This article develops an explanation for ethnic discrimination based on what can be called “social decoding.” It is hypothesized that humans have developed unique cognitive skills for discerning situations in which others will behave in a self-interested opportunistic fashion. However, these cognitive skills, like the human ability to acquire language, are effectuated by environmental programming. Consequently, people will be able to decode accurately only when dealing with others of similar type. From this it follows that when selecting the “best” candidate from several populations each of which contain a large number of people, an individual will almost certainly end up choosing someone from the population that she or he can more accurately decode. Therefore, assuming that a common ethnic background is associated with more accurate decoding, people will appear to discriminate in favor of others who are ethnically similar. Ironically, this “discrimination” arises because people cannot discriminate as accurately when dealing with members of a dissimilar population.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Alexander, R. D.1975. The search for a general theory of behavior. Behavioral Sciences20:77-100.
2.
Alexander, R. D.
1979. Darwinism and human affairs. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
3.
Alexander, R. D.
1989. Evolution of the human psyche. In Origins and dispersal of modern humans, edited by P. Mellars and C. Stringer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
4.
Axelrod, Robert
. 1984. The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books.
5.
Barkow, Jerome H.
1989. Darwin, sex, and status: Biological perspectives on mind and culture. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
6.
Barkow, Jerome H.
1992. Beneath new culture is old psychology: Gossip and social stratification. In The adapted mind, edited by J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press.
7.
Chomsky, Noam
. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
8.
Chomsky, Noam
. 1975. Reflections on language. New York: Random House.
9.
Cornell, Bradford
, and Ivo Welch. 1994. Culture, information and screening discrimination. Working paper, Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles.
10.
Cosmides, Leda
. 1989. The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason?Cognition31:187-276.
11.
Cosmides, Leda
, and John Tooby. 1989a. Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Part I: Case study: A computational theory of social exchange. Ethology and Sociobiology10:51-98.
12.
Cosmides, Leda
, and John Tooby. 1989b. Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Part II: Theoretical considerations. Ethology and Sociobiology10:28-49.
13.
Cosmides, Leda
, and John Tooby. 1992. Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In The adapted mind, edited by J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press.
14.
Crawford, Vincent P.
, and Joel Sobel. 1982. Strategic information transmission. Econometrica10 (November): 1431-1452.
15.
Crick, Francis
. 1994. The astonishing hypothesis. New York: Charles.
16.
Dawkins, Richard
. 1976. The selfish gene. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
17.
Dawkins, Richard
. 1982. The extended phenotype. Oxford: W. H. Freeman.
18.
Dawkins, Richard
. 1986. The blind watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
19.
Dunn, Judy
. 1987. The beginnings of moral understanding: Development in the second year. In The emergence of morality in young children, edited by J. Kagan and S. Lamb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
Festinger, Leon
. 1957. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
21.
Fodor, J.
1983. The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
22.
Frank, R. H.
1988. Passions within reason: The strategic role of the emotions. New York: W. W. Norton.
23.
Gazzaniga, Michael S.
1985. The social brain: Discovering the networks of the mind. New York: Basic Books.
24.
Gazzaniga, Michael S.
1992. Nature's mind: The biological roots of thinking, emotions, sexuality, language, and intelligence. New York: Basic Books.
25.
Gigerenzer, G.
, and K. Hug. 1992. Reasoning about social contracts: Cheating and perspective change. Working paper, Institute for Psychology, University of Salzburg, Austria.
26.
Goffman, Erving
. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.
27.
Gould, Stephen J.1979. Panselectionist pitfalls in Parker & Gibson's model of the evolution of intelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences2:385-386.
28.
Hebb, Donald
. 1949. The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. New York: John Wiley & Co.
29.
Hirshleifer, Jack
. 1993. The affectations and the passions. Rationality and Society5 (April): 185-202.
30.
Issac, G. L.
1983. Aspects of human evolution. In Evolution from molecules to men. New York: Cambridge University Press.
31.
Kagan, Jerome
, and Sharon Lamb. 1987. The emergence of morality in young children. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
32.
Kosslyn, Stephen M.
, and Olivier Koenig. 1992. Wet mind: The new cognitive neuroscience. New York: Free Press.
33.
Loury, Glenn C.1994. Self-censorship in public discourse: A theory of “political correctness” and related phenomena. Rationality and Society6(4): 428-461.
34.
Malinowski, B.
1922. Argonauts of the western Pacific. New York: Dutton.
35.
Maljkovic, V.
1987. Reasoning in evolutionary important domains and schizophrenia: Dissociation between content-dependent and content-independent reasoning. Working paper, Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
36.
Mauss, M.
[1925] 1967. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. New York: Norton.
37.
Maynard Smith, John
. 1982. Evolution and the theory of games. Oxford, England: Cambridge University Press.
38.
Mehrabian, Albert
. 1981. Silent messages. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
39.
Milgrom, Paul
, and John Roberts. 1992. Economics, organization and management. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
40.
Neese, Randolph M.
, and Alan T. Lloyd. 1992. The evolution of psychodynamic mechanisms. In The adapted mind, edited by J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press.
41.
Nelson, Marilyn M.
, and W. T. Illingworth. 1991. A practical guide to neural nets. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
42.
Peters, Roger
. 1987. Practical intelligence. New York: Harper & Row.
43.
Pinker, Steven
, and Paul Bloom. 1992. Natural language and natural selection. In The adapted mind, edited by J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press.
44.
Pinker, Steven
, and A. Prince. 1988. On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition28:73-193.
45.
Rasmusen, Eric
. 1989. Games and information. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
46.
Rose, M.1980. The mental arms race amplifier. Human Ecology8:285-293.
47.
Schelflen, Albert
. 1971. Body language and the social order. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
48.
Sowell, Thomas
. 1981. Markets and minorities. New York: Basic Books.
49.
Sternberg, Robert J.
, and Richard K. Wagner. 1986. Practical intelligence: Nature and origins of competence in the everyday world. New York: Cambridge University Press.
50.
Symons, Donald
. 1979. The evolution of human sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.
51.
Tooby, J.
, and I. DeVore. 1987. The reconstruction of hominid behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In Primate models of hominid behavior, edited by W. Kinzey. New York: SUNY.
52.
Trivers, R. L.
1976. Preface to the selfish gene. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
53.
Trivers, R. L.
1985. Social evolution. Berkeley, CA: Benjamin/Cummings.
54.
Vernon, Philip
. 1933. Some characteristics of the good judge of personality. Journal of Social Psychology4:42-51.
55.
Wilson, James Q.
1993. The moral sense. New York: Free Press.
56.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
. 1953. Philosophical investigations. New York: Macmillan.
