Human prejudice has ancient evolutionary roots
The tendency to perceive others as "us versus them" isn't exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.
In a series of ingenious experiments, Yale researchers led by psychologist Laurie Santos showed that monkeys treat individuals from outside their groups with the same suspicion and dislike as their human cousins tend to treat outsiders, suggesting that the roots of human intergroup conflict may be evolutionarily quite ancient.
The findings are reported in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"One of the more troubling aspects of human nature is that we evaluate people differently depending on whether they're a member of our 'ingroup' or 'outgroup,'" Santos said. "Pretty much every conflict in human history has involved people making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race, religion, social class, and so on. The question we were interested in is: Where do these types of group distinctions come from?"
The answer, she adds, is that such biases have apparently been shaped by 25 million years of evolution and not just by human culture.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-human-prejudice-ancient-evolutionary-roots.html
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