How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
What Groups Matter?
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moralities of Everyday Life
635 calificaciones
De la lección
Family, Friends, and Strangers
Our moral feelings are usually most powerful towards our kin (such as our parents and our children) and our friends and allies. We will discuss these special bonds, and then turn to the morality of racial and ethnic bias. Then we use the tools of behavioral economics to explore the controversial question of whether we are ever truly altruistic to strangers.
Conoce a los instructores
Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
So let's talk about the psychology of groups.
What groups matter?
When you see a new person you can put him or her into countless possible categories.
What sort of categories do we tend to put people into?
The answer is actually kind of interesting.
There are three categories that jump out when you see a new person.
And these are
age, sex and race. To some extent, this is intuitive.
I mean, you could imagine, imagine seeing somebody,
and imagine how you register what they look like.
But this is actually beyond intuition, being supported by psychological research.
And the, and the sort of experiments people use to
figure out what categories we take seriously, involve memory confusions.
So imagine you hear
two dozen people, and they each tell you something.
And then later on you have to remember who said what.
Well, if you do perfect, that doesn't tell you anything.
But people don't do perfect.
If it's not 25, you can get 100 people.
Sooner or later, you start to make mistakes.
But what's interesting is the mistakes aren't random.
The misattributions aren't random.
And what psychologist's have found, is that
the misattributions tend to follow these three categories.
So, if you here something from a young white woman, and you get
it wrong, you forget who said that, you're more likely to attribute it mistakenly
to another young white woman than to an older Hispanic man.
Your, your, your confusions,
getting one person mixed up with some, with
somebody else, getting one source of information mixed
up with another source of information, will fall
along the lines of age, sex and race.
Even babies readily distinguish the individuals
they encounter on those three dimensions.
Babies can tell the difference between a baby and an adult or toddler and an adult.
Babies very quickly can tell the difference between
a man and a woman.
And in fact, most babies, babies who are raised
by women, prefer women as a category over men.
There's some evidence that babies who are raised
by a man will later prefer men, over women.
But we know they make those categorical distinctions.
And babies carve up the world, roughly according
to the categories we would use racial categories.
So for instance, in one study
done in China, they saw which of these four faces would babies prefer to look at.
And the answer was, they would prefer the face on the far left.
That is, the Chinese face, over other faces.
Now, there's a puzzle here.
It's not surprising that we naturally carve
the world into categories of sex and age.
From the standpoint of our evolutionary history, sex and age are always relevant.
For most of human history the history of our species,
there were profound differences in the activities of males and females.
Certainly from a reproduction standpoint,
the male-female distinction is very important.
And obviously age matters.
It matters whether you're dealing with an old person or a toddler.
It matters whether it's someone middle-aged or
a teenager.
So it's not surprising from an evolutionary
point of view, and even from a
common sense point of view, that we would take sex and age very seriously.
But in a very interesting paper Robert Kurz, Kurzban, John
Tooby and Leda Cosmides point out that race is the odd-man out here.
For most of our evolutionary history we didn't encounter people
who looked very different from us. We had no motorized transportation.
People didn't go very far.
And so, the people you would be surrounded by are people who kind of look like you.
So why would we be so prone to break the world into racial categories?
Why would race matter so much?
And the conclusion that they come to, the
hypothesis that they make, is that race is relevant.
Is that, age and sex are relevant, in and of themselves.
Age matters and sex matters.
But race is relevant only as a proxy.
What race is a proxy for, in some societies but not others, is
socially relevant groups or coalitions. So to spell it out a bit,
people growing up and living in a society like the United States will notice
that, that, that people with dark skin and people
with light skin correspond to two socially relevant divisions.
These, these are groups that are often
in conflict, that have had a tumultuous history,
a history of, of slavery and exploitation
that, that, that different all sorts of ways.
And so you notice that, that in this society,
though maybe not other societies, skin color tells you something
about the groups.
and, and Kurzban and his colleagues, based
on this theory, did a very interesting experiment.
They did a memory confusion paradigm of the normal sort.
And they found that normally people will, will make mistakes based on race.
So, if you have, you know, black individuals and white individuals,
and a black individual says something and you get it wrong.
You're more likely to attribute it to another black individual
than a white individual. Standard finding.
But then they did something clever.
They put these characters in basketball jerseys.
Different basketball jerseys, representing different basketball teams.
And now what they find is, the race
effect largely, not entirely, but largely goes away.
Now you start making misattributions based on team.
And the way
they interpret this data is, you've
successfully replaced one coalition with another.
If you're a Red Sox fan, the difference
between the Red Sox and the Yankees matters hugely.
The difference between a black Red Sox player,
and a white Red Sox player, not so much.
One coalition could swamp the other. Now, this coalitional view, makes some
interesting predictions, about the minds of babies and children.
So, the prediction it makes in particular is that, although babies
and children can distinguish between different
races, it shouldn't matter to them.
They should only take race seriously later on in development in some societies and
not others when they're aware that race skin color is a proxy for coalition.
And in fact
Catherine Kinsler and her colleagues, did several
quite elegant experiments that find exactly that.
So you take a toddler, and you have two people offer the toddler a toy.
And the question is, who will the kid take it from?
And one person is black and the other one's white.
And say the toddler in this study is white.
What's the answer?
Well, the answer is, they're 50-50. Although they
can distinguish between different races and they know, and they might
even prefer to look at their own race than another race.
They don't care.
It doesn't matter to them. It's only later in development, depending
on the society, depending on, on, on the situation age four, age five, age six.
It's later in development that race starts to matter.
But initially, race doesn't seem to matter, to the kids.
What does matter? Well,
from a coalitional point of view.
One reasonable question is, what's the cue that, that has always been
a signal that you're dealing with a member of a different group?
The answer is not skin color.
The answer, actually, is language.
So, societies, different cultures within the same
geographical area, they might all look alike.
But if there's any separation
at all, they might talk a little bit differently.
And so, you could imagine that humans are
pre-wired to take differences in language as deeply significant.
And in fact, if you do the same such experiment that I described before.
But now, forget about color, what happens is one of these
people is speaking English and the other one is speaking French.
Who do the kids, the American
kids, take the toy from?
And the answer is, they take it from the person speaking English.
What if one of these characters is speaking English?
And the other one is speaking English but with a little bit of an accent.
Again, the toddlers will prefer the speaker without the accent.
They're very carefully making discrimination's then, on the
basis of what social group you fall into.
And before they're ever sensitive to the role of a
fact consideration like race, they're glomming onto how people talk.
Now, there's many other ways, you could
break up the world into different coalitions.
Language is just one of them.
But, one lesson from social psychology, is that humans, at least human adults.
But, in some experiments kids, even young kids, are extremely prone
to break up in the world into us versus them.
And in order to get people to break up the
world into us versus them, you don't need very much.
So, some of the original studies were
done by the, the social psychologist Aree Toshfel.
And what Toshfel did in one of his classic
studies is, he got people to rank different abstract paintings.
And then regardless of the rankings that they, that they gave.
That was just a way to sort of get them to think something was going on.
Regardless of the rankings that they gave, he
said to half of them, you're a Klee lover.
You love the paintings of Klee.
And the other half, he told, you're a Kandinsky lover.
You love the paintings of Kandinsky.
Then he offer these individuals some money
to distribute.
Either to their own, members of their own group, not themselves, but
members of their own group, or members of other groups, the other group.
And what he found was, that Klee lovers would
say, I want give the money to other Klee lovers.
And I don't want the Kandinsky lovers to have quite so much.
And the Kandinsky lovers would say the same thing.
Even on the sort of most arbitrary of distinctions,
people take it seriously.
Other studies have found that you could break up people into
two different groups and get people to favor their own group.
Literally on the basis of a flip of a coin.
So, you flip the coin, you're in a heads group, you're in a tails group.
Then you ask people how they want their resources distributed, it turns
out, even then, they want to favor their own group over another group.
The similar
experiments have been done with children.
Some of this work has been done by Melanie Killen and her colleagues.
Where you get some kids to either wear blue t-shirts, or red t-shirts.
You make it clear, this is sort of an arbitrary division.
But very quickly, the blue t-shirts kids
would hang out with other blue t-shirt kids.
The red t-shirt kids with other red t-shirt kids.
And each group thinks the other group
is in some way inferior.
And each group thinks their own group is
in some way better and supports their own group.
In this way that group thinking connects
deeply to our, the psychology of coalitions.
The psychology of
teams, of warring teams that are competing.
And in the process of this, group
thinking involves favoritism towards your own group.
And some sort of negativity, even dehumanization of the other group.
And this is a theme we're going to develop in the next lecture.
[MUSIC]
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