The Psychology Behind "Worthy" and "Unworthy" Victims of War

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“Are Ukrainians more deserving of sympathy than Afghans and Iraqis?” wonders Moustafa Bayoumi in The Guardian. The question refers to the seeming double standard with which numerous news anchors on Western media outlets discuss Ukrainian refugees of war as compared to those of non-European descent. Heated debates on social media revolve around the asymmetric outpouring of empathy for white as opposed to non-white victims.

According to many, the answer to this dilemma can be found within psychology. The selective empathy based on ethnicity, they say, is a natural human response, a reaction that is evolutionarily deeply rooted in our psychology. It is not the first time that the (social) sciences have been misinterpreted in order to justify racist tendencies.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, psychology and other sciences often served as justifications for colonial racism. Racist theories conveniently supported the preconceptions of people with darker skin tones as intellectually inferior and culturally backward, rendering their colonial exploitation a matter of logical consequence. Skull shape, emotionality, skin color, and many other facets of human diversity were claimed as markers that justified the unprecedented violence against the colonized peoples. Indeed, colonial racism systematically eradicated the pang of empathy and cognitive dissonance one feels when harming innocent human beings as it disengaged the victims of colonialism from a humanist morality.

Today, similar dynamics can still be observed. In the online world, some people are citing psychological theories that would explain why they feel more affinity with white Ukrainian refugees than the millions of non-European victims from the Middle East whose lives have also been destroyed by conflict.

A natural consequence of in-group bias, they say.

The term in-group bias comes from Tajfel and Turner's Social Identity Theory (1979), which states that people have the natural tendency to prefer individuals from their own group over individuals from another group. It is hypothesized to be an evolutionary mechanism that took shape during our hundreds of thousands of years of history as hunter-gatherers. During that time, the theory goes, the chances of survival were greater for groups that had a good dose of distrust towards strangers.

As I discussed above, the unscientific application of a scientific theory often serves to justify inhumane behavior. I have often discussed the theory with my students during my lectures—and if there is one thing that the theory does not explain, it is racism. Let me tell you why.

The authors of the theory correctly state that evolutionary explanations for human behavior must be sought in our past as hunter-gatherers. It's only recently that we've become part of complex societies, yet we have evolved behavioral tendencies that are adapted to hunter-gatherer environments. That is why we have no natural fear of cars, yet they pose a graver danger to us than snakes, for which we do possess an automatic fear response.

This also means that behavioral tendencies such as the in-group bias evolved during a time when the only strangers one encountered as a hunter-gatherer most likely had the same hair color, skin color, and facial features as oneself. Ships, planes, and automobiles that allow us to travel the world and meet people of different skin colors did not yet exist. Hence, one classified someone as a stranger based on non-phenotypic characteristics such as language and clothing style.

In other words, the theory indirectly opposes the idea that racism is natural, namely: that during most of our history, people who looked like us posed a greater threat to our lives than people who did not. People with different skin colors lived so far away that the vast majority of people simply never encountered them. Even until recently, this has been the case: In the past thousand years, white Europeans waged more bloody wars against each other than against any non-European group.

The reverse is also true. When Europeans first arrived on the shores of the Americas, the native populations received them with open arms. Travel diaries of European settlers describe the surprise they felt at the kindness and warmth with which they were welcomed. The Europeans apparently looked so vastly different from the native population that their appearance did not trigger any sense of threat, comparable to the bird species found on remote islands that do not fear human beings because they never experienced our potential for violence.

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In other words, the recent phenomenon of colonial racism based on skin color and other expressions of the human phenotype cannot be a natural phenomenon evolutionarily nested in our psychology. Racism is an ideology, just like fascism is. Ideologies serve as mechanisms for justification; they excuse one's own immoral and dishonest treatment of others by morally disengaging them from values of justice and fairness.

In sum, an in-group bias only occurs when we classify people as "the other" or the "out-group." For most of our history, that classification has been reserved for people who in many ways resemble us as they posed a greater danger to our lives than those who did not. Recently, however, colonialism ensured that the out-group status is reserved only for people who historically posed virtually no danger to Europeans—namely, people with a different skin color.