> Here, if these behaviours were illogical and had a negative payoff in all cases, they may not have existed in the first place- or persisted. But they do. Why?

> Here, if these behaviours were illogical and had a negative payoff in all cases, they may not have existed in the first place- or persisted. But they do. Why? In my opinion, that is not a meaningful question because the answer is simple: people are not always totally rational, they do not make all of their decisions based on logical analysis. In fact, many of the opinions they hold are not even based on conscious choices. I agree that racism, sexism, and bigotry in general are probably rooted in the distant past and that, in some cases, they provided evolutionary advantages. But it is partially for this reason that their persistence needn't be logical or advantageous. A child socialized by its parents to be racist doesn't usually face a conscious decision later on whether to become (or continue to be) a racist. This is, in my very humble opinion (MA in econ, take from that what you will) one of the weaknesses of the field: economists seem to think people and social dynamics are icky. Why accept the obvious explanation that parents teach their kids racism and some of the kids, for various psychological or social reasons, continue to be racists? It is much more interesting to make a bunch of crazy assumptions about people so that you can plug the whole thing into a nice clean mathematical model.