physorg | "This study tests
the model that the mind cares about physical features only to the extent
that they suggest social relationships," explained Pietraszewski. "It
shows that the reason the mind attends to race at all is to keep track
of people's affiliations. When race proves not to be a factor, the
alliance detection system attends to it only minimally, if at all."
"The method we used is entirely unobtrusive," said Tooby. "People
don't know what you're measuring, and they couldn't control it even if
they did. It shows the principles by which you're categorizing people
implicitly. In and of itself, implicitly assigning people to racial
categories is not racism. But if you combine the tendency to categorize
by race with a negative evaluation, that is racism."
According to Tooby, when race does not predict who's on what side of
an issue or who's supporting whom, the mind discards it as an element
for identifying alliances. "Traditionally, the general impression people
had was that when you learn to be racist, it gets deeply inscribed and
sneaks out in subtle ways and it's slow to change," he explained. "One
of the striking implications of this research is that the tendency to
categorize by race is easy to eliminate.
"The common-sense interpretation of why you see racial categories in
the world is because different kinds of people exist, and they look
different from each other. Therefore, just like you pick up differences
between pears and peaches, you pick up different races in the world,"
continued Tooby. "But at the genetic level the differences are really
hard to see. It's just not the case that people of one race have a large
series of genes that people from another race lack; you just don't see
that."
The question then becomes why racial differences are so visually
salient to people. "We see race in the world because patterns of
alliance and cooperation have trained us to sort people into categories
that way," he said. "And this training requires that our visual systems
pick up tiny differences and amplify them until what we see matches the
alliance structure of our social world. Young children are often
surprised when adults describe players on their favorite team as being
of a different race. They don't see it."
"This research suggests that our minds retrieve race because it
predicts alliances in our social world," said Cosmides. "When other cues
predict cooperative alliances better, the mind reduces its reliance on
racial categories. That's why we refer to the content of your
cooperation, not the color of your skin."
For years, she added, social scientists have tried unsuccessfully to
identify social situations that decrease the extent to which people
categorize others by race. "One of the reasons people had assumed it was
so difficult is because it's supported by these perceptual
differences," she said. "But we also show that when you have purely
perceptual categories—like wearing red shirts versus yellow shirts—and
when shirt color doesn't mean anything about coalitions or social
differences, people barely pick it up, or they don't pick it up at all.
You can't just say people categorize others by skin color because their
visual system can't help it."
If categorizing individuals by race is a reversible product of a
cognitive system specialized for detecting alliance categories, changing
behavior might have more powerful effects than changing minds, the
researchers said. "Many people assume you need to change how people
think about racial issues to eliminate racism," Cosmides explained.
"This research suggests that if cooperation across racial lines
continues to increase in our society, our tendency to think about people
in racial terms will fall away. Cooperation should change how people
think."
