1 / 11

Social Activism : Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

Explore the intersection of psychology and race, as well as the implications for the GLBT community. Understand how social dynamics and group membership affect our perceptions and behaviors.

Jims
Download Presentation

Social Activism : Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology Sean McLennan Linguistics / Cognitive Science Indiana University OutRights Calgary, Alberta April 2, 2007

  2. Psychology and Race • Traditional claim that the cognitive encoding of certain personal characteristics is automatic and mandatory • gender, age, race • huge base of experimental support • argued that humans have innate neural circuitry to deal with these characteristics • Essentially: when you encounter someone briefly, you’ll remember gender, age, and race even if you remember nothing else. Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  3. Psychology and Race • Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides (2001): • Evolutionarily it makes no sense for race to be one of these characteristics • it’s only been very recently that human beings have been consistently exposed to racial differences • Through a series of experiments demonstrated that in fact “Coalitional Alliances”, i.e. group membership is what is important • manipulating social context can override attention to race Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  4. Psychology and Race • Conclusions: • humans are very sensitive to social dynamics • humans are very sensitive to indicators (often visual) that are statistically correlated with group membership • categorization based on group membership is largely an unconscious, automatic, and mandatory process and perhaps most importantly... Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  5. Psychology and Race Any arbitrary characteristic (ex. skin color) will be attended to and automatically / mandatorily encoded in memory to the degree it is predictive of group membership Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  6. GLBT Implications • Persistence of popular stereotypes • based on observable cues (primarily visual) • self-reinforcing because majority of the GLBT community is invisible • “Gaydar” • queer people become (unconsciously) sensitized to subtle cues due to high social interest / motivation Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  7. GLBT Implications Most importantly: • Changing Social Attitudes • perceived group membership differences, regardless of occurring in positive or negative contexts, reinforces social segregation which in turn invites differential treatment and discrimination • meaningful changes in attitude diffuse quickly within social groups but slowly (if at all) across group boundaries (Rogers, 1995) Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  8. Changing Social Attitudes • Rallies, Pride Festivals, Gay TV Channels, Gay Districts, etc. • good for developing community and solidarity • necessary for increasing public awareness and political change • probably hamper public acceptance and social change The terrible irony: the very thing that gives us strength as a community may be acting against our ultimate goal of “hohumization” Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  9. Changing Social Attitudes • The Good News • Social context is manipulable • Group membership is hierarchical • at any given time, any given individual belongs to a practically infinite number of “groups” with varying degrees of social impact • establishing environments where the salience of a unifying group identity supercedes the GLBT/straight division can facilitate changes in attitude • ex: family; “Shad Valley” (Canadian program for high school students); “GLB Speaker’s Bureau” (IU program) Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  10. Changing Social Attitudes • The Good News con’t • GLBT community has some advantages • unique, generally negative fact that GLBT people are typically not born into GLBT families (which subverts youth support), guarantees a presence in all demographic groups • invisibility, which unfortunately helps reinforce stereotypes, permits the element of surprise; social environments can be established before homosexuality is introduced into the dynamic Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

  11. Conclusion • The goals of political equality and social equality do not necessarily proceed together (strategies good for one can even hinder the other) • By being aware of how humans process social information we can consciously balance actions, programs, and education in order to simultaneously bring about both goals Social Activism: Implications from Evolutionary Psychology

More Related