The possible reasons for this change may include the massive boost to Europe’s intelligence provided by the Black Death which killed about 80% of English serfs (see Dutton, 2014). This would have, presumably, elevated K-strategy and trust levels. Other reasons would have pushed this even further, including Christianity’s religious extremism and its complete prohibition on contraception. It has been suggested that at a certain level of development civilizations develop contraception and that this is better employed by the more intelligent who, anyway, see less of a need to have children because they are less instinctive, less religious and suffer lower child mortality. Accordingly the positive association between intelligence and fertility in pre-industrial societies (see Clark, 2007) goes into reverse, society becomes less intelligent, and it goes backwards (Meisenberg, 2007). The West managed to reach the Industrial Revolution before this happened because it was so intolerant of religious deviation, selected very strongly for religiousness (see Dutton & Madison, 2017), and had a strong taboo on contraception (see Meisenberg, 2007). Accordingly, in understanding race differences in ethnocentrism, it must be understood that races are in constant evolution, altering relative to other races, and are doing so at different rates. This study attempts to understand what the differences are and why they exist at the time of writing. The seemingly fleeting nature of the differences between European and Arab and South Asian peoples may be because they are relatively closely related, all ultimately ‘Caucasian’ (Rushton, 1995).
12. Conclusion
It is fairly clear that a fast Life History is associated with negative ethnocentrism while a slow Life History is associated with positive ethnocentrism. High levels of cousin marriage are likely to occur in a fast Life History context and boost negative and possibly positive ethnocentrism. Religiousness will, in general, boost ethnocentrism as will genetic similarity, as Rushton has observed. Likewise, as Charlton has argued, it is possible that a strong level of Natural Selection will boost positive ethnocentrism. This allows us to understand why Northeast Asians, Arabs, and Jews may display higher ethnocentrism than Europeans. It may also be that a ‘low ethnocentrism’ strategy has been specifically useful for Europeans, though more research would be needed to conclusively demonstrate this.
Chapter Nine
Stress, Demographics and Diversity
1. Introduction
In the previous chapter, we examined very fundamental reasons why there are race differences in ethnocentrism. In this chapter, we will examine more superficial reasons, which may also better explain differences between relatively similar ethnic groups. In this chapter we will examine (1) stress, especially as caused by poverty and mortality salience; (2) intelligence and education; (3) the median age of the society; (4) the society’s gender balance; (5) the level of ethnic heterogeneity and ethnic conflict in the society.
2. Risk, Stress and Ethnocentrism
Danger appears to be a crucial environmental variable which promotes ethnocentric behaviour. This would make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Danger leads to the release of adrenaline and high levels of adrenaline are associated with highly instinctive — survival-focused — behaviour. Accordingly, under intense levels of stress, we would expect evolved psychological adaptations to become more prominent. Accordingly, it is not surprising that a body of evidence has found that highly stressful situations appear to increase ethnocentric behaviour. These are potentially ‘survival’ situations and in such situations we would unconsciously be acting in our genetic interests. We have already observed that extreme self-sacrifice for the good of the ethnic group can, in some circumstances, be in our genetic interests.
For example, Pratto and Glasford (2008) examined how the stressor of competition might influence the extent to which subjects value other human lives, by asking them their views on certain hypothetical policies. They showed that Americans value American and Iraqi lives equally when outcomes for those nations do not compete but when there was competition Americans valued American lives more than those of Iraqis. They extended this experiment, showing that even when large numbers of lives were at stake Americans valued a smaller number American combatant lives over a much larger number of Iraqi civilian lives. This would seem to imply that at times of competition ethnocentrism is heightened and heightened to such an extent that the very lives of members of other ethnic groups come to be worth relatively little. It is also congruous with the evidence that ethnocentrism is strongly an adaptation to intergroup competition. Interestingly, Greitenmeyer (2014) has found that playing violent video games not only increases feelings of aggression but particularly increases aggression in relation to members of perceived out-groups; in other words it increases negative ethnocentrism. This finding would be in line with view that stress — which is likely to be induced by playing a violent video game — is a key factor in negative ethnocentrism.
Agroskin and Jonas (2013) studied how ‘mortality salience’ (fear of death) impacted ethnocentric behaviour. They found that mortality salience made people behave in a more ethnocentric way, in the sense that they felt more inclined to defend whatever ‘in-group’ they were part of. The researchers argued that loss of control mediated this effect, so, in essence, the feeling that one is not in control of one’s life — for example, due to mortality salience — leads people to behave in a way which is highly defensive of their in-group. This finding would be congruous with the idea that stress — which would be caused by uncertainty among other factors — is associated with ethnocentric behaviour.
We have already looked at the way in which oxytocin is associated with ethnocentric behaviour. Olff et al.’s (2013) literature review found that oxytocin increases ethnocentrism in a particularly pronounced way among subjects who are already prone to experiencing high levels of stress, due to suffering from anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or having undergone childhood maltreatment of some kind. Cheon et al. (2014) found, as we have already noted, that people are more ethnocentric when they carry a particular gene form which has been found to make people more sensitive to stress and danger.
We have already looked at Thornhill’s ‘parasite stress’ model of ethnocentrism and we have found it to be problematic in a number of respects. However, it is potentially congruous with the finding that ethnocentrism is increased by stress. Thornhill has found, in essence, that the more industrialized countries — those that have been industrialized for longer — are, in general, less ethnocentric than less developed ones. He has put this down to parasite stress, but the problem with this argument is that it fails to explain ethnocentrism differences all over the world. Parasite stress might explain why Ghana would be more ethnocentric than England but it wouldn’t really explain why Poland or East Germany would be more ethnocentric than England. Thus, a broader explanation, which would encompass parasite stress and which would readily explain all these differences, would simply be general stress. Industrialization reduces stress by combatting the causes of many of our fears. It allows widespread inoculation against and cure of illness, so reducing child mortality to tiny levels while allowing most people to live well into old age, and it ensures an extremely high standard of living such that even the poorest have high living standards by the standards of a century ago. It puts an end to famine, and tends to lead to high levels of political stability and low levels of war precisely because of the resource abundance which it produces. As such, we would expect the more industrialized areas to experience lower levels of all forms of stress than the less industrialized areas and, if stress causes ethnocentric behaviour, then ethnocentric behaviour would generally be lower in societies that were more industrialized, at least when controlling for other factors.
However, as stated, we cannot entirely reduce this to parasite stress. Differences between some countries may also be explained by slight differences in living standard, geographical position (for example, if the country is next to a dominant and aggressive neighbour), and even the
genetic proneness of the population to experience stress. For this reason, differences in general stress levels are a more parsimonious explanation for differences in ethnocentric behaviour than are differences in parasite stress levels alone. In addition, as discussed, Figueredo et al. (2011) have shown that an unstable environment and consequent fast Life History strategy does lead to higher levels of negative ethnocentrism and we have also observed mechanisms which might cause the very same environment to result in high levels of positive ethnocentrism. Accordingly, a society that was under stress and which became less stable — due, for example, to fear of invasion or due to an economic slump — would move towards a faster Life History strategy and would therefore be likely to become more negatively ethnocentric.
Dutton et al. (2016a) tested this by looking at levels of ethnic conflict (N = 48; Vanhanen, 2012), per capita income in 2008 (N = 56; Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012), Life expectancy 2008 (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012), Infant Mortality 2008 (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012), crime rate in 2008 (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012) and GDP in 2008 (CIA World Factbook). All of these variables could be regarded as stressors. Ethnic conflict was not significantly associated with ethnocentrism. In terms of significant correlations, per capita income was negatively associated with negative ethnocentrism (r = −0.35), infant mortality rate was positively associated with positive ethnocentrism (r = 0.4), and GDP was negatively associated with it (−0.3). Accordingly, on the surface at least, the more stressful a country is to live in then the more ethnocentric it is, though there may be other relevant factors underlying these differences.
So, in addition to differences in religiousness and cousin marriage elevating ethnocentrism among Arabs, the greater stress induced by living in an Arab society would also do so. And with reference to our discussion of the response to the Great Migration in Chapter One, the relative poverty of Eastern Europe would predict stress and thus ethnocentrism.
3. Age Profile and Gender
Indirectly related to the above discussion is the issue of the age-profile of the population. Rekker et al. (2015) assessed 1302 Dutch youths aged twelve to thirty-one years. They found that around late adolescence — approximately the age of sixteen — people became less supportive of Multiculturalism and more negatively ethnocentric. As they grew into ‘early adulthood’, their attitudes became more stable and less politically extreme. However, they also became less ethnocentric than they had been in early adolescence. Also, as they got older, the effect of education on ethnocentrism scores became increasingly pronounced, while educational differences were a factor of little significance among adolescents. There are a number of reasons why we might expect adolescents to be more ethnocentric.
Firstly, and most obviously, adolescence involves the development of a distinct personality profile. Soto et al. (2011) have shown that the personality traits of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness tend to increase with age with the exception of a dip during early adolescence when both of these traits go into reverse for a short period before continuing to increase in late adolescence. The possible reason for this, it might be speculated, is to aid a psychological break with the parents. Rekker et al. and Soto et al. use different terminology for the same time period, so the results replicate each other. But this raises the question of why this happens. The development of the late adolescent brain leads to experiencing certain negative feelings more strongly and it is this which may be the motor, partly, of increased ethnocentrism. For example, a number of studies have reported that both boys and girls appear to peak in terms of experiencing feelings of anxiety during late adolescence (see Arnett, 2007, p. 116). These tend to decrease thereafter.
Secondly, it is widely agreed that adolescence is a time of profound change. Not only does a person’s body change but his brain changes. In mid-adolescence the temporal cortex, an area which processes music and language as well as social factors such as facial recognition and mood attribution, reaches its peak volume. The pre-frontal cortex, the seat of abstract and symbolic thought, also reaches its peak volume at this point. During adolescence the amygdala, a structure which encodes negative memories, gains peak volume as well. This causes adolescents to become withdrawn and anxious but better at being conditioned by negative stimuli. Adolescents also use the amygdala to a greater extent than adults who will, for example, use the frontal cortex (rational thought) to a greater extent in making evaluations. Adolescents display an elevated response to dopamine, which rewards us with pleasurable feelings for engaging in evolutionarily useful behaviour. For all these reasons, the adolescent is no longer a child but is not really fully an adult and he is left questioning who precisely he is. He may experiment with different forms of identity — seen in fleeting youthful engagement with political protest, the arts or religion — in order to eventually discover who he is. The benefits of the ‘adolescent personality’ to evolution are relatively clear. A longer adolescence allows for a period of learning which makes the organism better able to survive in a highly selective environment, as was our environment until the Industrial Revolution. By slowing down the organism’s development and introducing a lengthy juvenile and adolescent period, the organism has a longer period in which to learn about its social and broader environment before it becomes sexually active and tries to reproduce. There may also be some benefit at the group level to the creativity unleashed by the personality-intelligence combination found in late adolescence as we have noted that genius — and original discovery — is associated with high intelligence and moderately high psychoticism, meaning that lesser creative achievement may be associated with the adolescent period. But, clearly, the downside to adolescence is experiencing certain negative feelings very strongly, such that one can be successfully conditioned against damaging courses of action (Alacorta, 2012). This would increase stress, which appears to be associated with ethnocentrism.
The experimentation aspect in adolescence may itself heighten stress. The adolescent will usually experience his first sexual relationship and the breakdown of this relationship, he may experiment with different social groups and find himself disillusioned and marginalized along the way, and he is likely to move out of his parents’ home and begin to fend for himself, semi-independent of his family. In addition, he will have to make important and potentially irreversible decisions about the direction of his work life and his relationships. All of this will place the adolescent under a great deal of stress and it is likely no coincidence that religious conversion experiences, which have been shown to be underpinned significantly by stress, tend to occur, if they occur at all, during late adolescence (see Dutton, 2008; Conn, 1986). Of course, it would appear likely that this increased level of stress would potentially heighten feelings of ethnocentrism and, in this regard, it is noteworthy that many religious groups can be understood to be highly group-centric. They have strong group borders, a clear sense of differentiation between the in-group and the out-group, they cast the in-group as morally and spiritually superior to the out-group, and they have difficult tests of membership. Indeed, Dutton (2008), in analysis of fundamentalist Christian student groups, found that the more identity-challenging, and thus stressful, the university environment was the more fundamentalist the main evangelical student group tended to be.
A third possibility is that humans are evolved to be particularly ethnocentric at a particular age. This would potentially make sense in evolutionary terms. We have seen from computer modelling that a significant selection pressure in favour of ethnocentric behaviour is group conflict. In such conflicts, we would expect each group to oppose each other using the most physically able members of the group and these would usually be those of the age group that is now classed as late adolescent. This being the case, there would be an evolutionary benefit to this particular age-group being especially ethnocentric in their behaviour. At the individual level, being strongly ethnocentric at that age would allow you, if you survived, to prove your physical ability, rendering you sexually selected for. However
, being similarly ethnocentric at an older age or at a younger age would involve taking a far greater risk which would be far more likely to limit your individual and family fertility. At the group level, the group which possessed the most ethnocentric late adolescents would be more likely to triumph in any group conflict. If the blip in negative ethnocentrism increasing in late adolescence were for evolutionary reasons, we would expect it to be more pronounced among males than females because it would be males who would be fighting on behalf of the tribe. This is precisely what Rekker et al’s data showed. In addition, Van der Graaff et al. (2014) and others have found that there is a temporary dip in empathy during adolescence and that this is more pronounced among boys than girls. This is precisely what we would predict if the findings reflected an evolutionary strategy to deal with group conflict. It would benefit the boys, though not the girls, to be particularly aggressive at about this age as they would be the ones fighting the members of out-groups. Interestingly, Figueredo et al. (2011) found that males were more ethnocentric than females even when males’ generally faster Life History was controlled for. This would imply that males are simply evolved to be more ethnocentric than females independent of the kind of personality or Life History strategy they have. Figueredo et al. (2011, p. 27) explain this in the same way that we have explained Rekker et al’s findings. They state: ‘We attribute this additional effect of the traditional predominance of males as participants in inter-group warfare within the overwhelming majorities of ancestral as well as contemporary human societies. Male humans were typically the warriors and could therefore be expected to evolve more negative ethnocentrism as an adaptation to that historical role’.
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