How Do Humans Deal with Differences/Otherness?

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Human beings developed the ability to perceive and react to differences because it is crucial to evolution, adaption, and survival. Living things, in one way or another, perform pattern-matching activities that call out differences (Basch, 1988).

• Is this thing approaching me dangerous?
• Will it hurt me? Is it too big?
• Will it try to eat me?
• Or can I eat it?

The perception of differences allows humans to anticipate, predict, sort out cause and effect, pursue alternatives, and more. The process involves creating order out of the myriad stimuli with which we are confronted. Recent research suggests this categorization starts early. Already at four months, babies can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects (Spriet, et al., 2022).

Affects, cognition, and language are all involved in this pattern-matching and sorting out process, but affects and cognition are especially critical. Creating order out of disorder is one of the primary functions of the brain, and assessing the nature of differences in stimuli is a large part of that.

But that impulse can backfire—and many people end up having a great deal of trouble with differences. While in a peaceful, secure world, differences can be a source of curiosity, exploration, and enjoyment. In an insecure, frightening world, they may be a source of fear, envy, and rage, potential dangers to be avoided or battled.

In dealing with differences, two processes are especially important: innate capacities (affects) and learning (cognition). There is overlap between the two, and it is not always easy to determine what is innate and what is learned.

The innate capacities relevant to this discussion consist of two components.

• The first concerns the inborn abilities to assess the nature of incoming stimuli—i.e., are they similar or different, do the patterns match or not.
• The second is temperament, defined as biologically-based individual differences in emotion and motor reactivity and self-regulation that demonstrate consistency across situations over time; temperament can be modulated by environmental factors.

The learning/cognitive process also consists of two components.

• The first component includes information that comes into a person from the outside world, such as nonverbal indications from the environment (“social referencing”), verbal learning (being told something verbally), and formal education.
• The second entails what is learned by the individual through his/her own experiences that are the result of outward action, interaction, and reaction.

Thus, innate factors, as well as learned processes, contribute to how humans respond to differences/otherness and what affects—e.g., interest (curiosity) or fear—are elicited. In other words, bias and prejudice seem to result from the impact of early learning and experiences on the affect system.

Affects

Let’s look more closely at bias, prejudice, and violence through the lens of affects. A detailed description of affects can be found in Tomkins (1991, pp. 5-73). The close interactions between affects and cognition will soon become apparent.

Surprise, fear, and interest depend on the rate of stimulus increase and neural firing. When looking at how the surprise response is followed by either fear or interest, we need to pay attention to how the cognitive process sorts out the nature of the stimulus.

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• Is it familiar or not?
• How different is it from other stimuli?
• Is it dangerous or beneficial?

As Tomkins puts it: “It is not uncommon for startle to be followed by terror, but it may be followed by excitement depending on the outcome of poststartle scanning” (1991, p. 495). Tomkins’ term “poststartle scanning” refers to the capacity of animals, including humans, to assess present stimuli and circumstances, compare them to the past, and anticipate and predict. “Presumably, there must be a sufficient cognitive complexity to enable the animal to create a matrix of anticipations independent of the actual presence of the original terrifying scene” (1991, p. 497).

Here is where pattern-matching, differences, and learned experience quickly become important (Basch 1988). Affects are innate responses to stimuli, but which stimuli trigger which affects appears to be based largely on experience and learning.

We know that a stimulus can elicit fear and lead to bias and prejudice, and to anger, rage, and violence. However, the key issue here is that cognitive processes can impact affect and lead to a response of interest—curiosity—rather than fear.