A Natural Desire for Ethnic Identity? Comments on Stephen Sanderson and Frank Salter

In Human Nature and the Evolution of Society, Stephen Sanderson has suggested that my list of twenty natural desires should be altered to include the natural desire for ethnic identity. 

I am not persuaded by his argument, which he derives from Pierre van den Berghe and Frank Salter, that ethnic affiliation is an evolutionary adaptation, in that those who favor their ethnic community over others are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests.

A similar evolutionary explanation of ethnic identity and ethnocentrism is J. Philippe Rushton's "genetic similarity theory," which is his extension of Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory of altruism.  It's an extension beyond kin to non-kin that are genetically similar to us.  We have evolved to like those who look like us, because groups of people that look similar share more genes with one another than other groups.  

I am persuaded that evolved human nature is inclined to tribal thinking, so that we naturally categorize people as us and them, and we naturally favor our group over others.  And while the social conditions of life have often predisposed people to make this in-group/out-group division along racial and ethnic lines, there is no evidence that this predisposition is an innate adaptation of the human mind. 

On the contrary, there is lots of evidence that while we are innately inclined to look for cues of coalitional affiliation, the content of those cues depends on social learning; and people in multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies can be taught to be cooperative without regard for racial or ethnic boundaries.  In fact, Frank Salter implicitly concedes the truth of this point when he laments that ethnic nepotism is not instinctive, and therefore serving ethnic genetic interests requires artificial cultural strategies devised by modern scientific reasoning, and that no ethnic state has ever succeeded in securing an adaptive ethnic group strategy.

This debate over whether racial and ethnic identity is an evolutionary adaptation has implications for the current debate in North America and Europe over immigration policies.  In On Genetic Interests, Salter argues that opening a nation's borders to immigrants is contrary to the genetic interests of the native population.  People of European descent have been the majority of the population in the United States and Europe.  But with increasing non-European immigration, those of European descent will eventually become the minority, and at some point the European ethnies will be completely replaced by non-European ethnies.  (Salter has followed van den Berghe in coining the word "ethny" as a substitute for "ethnic group" as the term for a population sharing common descent, but whose members are so numerous that they cannot form a group.) 

To protect the genetic interests of these ethnies--to prevent their extinction in the genetic competition with other ethnies--Salter argues for "universal nationalism":  each nation should have a right to protect its distinctive ethnic identity by restricting or prohibiting the flow of immigrants who do not share its ethnic identity.  There would be ethnic equality in that every ethny would have a right to its own ethnic homeland.  But there would also be ethnic inequality in that every ethnic homeland would discriminate against foreigners with different ethnic identities.  Every nation would have the right to practice ethnic nepotism.

Sanderson does not recognize the two major problems with Salter's argument.  The first problem is that what Salter identifies as "ethnic genetic interests" have no roots in the evolved instincts of human nature, and thus Salter's strategies for protecting those interests must be artificial contrivances of reason.  Salter admits that in protecting their genetic interests in modern states, "humans can no longer rely on their instincts" (28).  Human beings have evolved instincts for individual survival and for the reproductive interests of their families and their extended tribal groups.  But in the environments of evolutionary adaptation, our foraging ancestors had no experience with ethnic identities that might embrace millions of anonymous individuals scattered around the world.

The very idea of "ethnic genetic interests" depends on a scientific knowledge of genetics that has not been available to human beings until recent decades.  Even most evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists don't recognize ethnies as extended kin groups. 

There is evidence for evolved instinctive tribalism by which we distinguish between in-group and out-group.  But the cues for identifying who belongs to which group are set by social experience that is not instinctive but learned.  As Salter admits, the famous social psychological experiments of Muzafer Sherif, Henri Tajfel, and others have shown that people identify with groups of all kinds and develop ethnocentric attitudes towards out-groups based on arbitrary cues.  In laboratory experiments, people can be randomly assigned to different groups based on arbitrary factors--such as flipping a coin to identify some people as "heads" and others as "tails"--and then those groups will try to outcompete one another.

One of the most revealing experiments is not cited by Salter.  Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides have shown that racial categorization in identifying coalitional alliances can be eliminated when the cues for coalitional affiliation do not track race ("Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 [2001]: 15387-15892).  Their experiment was designed to test their hypothesis that the human mind evolved to track coalitions--to decide who is allied with whom--but that the coalitional code is learned by experience and that there is no evolved instinct for seeing race and ethnicity as the cues for coalitional assignment.  Their hypothesis arises from the thought that in the environments of evolutionary adaptation, foragers would have experienced group competition, but they would not have generally encountered members of different races.

Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides asked volunteers to look at eight photographs of young black and white men and women wearing the same gray jersey.  Associated with each photograph was a sentence suggesting group conflict--such as "They were the ones who started the fight"--and it was arranged so that it was clear that these eight people were split into conflicting pairs.

The volunteers were given a "distractor task" to get their minds off the subject.  They were then asked to recall which sentences went with which photographs.  The distraction was designed to force them to rely on their unconscious feelings rather than their conscious memories.

Even though the two sides in the fictional fight were racially mixed, the volunteers tended to pair blacks with blacks and whites with whites, as though they assumed that conflict would be based on racial differences.

But then, in the next experiment, everything was the same, except that some of the jerseys were yellow instead of gray, and the sentences implied that the conflict was between the yellows and the grays and not the blacks and the whites.  Most of the volunteers easily picked up the hint that the conflict was based on the color of the jerseys rather than the color of the skins.  Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides concluded: "Despite a lifetime's experience of race as a predictor of social alliances, less than four minutes of exposure to the alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race."

So it seems that the evolved human mind has an instinctive coalitional codemaker, but the codebook is not naturally instinctive but socially learned.  That explains why in appealing to "genetic interests," Salter cannot rely on human instincts to tie those interests to racial and ethnic identities, and why he complains that modern multiethnic societies have gone a long way towards teaching people to feel social solidarity that transcends the boundaries of racial and ethnic identity.

This also explains Salter's second big problem.  He tries to formulate various strategies for defending ethnic genetic interests in modern states.  But he admits that probably none of them will work very well.  He identifies various "ethnic states" in the modern world, but he admits that "no state yet developed has reliably kept its promise as an adaptive ethnic group strategy" (221), which includes "the best known modern ethnic state"--Nazi Germany (231).  For example, none of the ethnic states he mentions have succeeded in raising the total fertility rate of its ethny.  The drop in the total fertility rate for native Germans continued under the Nazis, and the Germans have one of the lowest fertility rates for any population in the world.  Other modern ethnic states that Salter mentions--such as Malaysia--show the same failure to raise fertility rates.  Malaysia provides special protection for the Malay majority at the expense of the Chinese and Indian minorities, and yet the total fertility rate for Malays have fallen below replacement levels. (I have written about low fertility in the demographic transition.)

All of this leads me to conclude that while there might be a natural desire for tribalism, the expression of that tribalism as racial or ethnic identity is not natural but cultural.

Some of my posts on the biological reality of race can be found here, here, here, and here.

Do "Just Babies" Confirm Adam Smith's Reflective Liberal Sentimentalism?

                               Experiments at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University

"The one-year-old decided to take justice into his own hands.  He had just watched a puppet show with three characters.  The puppet in the middle rolled a ball to the puppet on the right, who passed it right back to him. It then rolled the ball to the puppet on the left, who ran away with it.  At the end of the show, the 'nice' puppet and the 'naughty' puppet were brought down from the stage and set before the boy.  A treat was placed in front of each of them, and the boy was invited to take one of the treats away.  As predicted, and like most toddlers in this experiment, he took it from the 'naughty' one--the one who had run away with the ball.  But this wasn't enough.  The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head."

In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Paul Bloom reports this as one of the experiments conducted at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University (p. 7).  He presents these experiments as showing that Charles Darwin was right in claiming that evolved human nature shows a natural moral sense--a sense of right and wrong--that is manifest in babies in the first few years of life, appearing at such an early age that it must be a natural instinct that requires little or no social learning.  (Bloom summarized some of his reasoning in an article in the New York Times Magazine here.)

Bloom also argues that these experiments confirm Adam Smith's moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because they show that Smith was right in observing that we are naturally social animals, with evolved propensities to care about our fellow human beings, a care that is expressed as sympathy or empathy, through which we judge others and judge ourselves as we appear in the eyes of others, judgments that are expressed as moral sentiments of approbation or disapprobation.  When we see people suffering unfair injuries, we sympathize with their suffering and share their resentment against those who have injured them, because we have imaginatively projected ourselves into their situations--perhaps even projecting ourselves into a puppet show.  That resentment against injustice is the natural ground of rights, because we judge rights from wrongs: human beings have the right not to be injured in ways that would elicit our moral resentment.  This is what I have called Smith's reflective liberal sentimentalism (here, here, and here).

I use Michael Frazer's term "reflective sentimentalism" to indicate that Smith's moral psychology combines reason and emotion in explaining moral judgment.  The moral emotions--such as love, indignation, guilt, and shame--provide the motivation for moral experience.  Moral reasoning elicits and directs those moral emotions.  The moral emotivists (like Jesse Prinz and Jonathan Haidt) who deny the role of reason in morality and the moral rationalists (like Immanuel Kant and Peter Singer) who deny the role of emotion are both wrong.  The reflective sentimentalists (like Smith and David Hume) rightly see the complex interaction of reason and emotion in human moral experience.  Darwinian science can explain how this moral psychology is rooted in evolved human nature.

I call this reflective sentimentalism "liberal" for three reasons.  First, it recognizes the natural separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make.  As members of the same species, we share those general propensities or generic natural desires that constitute our human nature.  But we are also unique in our identities as individuals with personal temperaments and social histories.  For the harmony of society, there must be some shared experiences between individuals based on sympathy.  But sympathy can never be perfect in the sense of being a complete unity of spectator and actor, because this would deny the separate identity of the two individuals.  "Though they will never be unisons," Smith observed, "they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required" (TMS, I.i.4.8).

The second reason for calling this moral psychology liberal is that it assumes the liberal no-harm principle as the standard for justice.  Smith claimed that justice was a "negative virtue," in that it hindered us from any unprovoked harming of our neighbor.  Harmful actions deserve punishment coming from the resentment of the person harmed and the sympathetic resentment of the spectator.  By comparison, beneficent actions deserve reward coming from the gratitude of the person benefited and the sympathetic gratitude of the spectator; but beneficence cannot be extorted by force.  "Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defense, and for defense only.  It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.  It prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that the offender may be made to repent of his injustice, and that others, through fear of the like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offence. It must be reserved therefore for these purposes, nor can the spectator ever go along with it when it is exerted for any other" (TMS, II.ii.1.4).  Here we see the Golden Rule of the Law of Nature: "As every man doth, so shall it be done to him, and retaliation seems to be the great law which is dictated to us by Nature" (TMS, II.ii.1.10).  The Golden Rule is enforced by the "animal resentment" that moves us "to return evil for evil" (II.1.1.4, II.iii.3.4).  This is what John Locke called the "executive power of the law of nature"--the natural propensity to punish those who injure us.

The third reason for calling Smith's reflective sentimentalism liberal is that it explains morality through the liberal idea of unintended order.  Smith sees morality as a self-enforcing order arising unintentionally through the free exchanges of individuals acting to satisfy their own individual desires.  Individuals are naturally moved by the desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, so that they exchange personal sentiments and moral judgments with one another, which creates commonly shared standards of morality.  Such an unintended order can be contrasted with an intended order that has been rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliberately planned purpose.  (I have developed this thought here.)

Consider how Bloom's experiments with babies illustrate these points.  The toddler who recognized the naughty puppet and decided that he deserved punishment showed a combination of reason and emotion.  He had the cognitive capacity to understand that the puppet in the middle had been harmed by the puppet on the left who ran away with the ball.  He also had to sympathize with the imagined resentment of the puppet victim, which motivated his punishment of the bad puppet by taking away the treat and slapping him.  Notice that this third-party punishment is a disinterested judgment, in the sense that it concerns actions that don't directly affect the baby himself.

The cognitive understanding of the puppet show by itself would not have motivated the moral judgment without the moral emotion of sympathetic resentment.  Psychopaths illustrate this.  Bloom relates the story of a thirteen-year old mugger who viciously attacked elderly women.  When a reporter asked him about the pain he had caused a woman, the boy was surprised by the question and responded: "What do I care? I'm not her."  He had a rational understanding of what he had done, but his moral judgment was impaired by his lack of moral emotions such as sympathy and guilt.

If these babies show a naturally evolved propensity to third-party punishment, then we need to explain the evolutionary process that produced.  There are at least three theories for this.  We might explain this through group selection, in that groups with third-party punishment tended to outcompete groups without such punishment.  Or we might explain this through individual selection, in that individuals inclined to third-party punishment earned good reputations that enhanced their survival and reproduction.  Or we might explain this though an evolutionary combination of revenge and empathy, in that individuals imagine themselves in the shoes of a victim and then respond as if they themselves had been harmed.

Although I have said that these babies show third-party punishment as a disinterested judgment, this is not totally disinterested or impartial, because the babies favor those close to them--their relatives and others in their group--over strangers.  Infants prefer the voices of their mothers over strange voices, and they prefer those who speak the native language over those speaking foreign languages.  They fear strangers.

Some studies have found that children often favor peers of the same race and think that they are better people.  But this is true mostly for children in racially homogeneous schools.  Children in racially diverse schools don't care about race.  This suggests that there is a natural bias to favor one's own group over others, but social contact with other people can expand one's circle of group identity.  Forming a coalition to compete with outsiders is part of our evolved human nature, but identifying those who do and do not belong to our coalition depends upon our social environment.  The famous Robbers Cave experiment of Muzafer Sherif and the "minimum group" experiments of Henri Tajfel show that any arbitrary assignment of people to different groups can quickly create an Us versus Them psychology.

We can see this at work in Donald Trump's xenophobic rhetoric supporting his anti-immigrant policies, as in his warning about the "invasion" of people from Latin America.  His opponents have to counter this by portraying Hispanic immigrants in a sympathetic manner as victims of unjustified harm.

REFERENCES

Bloom, Paul. 2013. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown Publishers.

Bloom, Paul. 2010.  "The Moral Life of Babies." New York Times Magazine, May 9.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, and Karen Wynn. 2011. "Young Infants Prefer Prosocial to Antisocial Others." Cognitive Development 26: 30-39.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom. 2007. "Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants." Nature 450: 557-59.

Hamlin, J. KIiley, Karen Wynn, Paul Bloom, and Neha Mahajan. 2011. "How Infants and Toddlers React to Antisocial Others." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108: 19931-19936.

Marshall, Julia. 2019. "The Development of Corporal Third-Party Punishment." Cognition 190: 221-29.

McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. 2015. "Costly Third-Party Punishment in Young Children." Cognition 134: 1-10.

Rossano, Frederico. 2011. "Young Children's Understanding of Violations of Property Rights." Cognition 121: 219-27.