FROM Brexit to President Trump, recent political events have let some nasty cats out of the bag. Racists and xenophobes are on the march. But perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising: after all, that is what we are.
Here’s the unpalatable truth: we are biased, prejudiced and quite possibly a little bit racist. Psychologists have long known that we put people into little mental boxes marked “us” and “them”. We implicitly like, respect and trust people who are the most similar to us, and feel uncomfortable around everybody else. And before you deny it, this tendency towards is so ingrained we often don’t realise we are doing it. It is an evolutionary hangover affecting how the human brain responds to people it perceives as different.
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In one study from 2000, just showing participants brief flashes of faces of people of a different race , part of the brain’s fear circuitry, even though the participants felt no conscious fear. According to more recent research, however, the amygdala doesn’t just control fear; it responds to many things, calling on other brain areas to pay attention. So although we’re not automatically scared of people different from us, we are hardwired to flag them. Evolutionarily, that makes sense: it paid to notice when someone from another tribe dropped by.
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We’re also prone to dehumanisation. When at Princeton University scanned volunteers’ brains as they looked at pictures of homeless people, she found that the medial prefrontal cortex, which is activated when we think about other people, stayed quiet. Volunteers seemed to be .
“The bad news is how fast this automated ‘us’ and ‘them’ response is, and how wired in it is,” says Fiske. “The good news is that it can be overcome depending on context.” In both the homeless study and a rerun of the amygdala study, Fiske found that fear or indifference quickly disappeared when participants were asked questions about what kind of food the other person might enjoy. “As soon as you have a basis for dealing with a person as an individual, the effect is not there,” says Fiske.
What’s more, what we put in the “them” and “us” boxes is remarkably flexible. When at New York University created in-groups including people from various races, volunteers , regardless of race. All you have to do to head off prejudice, it seems, is to convince people they are on the same team.
We are also instinctively cooperative, at least when we don’t have time to think about it. Yale University psychologist David Rand asked volunteers to play gambling games in which they could choose to be selfish, or cooperate with other players for a slightly lower, but shared, payoff. When pressed to make a snap decision, people were much more likely to cooperate than when given time to mull it over.
So perhaps you’re not an asshole after all – if you know when to stop to think about it and when to go with your gut. Maybe, just maybe, there is hope for the world.
This article appeared in print under the headline “You are… an asshole”
