participants were asked
their opinions about immigrants from either a familiar country (such as Scotland) or an unfamiliar one (such as Nigeria). Those who had been primed to think about disease were more xenophobic toward people from unfamiliar countries.

Another study made a fascinating extension of these results by looking at the behavior of pregnant women. During the first trimester of pregnancy, a fetus is especially at risk if the mother contracts a disease. Women have a number of biological and psychological mechanisms designed to reduce these risks; for example, pregnant women become highly selective about their diet, avoiding novel foods and foods that are likely to carry bacteria, such as meat and fish. Women in the first trimester are especially prone to nausea and disgust. It is a burden, but a functional one: Women who suffer through more of these symptoms are less likely to have spontaneous abortions, and they tend to have healthier babies.

Based on what we have seen so far in this chapter, you might expect pregnant women to hold dimmer views of strangers. Carlos Navarrete, Dan Fessler, and Serena Eng decided to find out if that is true. To do so, they conducted a study in which they asked American women to evaluate two essays, one written by an American and expressing strongly pro-American opinions, the other written by a foreigner critical of the United States and its people. Pregnant women were four times more favorable than nonpregnant women toward the American. Furthermore, this relative antipathy toward the foreigner was substantially higher during the first trimester. Indeed, the incidence of xenophobic attitudes dropped over the course of pregnancy, just as incidence of the nausea did.

All this research suggests that an evolutionary perspective can help us better understand stereotyping and prejudice. The more we understand
these processes and what might magnify them, the better equipped we will be to combat them.

Combating prejudice has long been one of psychology's most noble goals. Unfortunately, the theories psychologists relied on were often incomplete and were sometimes just dead wrong. For example, before psychologists began to understand that the mind uses different rules for handling different kinds of information, we tended to talk about all forms of prejudice as being more or less the same thing—“negative feelings” about the members of a group. As my colleagues Steve Neuberg and Cathy Cottrell have pointed out, though, negative feelings come in more than one flavor. The same fellow might hold prejudices against black men because he fears a physical threat from the gang members on the corner, prejudices against homosexuals because he feels disgust at the thought of two men dancing and kissing, and prejudices against Asians because he worries they will out-compete him for money and jobs. As Schaller's research demonstrates, some prejudices might be motivated by a fear of disease and others by a fear of physical danger, so that prejudice against a black woman from Nigeria might have different motivations than prejudice against a black man from east Los Angeles. Only in some cases are two groups subject to the same prejudice, and sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, Cottrell and Neuberg found that college men and women had surprisingly similar negative feelings about fundamentalist Christians and radical feminists—in this case, students perceived both groups as threats to personal freedom.

If you want to reduce prejudice, then, an intervention designed to reduce the wrong kind could fail or even backfire—increasing the very prejudices you hoped to reduce. So this stuff really matters. Steve Neuberg and Mark Schaller tried to spell all this out in a paper they submitted to
American Psychologist
, the official journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). But the paper was
rejected, and the reviews revealed all the old political antipathies toward evolutionary psychology. Despite the expressed intention of the APA to combat stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, an evolutionary approach to the matter was judged to be “insufficiently sensitive.”

To be fair,
American Psychologist
has high standards, and most papers submitted there are rejected, so perhaps Neuberg and Schaller's paper was turned down because of other problems. But I did think that Neuberg and Schaller's paper proposing an evolutionary model of prejudice was much more important in its implications than many of the more “sensitive” papers published around that time (which frequently rehashed the claim that psychologists are subtly racist or sexist even when they are trying not to be).

The controversy that dogs evolution-inspired papers like Neuberg and Schaller's flows directly from the controversy that dogged sociobiology in the 1970s. Ullica Segerstråle, a scientific historian who was working on her doctorate at Harvard when the firestorm began, wrote
Defenders of the Truth
, a detailed account of the earlier period. When Wilson's book
Sociobiology
came out, a group of Marxist intellectuals—including Richard Lewontin, a famous Harvard biologist, and his colleague Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist who became a widely read science writer—mounted a heated attack on the idea that human behavior could be understood in evolutionary terms. The opponents argued that sociobiology was an attempt by white male elitists to justify the status quo. Indeed, Gould argued that sociobiology was linked to Nazism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and other forms of societal evil. After Gould died, the torch passed to several zealous followers, including Hilary and Steven Rose, who claim that evolutionary psychology “is transparently part of a right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity, above all the welfare state.”

A cornerstone assumption of this critique is the claim that evolutionary accounts of behavior include an intrinsic assumption of genetic determinism, which in turn precludes societal change. If this were true, then it would hardly be appropriate for
American Psychologist
to publish an article on evolutionary psychology and racial prejudice. It would be worse than insensitive; it would be aiding and abetting a right-wing plot to convince people that racism is in their genes and therefore impossible to change. The problem with the critique, however, is that neither the premises nor the conclusions have a shred of truth.

For one thing, even if evolutionary theorists were in fact a pack of right-wingers, or even a pack of mildly conservative people who like the status quo, that should have no bearing on how one evaluates their findings. Science proceeds by challenging our assumptions, whatever they may be, and then submitting those challenging alternatives to empirical tests. Good reasons for publishing or not publishing a research finding ought to include whether it is interesting and whether the data supporting it are rigorous—not whether the scientist based his or her hypothesis on the proper political ideas. But I am sort of wasting my breath here, because as it turns out, evolutionary psychologists are, like most academics, a left-leaning group. I have been to several meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the people I see there are a lot of young women and men who look as if they belong to the Sierra Club and hang out in coffee shops that sell fair-traded organic coffee. Most of the old white men there tend to sport the “I was a hippie in the '60s” look.

In fact, when Josh Tybur, Geoffrey Miller, and Steve Gangestad surveyed a sample of 168 doctoral students in psychology on political issues and their votes in the 2004 presidential election, they found that evolutionary psychology students were substantially more liberal than the American populace, and even more liberal than other academics. At the time of Tybur's survey, 30 percent of the American
population identified as Republican; none of the evolutionary psychologists did. In this, they were similar to other psychologists, only slightly more liberal (12 out of 137 non–evolutionary psychologists, but none of the evolutionary psychologists, had voted for George W. Bush). When questioned on specific beliefs, evolutionary psychologists also expressed significantly more liberal attitudes than the U.S. population, and again they were like other psychologists, only slightly more liberal. The only substantial difference between evolutionary psychologists and the other group was that evolutionary psychologists were significantly more positive about the use of the scientific method.

As for claims of genetic determinism, these are also simply false. Indeed, research generated by evolutionary psychologists has suggested something very different: Evolved psychological mechanisms were designed by natural selection to respond to
variations
in the environment. Hence, evolutionary psychology is inherently concerned with discovering the varying environmental cues that turn adaptive mechanisms on and off. All the findings discussed in this chapter reflect this. I have talked about findings showing that certain kinds of prejudice are triggered by fear, others are triggered by concern with disease, and still others by economic threats. And the same is true for all the other chapters in this book: We have been talking a lot, and will talk more in later chapters, about how adaptive psychological mechanisms respond to variations in threats and opportunities in the environment. That just does not qualify as genetic determinism. (If you want more evidence, read John Alcock's
Triumph of Sociobiology
or Steven Pinker's
Blank Slate
.)

At the same time, seeking to understand the mechanisms that cause prejudice is not the same as justifying them. Those who claim otherwise are falling for something called the naturalistic fallacy, which confuses discussions of what is “natural” with discussions of what is “good.” It is easy to see why one might make this mistake if one does not think too deeply about it. Indeed, the word “natural”
often does have a positive connotation, as in “natural foods.” However, the positive connotation does not quite hold up if you look at the natural world. Here are some things that are quite natural: tuberculosis, cancer, AIDS, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, leeches, tapeworms, infanticide by male lions, earthquakes, and tsunamis. None of these natural things would typically be regarded as intrinsically morally superior to “unnatural” things like iPods, impressionist paintings, hybrid cars, or well-manicured English gardens.