Robert Kurzban

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Perceptions of Race

• Robert Kurzban
• University of Pennsylvania

The Second CEFOM/21 International
Symposium Culture, Norms, Evolution Hokkaido
University, Sapporo, Japan August 8th
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Claims

• Automaticity in categorization is an unlikely
  design feature (for race)
• Race is a proxy for the fundamental conceptual
  cognitive element, coalition.
• Providing an alternative coalitional dimension
  should be potent for changing categorization

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Background Social Categorization Literature

• Social Psychology 3 social categories are
  automatically encoded Age, Sex, Race
• Efforts to attenuate categorization by race have
  been unsuccessful

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Method Memory Confusion

• Participants hear conversation see photos
• In a recall task, participants are asked to
  recall who said what.
• Errors in recall index categorization
• Within-Between group errors calculated for each
  dimension (and statistically corrected)

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• Does anyone besides Rob have a question?
• Which professor from UBC was It?

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Taylor et al., 1978

• Error rates at 66
• More within than between race and sex errors
  observed
• Categorization by race not changed by
  instructions to try to recall information.

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There are certain categories that are highly
accessible and difficult to suppress, in
particular race and sex. Assuming that these
categories are extremely salient and powerful,
and are automatically encoded in the absence of
any specific memory instructions, they may be
rather insensitive to contextual variations 
We believe that one of the contributions made by
our research is to show how hard it is to
interfere with strong, automatically activated
categories Hewstone et al., 1991, p. 526
See also Hamilton, Stroessner, Driscoll, 1994
Fazio Dunton, 1997 Wegner Bargh, 1998
(Handbook chapter)
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Additional Cites

• our theoretical framework and the latency data
  lead us to believe that the process began with
  attention being automatically drawn to the race
  of the Black targets. Fazio Dunton, 1997
• Easily discriminable personal featuresespecially
  the big three of gender, race, and agetend to
  activate preconsciously the categories or
  stereotypes associated with them.
• Wegner Bargh, 1998 (Handbook chapter)

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Theoretical Background Race

• Adaptations are shaped by recurrent features of
  ancestral environment
• Sharp phenotypic gradients were not a recurrent
  feature of ancestral environments.
• It is unlikely that there are adaptations
  designed to encode race per se.
• Racial categorization is a byproduct. But of what?

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What is racial categorization a by-product of?
Color perception?

• Stangor et al. expt 5 Colored sweatshirts had no
  meaning not used as a category by participants.
• Note. Attentional demands cant explain this sex
  and race can simultaneously be strongly encoded.
• Perceptual similarity should affect encoding. It
  doesnt (Stangor et al., expt 2)

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What is racial categorization a by-product of?
Reasoning about natural kinds?

• Various accounts posit humans essentialize human
  groups.
• Rothbart Taylor, Hirschfeld, Gil-White
• If so, this would explain the consistently strong
  results for encoding of race. But, these models
  do not (straightforwardly) predict that it should
  be possible to attenuate this process

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What is racial categorization a by-product of?
Mechanisms designed to parse coalitions and
alliances?

• Races were not a part of human ancestral
  environments. Dynamic alliances and coalitions
  were.
• Categorization by race might be attenuated if
  race is not diagnostic of alliances, but another
  visual cue is.
• Additional predictions derived from this
  analysis
• While sex could have evolved domain-specific
  machinery, race could not.
• Categorization by sex should be stronger than by
  race, everything else equal.

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Experiment Details

• Racially mixed (4 White, 4 Black) basketball
  teams (all male)
• Competitive content in dialogue
• IV Jersey color cue to team membership
• Prediction Attenuate racial encoding

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Sample Stimulus
And you play like youre in a zoo. Where you
should be anyway
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Results

• Adding shirt color cue increases categorization
  by team (not surprising)
• Adding shirt color cue decreases categorization
  by race (surprising)

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Experiment 2

• Same as above, except teams are all White, but of
  mixed SEX.

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Conclusion

• Categorization by race is not automatic,
  and can be attenuated, even after only relatively
  short exposure.

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But does the attenuation of race replicate?
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Note No sex differences
n.s.
n.s.
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Research Program
Cooperation
Categorization

• More direct method Reaction times to gauge
  categorization
• Additional control cognitive load condition
• Additional contexts.