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Evolutionary Psychology
The Evolutionary Psychology of Anti-Semitism
Hate has deep roots
Posted April 25, 2018
There we were in the first exhibit of New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. It was myself, my wife, and our two teenage kids - along with my niece and two of her college friends who were visiting from Ohio. The first exhibit is emotionally powerful and complex. You stand in a large, dark space with about 40 others. A video, with dim lighting, appears on the wall. The sound system is professional-grade - and you, as a museum visitor, become one with the experience - like it or not.
Jew.
This word is uttered by someone in the video. In English. The first thing you notice, is the clearly negative connotation in the pronunciation of this term - a term that simply means “a Jewish person.” Next, that same word, translated into dozens of languages across the world, is uttered by all kinds of other people - with all kinds of accents. Yet that negative connotation audibly and conspicuously lingers.
As someone who is of Jewish background, I found this exhibit to really have a strong emotional impact. “Got it,” I thought. “The Jews are hated by people all over the world. Damn ...”
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Anti-Semitism
Each year, our university community hosts a program called One Book, One New Paltz. This year, our communal book was Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a historical fiction that has Charles Lindbergh winning an election over FDR on an America First platform. Without spoiling too much of the very provocative plot, let me just say that anti-Semitism rears its head quite conspicuously in this book.
This year, the program committee for One Book, One New Paltz asked me, along with several of my graduate students (Jacqueline Di Santo, Olivia Jewell, and Julie Planke) to give a symposium on the psychology surrounding the events that take place in this book. We were glad to do so. As part of that, I gave a presentation on the basic evolutionary social psychology of hate. This presentation was an attempt to use our understanding of concepts in the field of evolutionary social psychology to help understand inter-group hate. In other words, how in the world can the human mind lead to such atrocities as found in the Holocaust?
The Founders of Modern Social Psychology
The field of social psychology, interestingly, was largely founded by scholars of Jewish descent. In fact, several of these scholars were looking to help us understand the atrocities of the Holocaust and to help us understand the nature of Anti-Semitism itself. Solomon Asch famously studied the nature of conformity, showing that people are quite capable of following along with a crowd even when they know that the crowd is totally wrong. Stanley Milgram, another American Jew, showed that any regular Joe is capable of obeying an authority figure to the point of being able to kill an innocent other. Lee Ross showed that our understanding of the social world is full of biases - biases that we are not able to see ourselves and that often are riddled with the foundations of prejudice toward members of other groups.
The below sections provide brief glimpses into concepts related to evolutionary social psychology that can help us understand how large-scale Anti-Semitism has come about in the history of humans.
The Flaw of the Great Evolutionary Leap
Through independent lines of scholarship, David Sloan Wilson (2007) and Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza (2009) made the case that a key to human uniqueness is the fact that our ancestors started to create coalitions across lines of kinship. That is, human beings form coordinated groups comprised of unrelated individuals. On one hand, this is great because it allows us to do all kinds of things, such as create symphonies, build cities, and engage in organized sports.
It turns out that early religious thinking may have been the initial catalyst for this kind of group organization (see Wilson, 2002). Religions, after all, regularly encourage other-oriented behaviors and discourage selfish behaviors. This said, if you know your history well, you know that religion is not all peaches and cream.
Religions famously encourage prosocial behavior toward members of one’s own religious sect in particular. And this fact plays out in modern psychological research, which has shown that people show positive biases toward others who show outward signs of being in one’s own religious group (see Widman et al., 2009).
In-Group/Out-Group Thinking
This all leads to the famous research tradition of ingroup/outgroup reasoning (see Billig & Tajfel, 1972). A psychological ingroup is comprised of others whom one sees as sharing characteristics with oneself. An ingroup member is on one’s own team in terms of some dimension. And research has shown that it could be any dimension, really. Ingroups come about by sharing the same ethnic group, being from the same geographic region, being part of the same religion, liking the same sports team, and more. In fact, it is pretty easy to create ingroups and outgroups under lab conditions.
In short, people show biased behaviors - being more prosocial toward members of their ingroups and showing antisocial behaviors toward members of their outgroups. In fact, there is some research showing that we may see outgroup members as less human than ingroup members (see Smith, 2008). And this dehumanization, seeing members of another group as less than human, seems to be a psychological factor that allows for discrimination toward members of another group.
Across history, Jews have, for instance, been painted as comparable to animals that are vectors of disease - rats, lice, and more. These dehumanized portraits, which often made it into Nazi propaganda posters, led to the large-scale predisposed tendencies for people to feel hatred toward the Jews. We hate vermin in the house, after all, for good reasons.
Outgroup Homogeneity
An offshoot of ingroup/outgroup reasoning is found in the concept of outgroup homogeneity, or the tendency to see members of an outgroup as having little variability among one another. This is the they are all the same attitude. In pre-war Europe, Jews were painted in monolithic terms. They were seen as all the same. They were, simply, the Jews. This conception of these people did not allow for an understanding of variability among Jewish people. This conception did not allow for an appreciation that there are all kinds of people who fit under the umbrella of being Jewish. And this is standard social psychology. Outgroup homogeneity is strong. Once we see a group as an outgroup, we usually see very little variability among the individuals in that group - and we are more likely to see the members of that group through the lens of prejudice.
Mechanisms of Belief Perseverance
Worse, once our minds go down a particular path, changing our minds is particularly difficult. And this is for all kinds of reasons. There are many psychological processes that make it incredibly difficult for us to change our minds on things Cognitive dissonance makes it hard for us to hold two incompatible thoughts at the same time - so we take extra-special steps to see the world in a way that matches how we want to see the world. Selective exposure is the tendency for people to choose to be exposed to information that is consistent with what they already believe. Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to interpret ambiguous information as consistent with what they already think. And on and on.
A broad array of social psychological processes has a primary function of maintaining our current perspective on the world (even if we are, in fact, totally wrong).
Deindividuated Behavior
And once we hold negative attitudes toward some group, we are capable of engaging in nasty behavior toward them pretty easily. Zimbardo (2007) has conducted many studies over the years on the social psychology of evil. This research has documented one clear finding: When people are deindividuated, having their identities downplayed (e.g,. From being in a dark room or by using a fake name), people are much more likely to engage in anti-social, and even, evil behavior. The people who did the killing in the concentration camps were set up so that they flipped the switch from another room so that they could not immediately see their victims. These killers were deindividuated in their actions. And all the social psychological work on deindividuation shows that deindividuation is situational catalyst to the dark side of the human condition.
Bottom Line
Look, I know that this post deals with very dark content. But the human condition is often very dark and we cannot turn a blind eye. It is up to us, the concerned citizens of the world now, to make sure that something like the Holocaust never happens again. If we want to help make for a better future, then we need to understand the past. And we need to understand the social science that helps us map out exactly what went wrong in the past so that we are equipped to make for a better future. We ignore the social and behavioral science on the topic of hate to our own peril.
