Just Babies (12 page)

But we can also rebel against our parochial biases. Consider the famous story of the
Good Samaritan, which begins with a lawyer asking Christ what he should do to inherit eternal life. Christ asks him what is written in the law, and the lawyer responds by saying that we should love God and we should love “thy neighbor as thyself.” Christ says that this is correct, and then the lawyer follows up, asking: “And who is my neighbor?” Christ responds with this parable:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

Christ asks the lawyer which of these three men was the neighbor of the victim, and the lawyer responds, “He that shewed mercy on him.” And Christ then says: “Go, and do thou likewise.”

The moral of the story isn’t hard to figure out. The Samaritans were despised by the Jews, which might be why the lawyer didn’t just answer, “the Samaritan”—he couldn’t bear to say the name. Plainly, then, what we have here is an injunction to ignore traditional ethnic boundaries. As the philosopher and legal scholar Jeremy Waldron puts it,
“Never mind ethnicity, community, or traditional categories of neighbor-ness”—the point of the story is that the mere presence of the stranger makes him a neighbor and thus worthy of love.

This is a radical position. For much of human history, and for many societies now, our moral obligations extend only to neighbors whom we already know. The geographer and author Jared Diamond notes that in the small-scale
societies of Papua New Guinea,
“to venture out of one’s territory to meet [other] humans, even if they lived only a few miles away, was equivalent to suicide.” The anthropologist Margaret Mead was famously romantic about the lifestyles of small-scale societies and viewed them as morally superior in many regards to modern societies—but she was blunt about their feelings toward strangers:
“Most primitive tribes feel that if you run across one of these subhumans from a rival group in the forest, the most appropriate thing to do is bludgeon him to death.”

Perhaps some of this is bluster. Regardless of one’s sentiments, attempting to kill someone is a risky act. You might fail and get killed yourself, or you might succeed and then have to contend with vengeance from his kin and tribe. But even if outright violence is an extreme reaction, the natural reaction when meeting a stranger is not compassion. Strangers inspire fear and disgust and hatred.

In this regard, we are like other primates. In
The Chimpanzees of Gombe
,
Jane Goodall describes what happens when a gang of male chimpanzees comes across a smaller group from another tribe. If there is a baby in the group, they may kill and eat it. If there is a female, they will try to mate with her. If there is a male, they will often mob him, rip flesh from his body, bite off his toes and testicles, and leave him for dead.

And yet things have changed. I often fly into strange cities, but I hardly expect that strangers will jump on me in the airport and try to bite off my toes and testicles. Indeed, even cultures in which traveling and travelers are rare often
have elaborate codes for hospitality and the proper treatment of visitors. Any adequate theory of moral psychology has to explain both our antipathy toward strangers and how we sometimes manage to overcome it.

B
ABIES
make distinctions between familiar and strange people almost immediately.
Newborn babies prefer to look at their mother’s face rather than at a stranger’s face;
they prefer their mother’s smell; and
they prefer her voice. This last discovery came about through the use of an inspired experimental method. Researchers placed babies in bassinets with headphones on their ears and a pacifier in their mouths and calculated the average rate at which each baby sucked on its pacifier by measuring the time between the end of one period of sucking and the beginning of the next. Then the babies heard either their mother or a strange woman reading Dr. Seuss’s
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
Babies could use their sucking behavior to control which voice they heard—for half the babies, they would hear their mother if the gaps between sucks was shorter than their average; for half, if it was longer. Babies younger than three days of age were able to figure this out, and they used the timing of their sucking to listen to what they wanted—which turned out to be the sound of their mother’s voice.

Since babies can’t know ahead of time what their mom looks like or smells like or sounds like, these preferences must be due to learning: babies see and smell and hear this woman who has been caring for them, and this is whom they come to prefer.

Not only do babies like familiar people, they also like familiar kinds of people. We can explore this using looking-time methods. Earlier, I talked about how babies, like adults, look longer at what is surprising. Babies also share with adults a tendency to look longer at what they like, and we can use this to explore their preferences. It turns out that
babies who are raised by a woman look longer at women; those raised by a man look longer at men.
Caucasian babies prefer to look at Caucasian faces, as opposed to African or Chinese faces; Ethiopian babies prefer to look at Ethiopian faces rather than Caucasian faces; Chinese babies prefer to look at Chinese faces rather than Caucasian or African faces.

If you saw these biases in adults, you might assume that they reflected a preference for others of their own race. But this isn’t likely true for babies. They don’t often look into mirrors, and they wouldn’t understand what they were seeing if they did. Instead, babies are developing a preference based on the people they see around them. Consistent with this, babies raised in ethnically diverse environments—such as Ethiopian babies living in Israel—show no preference on the basis of race.

These findings support a simple theory of the developmental origin of racism: Babies have an adaptive bias to prefer the familiar, so they quickly develop a preference for those who look like those around them and a wariness toward those who don’t. Since babies are usually raised by those who resemble them, white babies will tend to prefer white people; black babies black people; and so on. Racist views get elaborated in the course of development; children
learn facts about specific groups; they pick up scientific or religious or folk explanations about why and how human groups are different; and they come to absorb cultural lessons about whom to fear, whom to respect, whom to envy, and so on. But the seeds of racism are there from the very start, in a simple preference for the familiar.

I used to believe this, but I don’t anymore. I think there is convincing evidence for a better theory of the origin of racial bias, one supported by research with both adults and young children.

L
ET
’
S
look at adults first. Laboratory studies find that
adults automatically encode three pieces of information when we meet a new person: age, sex, and race. This fits our everyday experience. After meeting someone, you might quickly forget all sorts of details, but you are likely to remember whether you were talking to a toddler or an adult, a man or a woman, and someone of the same or a different race.

In an influential article, the psychologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides point out that
there is something strange about this triad. The focus on sex and age makes sense—our ancestors would have needed to appreciate the difference between a man and a woman, or a three-year-old and a twenty-seven-year-old, in order to conduct any kind of social interaction, from procreation to child care to warfare. But race is the odd man out. The physical cues that correspond to what we now see as races are determined by where people’s ancestors came from, and since our ancestors traveled mostly by foot, the typical
person would never have met anyone belonging to what we would now call “a different race.”

Kurzban and his colleagues conclude that attention to race per se could not have evolved through natural selection. Instead, they argue that race matters only insofar as it piggybacks on
coalition.
Like many other primates, humans live in groups that come into conflict, sometimes violently. It would be useful, then, to be predisposed to understand such coalitions, to break the world into Us versus Them. Race becomes important because in some societies people learn that skin color and certain body features indicate which of many conflicting groups an individual belongs to. This is in much the same way that we might learn that different sports teams have different-colored uniforms; there is nothing inherently interesting about the color of the uniforms—they matter because of what they signal. Racial bigotry develops, then, in much the same way as a child growing up in Boston will come to associate a Red Sox uniform with Us and a Yankees uniform with Them.

Now, there may be other reasons why race is salient. For one thing,
our hominid ancestors may have regularly encountered other hominid species. If so, we may well have evolved cognitive mechanisms to reason about these species, and may then have applied this mode of reasoning to other human groups within our own species. This would explain
our tendency to
biologize
race, sometimes thinking, incorrectly, of distinct human groups as if they were distinct species, rather than coalitions. Or our interest in race could get a boost as a by-product of a general perceptual
bias to favor the familiar—what is sometimes described as
the “mere exposure” effect. This phenomenon applies to all manner of things: for instance, we like arbitrary squiggles more if we’ve seen them before. We already know that babies prefer to look at familiar people and familiar kinds of people; perhaps this is the origin of a same-race preference that persists throughout development.

Finally, a focus on race could be a by-product of an evolved interest in who is and isn’t family. Kin has always mattered; it makes perfect Darwinian sense to favor someone who looks like you, because that individual is likely to share more of your genes. Instead of being a proxy for coalition, then, race could be a proxy for kinship.

But while these other factors might play a role, there is compelling support for the race-as-cue-to-coalition theory. To test their hypothesis, Kurzban and colleagues used a method known as
the memory-confusion paradigm. Researchers give people a series of pictures of people’s faces, each with a sentence attributed to that person. Later, researchers ask participants to recall who said what. Given enough picture/sentence pairs, participants inevitably make mistakes, and those mistakes reveal what characteristics we naturally encode as meaningful. If one hears something from a young Asian woman and later forgets the source, it is more likely to later be attributed to a young Asian woman (or another young person, or woman, or Asian) than to an elderly Hispanic man. Moviegoers are more likely to get Laurence Fishburne confused with Samuel Jackson than with Lindsay Lohan.

Kurzban and his colleagues’ memory-confusion study used pictures and statements by black and white people but they added a clever twist: sorting the people into two groups (with equal numbers of white and black people in each group) and dressing them in distinctly colored basketball jerseys. They found that participants still made mistakes based on race, misattributing statements like “I need to do some stretching” or “I just want to get out and play,” but now when people got it wrong, they were most likely to do so based on jersey color, not skin color. To put this in real-world terms, a sports fan—at least when watching sports—is thinking more about team membership than about the skin color of the individual players.

This way of making sense of race fits well with the work of the psychologists Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius, who argue that societies form hierarchies based on three factors:
age, sex, and a third, variable category that is sometimes race but may also be religion, ethnicity, clan, or any other social factor.

T
HE
coalition theory also fits well with some recent studies of young children. If coalition is what matters most, one wouldn’t expect children to focus on skin color or any other physical feature. Rather, they should pay attention to something that is uniquely human—language. Because speech changes much quicker than physical features—if groups separate for any period of time, they will begin to talk differently—language is a superior indicator of coalition and group membership.

This connection between language and coalition is explicit in the Old Testament. While the word
shibboleth
can now be used more broadly to mean a custom or belief that distinguishes a class or group of people, it originated as a specifically linguistic test of whether an individual was one of Us or one of Them. As the story goes, the Gileadite tribe captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, where their recently defeated rivals had lived. To ensure that no Ephraimite refugees made it past their checkpoint, the Gileadites made everyone who sought to pass say the word
shibboleth.
Ephraimites didn’t have a “sh” sound in their dialect, so if the refugee said
sibboleth
, the Gileadites knew to kill him. The Americans used a similar trick in the Pacific theater during World War II. Sentries at American checkpoints would shout at unfamiliar approaching soldiers, telling them to repeat the word
Lollapalooza.
Many Japanese people have difficulties pronouncing the “L” sound, so if they shouted back a distorted version of the word, the sentry would open fire.

Young babies can recognize the language that they have been exposed to, and they prefer it to other languages even if it is spoken by a stranger. Experiments that use methodologies in which babies suck on a pacifier to indicate their preferences find that Russian babies prefer to hear Russian, French babies prefer French, American babies prefer English, and so on. This effect shows up mere minutes after birth, suggesting that babies were becoming familiar with those muffled sounds that they heard in the womb.