You might wonder how I like to research for my speeches,
consulting and books. I do deep dives into the research. I love to swim in the true blue research on my topic. I can
get lost for hours just looking up one topic. When I was writing my book,SNAP Making the Most of First Impressions Body Language
and Charisma, I spent two years doing deep dives into the research.
Here is an example of just one deep dive!
Conditioning
is a basic process whereby automatic feelings and actions are triggered by the
presence of particular cues. We become conditioned as a sensory stimulus is
repeatedly paired with a feeling, such as an angry parent with a slap, leading
to any anger evoking the emotional fear and hurt.
As we grow used to being with other
people, we subconsciously learn to read their body language particularly as it
triggers emotions and memories that let us predict what will happen next. And
we then automatically react before the event occurs, for example flinching at
an angry voice. Positive cues happen too, such as when we feel good.
In case you hadn't heard, there's a new-ish field within
psychology, called positive psychology, which is very relevant to self growth.
The premise of the field is that throughout the history of psychology, far too
much emphasis has been placed on mental illness and disorder, and getting
people from a "minus 5 to a zero." The aim of positive psychology is
to look more deeply into the factors that cause people and groups to thrive -
getting people from "zero to plus 5".
One of the main areas of interest then, is positive emotions. This is a term I
don't particularly like, because all emotions are 'positive' in the sense that
they serve an adaptive function - but you know what I'm talking about; the
emotions that are, for most people, more pleasant to experience.
Here are a few findings from this line of research into positive emotions,
which you hopefully didn't know before.
Positive emotions undo the effects of negative emotions
'Negative' emotions (again a term I don't like), prepare the body for a certain
type of action. To do this, they have specific psychological and physiological
effects on the body (such as increased cardiovascular activity). Positive
emotions, when elicited after negative ones, serve to rid the individual of
this 'action readiness', giving them access to a broader repertoire of
potential behaviors.
Positive emotions increase creativity
Positive emotions have been shown in a number of studies to improve creative
thinking. It is important to point out the type of creative thinking in
question. The studies test divergent thinking; a typical task might be
"come up with as many possible uses for a brick as possible". So
positive emotions are useful in the 'brainstorming' sense of creativity.
Negative emotions have the opposite effect, and negative to neutral states are
more effective when critical thinking and attention to detail are required.
Bear this in mind when selecting your study playlist - choose music that
elicits the most useful mood for the task.
Positive emotions counter the own-race bias
There is a phenomenon called the 'own-race bias' in facial recognition. We find
it easier to recognize the faces of people belonging to our own race than we do
people belonging to others. This is the technical term for the "they all
look the same to me" experience. But studies have shown that people in
positive moods are less susceptible to the own-race bias, relative to neutral
or negative moods.
You might have noticed a common theme running through these three points:
positive emotions broaden your perceptions/thoughts/behaviors, while negative
ones narrow them. The idea is that deep in our evolutionary past, our ancestors
faced very specific threats, and our bodies have evolved to attend to these
threats in specific ways, to the exclusion of other things in the environment.
For example, if there's a dangerous predator nearby, you don't want to be
caught admiring the pretty daisies. So your whole body shifts perceptions and
resources to prepare you to run or fight. But when things are going well, when
there's no particular threat, it's better to broaden your perceptions and the
potential thoughts and actions you can take, so that you can expand, build
resources and make new allies.
Hence, positive emotions counter the physiological effects of negative ones,
allow more divergent thinking, and help you to processes faces more globally,
rather than focusing on particular features, as negative emotions would tend to
lead you to do.
References:
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive
Psychology. American Psychologist. 56 (3), 218-226.
Johnson, K. J., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2005). "We all look the same to
me": Positive emotions eliminate the own-race bias in face recognition.
Psychological Science, 16, 875-881
** To comment on this article or to read comments
about this article, go here.
About the Author:
Warren is a student at UEL, studying
psychology. When he's not studying for his courses, he's at his day job as a
research assistant or writing for his positive psychology blog. Do get in touch
if you want to discuss this or
IMPRESSIONS OF DANGER INFLUENCE IMPRESSIONS OF
PEOPLE:
AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ON INDIVIDUAL AND
COLLECTIVE COGNITION
Mark
Schaller, Jason Faulkner, Justin H. Park
University of British
Columbia
Steven L. Neuberg, and Douglas T. Kenrick
Arizona State University
(2004)
Journal of Cultural and
Evolutionary Psychology
Volume 2, pages 231-247
Abstract.
An
evolutionary approach to social cognition
yields novel hypotheses about the perception of people belonging to specific
kinds of social categories. These implications are illustrated by empirical results linking the
perceived threat of physical injury to stereotypical impressions of outgroups.
We review a set of studies revealing several ways in which threat-connoting
cues influence perceptions of ethnic outgroups and the individuals who belong
to those outgroups. We also present new results that suggest additional implications of evolved
danger-avoidance mechanisms on interpersonal communication and the persistence
of cultural-level stereotypes about ethnic outgroups. The conceptual
utility of an evolutionary approach is further illustrated by a parallel line
of research linking the
threat of disease to additional kinds of social perceptions and behaviors.
Evolved danger-avoidance
mechanisms appear to contribute in diverse ways to individual-level cognitive
processes, as well as to culturally-shared collective beliefs.
Key words: Cognition, Communication, Culture, Danger,
Emotion, Evolution, Stereotypes
IMPRESSIONS OF DANGER INFLUENCE IMPRESSIONS OF
PEOPLE:
AN
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ON INDIVIDUAL AND
COLLECTIVE
COGNITION
As a species, humans typically respond with fear and avoidance
to environments that pose real risks to physical well-being. We feel nervous
when we peer over a precipitous cliff, for example, and we jump away from
snakes that slither out of the grass. These emotional and behavioral responses
are functional; they help prevent injury and promote survival. As functional as these psychological
tendencies are today, they were surely even more functional among human (and
pre-human) populations during the long epochs of the historical past, when, in
the absence of modern medical interventions, injury and infection were likely
to lead to disability or death. Given these functional consequences, the
capacity for fearful, avoidant responses has been evolutionarily adaptive.
This does not mean, however, that these psychological
responses are perfectly calibrated to the actual danger lurking in the
environment. Far from it. As with many other adaptive responses, fearful
responses over-generalize: We often react fearfully even in the absence of any
real danger. A precipitous cliff may make us feel faint even when we are
strapped securely in a gondola seat, and a garden hose in the grass may scare
us just as much as a snake. Despite our capacity for rational appraisal, these
reactions can be triggered instantly and automatically by the perception of
simple schematic perceptual cues. Fearful reactions to dangerous things are often extended predictably to
non-dangerous things as well.
Just as cliffs
and snakes are potentially dangerous, so are people on occasion. As such, we react
with fear and avoidance to some interpersonal encounters. These reactions can
occasionally be justified on clearly rational grounds, but often they are not.
Certain people might arouse anxiety and avoidance simply because they have some
characteristic that heuristically fits some schematic danger-connoting profile,
even if that characteristic is logically irrelevant to any real danger. Just as
we sometimes treat garden hoses as though they were snakes, we sometimes
perceive benign people to be dangerous.
This
psychological tendency has consequences for our impressions about individuals
and for our prejudicial attitudes toward groups of people. Moreover, because
individual-level acts influence collectively-shared beliefs, the evolved
psychology of danger-avoidance may also influence the collective norms that
define human cultures. The purpose of this article is to describe some of the
subtle ways in which individuals' perceptions of danger influence individual
and collective impressions of others.
THE EVOLVED
PSYCHOLOGY OF DANGER-AVOIDANCE
Throughout our
evolutionary past, specific kinds of cognitive mechanisms are likely to have
emerged that helped individuals avoid recurrent dangers. To operate, these
mechanisms would have to be sensitive to perceptual cues that predicted the
presence of danger. For example, a loud noise like an animal’s growl may have
predicted the presence of a mammalian predator, and a coiled tubular shape on
the ground may have predicted the presence of a snake. Cognitive mechanisms for
detecting these cues would have conferred a survival advantage.
While there may
be an innate tendency to associate some categories of cues with danger, many
specific danger-connoting cues must be learned. However, even when learning is
involved, certain kinds of stimuli are more rapidly learned to be linked to
danger. For example, we learn to more rapidly associate aversive outcomes with
potentially-dangerous objects (e.g., snakes) than with benign objects (e.g.,
flowers or mushrooms). We also learn to more rapidly associate aversive
outcomes with specific dangerous objects that existed in
evolutionarily-relevant epochs (e.g., snakes) than with equally-dangerous
objects of more recent vintage (e.g., electrical outlets; for a review see Ohman and Mineka, 2001).
Adaptive
cognitive mechanisms for detecting danger are not always accurate (Haselton, Nettle and Andrews, 2004). Because the failure to
avoid an actual danger carries serious negative consequences, whereas the
erroneous avoidance of benign entities does not, these danger-detection
mechanisms are likely to be biased in predictable ways. Specifically, evolved danger-detection mechanisms have
probably evolved to be risk-averse: To err on the side of
"false-positives" – so as to minimize the dire consequences of
"false negatives" – and thus to treat as dangerous many benign
environmental cues (e.g., garden hoses) which are superficially similar to the
cues connoting ancestral dangers. This implies that in contemporary
environments, danger-avoidance responses may be triggered by a variety of cues
that are not actually dangerous at all.
Adaptive
danger-avoidance mechanisms not only promote hyper-vigilance to cues predicting
possible danger, but also activate a pattern of functionally adaptive responses
to danger. In avoiding
danger, time is of the essence, and so initial danger-avoidance responses are
probably rapidly and reflexively elicited by danger-connoting cues (Schaller, 2003). For example, the
acoustic startle reflex occurs very rapidly in the absence of any conscious
cognitive analysis of a situation. The specific response to any perceived
danger is likely to involve the automatic activation of specific emotions and
cognitions that motivate specific functionally-beneficial behaviors (e.g.,
avoidance).
Successful
danger-avoidance mechanisms must also be attentive to contextual cues providing
information about an individual’s actual vulnerability to danger. In contexts
connoting high vulnerability, the cost of false negatives increases as it is
especially dangerous to ignore a potential threat when one is especially
vulnerable to that threat. In contexts connoting low vulnerability, the cost of
false positives increases. This is because under conditions in which one is
truly invulnerable to harm, the functional benefits of a danger-avoidant
response are negligible and may in fact be outweighed by the costs of engaging
in that response (e.g., caloric consumption, disruption of ongoing tasks). As a
result, danger-avoidance responses are often amplified in contexts connoting a
high vulnerability to danger and may be inhibited in contexts connoting a low
vulnerability to danger. For example, the acoustic startle reflex is amplified
in conditions of ambient darkness, a contextual cue that typically signals greater
vulnerability to danger (Grillon,
Pellowshki, Merikangas and Davis,
1997). Similarly, the engagement of evolved danger-avoidance mechanisms may
also be moderated by individual differences in perceived vulnerability to harm.
For a variety of reasons, some people feel especially vulnerable to specific
dangers, whereas other people feel especially invulnerable. These chronic feelings of
vulnerability or invulnerability provide additional information that may
amplify or inhibit danger-avoidance responses.
In summary,
evolved danger-avoidance mechanisms typically (a) promote hyper-vigilance to
danger-connoting cues, (b) are biased to be risk-averse and so are likely to
perceive danger even when none is present, (c) automatically elicit
functionally-relevant emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses, and (d)
are moderated by both chronic and contextual information that heuristically
conveys personal vulnerability to danger.
THE AVOIDANCE OF
DANGERS POSED BY PEOPLE
Evolved
danger-avoidance mechanisms influence reactions not only to cues in the
physical environment, but also toward cues in the social environment.
Interactions with specific kinds of people may result in a variety of forms of
physical harm (direct physical assault, transmission of infectious diseases,
etc.). Just as a specific danger-avoidance mechanism appears to have evolved to promote detection and
avoidance of snakes (Ohman and Mineka, 2001), other specific
danger-avoidance mechanisms may have evolved to detect and avoid specific kinds
of people who pose specific kinds of threat to personal well-being (Kurzban and Leary, 2001; Neuberg
and Cottrell, 2002; Schaller, Park and Faulkner, 2003).
Like other
hypothetical danger-avoidance processes, interpersonal danger-avoidance
requires detection of specific features in others that heuristically connote
harm-doing potential. Upon detecting these cues, an interpersonal
danger-avoidance mechanism likely triggers psychological responses (e.g., fear)
to motivate behaviors (e.g. avoidance) that reduce the threat posed by
potentially dangerous others. In addition, interpersonal danger-avoidance
responses are likely to be moderated by chronic or contextual variables
connoting vulnerability to specific interpersonal dangers.
This
analysis of hypothetical danger-avoidance mechanisms has implications for
contemporary social cognition. If some ancestral cognitive mechanisms arose to
detect and avoid people heuristically associated with danger, then people who
possess similar danger-connoting features in contemporary environments might
currently be targets of these reactions. This is likely to occur regardless of
whether these features accurately predict the presence of real danger in modern
environments, since these mechanisms are responsive to heuristic (but not
necessarily accurate) danger-connoting cues. At the level of individual
cognition, danger-avoidance processes might underlie various phenomena in the
realm of person perception, stereotyping, and prejudice. Some people might be judged to
have specific kinds of negative characteristics simply because they share
superficial features that trigger evolved danger-avoidance responses. Moreover,
at the level of collective cognition, concerns about interpersonal danger might
promote the transmission of specific kinds of negative beliefs about
people heuristically associated with danger. This may promote the emergence and
persistence of specific kinds of culturally shared beliefs about the dangers
posed by specific categories of people.
In recent years,
several research projects have been motivated by this evolutionary approach to
individual and collective cognition, yielding a novel set of discoveries
bearing on a diverse set of social cognitive phenomena. We now review some of
this research, focusing especially on studies that explore the cognitive and
cultural consequences of an evolved mechanism for avoiding interpersonal
physical injury.
IMPLICATIONS FOR
CONTEMPORARY INTER-GROUP IMPRESSIONS
During much of our evolutionary history, people lived in small tribal units.
In this setting, unexpected interactions between individuals from mutually
unfamiliar tribes may have aroused physical violence, thus representing a
threat to individuals' health and survival. The functional cost associated with
these inter-group encounters may have led to the emergence of specific
psychological mechanisms that facilitated the avoidance of tribal outsiders. A danger-avoidance mechanism may have evolved to facilitate the
learning and detection of cues identifying tribal outgroups, as well as to
facilitate the cue-based arousal of functionally-relevant emotions (e.g., fear)
and cognitions (e.g., stereotypic beliefs that linked tribal outgroups with
traits connoting danger). While operating directly at the individual level of
analysis, this psychological mechanism may also have had collective
consequences by promoting the interpersonal transmission of beliefs that
focused on the threats posed by members of tribal outgroups.
Although contemporary social environments are very
different from those that characterized our evolutionary past, any modern
category of people who fit a "tribal" template (e.g., ethnic
outgroups) might trigger this evolved danger-avoidance process.
This analysis
produces a number of testable hypotheses. If ethnic outgroup status triggers an
evolved danger-avoidance process, then encounters with ethnic outgroup members
might arouse danger-relevant emotions and cognitions. Existing research supports this idea; interactions
with members of ethnic outgroups elicit self-reported fear and anxiety as well
as increased cardiovascular reactivity (Blascovich,
Mendes, Hunter, Lickel and Kowai-Bell,
2001). Brain
structures linked to danger-relevant emotions such as fear are also activated
when people perceptually encounter ethnic outgroups (Phelps et al., 2000). Reactions to outgroups also include
specific kinds of danger-relevant cognitions. For example, ethnic
outgroups often evoke negative stereotypes that reflect specific concerns about
hostility and untrustworthiness.
Additional, more
textured, hypotheses are implied by this analysis as well: Any variable (either
chronic or contextual) that creates an impression of vulnerability to physical
danger may more strongly trigger danger-avoidant responses in response to
members of ethnic outgroups. This may occur even if the source of vulnerability
is logically unrelated to the outgroup, as an evolved danger-avoidance
mechanism is likely to respond heuristically to any signal of personal
vulnerability. To test these hypotheses, several sets of studies examine the
link between danger-vulnerability variables and functionally-specific
cognitions about members of ethnic outgroups.
Functional
Projection of Emotion in Interpersonal Perception
An important part
of any social interaction is the assessment of others' intentions. One of the
primary means of assessing others’ intentions is through the perception and
decoding of their emotion-relevant facial expressions. A large body of psychological literature has
examined the processes that assist, influence, and sometimes bias our
perceptions of others' emotions (e.g., Niedenthal
and Halberstadt, 2003), and
danger-avoidance mechanisms clearly play some role here. People are especially
quick to detect the emotional expression of anger, which most clearly connotes
an impending threat (Hansen and Hansen, 1988; Öhman, Lundqvist
and Esteves, 2001). Furthermore,
some people are better than others at detecting anger. For instance, children
who have been the object of physical abuse, and so may be especially wary of
hostility, are particularly accurate at anger-detection (Pollak and Sinha, 2002). In a recent set of studies, Maner et al. (2004) examined the
perception of others' emotions within an intergroup context. These studies
tested the hypothesis that individuals who are especially wary of danger are
also more likely to perceive anger in the faces of people whose ethnic outgroup
membership implicitly connotes potential hostility.
In one study reported by Maner
et al. (2004), white American participants were presented with a series of
photographs, each depicting a target person. The target persons varied along
dimensions of both race (Black versus White) and gender (Men versus Women).
Story of TV star
from the Waltons talking about musieme door to prejudice and door to
undprejudic Thus, among the target persons there was a category of individuals
– Black men – that fit a cultural stereotype connoting the potential for
hostility. While all photographs depicted target persons with neutral facial
expressions, participants were told that the targets were photographed while
they were deliberately trying to mask an emotion that they were feeling. The
task of participants was to rate the extent to which each target person was
feeling one of several different possible emotions (anger, fear, happiness,
etc.). Prior to this emotion-detection task, participants were shown one of
several short movie clips. One of these clips was pre-rated to arouse a
fearful, vulnerable, self-protective state in participants. Emotion-detection
ratings made by participants in this condition were compared to those made by
participants who were shown an affectively neutral movie clip (control
condition).
Results revealed
that a temporarily-activated state of vulnerability led to the perception of
more anger in the faces of Black men. Moreover, this effect was
target-specific: There was no such amplification in the amount of anger
perceived in the faces of White men, nor was there any such amplification in
the amount of anger perceived in the faces of women. This effect was also specific to the
functionally-relevant emotion of anger: There was no tendency to perceive
greater levels of fear or other emotions in the faces of Black men. Thus, these
results cannot be attributed to the facilitating effects of physiological
arousal, or to any sort of semantic priming process. The process that does
account for these results is a sort of functional projection of emotion. That
is, participants feeling a specific emotional state (fear) projected a very different
but functionally-relevant state (anger) onto a specific set of others whose
outgroup membership (and the cultural stereotype associated with it)
heuristically connotes potential danger.
In another study
using this procedure, Maner et al.
(2004) extended the functional projection phenomena to the perception of a
different outgroup. Participants were White Americans and target photographs
depicted men and women who were either White Americans or of apparent Arabic
ethnicity. It is important to note that this research was conducted during a
period of time in which U.S.-Arab relations were strained, and American media
portrayals of Arabs tended to focus on potential hostilities. As there was
expected to be considerable variability in individuals' stereotypes of Arabs,
participants also completed measures assessing their implicit stereotypes of
Arabic people. Results revealed that these individual-level stereotypes
moderated the functional projection phenomenon. Among participants who held
negative stereotypes of Arabs, the pattern of results replicated those of the
first study. Fearful participants perceived greater anger (but not other
emotions) in the faces of Arab (but not White) target persons. However, the
functional projection phenomena did not emerge among perceivers who held no
implicit negative stereotype, presumably because Arabic ethnicity could not
serve as a heuristic cue connoting potential danger.
Together, these
findings reveal that a temporarily-activated impression of impending danger can
lead to predictable biases in individuals' perceptions of angry emotional
states in ethnic outgroup members. The specific nature of this bias is
consistent with the functional analysis of danger-avoidance offered by an
evolutionary perspective. The results also reveal that this functional
projection phenomenon is variable across individuals, and is dependent on the
extent to which individuals perceive the outgroup in specific stereotypical
ways. This finding offers the useful reminder that the contemporary
consequences of underlying evolutionary mechanisms must be considered in the
context of other processes (e.g., idiosyncratic social learning experiences)
that affect the attitudes and inclinations of individuals.
Expression
of Prejudicial Beliefs
The functional
projection findings were observed when perceivers made emotion judgments about
individual group members. A conceptually similar phenomenon emerges when
perceivers make trait judgments about outgroups as a whole. Schaller, Park and Faulkner (2003) examined the effects of
both chronic and temporarily-activated feelings of vulnerability on the
expression of beliefs about an ingroup and an outgroup. Participants were
students at a Canadian university. They were asked to rate "men from
Canada" (an ingroup) and “men from Iraq” (an outgroup associated with
negative stereotypes) on a set of four personality traits. Two of these traits
(hostile and trustworthy) were especially relevant to the potential for threat
whereas the other two traits (ignorant
and open-minded) were equally
evaluative, but less threat-relevant. Prior to making these ratings, a
manipulation was introduced: the level of ambient lighting. Participants in one
experimental condition completed their ratings under well-lit conditions, while
those in another condition completed their ratings after the lights in the room
had been turned off and the room was plunged into total darkness. In addition,
all participants completed the “Belief in a Dangerous World” scale (BDW; Altemeyer, 1988), a self-report measure
assessing chronic concerns about vulnerability to danger. Therefore, the
research design provided the opportunity to test the individual and joint
effects of a chronic vulnerability cue (BDW) and a temporary vulnerability cue
(ambient darkness) – both of which are logically irrelevant to intergroup
relations – on trait perceptions of ingroup and outgroup.
Results revealed
no effects at all on threat-irrelevant trait ratings. However, an interesting
interactive effect of BDW
and ambient darkness emerged on threat-relevant trait ratings. Iraqi's were
rated to be especially hostile and untrustworthy (and Canadians were rated to
be especially non-hostile and trustworthy) by participants who had high BDW
scores and made their ratings in the dark. Darkness did not lead to this
greater prejudice among low-BDW individuals who felt chronically invulnerable
to harm. Similarly, BDW was not associated with greater prejudice for those
individuals who made their ratings in a well-lit room (and so were not exposed
to an environmental trigger for vulnerability).
These results
reveal that chronic and temporarily-activated impressions of vulnerability to
danger can lead to more exaggerated prejudicial beliefs about outgroups.
Moreover, these variables may interact in interesting ways. Importantly, these
effects are specific to very particular domains of judgment - domains that are
functionally relevant to perceivers' feelings of vulnerability.
Automatic
Activation of Stereotypes
If indeed these
phenomena represent the contemporary expression of evolved danger-avoidance
mechanisms, then the effects are likely to be rooted in automatically-activated
cognitions. Schaller, Park and Mueller (2003) reported two studies that
tested the effects of vulnerability cues on the activation of underlying
cognitive structures. These studies examined the interactive effects of BDW and
ambient darkness on the activation of specific stereotypes about Blacks.
In one study,
participants (non-Black students at a Canadian university) viewed a slide show
depicting a series of photographs of young Black men. Afterwards, they rated
the extent to which they perceived various traits to be part of the cultural
stereotype of Black people – a task that has been used previously to assess the
automatic activation (rather than personal endorsement) of ethnic stereotypes.
Some of the rated traits were highly threat-relevant (e.g., criminal,
untrustworthy) whereas others were stereotypical but less threat-relevant
(e.g., lazy, ignorant). Participants in one condition viewed the slide show
under dimly-lit conditions, whereas participants in another condition viewed
the slides under conditions of near-total darkness. All participants completed
the BDW scale. Results were conceptually consistent with the findings reported
by Schaller, Park and Faulkner (2003). There were no
meaningful effects on the activation of threat-irrelevant stereotypes, but BDW
and ambient darkness had an interactive effect on the activation of
threat-relevant stereotypes. High-BDW participants in the darkness condition
were especially likely to perceive danger-connoting traits to be part of the
cultural stereotype of Blacks.
Schaller,
Park
and Mueller's (2003) second study
replicated this finding using a different measure of stereotype activation.
Participants completed two versions of an “implicit association task” (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz, 1998) – a computer-based
response-time measure that assesses cognitive associations between specific
social categories and semantic information. One IAT assessed the activation of
an implicit association between the social category “African” and the semantic
category “Danger.” Another IAT assessed the implicit association between
“African” and the broader evaluative category “Unpleasant.” Results revealed an
interactive effect of BDW and ambient darkness on the African/Danger IAT such
that high BDW participants in the dark were more likely to associate “African”
with “Danger”. No meaningful effect was observed on the less-functionally-specific
African/Unpleasant IAT.
These results are consistent with other
findings from this line of research, and demonstrate more clearly the effects
of vulnerability cues on the automatic activation of functionally-relevant
cognitive structures.
Sex Differences in
Danger-Avoidant Impressions
There are
several reasons to consider the extent to which there might be sex differences
in the activation of the danger-avoidance processes that operate in social
perception. Women are perhaps more truly vulnerable than men, because women are
generally smaller in stature and so less able to repel physical assaults.
Consequently, a perspective based on the rational assessment of contemporary
vulnerability suggests that the danger-avoidant phenomena reviewed above might
show up more strongly among women than men. An evolutionary perspective,
however, suggests something quite different. In ancestral environments, it is
likely that males more than females were at risk for unexpected intergroup
encounters. Among the primate species most closely related to human beings,
males range more widely than females and are more likely to spend time at
territorial boundaries (Goodall,
1986; Hasegawa, 1990) Intergroup
contact and intergroup hostilities also involve males more than females (Cheney, 1986; Wrangham, 1987). Therefore, the functional benefits
associated with a wariness of outgroup threat (and the cognitive processes
underlying this wariness) would have been greater among males. This line of reasoning suggests that the
danger-avoidant interpersonal perception phenomena reviewed above may be
stronger among men than among women.
Consistent with
this evolutionary perspective, in several of the studies reviewed above,
effects emerged more strongly among men than among women. In one of the studies reported by Maner et al. (2004),
men more than women showed the tendency to perceive anger in Black male faces
following the activation of a self-protective state. There was a similar sex
difference in the effect of ambient darkness on perceptions of Iraqi's
hostility and untrustworthiness (Schaller, Park and Faulkner, 2003).
Additionally, in one study reported by Schaller, Park, and Mueller (2003), men
showed a stronger interactive effect of BDW and darkness on the activation of
danger-relevant Black stereotypes. While
not all studies show meaningful sex differences, the pattern emerging in these preliminary findings
suggests that while danger-avoidant intergroup cognitions do occur across both
sexes, they are likely to be triggered especially strongly in men.
Communication and the
Persistence of Culturally-Shared Stereotypes
The studies
summarized above all examine the operation of danger-avoidance processes at the
level of individual cognition. We know, of course, that human cognitive
processes are importantly influenced by culture (for a review, see Lehman, Chiu and Schaller, 2004), and so
it might be tempting to argue that these phenomena are simply the result of
cultural norms and do not indicate the operation of evolved cognitive processes
at all. After all, children are typically socialized to avoid strangers, and
there are endless examples of cultural products – myths, legends, and other
kinds of collective beliefs – that depict outgroups in unfavorable ways. Logically however, a cultural explanation is
not an alternative to an evolutionary explanation. These two kinds of
explanations operate at very different levels of analysis. Any explanation
based on cultural beliefs and norms demands that we ask why those beliefs and
norms have the specific contents that they do – and an evolutionary analysis is
useful in supplying answers to that question (Atran and Norenzayan, in press; Kenrick, Li and Butner, 2003; Krebs and Janicki, 2004; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992). As a
means of integrating evolutionary and cultural perspectives in the present
context, it is fruitful to consider more thoroughly how evolved
danger-avoidance mechanisms may shape the collective beliefs that help to
define human cultures.
One preliminary
empirical exercise of this sort extends previous studies that have examined the
role of interpersonal communication in the emergence and persistence of
collectively-shared stereotypes. Schaller, Conway and Tanchuk (2002) report
several studies documenting two key findings. First, there is considerable
variability in the extent to which individuals are likely to talk about the
specific characteristics of other people; some traits are more
"communicable" than others. Second, those traits that are more highly
communicable are more likely to persist over time in the popular stereotypes of
culturally-visible outgroups. These findings implicate a process in which
individual decisions, operating within the context of interpersonal
communication, ultimately shape the contents of culturally-shared beliefs. The
question remains: Why are some traits more communicable than others? One
possible answer is this: Those traits that are more diagnostic of danger are
more likely to be talked about – and so are more likely to persist in the
collectively-shared cultural stereotype of groups.
Some preliminary
data support this conceptual analysis. A sample of 43 participants rated 76
traits in response to the following question: “If someone has this trait, to
what extent does the person pose some potential danger to others?” Responses
were recorded on a 10-point scale anchored by endpoints labeled "no danger
at all" and "high level of danger.” The mean rating for each trait
was computed, and these means were converted into z-scores. The absolute value
of these z-scores represented the extent to which the trait was relevant to
danger. Higher values were associated with traits that more clearly implied
threat or the absence of threat; values close to zero indicated that the trait
was not diagnostic of threat. Across the 76 traits, these danger-relevance
values predicted a trait's communicability score (obtained from a different
sample and reported by Schaller et al., 2002), r = .37, p < .001. Apparently, people are more likely to talk
about traits that are more clearly diagnostic of danger.
Given the
well-documented impact of interpersonal communication on culturally-shared
beliefs (Harton and Bourgeois, 2004; Latane, 1996; Schaller et al., 2002),
it is possible that normative beliefs about salient outgroups are especially
likely to coalesce around danger-relevant traits. This hypothesis can be tested
by examining the correlation between a trait's danger-relevance and its
persistence in collective stereotypical beliefs. Schaller et al.
(2002)
summarize data that provides 10 different assessments of a trait's persistence
in Americans' collective stereotype of Blacks across several generations in the
1900s. Each assessment indicates persistence from some specific time period to
some specific later time period (for details, see Schaller et al., 2002).
For each set of persistence scores, one can compute the correlation between a
trait's danger-relevance and its persistence in the collective stereotype.
(Following the procedures of Schaller et al., these analyses controlled for the
actual level of stereotypicality at the first point in time). These 10 partial
correlations, each of which provides a test of the hypothesis, are summarized
in Table 1. Given the small number of traits that define a collective
stereotype at any single point in time, the actual magnitudes of these
correlations are highly variable. What is more meaningful is the fact that
every one of these correlations is positive, a pattern of results that is
highly unlikely to have occurred by chance alone. The results clearly reveal that traits that are higher
in danger-relevance are also more likely to persist as defining elements of the
culturally-shared stereotype of Blacks. Given that these results are
very preliminary and examine the contents of only one very specific cultural
belief (Americans' collective stereotypes of Blacks during the 1900s), it would
be premature to draw over-general conclusions. Still, these results do offer
some hint that evolved danger-avoidance processes may guide not only contemporary
cognitive responses operating at the individual level, but may also shape the
collective belief systems that, in part, define a culture.
ADDITIONAL DANGERS,
ADDITIONAL CONSEQUENCES ON
COGNITION AND CULTURE
In addition to
physical danger, a variety of other threats to individual health might also
have led to the evolution of specific psychological mechanisms that influence
contemporary impressions of specific categories of people (Kurzban and Leary, 2001; Neuberg and Cottrell, 2002).
Moreover, by also influencing the decisions people make about interpersonal
communication, these same mechanisms may exert an unintended impact on
collective beliefs as well.
Consider briefly the danger posed by the interpersonal
transmission of bacteria, viruses and other disease-causing agents. The
perceived threat of disease transmission underlies the social rejection of
people who we know are afflicted with contagious diseases (Crandall and Moriarty, 1995). An evolutionary
perspective reveals how this threat might also underlie more irrational
negative reactions to people who are actually physically healthy, but who
possess heuristic cues connoting the presence of contagious disease (Kurzban and Leary, 2001; Schaller, Park and Faulkner, 2003).
Avoiding
communicable pathogens and parasites is likely to have been a recurring concern
throughout human evolutionary history. Psychological mechanisms may have
evolved to facilitate the recognition of—and automatic aversive reactions
to—superficial cues that were correlated with the presence of contagious
diseases in others. Individuals may be responsive to specific physical features
that are correlated with the presence of pathogens (Rhodes et al., 2001). In addition, given the tendency for evolved
danger-avoidance mechanisms to be risk-aversive, it is likely that individuals
may also be responsive to broad categories of cues that indicate some sort of
physical abnormality. Any salient morphological abnormality may automatically
activate disease-relevant emotions (e.g., disgust) and cognitions (e.g.,
implicit associations between target persons and disease) that motivate
behavioral avoidance. These mechanisms may be especially likely to be triggered
when perceivers feel highly vulnerable to disease.
Several recent studies provide support for this mechanism
and reveal its implications for prejudicial social impressions. Park, Faulkner and Schaller (2003) report findings from a
study that assessed the extent to which physically disabled individuals are
implicitly associated with disease. Results revealed that these associations
were stronger among participants who were either chronically sensitive to
disgust (an emotion presumably linked to disease-avoidance mechanisms) or who
perceived themselves to be highly vulnerable to disease. This occurred even
though the specific target disabilities were not logically associated with
contagious disease at all. Another study (Park, Schaller and Crandall, 2004) examined the effects of disease-vulnerability on
the automatic activation of stereotypes about fat people. Results revealed that
chronic concerns with contagious disease predict stronger expression of dislike
for fat people, and also showed that the temporary salience of contagious
diseases enhances the tendency to associate fat people (but not thin people)
with the semantic concept "disease."
The danger of disease may be heuristically signalled not
only by morphologically unusualness but also by cultural unusualness as well,
particularly by evidence that others violate local norms governing behavior in
disease-relevant domains (e.g., food preparation, personal hygiene).
Consequently, an evolved disease-avoidance mechanism may contribute to
xenophobic attitudes toward subjectively foreign outgroups. Results from a recent series of studies
support this hypothesis (Faulkner, Schaller, Park and Duncan, in press). Both chronic and temporarily-salient
concerns with disease predict exclusionary attitudes toward subjectively
foreign (but not familiar) immigrant groups.
There is also
research that indirectly implies some impact of evolved disease-avoidance
mechanisms on interpersonal communication and the consequent emergence of
collective knowledge. This work focuses not on stereotypes, but on "urban
legends." Heath,
Bell
and Sternberg (2001) examined
the influence of disgust – an emotion functionally linked to disease-avoidance
mechanisms – on individuals' decisions to transmit these contemporary myths to
others. Results revealed
that people prefer to transmit urban legends that elicit a greater amount of
disgust, and that legends eliciting more disgust are more widely distributed on
the Internet. Thus, through the mediating mechanism of interpersonal
communication, evolved disease-avoidance processes operating at the individual
level may exert an indirect influence on the specific contents of popular
beliefs and other culturally-shared knowledge structures.
EVOLUTION, COGNITION, AND
CULTURE
An evolutionary
approach to social cognition illuminates interesting and non-obvious relations
between human origins, human cognition, and human culture. Evolutionary
pressures have sculpted cognitive processes through which individuals produce
decisions. These decisions influence acts of interpersonal communication, and
these acts of communication constrain the contents of culturally-shared
beliefs. A consideration of evolutionary pressures operating in the ancestral
past can yield predictive insights into the kinds of knowledge structures that
are likely to become culturally ubiquitous in the present, and remain so into
the future. This does not discount the fact that cultural norms vary widely
across different human populations, in response to contextually-idiosyncratic
variables. But lurking beneath these
overt cultural idiosyncrasies, there may lie deeper cross-cultural universals
rooted in evolutionarily-fundamental facets of human cognition. In a sense,
culture is like a coloring book: Evolved cognitive mechanisms provide a finite
set of universal templates which may then be colored in an infinite variety of
idiosyncratic, population-specific ways.
Just as culture
is influenced by cognition, cognition is also influenced by culture. Our
evolved cognitive architecture is characterized by a high degree of flexibility
that allows us to adjust our behavior to a variety of different socio-cultural
contexts. Social learning processes are fundamental here. In any given cultural
context, individuals must learn which specific superficial cues connote certain
kinds of danger (e.g., specific perceptual cues that differentiate
locally-relevant ingroups from outgroups) and which other specific cues connote
personal vulnerability to danger. These local learning environments produce
population-specific inputs that moderate the outcomes of evolved
stimulus-response relationships. Thus, cognition too is like a coloring book:
Our evolutionary history has shaped a finite set of basic cognitive mechanisms,
and these mechanisms can be informed in an infinite variety of ways by the
learning histories of individuals. An important agenda for future research in
psychology is to provide a more complete reckoning of the complicated
relationships between evolution, cognition, and culture.
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Author Notes
This research was supported by funds
provides by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the U.S.
National Institutes of Health (research grant #R01MH64734.) Correspondence
concerning this article can be addressed to Mark Schaller, Department of
Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4. E-mail: schaller@psych.ubc.ca.
Table 1. Partial
Correlations Between a Trait's Danger-Relevance Score and its Persistence in
Americans' Collective Stereotype of Blacks.
_________________________________________________________________
Period
of Time Partial
Correlation
For
Which Persistence Between
Danger-Relevance
Was
Computed And
Persistence
_____________________________________________________
1930s
to 1950s .99
1930s
to 1960s .63
1930s
to 1980s .74
1930s
to 1990s .35
1950s
to 1960s .59
1950s
to 1980s .75
1950s
to 1990s .24
1960s
to 1980s .49
1960s
to 1990s .34
1980s
to 1990s .20
____________________________________________________
Nonverbal
Communication of Race Bias on TV Influences Viewers' Own Bias
ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) — Subtle patterns of
nonverbal behavior that appear on popular television programs influence racial
bias among viewers, according to research from Tufts University to appear in
the December 18, 2009, issue of the journal Science.
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Also:
"Today, racial bias is
often revealed via more subtle means than outright racial slurs," said
first author Max Weisbuch, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology
department at the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts. "We wanted to know
how frequently people were exposed to those subtle patterns of racial bias via
TV and what influence such exposure might have. Sadly, we observed that
nonverbal race bias is a typical pattern on scripted television shows. White characters
are treated better across the board and this has an impact on viewers."
Black characters elicit
especially negative nonverbal responses, such as facial expressions and body
language, from other characters, and viewers exhibit more racial bias after
exposure to such negative responses, according to the Science paper.
The Tufts team studied the
prevalence, subtlety and impact of nonverbal race bias in 11 popular weekly
scripted television shows. They found that characters on the shows exhibited
more negative nonverbal behavior toward black characters than to white
characters of the same status. Exposure to "pro-white" (vs.
"pro-black") nonverbal bias also increased viewers' race bias, as
assessed with reaction-time and self-report measures.
"Our findings suggest that
hidden patterns of televised nonverbal behavior do measurably influence bias
among viewers, even though viewers may be unable to consciously report
observing a pattern of bias," said senior author Nalini Ambady, Ph.D.,
professor of psychology, Neubauer Faculty Fellow and director of the
Interpersonal Perception and Communication Laboratory at Tufts University,
where the research was done.
The Science study authors examined black and white
characters whose status and positive attributes, such as likability and
intelligence, could be roughly equated. For each of 30 characters, they edited
brief clips to remove both the audio track and the featured black or white
character, so it was possible to see how the "target" character was treated
without actually seeing that character. Judges, who had not previously watched
the shows, rated the extent to which the unseen characters were treated
positively and liked by the other characters. Compared with black characters,
white characters elicited significantly more favorable nonverbal responses. The
studies did not examine why biases in the programs occur.
In addition, the Tufts
researchers examined the effects of exposure to such nonverbal race bias on
observers. Among their findings: Participants exposed to silent
"pro-white" video clips later exhibited significantly faster reaction
times to white-positive and black-negative pairings than to white-negative and
black-positive pairings.
The researchers also discovered
that observers found it difficult to recognize a pattern of bias across the
pro-white or pro-black clips -- thus, the bias patterns were quite subtle.
According to the study,
"Nonverbal behavior that communicates favoritism of one race over another
can be so subtle that even across a large number of exposures, perceivers are
unable to consciously identify the nonverbal pattern. Nevertheless, exposure to
nonverbal race bias can influence perceivers' race associations and
self-reported racial attitudes."
Lead author Max Weisbuch is
conducting follow-up research on the nature and implications of the effects
described in the paper.
Co-author Kristen Pauker, now a
visiting researcher at Stanford University, is a former postdoctoral researcher
in Ambady's laboratory.
The research was funded by the
National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institutes of
Why Few
People Are Devoid Of Racial Bias
ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2007) — Why are some
individuals not prejudiced? That is the question posed by a provocative new
study appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of
the Association for Psychological Science.
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The authors investigate how
some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive
human tendency to favor one's own group.
Robert Livingston of the
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of
the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college
students who harbored either some or no racial biases.
What is remarkable about the
findings is that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured
by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that nonbiased individuals
differed from biased individuals in a psychologically fundamental way -- they
were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.
Subjects completed a task that
repeatedly paired unfamiliar Chinese characters with pictures that evoked
positive or negative emotions (e.g., puppies or snakes). The objective was to
see whether unfamiliar Chinese characters could evoke emotions by simply being
paired with pictures that evoked these emotions (i.e., classical conditioning).
Results showed that nonbiased
individuals were less likely than biased individuals to acquire negative affect
toward characters that were paired with negative pictures. This implies that
people who display less racial bias may be more resistant to the kinds of
real-world conditioning that leads to racial bias in our society.
The results suggest that
"whether someone is prejudiced or not is linked to their cognitive
propensity to resist negative affective conditioning," according to the
authors. Thus, reducing prejudice may require more than simply adopting
egalitarian values. Instead, such change may require reconditioning of the
negative associations that people hold.
"Just as it is difficult
to change visceral reactions to aversive foods (e.g., lima beans) through sheer
force of will," writes Livingston, "it may also be difficult to
change visceral attitudes toward racial groups by acknowledging that prejudice
is wrong and wanting to change." The authors argue that although negative
affect cannot be reduced by reason alone, it could be reconditioned through
positive interpersonal experiences or exposure to more positive images of
Blacks in the media.
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The
Liberating Effects Of Losing Control
ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2009) — Self-control is one
of our most cherished values. We applaud those with the discipline to regulate
their appetites and actions, and we try hard to instill this virtue in our
children. We celebrate the power of the mind to make hard choices and keep us
on course. But is it possible that willpower can sometimes be an obstacle
rather than a means to happiness and harmony?
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Also:
Tufts University psychologists
Evan Apfelbaum and Samuel Sommers were intrigued by the notion that too much
self-control may indeed have a downside - and that relinquishing some power
might be paradoxically tonic, both for individuals and for society.
They explored the virtue of
powerlessness in the arena of race relations. They figured that
well-intentioned people are careful - sometimes hyper-careful - not to say the
wrong thing about race in a mixed-race group. Furthermore, they thought that
such effortful self-control might actually cause both unease and guarded
behavior, which could in turn be misconstrued as racial prejudice.
To test this, they ran a group
of white volunteers through a series of computer-based mental exercises that
are so challenging that they temporarily deplete the cognitive reserves needed
for discipline. Once they had the volunteers in this compromised state of mind,
they put them (and others not so depleted) into a social situation with the
potential for racial tension - they met with either a white or black
interviewer and discussed racial diversity. Afterward, the volunteers rated the
interaction for comfort, awkwardness, and enjoyment. In addition, independent
judges - both black and white - analyzed the five-minute interactions,
commenting on how cautious the volunteers were, how direct in their answers -
and how racially prejudiced.
As reported in Psychological Science, a
journal of the Association for Psychological Science, those who were mentally
depleted - that is, those lacking discipline and self-control - found talking
about race with a black interviewer much more enjoyable than did those with
their self-control intact. That's presumably because they weren't working so
hard at monitoring and curbing what they said. What's more, independent black
observers found that the powerless volunteers were much more direct and
authentic in conversation. And perhaps most striking, blacks saw the less
inhibited whites as less prejudiced against blacks. In other words,
relinquishing power over oneself appears to thwart over-thinking and "liberate"
people for more authentic
Patti Wood, MA - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at
www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at
www.snapfirstimpressions.com.
