I am quite convinced this can be traced back to our evolutionary past. We are social animals, always wanting to belong to a coalition. This phenomenon is dubbed as coalition(al) psychology by evolutionary psychologists. Another way of describing this phenomenon is in-group versus out-group bias. Read an excerpt of my book here:
“The risks of our coalitional psychology—Us versus Them
It is quite undisputed that people categorize themselves and others into various groups, for example according to gender, religious affiliation, etc. Multiple competing explanations have been theorized to explain this phenomenon. Back in 1985, Henri Tajfel and John Turner developed Social Identity Theory(SIT), one of the most famous theories in social psychology. They thought that this classification served two functions, namely (1) ordering the social environment, which made life less complicated, and (2) defining oneself in this social environment. They were uninformed by evolutionary psychology or biology, however, and biologists had another explanation: by banding together, our ancestors who mainly lived in nomadic tribes could defend or attack rivaling tribes (e.g. for resources). Biologist Ed Wilson (1975, p. 120)argued that if cooperation was so beneficial for ancestral human groups, natural selection would have favored psychological programs to spot and punish cheaters and to be wary of strangers.
Krebs and Denton (1997)suggested that forming enduring coalitions probably was critical to our ancestors’ survival. Belonging to a group and maintaining coherence between group members was necessary for cooperating and competing for resources with other animals and competing out-groups (other tribes). Both biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists reached the conclusion that our ancestors, hunter-gatherers, lived in bands and often came into conflict with other bands, although archeological evidence shows that inter-group trade also has a long history in human evolution (e.g. overview in Robinson & Barker, 2017). Within larger bands, sub-coalitions formed, as was found in human and related primate studies (for an overview, see Cosmides, Tooby & Kurzban, 2003). This led researchers to the hypothesis that humans would have an evolved brain program (a module or neural circuit) for detecting coalitions. Therefore, the single best and parsimonious explanation is that humans seek power by forming coalitions and alliances with similarly-minded others, especially in conflicts with other coalitions or out-groups.
Whereas dress and dialect probably emerged as some of the first markers in this cognitive system, it is likely that other cues would also have been in place early, and some may have developed as a by-product of this adaptive coalitional machinery. Other early cues in the adapted coalition (or alliance) detection system could have been X works together with Y, X defends the views of Y, X fights together with Y against an enemy,etc. (e.g. Pietraszewski et al., 2014). Years of research has revealed “that people spontaneously categorize newly encountered individuals by their sex, age and race,” (p. 2)[1]but recent research strongly suggests that implicit conversational cues as well as behavioral cues lead to spontaneous categorization; moreover, these cues have stronger effects than visual cues such as dress or race. This should not surprise us, some evolutionary psychologists say, because if we look at the differentiation of skin color, it is only a relatively new feature if you compare the last 60,000 years with the millions of years since we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. Based on experimental research, they argue that the fact that people categorize themselves and others into races is merely a by-productof our categorization and coalitional psychology. For example, if basketball teams were composed of 50% black and 50% white players and they all wore the same color of jersey for their team, the team members self-identified as a team and the categorization into race disappeared (near zero). The same effect was found when a strong verbal identification was given to the own group (a charity group membership, cues of political party support). By contrast, the categorization into sex and age did not disappear in such experiments (Kurzban et al., 2001; Pietraszewsky et al., 2014, 2015). The researchers interpret this pattern to mean that race. just like nationality, is a social rather than a biological construct, whereas sex and age are biological facts that do not trigger our coalitional psychology.
I do not entirely agree with this view, however. In the extensive chapter on recruitment methods, I explain how GWA studies can reveal biological patterns and track people’s ancestry. Moreover, humans tend to think in terms of ‘essences.’ Essentialismimplies that we tend to label species, using different discrete names for them. Children as well as adults expect species-specific properties: we view members of a category as sharing a deep, underlying, inherent nature (Rhodes et al., 2012). Thus far, our inclination towards essentialism has been found in every culture studied so far (Gelman, 2004; Henrich et al., 2010b). Itis probablyan evolved mind module that harbors a kind of folk biology. It was probably very helpful to our ancestors’ survival and food gathering practices. Francisco Gil-White (1999, 2001)provided a more elaborate hypothesis about essentialism: he proposed that we have innate knowledge about several species (just as other animals do) and that entails a belief in essences. This innate essentialism is an alternative explanation for why we tend to label people into races as well as ethnicities: ethnicities are characterized by clothing, rituals individuals use to display membership, language, and other behavioral norms. People tend to do label other humans too, whether they truly ‘belong’ to another species (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Australophitecus, etc.) or whether we sub-divide our own homo sapiens species into races. Essentialists erroneously see races as inherentlylazy, shrewd, smart, superior, etc. And, as Richard Dawkins noted on edge.org: “Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology.”
This essentialism might have resulted in a “cheap learning strategy” (Machery & Faucher, 2017, p. 1161)or a kind of heuristic: if you interact with people of other ethnicities that share the same behaviors, you might feel safer interacting with them. In a review of four competing hypotheses,[2]Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher (2017)agree that there must be an evolved, domain-specific, coalitional cognitivesystem. The fact that so many similarities in the classification of phenotypic properties can be found across cultures points to a universal cognitive system. But they conclude that the empirical evidence lends more support to the Gill-White hypothesis for explaining racialism,[3]although they don’t agree with all its aspects (e.g. essentialism) and are of the opinion that the jury is still out. The precise cognitive mechanism needs further specification.
In the previous paragraph, I wrote that I partially disagree with the idea that race has no biological roots. This also implies that I partially agree; indeed, GWA studies using ancient DNA have also demonstrated that a lot of admixture happened over the past few thousand years and before, making the primeval division of race untenable. Most people are of mixed race, although that is not always visible in skin color. But saying that biology isn’t involved at all has been proven wrong by DNA findings. In my opinion, it is more likely that age and sex were always obviously present in our evolutionary past. It is therefore logical that these categories never disappear. The concept of race is newer (our ancestors didn’t have a lot of opportunities to meet people of other skin color), which is probably why it can be replaced so quickly with another arbitrary set. Nevertheless, what is important is that our coalitional detection system makes us interpret cues like skin color or facial features as cues for social interaction, thus leading us to categorize people by race, but the good news is that this can easily be overcome. This coalitional categorization system seems to be dynamic and can be ‘updated.’ In humans, group membership is often fluid and can be defined by many axes (e.g. religion, region, language, political views) (e.g. Moya & Scelza, 2015; Pietraszewski, et al., 2014, 2015).
No matter which one is considered the best evolutionary hypothesis, the proposition that our coalitional psychology results in different behavior towards members of the own group (in-group) than towards members of the other group (out-group) has been tested and confirmed many times. We are more cooperative towards our in-group and more hostile towards members of the out-group(e.g. Burkart et al., 2009). There is some strong evidence for the biological foundations of our coalitional psychology. Firstof all, our coalitional psychology is regulated by hormones: oxytocinproduces kind behavior towards in-group members and hostile behavior towards out-group members. These hormones only have an effect on people who are already prosocial(see for example Sapolsky, 2017, p. 116 and p. 258). Second, functional neuroimaging studies have found differences in neural development. Children pay more attention to out-group faces (probably to anticipate threat), whereas adolescents show relatively greater activation in a number of brain regions,such as the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex, to in-group faces—probably because fitting in becomes very important to them (Guassi Moreira et al., 2017). Competing explanations, such as the SSSM of social psychology, can be ruled out (Pietraszewski, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2014; Bailliet et al., 2014). This also means that this evolved, inherited, and innate coalition detection mechanism cannot be ‘stopped.’We only need to find and use smart ways to avoid the negative effects in organizations (as well as between nations, of course, but that is beyond the scope of this book).
[1]There is still a heated debate as to whether use of the term ‘race’ is ‘allowed’—people on the extreme left of the political spectrum can’t stand if other people (even scientists) use the word. In the biological sciences, it means that a population is (1) statistically significantly genetically distinct from another population, (2) found within more or less localized territory, and (3) can still interbreed with neighboring populations (Cliquet, 2010). Using these scientific criteria, there is no reason to oppose the use of the term ‘race’ for the human species too. Moreover, people of all skin colors automatically identify with people of their skin color. I will deal with this issue more in depth in the chapter on recruitment.
[2]Theories that view race as a ‘social construct.’
[3]Racialism is the value-free term to describe the fact that people automatically classify humans on the basis of physical properties such as skin color, facial features, height, etc.”