Ever looked into the psych research on the “other-race face effect”?
The TLDR version is:
a) People from a wide assortment of cultures tend to be much worse at differentiating the faces of people from unfamiliar racial groups (AKA “they all look alike to me”)
b) This effect is definitely learned, as cross-racial adoptees tend to be better at differentiating the faces of the people from the races they live with rather than their own.
I’m not sure how it goes for kids with same-race parents but different-race peers (AKA non-adoptee immigrants), but I’d expect something in the middle.
Yes, just as there were doubtlessly white cultures who would have considered redheads a different “race.” Not so much nowadays. If we can move beyond caring about those distinctions then surely we have the potential to move beyond caring whether someone comes from an Asian or Jewish background.
But we’ve gotten past that to the point where the original meaning of “sinister” is all but lost.
Which shows that how we categorise what is – and is not – a designation of “in group” is not ingrained at all. It’s taught, if not explicitly, then implicitly.
Works the same for single race kids raised very early in a mixed race community or family. It has to do with the brain getting enough exposure to people of different races early on in more than just person-passing-by. The cognitive pathways to differentiate more subtle differences in facial features get established.
The effects are seen so readily in mixed races families bc the child is getting serious one on one time with people of another race. Same thing happens if various caregivers and peer-friends are different races. It’s hard to “other” the kinds of people you grow up with.
I would point you to some reliable sources but I don’t have the time right now, sorry.
Although I’m not, my friends are disproportionately Jewish, and I’m really wondering where this “cold” stereotype comes from. Presumably the haters have never actually met any Jews? Certainly they’ve never been to a Jewish wedding!
As a matter of fact, as a parent, yes. My daughter’s school is small, and they have a zero tolerance policy on bullying. The kids must first work together to figure their shit out, and then, if not, the teachers or principle and parents intervene to help them. They do this from the time they are 3 years old. My daughter’s HS class has no problems with bullying.
So, yes it’s a learned behavior. Kids begin learning about the world around them almost as soon as they are born. Their little brains are sponges, and they quickly learn to mimic behaviors around them.
And you won’t do that by dismissing our social behaviors and how they shape our society.
Communication and cooperation also come naturally. All those things you list are social constructs that have changed over time. They are not baked into our DNA, they are learned behaviors, which might at times be driven by our baser instincts.
Funny, all I’ve read in those fields attend to the constructed nature of society and our behaviors. They don’t assume something is biological, primarily because they can see change over time and they are not themselves biologists.
I hear that; just a couple of weeks ago I was saying that the only thing that makes me happy that my parents are addled and in care is that those two flee’ers from Nazi-occupied Holland don’t see or understand what’s happening. It would break them.
This. We are a social species that spends a helluva lot more time cooperating than picking fights with each other, even in bad times. THAT is the part of human nature that we should be working hard to cultivate instead of taking the fatalistic “humans are bigots, no way around it” attitude.
I think this makes perfect sense if you think about it. We are great at pattern recognition and separating things into categories. If say 90% of your average daily interaction is one race, including people you see every day (classmates, workmates, etc) one has to be able to discern all the more subtle differences between people vs the more obvious and unique outliers.
If I were doing a study on this, I’d test say black kids at predominately white schools, and white kids at predominately black schools, and I bet both would test out better than the average. Due to their exposure, they will have a lot more instances where they will be able to discern more subtle differences between people.
Meeting more and different people. I would guess that a college education takes care of some of it; extensive travel some as well. I’m also certain there’s folks for whom there is no cure for bigotry.
While I disagree with the poster, using the term “DNA” as a metaphorical way of saying “inherently” (itself being a metaphorical device more often than not) is common usage. Annoying or not, and factually flawed as fuck or not: it’s here to stay, and we don’t get rid of it by telling people to STFU and study biology.
“The original research by Ohman and Mineka with monkeys and adults suggested two important things that make snakes and spiders different,” LoBue says. “One is that we detect them quickly. The other is that we learn to be afraid of them really quickly.” Her research on infants and young children suggests that this is true early in life, too—but not innate, since small children aren’t necessarily afraid of snakes and spiders.
If you are speaking of a non-biological construct, such as an AI or a philosophy, one can grudgingly accept the “metaphor” excuse, as it is patently obvious that such things do not have possess Deoxyribonucleic acid.
When referring to biological constructs, it automatically implies actual genetic coding. The nature (immutable) over the nurture (learned from interaction with the world and society).
We have fear instincts. What we fear is taught – how early we learn it varies. Fear also ≠ hatred. That we should actively hate someone or something is taught, not ingrained.
I agree to a large extent, but I do not expect anyone to make this distinction any more. The sad but true state is that terms like gene, DNA, and also niche have been appropriated for a wide usage, which spills back even into biology.
I’m not advocating you should accept this without contradiction. I’m very much for precision of language and semantics when it comes to racism.
