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I would have thought that the comment "xenophobia is natural" is fairly uncontroversial. It's certainly not an artificial construct forced upon people (although

by shard 6y ago

I would have thought that the comment "xenophobia is natural" is fairly uncontroversial. It's certainly not an artificial construct forced upon people (although certain expressions and targets might be). That's why there are articles like http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-your-brain-hates-other-people http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-your-brain-hates-ot... . After all, even animals can exhibit xenophobic behaviors. I don't think runarberg meant that xenophobia is acceptable or proper.

runarberg 6y ago
I didn’t, but it was a poor choose of wording non-the-less and therefor deserved the criticism. It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the literature of psychological biases, but I don’t think there is a clear case that we have inherit biases towards outgroups. Or at least any experiments that previously have demonstrated such biases have had biases them self. I at least wasn’t ready to accept a theory of outgroup prejudges being ”natural” without resounding evidence from good experiments. A Marxist might argue that given the previously mentioned conditions (in particular worker alienation) would create an alienated “outgroup” which others (including the working classes) would learn to despise. However this is hardly something that some might call a natural condition. And marxism is far from being an accepted theory of human behavior.
- csa 6y ago
  > It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the literature of psychological biases, but I don’t think there is a clear case that we have inherit biases towards outgroups. There is an abundance. Check out the literature on adult development. I’m partial to Kegan’s model, but others work. Here is an accessible article on Kegan’s work: https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of-adult-development-d63f4311b553 https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th... Kegan might not say that stage 3 folks are inherently biased towards outgroups, but they are certainly defined by their in-group. This can lead to challenging perspectives when dealing with other groups.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Like I said, its been a while since I read up on the literature, but when I did (more then 10 years ago) there were similar models backed most of them not backed up by any evidence, but those that were usually had some flaws in the experimental design that made the results biased. E.g. they were asked to rate neutral images as positive or negative, some were primed with images of outgroup person while others with ingroup. The outgroup group would respond more negatively. But there is a problem with this design and they found out that it is not bias towards the outgroup that created the result. Maybe they have experiments that demonstrates (without a bias) that xenophobia is natural in humans, but I doubt it. I want to see some extraordinary evidence before I believe such an extraordinary claim.
munk-a 6y ago
I wanted to clarify that my comment was just to specifically pick at that wording and lean toward correcting any implication that it is acceptable or proper. I think runarberg's comment added a lot of helpful information to the discussion and I don't at all think it was made in bad faith. My response may have been a bit touchy since the US is dealing with some pretty big issues right now but I think that the meat of what he said w.r.t. improving quality of life as a way to address increasing xenophobia is spot on and I'm very much of the same mind, when people are trodden on some object upwards and others find other people they can trod on themselves (transitive bullying or some such?) and bringing QoL up across society with good supportive social programs can really help minimize Xenophobia and shift it from a belief embraced by a group that has been sorta-kinda denounced by politicians to something entirely fringe (like neo-nazis and the KKK were in the 90s).

by shard 6y ago

runarberg 6y ago

I didn’t, but it was a poor choose of wording non-the-less and therefor deserved the criticism. It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the literature of psychological biases, but I don’t think there is a clear case that we have inherit biases towards outgroups. Or at least any experiments that previously have demonstrated such biases have had biases them self. I at least wasn’t ready to accept a theory of outgroup prejudges being ”natural” without resounding evidence from good experiments. A Marxist might argue that given the previously mentioned conditions (in particular worker alienation) would create an alienated “outgroup” which others (including the working classes) would learn to despise. However this is hardly something that some might call a natural condition. And marxism is far from being an accepted theory of human behavior.

csa 6y ago
> It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the literature of psychological biases, but I don’t think there is a clear case that we have inherit biases towards outgroups. There is an abundance. Check out the literature on adult development. I’m partial to Kegan’s model, but others work. Here is an accessible article on Kegan’s work: https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of-adult-development-d63f4311b553 https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th... Kegan might not say that stage 3 folks are inherently biased towards outgroups, but they are certainly defined by their in-group. This can lead to challenging perspectives when dealing with other groups.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Like I said, its been a while since I read up on the literature, but when I did (more then 10 years ago) there were similar models backed most of them not backed up by any evidence, but those that were usually had some flaws in the experimental design that made the results biased. E.g. they were asked to rate neutral images as positive or negative, some were primed with images of outgroup person while others with ingroup. The outgroup group would respond more negatively. But there is a problem with this design and they found out that it is not bias towards the outgroup that created the result. Maybe they have experiments that demonstrates (without a bias) that xenophobia is natural in humans, but I doubt it. I want to see some extraordinary evidence before I believe such an extraordinary claim.

munk-a 6y ago

I wanted to clarify that my comment was just to specifically pick at that wording and lean toward correcting any implication that it is acceptable or proper. I think runarberg's comment added a lot of helpful information to the discussion and I don't at all think it was made in bad faith. My response may have been a bit touchy since the US is dealing with some pretty big issues right now but I think that the meat of what he said w.r.t. improving quality of life as a way to address increasing xenophobia is spot on and I'm very much of the same mind, when people are trodden on some object upwards and others find other people they can trod on themselves (transitive bullying or some such?) and bringing QoL up across society with good supportive social programs can really help minimize Xenophobia and shift it from a belief embraced by a group that has been sorta-kinda denounced by politicians to something entirely fringe (like neo-nazis and the KKK were in the 90s).