Drawing upon an analysis of 176 countries, Vanhanen found that there was a 0.66 correlation between the extent of ethnic conflict and the level of ethnic heterogeneity. This finding would be congruous with the view that where there is no clearly dominant ethnic group then every group — including the largest group — is under threat from every other group. This would appear to increase not just negative but also positive ethnocentrism, because Vanhanen’s measure of ‘Ethnic Conflict’ includes behaviour which involves self-sacrifice on behalf of the ethnic group such as warfare, suicide bombing and general risky, law-breaking behaviour. On this basis, Vanhanen lists 176 countries and scores them in terms of Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Heterogeneity. As discussed, the correlation was 0.66 and he provides explanations for the various outliers. So, we would predict that ethnic conflict within a country — and thus ethnocentrism within that country — will be higher the less dominant the largest ethnic group is. However, that very same internally ethnocentric country would have very low levels of trust as a nation and, as such, would have difficulty mobilizing against an invader in a positive way, such as where self-sacrifice was required for the country.
On the other hand, Vanhanen’s research shows that there is a negative association between ethnic conflict and standard of living. So, based on 176 countries, EC correlates with democratization at −0.22, with Human Development Index 2010 at −0.39, and with PPP/GNI per capita 2008 at −0.253. It makes sense that Ethnic Conflict would be associated with a reduced standard of living for a number of reasons. A high level of ethnic conflict would render the society dangerous and unstable and so discourage long-term projects, and this would be reflected in a lack of cooperation and trust in the society, which would essentially be embroiled in a war of varying degrees of intensity. However, for this reason we would expect that it would be extremely stressful to live in a highly ethnically heterogeneous society and in that ethnocentrism appears to be highly instinctive we would expect such stresses to increase both in-group (in terms of the ethnic group) ethnocentrism and out-group ethnocentrism, rendering such societies relatively hostile to foreigners.
As discussed, Dutton et al. (2016a) tested ethnic conflict and found that there was no significant relationship with ethnocentrism. There was also no significant relationship, at the country level, between ethnic heterogeneity and ethnocentrism. However, all of the relationships were positive and in the range of 0.3 to 0.8. So, with a larger N it may be that a significant relationship would reveal itself.
6. Intelligence and Education
Hooghe et al. (2009) speculate on why Greece is an outlier among Western European countries in terms of trust and negative ethnocentrism. One possibility is average IQ. Average IQ has been shown to be positively associated with trusting people (e.g. Hooghe et al., 2012) even when controlling for key variables such as education (Carl & Billari, 2014), and as we have discussed above, ethnocentrism is associated with a fast Life History strategy, an aspect of which is low intelligence at the group level. The relationship between intelligence and trust may result from the way in which less intelligent people will be less able to work out whether someone is trustworthy, meaning it would make more sense for them to trust nobody (Carl & Billari, 2014). In addition, in Western countries, voters for strongly ethnocentric parties have the lowest average IQ based on studies of large cohorts (e.g. Deary et al., 2008). Indeed, even in non-Western countries voters for ‘far right’ parties, which tend to be the most negatively ethnocentric, generally have the lowest average IQs, as has been shown in Brazil, for example (Rindermann et al., 2012). The average IQ of Greece, at around 92, is the lowest of the countries in the OECD survey drawn upon by Hooghe et al. (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012) which may contribute to explaining the country’s low score on trust and its high score on negative ethnocentrism.
Hodson and Busseri (2012) used a large UK sample (N 15,884) and found that childhood IQ was negatively associated with holding ‘racist’ attitudes as an adult, mainly due to the association between low IQ and extreme right-wing ideologies. This relationship was found even when controlling for socioeconomic status and education level. Drawing upon the US General Social Survey between 1972 and 2010 (N 44,873), Wodtke (2016) also found that racial prejudice was negatively associated with intelligence. However, this was a weak association, of around 0.2. Dhont and Hodson (2014) have produced a literature review showing that even when controlling for variables, such as education level, there is a weak negative correlation between cognitive ability — general intelligence as well as different forms of intelligence — and prejudice.
As such, it is reasonable to conclude that low intelligence is associated with relatively high levels of negative ethnocentrism, so this is a factor in negative ethnocentrism in African and Middle Eastern countries as well. It could be argued, as we have already discussed, that more intelligent people are better attuned to the dominant ideology of Multiculturalism in Western countries and, as long-term thinkers, can see the benefits of conforming to it. Moreover, as intelligence tends to predict cooperative behaviour they have a desire to conform to the dominant ideology and, as such, through effortful control persuade themselves that they are not negatively ethnocentric and nor are they even positively ethnocentric (see Woodley of Menie & Dunkel, 2015, and Dutton, 2013). The difficulty with this argument, in this instance, is the evidence that even in countries where Multiculturalism is not the dominant ideology, supporting the most highly ethnocentric parties is still associated with lowest intelligence, when we might expect this to be true of supporting the extreme left if this theory were accurate (see Dutton, 2014). As such, the simplest explanation for all of these findings is that we have an instinctive drive towards out-group prejudice. Intelligence permits us to suppress this for a number of reasons: it makes us curious about new things as it correlates with the Intellect facet of Openness-Intellect; the intelligent will be better able to evaluate whether or not to trust people, rendering the default option of distrust of all outsiders less adaptive; intelligent people are more empathetic and so less likely to simply dismiss people and their feelings, and they are less black and white in their thinking.
Moreover, American philosopher Nathan Cofnas (2016) has argued that ‘evolutionary novelty’ (or ‘evolutionary mismatch’) needs to be defined as ‘deviations in the environment that render biological traits unable, or impaired in their ability, to produce their selected effects’ (Cofnas, 2016, p. 507). If ‘evolutionary novelty’ is thus defined, argues Cofnas, then the ecology is changing and so is constantly ‘evolutionarily novel’ and intelligence will help one to respond to it, meaning part of intelligence will involve reacting to this novelty. Indeed, as our evolved instincts will increasingly be ‘mismatched’ with the environment, the ability to solve problems — the essence of intelligence — will involve being non-instinctive and attracted, therefore, to mismatches; to the evolutionary novel. When defined in this way, I and Dutch psychologist Dimitri Van der Linden (Dutton & Van der Linden, 2017) argue, it starts to make sense that intelligence predicts attraction to evolutionary novelty, as being attracted to evolutionary novelty means being attracted to that which is non-instinctive, and being non-instinctive assists in solving new problems. Dutton and Van der Linden note that intelligence is associated to a variety of non-instinctive preferences: not wanting children, being relatively nocturnal, experimenting with homosexuality, and not being religious (see also Kanazawa, 2012). It would follow that, all else being equal, intelligence would predict being attracted to the idea of having friends and sexual partners from a different race and thus seeming low in negative ethnocentrism. This being the case we might even expect inter-racial relationships to be socioeconomically curvilinear with the highly intelligent (and thus high status) pursuing them due to their attraction to the evolutionarily novel and those very low in status (extreme r-strategists) pursuing them due to their focus on physical markers of health and genetic variety. On this basis, then, we would expect
societies with higher average intelligence to express lower levels of negative ethnocentrism and, due to the high levels of trust, higher levels of positive ethnocentrism. However, once these societies came into contact with foreigners we might expect these same characteristics to push them to extend the boundary of their in-group beyond the ethnic group.
There is fairly direct evidence with regard to negative ethnocentrism. It has indeed been found that having high social intelligence, which as we have discussed is partly a function of high general intelligence, is negatively associated with negative ethnocentrism (Dong & Collaco, 2009). Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) have actually proven a relationship between the extent to which a society has liberal values and its average intelligence. Using a sample of 127 countries, they find that the relationship between national IQ and liberalism is 0.51, it is 0.43 between postmodern values and national IQ, and 0.45 between modernist values and national IQ. In each case, these values include ideas of treating people equally and not being prejudiced. But there would also be an indirect reason for this association. Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) have shown that intelligence strongly predicts numerous measures of civilization such as education, literacy, per capita income, poverty, inequality, crime rate, political stability, political freedom, corruption, religiousness, access to health care, health, infant mortality, sanitation, and even happiness. In essence, living in a low-IQ, uneducated society can be understood as extremely stressful and, as such, we would expect people in such societies to be more prejudiced to outsiders.
A large body of evidence has also found that education, in Western countries, predicts lower levels of negative ethnocentrism. This has been found by Hooghe et al. (2009) and is implied in studies such as Deary et al. (2008) who found that the least intelligent in the 1970 UK cohort voted for the most ethnocentric political parties at the 2001 General Election. As such, we would predict that the more educated a country is the lower would be its levels of negative ethnocentrism. There are a number of interrelated reasons why we would expect this to be the case. Firstly, education level at both the individual and national level has been shown to be significantly explained by differences in intelligence. For example, school performance correlates with intelligence at 0.7 (Jensen, 1981) while there is a 0.6 correlation between national level of tertiary education and national IQ (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012). We have seen that intelligence suppresses negative ethnocentrism so we would expect highly educated countries to be less ethnocentric. Secondly, the intelligence and education level of a society are associated with how developed it is and so how safe and stable it is to live in. As such, a more educated society would be less ethnocentric for that reason as well. Thirdly, national intelligence would be damaged by living in a society with low levels of education. As we have discussed, 20% intelligence is a matter of environmental variables such as a stimulating environment. A less literate society would be less intellectually stimulated, in small part leading to a lower IQ and thus higher levels of negative ethnocentrism. In addition, Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) have shown that all of the correlates of intelligence tend to be significantly associated at a national level. As such, an uneducated society would be likely to have poor living conditions, poor access to health, high levels of infectious disease and poor sanitation. These variables would have a negative impact on brain development and so a negative impact on the average IQ of the population. As such, a low level of societal education would be likely to indirectly push up out-group prejudice.
The studies on intelligence and ethnocentrism tell us little directly about the relationship between intelligence and positive ethnocentrism. However, this can be inferred via the extent to which members of an ethnic community are prepared to engage in acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of it. An example of this would be the degree to which a country is democratic. Vanhanen (2012) has shown that democratic systems are less likely in ethnically divided societies. This is because they involve many individuals making personal sacrifices on behalf of the group and having a high level of trust in the group, these being markers of positive ethnocentrism. Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) found that, drawing upon data from 188 countries, the correlation between democratization and national IQ was consistently in the region of 0.5. Any form of civic pride may be understood to be an aspect of positive ethnocentrism and Deary et al. (2008) found that intelligence predicted degree of civic participation, as exemplified in the propensity to turn up to vote. Clearly, therefore, there is only a moderate correlation between national IQ and democratization. One of the difficulties with this analysis is that it is a measure of trust in the nation state. As Vanhanen has observed, countries with low average intelligence as less likely to develop a successful nation state because they will be more likely to be heavily divided along the lines of tribe and clan.
Again, Dutton el. (2016a) tested the relationship. They drew upon the national intelligence data in Lynn & Vanhanen (2012). There was a significant negative association between national IQ and positive ethnocentrism (r = −0.4). In other words, the less intelligent a nation is, the more nationalistic it is. There was also negative association between negative ethnocentrism and IQ but it was non-significant. It may be that less intelligent nations are more instinctive — due both to low intelligence and greater stress — and, therefore, more positively ethnocentric.
7. Conclusion
In this chapter, we have found that poverty and infant mortality rate are positively associated with positive ethnocentrism while infant mortality rate is positively associated with negative ethnocentrism. Median age is negatively associated with positive ethnocentrism, meaning a young society is more nationalistic. The gender balance does not appear to make a difference. However, less intelligent societies are more ethnocentric in both senses.
Chapter Ten
Industrialization and the Decline of Ethnocentrism
1. Introduction
In this chapter we will look at industrialization and dysgenics. We will see that both of these processes have had a significant environmental and genetic impact on differences in levels of ethnocentrism between countries as they have developed since around 1800 due to their impact on the variables which are associated with ethnocentrism that we have already established. They help to explain the low ethnocentrism of the West, compared to developing countries.
2. General Effects of Industrialization: The Decline of Religion
We would expect industrialization to have a number of significant effects on the degree to which people were ethnocentric as well as one very specific effect.
In terms of general effects, we have already seen that stress is associated with heightened ethnocentrism and especially heightened negative ethnocentrism. However, in numerous ways industrialization would be expected to reduce levels of stress. Modernization has created conditions in ‘modern’ countries that heavily reduce stress. Since the nineteenth century, Western European people have had the causes of many of their fears effectively controlled. Europeans need no longer fear numerous formerly devastating diseases, nor need they fear famine, predators, lawlessness nor death in a whole host of accidents, and their material standard of living has undergone considerable improvement (see Clark, 2007). There is even a (relatively comfortable) safety net in welfare states, which almost all Western European countries have to varying degrees. For these reasons, we would expect people in more developed countries to generally experience low levels of stress and this would be expected to reduce the extent of their negative ethnocentrism.
This reduced level of stress would then have a number of effects which would further impact the level of ethnocentrism. Firstly, we have seen that religiousness is associated with stress and that those who are more stressed or more subject to the experience of stress are prone to be more religious. There is abundant evidence that the extent to which people believe in God has declined throughout the twentieth century (see Dutton, 2014) just as the stress model would predict and, just as it would predict, this decline has gone into reverse during
periods of intense stress in the twentieth century, such as during World War II (see Bruce, 2002). As we have discussed already, religiousness can be understood as a means of making the group which adopts it more ethnocentric and thus better able to compete in the battle of group selection. Those who are religious are both more positively and more negatively ethnocentric. Seemingly because a moral God is watching over them, they behave in a more pro-social way. It is has also been shown that people who believe they are being watched will behave in a more pro-social way and even cues of being watched, such as picture of a face on the wall, increase pro-social behaviour (Bateson et al., 2006). This being the case, we might expect that declining religiousness would be paralleled by a decline in pro-social behaviour, including positive ethnocentrism. Religious people have a strong sense of group identity and we have already seen that having a strong sense of group identity is associated with negative ethnocentrism. Accordingly, as religion declines we would expect that a smaller and smaller section of society would be members of what is, in broad terms, a highly ethnocentric group and, indeed, a group which often acts as proxy for genes. The religious group performs this function because the significantly heritable nature of religiousness of around 0.44 (see Dutton, 2014) means that religious people will tend to assortatively mate. As such, whatever some religions may profess about the equality of Man, ‘religion’ can be regarded as a kind of proxy for genetic differences and, as we have discussed, it may even be a more reliable proxy, in some instances, than supposed ethnicity based on physical appearance. These possibilities are evidenced by the clear association between religiousness and racial ethnocentrism: people who are more religious have been found to be more negatively ethnocentric (e.g. Shinert & Ford, 1958) and more nationalistic (Eisinga et al., 1990). This is to be expected if religiousness is a proxy for genetic interests. Moreover, though there are exceptions to this, most religions have historically sanctified the group — such as the tribe or nation — to which its members belong. Even though Christianity professes a universalist model in theory, the practice is very different. At times of war, the leaders of Christian nations may assert that ‘God is on our side’ and that the enemy, though supposedly Christian, are actually in league with the Devil. Thus, religiousness would be expected to increase ethnocentrism (positive and negative), while its decline would reduce ethnocentrism because God would no longer be there to demand selfless behaviour on behalf of his eternally important group. With the decline of religion, one’s ethnic group would no longer be perceived as having any intrinsic — let alone eternal — importance. This would mean that there would be less of a motivation to fight for its preservation; in other words, less of a motivation to be ethnocentric.
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