Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  Hirschfeld and his coworkers designed and implemented several experiments to explore children’s ethnoracial beliefs. In one, more than one hundred three-, four-, and seven-year-old children were presented with drawings depicting an adult and two children. The figures in the drawings represented either blacks or whites, as indicated by skin color, hair, and shape of nose and lips. Each person was wearing some sort of occupational uniform, and each had either a thin or a stocky physique. Each of the children was presented with three such drawings. In every drawing the children shared two characteristics with one another, but only one with the adult. For instance, one illustration portrayed a heavy-set black woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform, with two children, a slender black girl dressed in a nurse’s uniform and a stocky black girl dressed in ordinary clothes, while another showed a stocky black man in a policeman’s uniform, a stout white child in a policeman’s uniform, and a heavy-set black child in ordinary clothes.

  Hirschfeld split the young experimental subjects into three groups, each of which had the task of matching the adult with one of the children. One group was asked whose parent the adult is, another group was asked which of the children represents the adult as a child, and the third group was asked which of the two children most closely resembles the adult. “The logic of the task is straightforward,” he explains.

  In each triad, each of the comparison pictures shares two features with the target adult, but they share only one feature between themselves. One triad set contrasts race to bodily build, one contrasts race to occupation, and one contrasts occupation to bodily build. When asked to choose which of the comparison pictures is the target as a child, the target’s child, or most similar to the target, children must decide which of the contrasted properties is most relevant. If children simply rely on outward appearances in making identity judgments, then they should be as likely to rely on one form of outward appearance as on another. Accordingly, they should choose at random. If they believe that one dimension contributes more to identity than another, they should rely on that dimension in making their choices.44

  The results were impressive. The children’s responses showed that they believed that racial characteristics are more likely to be inherited and to remain constant across a person’s lifetime than either occupation or body build. Even the three-year-olds tended to think of races as natural kinds, although their answers were the least consistent.

  The experiment also shows that children don’t group people into races because they observe them to be especially similar. To kids, two people wearing policemen’s uniforms are just as similar as two people with the same skin color. This suggests that children are inclined to think theoretically about race—in much the same way that we tend to think about species. Children implicitly believe that observable traits like skin color are signs of a deep essence that unites the members of a racial group under a single umbrella. Even three-year-olds think of racial attributes as “immutable, corporeal, differentiated, derived from family background, and at least consistent with biological principles of causality.”45

  Research also indicates that youngsters have the concept of race before they have any understanding of the observable traits that racial categories are supposed to latch on to. This is most effectively illustrated by looking at children’s efforts to make sense of race in their everyday lives.

  Ramsey … reports that a white three-year-old looked at a photograph of a black child and declared “His teeth are different!” Then the subject “looked again, seemed puzzled and hesitantly said, ‘No, his skin is different.’” At the age of four my daughter made a similar observation. She and I were stopped at a traffic light in France. She looked at an ethnically Asian family in the car next to us and then exclaimed that they looked like her friend Alexandre, a Eurasian child. I asked her in what ways she thought they looked like Alexandre. She mulled over the question for a moment, staring intently at the family as we waited for the light to change. Finally she said, “They all have the same color hair.”

  Hirschfeld goes on to remark:

  Of course she was right. Alexandre and the members of his family all had black hair—but so did I, at the time. More critically, the majority of the inhabitants of France have black hair whether they are ethnically French, Southeast Asian, or North African. The point to be taken from both stories is that preschoolers are aware of perceptual differences between members of racial groups and are aware that perceptual cues play a role in defining racial groups, but they do not appear to reflect on precisely which perceptual factors are important.46

  Hirschfeld believes that there is a reciprocal relationship between our innate essentializing tendencies and the social dimension of racial categories. Because they’re primed to essentialize, children quickly take adult categories on board. When children are told about racial categories (for example, that there are “white” and “black” people), they don’t assume that members of these groups have a common appearance. For young children, factors like skin color or hair texture may indicate a person’s race but they don’t define it. They only gradually learn about the physical characteristics associated in their culture with races and come to integrate these social constructions in accord with their preexisting template.

  The fact that ethnoracial thinking is already biologically tinged early in childhood is intriguing. But what, exactly, does it suggest? Why do our concepts of races and biological species have such an uncanny resemblance to one another? One possibility is that they’re cut from the same cloth. Hirschfeld suggests that the human mind possesses a specialized cognitive module—which he calls the human kinds module—that uses the same general principles as the module responsible for folk-biological reasoning to draw inferences about human populations. Just as the biological kinds module gives rise to folk-biological thinking, the hypothesized human kinds module produces a more-or-less universal form of folk-sociological thinking. The two mental systems operate independently of one another; both interpret their respective domains in terms of essences and natural kinds.47

  ON THE ORIGIN OF PSEUDOSPECIES

  Political enemies from western Kenya are called nyamu cia ruguru—animals from the west

  —KOIGI WA WAMWERE, NEGATIVE ETHNICITY: FROM BIAS TO GENOCIDE 48

  The close psychological relationship between biological and social essentialism might suggest that we unconsciously use the cognitive machinery originally evolved to make sense of the biological world to make sense of the social world. That is, when confronted with human groups, we tend automatically to think of them along the same lines as we think of biological species. This idea is set out in an article entitled, “Are ethnic groups biological ‘species’ to the human brain?” by an anthropologist named Francisco Gil-White.

  To get your mind around Gil-White’s hypothesis, begin by considering the social world in which our prehistoric ancestors lived. Of course, it isn’t possible to know for certain what the conditions of life were like, but there is more than enough evidence to allow us to make some well-informed conjectures. As far as we know, early humans lived in small, homogenous communities and rarely if ever encountered others who were physically unlike themselves. The overwhelming majority would never have met people with dramatically contrasting skin color, hair texture, or other phenotypic traits that we nowadays subsume under race. However, they almost certainly interacted with diverse cultural groups. It’s very likely that these smallish bands were part of larger communities consisting of hundreds of individuals that anthropologists call “ethnies” or “tribes.” Members of a tribe share a wealth of culturally transmitted beliefs, preferences, and rules of conduct—including the rule that one should mate only with members of the tribe (“normative endogamy”). Archeological evidence suggests that our Stone Age ancestors were organized into ethnies at least fifty thousand years ago, and possibly much earlier.49

  All things being equal, it is much easier to deal with members of one’s own tribe—people with a shared understanding of a
common way of life, who speak the same language and adhere to the same norms and values—than it is to engage in social exchange with outsiders. Social interaction across tribal boundaries is a minefield, rife with opportunities for misunderstanding, conflict, and—at the extreme—danger. Given this, it was advantageous for tribal groups to adopt conspicuous symbolic paraphernalia such as dress and body paint, scarification and jewelry, as well as forms of speech and ritualistic behaviors such as greeting rituals, eating rituals, dances, and religious practices to demarcate themselves from all others. Ethnic markers worked like cultural traffic lights to regulate the flow of social exchange and keep it as much as possible within the group. The mortal significance of ethnic markers is beautifully illustrated by a story in the biblical book of Judges, which highlights how something as seemingly trivial as the pronunciation of a word can be used to demarcate friend from foe. The story, which is set in the eleventh century BC, concerns a war between the tribes of Ephraim and Gilead. Defeated, the surviving Ephraimites try to retreat across the river Jordan to return to their homeland, but the men of Gilead have anticipated this move and turned the fords into checkpoints. Trapped, the Ephraimites try to deceive the sentries by disguising themselves as men of Gilead, but their attempt is foiled by a simple test.

  Whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” He said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.50

  Gil-White speculates that the growing insularity of ethnic communities, and the proliferation of ethnic markers setting them off from one another, created the illusion that ethnic identity is biologically inherited. You may recall that Erik Erikson captured this idea in his notion of cultural pseudospeciation.

  At its most benign … “pseudo” means only that something happens to appear to be what it is not; and, indeed, in the name of pseudospecies man could endow himself with pelts, feathers, and paints, and eventually costumes and uniforms—and his universe with tools and weapons, roles and rules, with legends, myths, and rituals, which served to bind his group together and endow its unique identity with that super-individual significance which inspires loyalty, heroism, and poetry.51

  Erikson’s remarks on pseudospeciation were very sketchy. Gil-White fills the story out with a plausible account detailing how pseudospeciation may have occurred. His idea is that once ethnic groups became consolidated, prehistoric humans began to respond to members of alien groups as though they were separate species. This happened because ethnic communities started to “look” like biological species to the human brain. Think about it. Ethnic communities adopted forms of display such as clothing and body paint that made them appear very different from one another. They also adopted different forms of behavior—especially speech and cultural rituals. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, they restricted marriage to other members of the tribe, which led to the consequence that ethnic membership was determined by descent. Members of each tribe possessed what amounted to a “cultural phenotype” that was handed down from parents to their offspring which echoed the reproductively transmitted biological phenotypes found in nature. The stage was now set for ethnic groups to trigger the cognitive module for intuitive biology, and thus cause the brain to process information about ethnic groups as though they were distinct biological species.

  “Over time…,” Gil-White suggests, “the brain evolved to improve the fit and make ethnies part of the ‘proper domain’ of the living kind module, completing the exaptation.”52 Exaptation is a biological term for features of organisms that take on functions that evolution didn’t originally adapt them for. Penguins’ wings are a nice example. Ancestors of modern-day penguins used their wings for flying, but their descendents embraced a semi-aquatic lifestyle, causing the ancestral wings to change their function.* The wings were modified to become flippers. There isn’t a sharp line to be drawn between adaptation and exaptation—in fact, exaptation might just as well be called “re-adaptation.”

  Gil-White’s hypothesis, then, is that once distinctive human cultures emerged, the biological kinds module took on an entirely new function. Its domain of operation expanded to include human kinds, and intuitive folk-biology gave birth to intuitive folk-sociology. As a result, ethnic groups look like biological species to the human brain. Gil-White calls this the Ugly Duckling hypothesis.

  The Ugly Duckling hypothesis predicts that categories that look like a species (i.e., meet the brain’s “input criteria” of a species) will tend to be essentialized, especially when the perceptions of descent-based membership and category-based endogamy, in particular, are strong. A corollary is that inductive generalizations of nonobvious properties—which essentialist intuitions motivate—will be more easily made in categories that look like species.53

  Hirschfeld and Gil-White propose rival explanations of why folk-sociology looks so much like folk-biology, but neither of them uses their theory to address dehumanization—the place where folk-sociology and folk-biology intersect—and it’s useful to consider how each theory could be used to explain it. Hirschfeld’s hypothesis suggests that we move so easily from racism to dehumanization because of the isomorphy between folk-sociological and folk-biological thinking. The psychological similarity between racial and biological thinking might explain why we often mix up the former with the latter, just like we sometimes confuse similar-sounding words. Now, add a dash of motivation to the mix. Because thoughts about ethnoracial groups have a deep resonance with thoughts about biological species, people’s minds naturally turn to thoughts about the latter when they want to denigrate the former. Because derogatory thoughts are the driving force, hated or despised species are unconsciously selected to represent them. However, Hirschfeld’s theory doesn’t explain why folk-biology and folk-sociology conform to the same pattern. Gil-White’s account fills in the gap, and in doing so suggests that the tie between folk-biology and folk-sociology is more intimate than structural isomorphism would allow. If folk-sociology is built on folk-biological foundations, then folk-biology is the default position. This might explain why ethnoracial categories so readily collapse into biological ones, but not vice versa.

  SUMMARY

  As the trajectory in this chapter has been fairly complex, and perhaps more than a little confusing, I think that it will be useful to conclude by summarizing the main points.

  1. We intuitively carve humanity up into natural human kinds or “ethnoraces” modeled on biological species. We have a “folk-sociological” theory that strongly resembles our “folk-biological” theory. These ways of thinking about the world are natural and compelling, and widely distributed across cultures, even though they are inconsistent with the scientific picture.

  2. The form of ethnoracial thinking is innate, while its content is determined by cultural beliefs and ideologies.

  3. Ethnoraces are believed to share an essence that defines the kind—there is a mysterious “something” that makes one African American, or Jewish, or Tutsi, or Irish. This essence is imagined as being somehow “inside” a person, but distributed throughout them rather than localized in a particular part. It is thought to be carried by bodily fluids—especially blood.

  4. Knowing a person’s ethnorace is supposed to allow one to make inferences about his or her nonobvious properties.

  5. A person’s ethnorace is considered to be a necessary, and therefore unalterable, characteristic. It remains constant at every possible world where they exist.

  6. Ethnoracial essence is taken to be responsible for stereotypical characteristics of natural human kinds. These attributes may or may not be expressed. If they are unexpressed, an individual who is a member of the kind may appear not to be a member of the kind.

  7. Folk-sociological thinking may be the product of a domain-specific
cognitive module: either a distinct “human kinds” module (Hirschfeld) or an extension of a “living kinds” module (Gil-White).

  8. Ethnoraces are the objects of dehumanization. First, a population is imagined as a natural human kind with a common essence, and second, their common essence is imagined to be a subhuman essence.

  Having gotten this far, we are now positioned to put in place the last few pieces of the puzzle of dehumanization. Neither Hirschfeld nor Gil-White set out to analyze dehumanization, but their observations about the similarity between folk-biological and folk-sociological thinking is crucial for accomplishing this.

  7

  THE CRUEL ANIMAL

  Ever since Darwin, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the continuity between human and nonhuman minds as “one of degree, and not of kind.”

  —DEREK PENN, KEITH HOLYOAK, AND DANIEL POVINELLI, “DARWIN’S MISTAKE’1

  I’ll teach you differences.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR 2

  FOR CENTURIES, PHILOSOPHERS AND THEOLOGIANS have pondered what it is that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Aristotle thought it was rationality. To others, it was the possession of an immortal soul or having been fashioned in the image of God. Mark Twain, who loved to deflate human arrogance, had his own suggestion. In an 1896 essay entitled “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” he argued that Man belongs at the bottom of the great chain of being, rather than near the top. Twain, an ardent Darwinian, suggested acerbically that his observations of human nature obliged him “to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals” in favor of “a new and truer one … the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.” Our descent is simultaneously biological and moral. We are, Twain believed, the only species capable of immorality.