Chapter Six
Ethnocentrism, Personality Traits and Computer Modelling
1. Introduction
We have almost completed our survey of the theoretical background. But there are two things we have to do before it is truly complete. We have to examine the concept of an ‘ethnocentric personality’ because, as we will see later, there are race differences in modal personality. So, if there is an ‘ethnocentric personality’ then this would neatly explain why race differences in ethnocentrism exist. We will then look at the concept of ‘group selection’ and we will show that ethnocentric groups are more likely to win the battle of group selection. As such, ‘group selection’ would appear to help us understand race differences in ethnocentrism.
2. Personality20
Personality is defined as ‘the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character’. Thus, personality can be seen as a series of variable traits. McAdams and Pals (2006, p. 212) emphasize in their definition of personality the centrality of ‘unique variation’ in ‘a developing pattern of dispositional traits’. In general, in current psychology, discussion of personality differences is focused through the prism of the so-called Big Five personality traits, all of which have been estimated to be somewhere in the region of at least 50% heritable (Nettle, 2007) and possibly up to around 0.66 heritable in some cases (Lynn, 2011a). The Big 5 have been developed since various personality ‘aspects’ — such as ‘warmth’ or ‘depression’ — have been found to correlate positively or negatively with each other, but to have no correlation, or only a very weak correlation, with other personality traits or with intelligence. As such, ‘five’ has been widely accepted as the number of separate personality variables and these variables are regarded as substantially independent of intelligence. The Big Five are:
1. Extraversion: Those who are outgoing, enthusiastic and active, seek novelty and excitement, and who experience positive emotions strongly. Those who score low on this express Introversion and are aloof, quiet, independent, cautious, and enjoy being alone.
2. Neuroticism: Those who are prone to stress, worry, and negative emotions and who require order. The opposite are Emotionally Stable and they are better at taking risks.
3. Conscientiousness: Organized, directed, hardworking, but controlling. The opposite are spontaneous, careless, and prone to addiction.
4. Agreeableness: Trusting, cooperative, altruistic, and slow to anger. This is contrasted with those who are uncooperative and hostile.
5. Openness-Intellect: Those who are creative, imaginative, and open to new ideas (this latter aspect being the ‘intellect’ component). This is contrasted with those who are practical, conventional, and less open to new ideas. This trait correlates positively with intelligence at 0.3 and the traits which compose it, such as ‘unusual thought patterns’ or ‘impulsive non-conformity’, are often only weakly correlated.
In each case, the traits are conceived of as a spectrum and are named after one extreme on the spectrum. They are considered useful because variation in the Big Five allows successful Life History predictions to be made. For example, the ‘Termites’ were a cohort of 1500 Americans of above average intelligence first surveyed in 1921 and then finally in 1991. Drawing upon them, it was found that extraversion, independent of any other factor, was a predictor of early death, increasing the risk three-fold (Friedman et al., 1993). As already noted, the Big 5 are substantially independent of each other, though there is a correlation at the level of the aspects of which they are composed. Specifically, what we might call the socially positive aspects of each trait do correlate. These are the aspects which make you a socially effective person — friendly, diligent, cooperative, reliable — meaning, in essence, that you get on in life. As such, personality can be reduced down to a ‘General Factor of Personality’ and people can be positioned higher or lower on a spectrum measuring this General Factor of Personality (see Van der Linden et al., 2010).
As we have already discussed, in the wake of World War II the concept of the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ became popular as a means of explaining ethnocentrism (Adorno et al., 1950). According to Adorno, this kind of personality was tough-minded, strongly rule-following and profoundly insecure. For Adorno, this kind of personality would be strongly prone to prejudice against deviant groups or any group that was different, including those from different ethnicities. This ‘authoritarian personality’ has also been widely termed the ‘ethnocentric personality’ (e.g. Barrios, 1992, p. 227). But, as we have already discussed, there is a conceptual difference between ethnocentrism and simply racial prejudice. Just because a person despises foreigners it does not follow that he will lay down his life for his own ethnic group. Van Izjendoorn (1989), in the Netherlands, and Todosijevic and Enyedi (2002), in Hungary, found a positive correlation between ‘authoritarian personality’ and ‘ethnocentrism’ among student samples. But, as we will see below, this does mean that they are precisely the same concept.
A number of studies have found evidence that dimensions of personality impact aspects of ethnocentrism, though it would seem that ‘ethnocentrism’ cannot be explained simply in terms of the Big Five. Bizumic and Duckitt (2008) found a positive association between ‘narcissism’ (to some extent low Agreeableness) and intergroup ethnocentrism, that is to say prejudice towards out-groups. In a study of Canadian students, Altemeyer (2003) found a correlation between religious fundamentalism, religious prejudice, and Manitoba nationalism. However, this latter finding was part of a general prejudice against minorities, including homosexuals. In the USA, de Oliveira et al. (2009) measured students in terms of the Big Five and tested whether the Big Five predicted being prejudiced against foreign-born teachers and in favour of American-born teachers. They found that Agreeableness and Conscientiousness predicted a lower level of prejudice against foreign born teachers. They also found that students who liked one instructor group more tended to like the other one less. However, once again, though this study may provide evidence that prejudice is predicted by the Big Five traits — specifically, low Conscientiousness and low Agreeableness — it does not provide us with an ‘ethnocentric personality’. It would seem to imply, however, that people who are low in Agreeableness extend this low Agreeableness to disliking people from groups of which they are not a part.
There is a growing body of research arguing that ‘ethnocentrism’ must be distinguished from simple ‘prejudice’. For example, Swedish psychologist Robin Bergh (2013) directly tested the idea that there might be an ‘ethnocentric personality’. He found that the only relevant traits on the Big 5 were Agreeableness and Openness and their contribution to variance in ethnocentrism was trivial. However, as Adorno’s model would imply, low Agreeableness was associated with being ‘prejudiced’, but this was prejudiced against all minority groups — homosexuals as well as members of other ethnic minorities. Thus, low Agreeableness may contribute to the prejudice dimension of ethnocentrism to some extent but it is clearly conceptually distinct. As we have already noted, Bizumic and Duckitt (2012) have found that there are two dimensions to ethnocentrism and these are clearly distinct from mere in-group and out-group prejudice, something which Bergh’s research substantiates.
As such, the body of evidence would indicate that the idea of an ‘ethnocentric personality’ cannot be accepted. This would imply that ethnocentrism is not the by-product of a particular or series of partly heritable personality traits, though aspects of it — such as prejudice against non-co-ethnics — are associated with certain personality traits. In this sense, it is comparable to religiousness. This is weakly (0.1) associated with certain personality traits, meaning that much of it is independent of these and ‘personality’ is nowhere close to being a full explanation. A meta-analysis of the relationship between religiousness and the Big Five (Saroglou, 2002) found that religiousness was weakly but significantly predicted by Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. In addition
, Neuroticism was found to be positively associated with ‘religious quest orientation’, in other words periodic religiousness, such as at times of stress (Hills et al., 2004). This weak correlation would imply that an element of religiousness is a by-product of two personality characteristics, or of aspects of them, which we would anyway expect to be selected for by natural and sexual selection: Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. These characteristics would render a male a more attractive mate, not least because they tend to be associated with high socioeconomic status (see Nettle, 2007) and would likely convey to the female that the male would honest and so invest in her and her offspring. From the male perspective, these characteristics would imply that the female was rule-following and honest, meaning he could be more confident that his offspring would genuinely be his (Blume, 2009).
However, the weakness of the association strongly implies something else. Religiousness and ethnocentrism would seem to be ‘instincts’, which have been selected for because of their fitness benefits (see Dutton & Van der Linden, 2017). ‘Instinct’ is generally defined as ‘an innate, typically fixed, pattern of behaviour in animals in response to certain stimuli’ (Oxford English Dictionary). By implication, the behaviour is present — to a greater or lesser extent — in all normal members of the species in question. Instinctive behaviour is heightened at times of considerable distress. Thus, those who are extremely frightened will generally respond with predictable, instinctive behaviour patterns (Steimer, 2002), though there will be individual variation in how much stimuli is needed to induce these behaviours. ‘Instinct’ appears to be very similar to the concept of an evolved domain-specific adaptation. One of the fundamental ideas of evolutionary psychology is that the mind consists of a number of modules which have been selected because they aided survival in specific recurrent situations in the evolutionary past (Durrant & Ellis, 2003, p. 9). Likewise, the fact that there does not appear to be any large association between ethnocentrism and the Big Five would imply that it is not simply a by-product of a certain kind of personality. It is also a specific trait and it has become widespread because of the benefits it provides in terms of fitness. Individuals who were inclined towards those who were genetically similar to them — which can be regarded as related to ethnocentrism — would, in small and relatively inbred populations, as well as in those in conflict with others — see more of their genes passed on, helping to spread ethnocentrism and increase its intensity in the population. More importantly, however, groups which contained a lower percentage of ethnocentric people would have been more likely to have been wiped out by groups who were more ethnocentric in any given conflict situation. Accordingly, ethnocentrism would spread throughout populations, though we might expect that it would spread differentially and be selected for more or less intensely at certain points, which would explain why a desire for genetic similarity has been shown to have a heritability of only 0.3 (Rushton, 2005).
In this sense, once more, it can again be compared to religiousness. It might be argued that religiousness is not an instinct in itself but rather the by-product of a collection of instincts, such as to over-detect agency (leading to the assumption that anything unknown is caused by an agent, as in conspiracy theories), obey authority, and look for causation (see Boyer, 2001). However, as myself and Swedish psychologist Guy Madison (Dutton & Madison, 2017, p. 2), have summarised:
It can be countered that there is strong evidence that religiosity is likely to be selected for in itself: it is a human universal, it is associated with increased fertility, it is substantially genetic (around 0.4), it has clear physical manifestations (in terms of brain changes specifically associated with religious experiences, for example), and it can be argued to be adaptive, in promoting health, among many other positive dimensions (see Vaas, 2009).
Religiousness would be individually selected for because it would reduce stress and belief in an all-loving God would promote pro-social behaviour, meaning the religious would be less likely to be killed by the band (Norenzayen & Shariff, 2008). It would be sexually selected for because it would betoken trustworthiness, rule-following and cooperatives. In much the same way, we have seen that ethnocentrism is a human universal and is significantly genetic, in the sense that a propensity to genetic similarity is partly genetic. There is evidence ethnocentrism is associated with healthy behaviours, because negative ethnocentrism involves elevated levels of disgust and thus disease avoidance (Navarette et al., 2007). But, as we will see later, ethnocentrism tends to be associated with religiousness, meaning that it is often difficult to separate the two. Nevertheless, ethnocentrics would be more cooperative with other group members, meaning there would be individual and sexual selection for such behaviour. They would increase their inclusive fitness.
Clearly, the degree to which an instinct — such as ethnocentrism or religiousness — would be selected for would vary with the nature of the ecology. In so much as races and ethnic groups are adapted to different ecologies, we would expect there to be differences in the extent of ethnocentrism between different races and ethnic groups. So what would underpin these differences?
3. Tracking the Spread: Computer Modelling
And now we turn to the other kind of selection, which would select for ethnocentrism: group selection. It should be noted that there is considerable debate over the utility of ‘group selection’ as a construct. It has been defended by Dutton et al. (2017). They observe that Wilson and Sober (1994) have espoused the ‘Multi-Level Selection Theory’. Wilson and Sober argue that selection can occur on multiple levels including on the individual, the kinship group, the group, and the entire species. Once cooperative groups develop within a species, selection will promote those groups which have the optimum level of qualities which allow them to outcompete other groups. This model, they argue, helps to explain the development of altruistic tendencies. ‘Kin selection involves making sacrifices for your kin and group selection is a logical extension of this, as ethnic groups are extended kinship groups’, they note. They further observe that even this nuanced version of ‘Group selection’ has been criticised in depth by Pinker (18th June 2012) because it ‘deviates from the “random mutation” model inherent in evolution’, ‘we are clearly not going to be selected to damage our individual interests, as group selection implies’ and ‘Human altruism is self-interested and does not involve the kind of self-sacrifice engaged in by sterile bees’. They respond to each of these points. They note as group selection builds on individual selection the metaphor is bound to slightly differ. The group-selection model merely avers that a group will be more successful if an optimum percentage of its members are inclined to sacrifice themselves for their group. And they further note that ‘it is clearly the case that a small percentage, in many groups, is indeed prepared to sacrifice itself for the group’. So, it seems to me that it is reasonable to accept multi-level selection and to regard ethnocentrism as group selected.
Were this to be the case then, all else being equal, the more ethnocentric group should always triumph in battles of group selection. This would mean that, all else being equal, races that were compelled, by the nature of their environment, to combat other groups (by being internally cooperative but externally hostile) would be more ethnocentric. And if it were indeed the case that the spread of genes for ethnocentrism was essentially inevitable then we would expect this prediction to be borne out with computer models. Computer simulation refers to a programme run on a computer which attempts to recreate a particular real-world system. The simulation uses an abstract model — known as a ‘computer model’ — in order to simulate the system in question. So, the ‘computer model’ is the algorithms and equations used to capture the behaviour of the system being modelled while the simulation is the actual running of the programme that contains these. Computer modelling has been employed to understand and predict a wide array of systems including weather forecasting, the design of noise barriers next to motorways, the behaviour of
buildings under various types of stress, and the behaviour of cars during crashes. Clearly, computer modelling allows scales of events to be tested that would be beyond anything realistically possible using traditional mathematical modelling. The spread of ethnocentrism is one area to which computer modelling has been applied.
4. Prisoner’s Dilemma
In the earliest work on this subject (e.g. Hales, 2000) agents played a one shot game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game where you are in prison and have to make a choice with regard to how to behave towards another prisoner. The person with the most points ultimately wins. If you cooperate he gets points and you lose them, and if you ‘defect’ (don’t cooperate) then you get points and he loses them. But the other prisoner knows what you’ve done and can punish you in the next round by ‘defecting’ himself. Clearly, there is reason to cooperate because you may benefit from the other prisoner’s cooperation with you in future interactions. However, in a ‘one shot’ game you will never interact with that person again, so it is always rational to defect. In the simulation, the agents were divided into groups with different colour tags, but they only interacted with those of the same tag.
Axelrod and Hammond (2003) devised an ethnocentrism computer model that was more sophisticated. In the model, as before, each interaction involves a single Prisoner’s Dilemma move: cooperate with the other agent or defect. An agent has three traits: a colour tag, the ability to cooperate or defect when meeting someone of their own colour, and the ability to cooperate or defect when meeting an agent of a different colour. This means they had four genetically transmitted strategies: humanitarian (cooperate with everyone), selfish (cooperate with nobody), treasonous (cooperate only with those of another colour tag) and ethnocentric (cooperate only with those of your own colour tag). Each agent has a 12% chance of reproducing. This is known as ‘Potential to Reproduce’ (PTR). Cooperating decreases an agent’s PTR by 1% while being the subject of cooperation increases that agent’s PTR by 3%. It can be seen immediately that if two agents both happen to cooperate this will be better for both of them in terms of reproduction and consequently better for their colour group. As such, defection always benefits the individual unless cooperation is mutual, which then benefits the entire group. Agents are placed on a grid where they can move in any direction until they run into others. They reproduce asexually with a mutation rate of 0.5% per generation and they have a 10% chance of dying at any given time. Axelrod and Hammond found that in the final 100 periods of ten 2000 period runs, 76% of the agents had the ethnocentric strategy, compared to 25% who would have had it by chance. In terms of behaviour, 88% of the choices made by agents were consistent with in-group favouritism. This high rate of in-group favouritism resulted from 90% of same colour interactions being cooperative, and 84% of the different colour interactions being non-cooperative. Thus, simulated conditions show how, over many generations, ethnocentric behaviour is likely to spread through a population and come to dominate it.
Race Differences in Ethnocentrism Page 11