Abstract
The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key ideas for creating a theoretical roadmap for this complex territory, namely the principles of etiological functionalism and the dual inheritance theory of human evolution. We show how a “molecular” approach to emotions fits into this picture, and use it to illuminate emotions that shape intergroup relations. Finally, we weave the pieces together into the beginnings of a systematic taxonomy of the emotions involved in social interactions, both hostile and friendly. While it is but a start, we have developed the argument in a way that illustrates how the foundational principles of our proposed framework can be extended to accommodate further cases.
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Notes
Within the motivational tradition, the view of emotions most closely aligned with our molecular approach is Scarantino’s New Basic Emotions Theory (Scarantino2015).
Note that nothing in this picture limits emotions to only involving a single motivation. For example, researchers studying “empty nest syndrome” might identify a distinct emotion capturing the combination of affectively positive pride and affectively negative loss (along with the associated cognitive processes) that parents experience when their children leave home. Likewise, researchers studying those who provide care for elderly relatives might identify a distinct emotion capturing the combination of grief, relief, and guilt about feeling relief that often occurs when a person they’ve been caring for passes away. Other kinds of complex, “mixed” or “bittersweet” emotions, might be similarly construed as containing multiple motivational and cognitive components.
In some cases, of course, a lack of beneficial resources could be called a threat, so hunger could be interpreted as the avoidance of starvation, and thirst as the avoidance of dehydration. But it stretches the meaning of “threat” to say that a person with a kitchen full of food is facing threat of starvation when his hunger drives him downstairs for a snack. Similarly, when a person who already has five children feels sexual attraction, it isn’t clear what adaptive threat is being avoided, and yet clearly the motivation to reproduce is still doing exactly what it was selected for. More generally, we are skeptical that the entire category of approach-based motives needs to be, or could usefully be, reinterpreted in terms of adaptive threats, understood as the lack of adaptive benefits or any other form of “threat”.
In their own words:
“There are a number of reasons why people may be motivated to assort with others from the same social category. First, people may be ethnocentric so they can avoid coordination costs by interacting with others who share their same preferences, expectations, or personality characteristics (McElreath et al. 2003). Alternately, people may be motivated to interact with others from the same group for cooperative endeavors, knowing they will have recourse to group-based punitive institutions were their partner to defect (Bowles and Gintis 2004; Boyd and Richerson 1992). The former interactions, which are pure coordination games, differ from the latter, cooperative ones in that there is no incentive to defect on one’s partner. However, behavioral patterns of assortment may reflect motivations for coordination, cooperation, or both, and without direct interventions it is nearly impossible to distinguish between them. Therefore, we discuss in-group preferences that may arise from either selection pressure jointly.” (Moya and Boyd 2015, p. 15)
Note that while “coordination costs” might sound like a reference to an adaptive threat, the term captures the fact that interactions with outgroup partners are merely less effective at producing adaptive benefits. Being less beneficial is not the same as being a threat or a harm, however, and neither of the two pressures described by Moya and Boyd would would select for motivations of avoidance toward outgroup members.
In their own words, “Cultural evolution created cooperative groups. Such environments favoured the evolution of a suite of new social instincts suited to life in such groups, including a psychology which ‘expects’ life to be structured by moral norms, and that is designed to learn and internalize such norms. New emotions evolved, like shame and guilt, which increase the chance the norms are followed. Individuals lacking the new social instincts more often violated prevailing norms and experienced adverse selection. They might have suffered ostracism, been denied the benefits of public goods, or lost points in the mating game.” (Boyd and Richerson 2009, p. 3286)
As Sripada and Stich put it (2007, p. 289), “children who learn that hitting babies is wrong do not need to be taught that one should exhibit anger, hostility, and other punitive attitudes toward those who hit babies.” Also see Kelly and Setman 2020 for discussion and review of recent evidence, especially from developmental psychology.
We should note that in humans, status appears to take two functionally distinct forms: dominance, which has a deep evolutionary history and is found in other species, and prestige, which is culture based and unique to us (Henrich and Gil-White 2001; Cheng et al. 2012). We acknowledge this complication, and its implication that there may be at least two distinct types of emotional molecules related to hierarchy in the human psychology of group membership, but set it aside for development in later work.
Also see Davidson (2019) for a pluralist account of racism that appears extendable to other notions associated with outgroup negativity, like xenophobia, prejudice, bigotry, etc. According to Davidson, all kinds of different entities can properly be called racist, including individual people, beliefs, motivations, actions, norms, laws, cultural groups, institutions, etc. Furthermore, on her account no one of those types of entities is more basically or primarily racist than any of the others.
See Buskell (2017) for a discussion of how such precultural cognitive mechanisms can serve as “cultural attractors” that boost the fitness of cultural variants, Nichols (2002) for evidence of a specific case involving culturally transmitted norms and the emotion of disgust, and Buchanan and Powell (2018) for a compatible but much broader picture concerning disgust, “threat cues”, and the spread of “exclusivist” norms and values.
Or, in Wilkerson’s (2020) provocative terminology, the conflict was about the American caste system.
Something similar often gets called “moral disgust” (Chapman and Anderson 2013; Kelly 2013; Plakias 2018). We avoid that label here and in our above discussion of anger (i.e see Russell and Giner-Sorolla 2011) to signal that not all internalized norms need be moral norms, and disgust (or anger, or any other emotion) can be activated by a norm transgression whether or not that norm counts as moral (Davis and Kelly 2018; Stich 2018).
There may not be any clear single term for affiliation in the vernacular (“attachment”? “love”? “admiration”? “fondness”? “concern”? “loyalty”? “team spirit”? “patriotism”?) or at least not as clear of a single correlate as in the cases of disgust, fear, and anger. As noted in Section II, however, our etiological functionalism and molecular view of emotions is free to depart from folk conceptions of emotions. We see this as feature of our approach rather than a bug. (Also see Mallon and Stich 2000 on the semantics of thin and thick ways of slicing emotions.)
From a broad evolutionary and historical view this is likely true, even if it may be false of many cultures today. As Marx notoriously pointed out, exploiting others in the pursuit of self-interest may be the very heart of capitalist culture; thanks to Uwe Peters for reminding us of this.
In the same spirit as the points made in footnotes 10 and 15, we again acknowledge a complication only to set it aside for future work. For there are likely many further emotional molecules in this genre, including those that pair affiliative motivation with the distinct assortative capacities associated with different forms of sociality and cognitive wherewithal, including but not limited to: familial love, genetic relatedness, and kin-related selection pressures; romantic love, mate choice, and child rearing-related selection pressures; friendship, camaraderie, and reciprocity-related selection pressures; the positive associative feelings that accompany the kind of interdependence found in social networks large enough that not everyone interacts on a regular basis, but small enough that members need to be able to keep track of everyone’s reputations and interconnections; and team spirit, group pride, patriotism, and forms of positive emotional investment associated with differently structured cultural groups and and larger communities, both real and imagined.
While we follow a trend (e.g. Henrich and Ensminger 2014) in describing some psychological motivations as “intrinsic”, it is not trivial to spell out what the term means, perhaps other than serving as a contrast class for “instrumental”; see Kelly 2020 for discussion on this and the connection between normative motivations, emotions, and other psychological sources of motivation.
In many situations, of course, the same norms will elicit both intrinsic and instrumental motivations at the same time. But in other cases, one might follow a xenophobic norm specifically in order to gain approval or seek status. Governor Wallace’s famous stand in the schoolhouse door in 1963 was a symbolic attempt to resist forced integration at the University of Alabama, which clearly served to garner approval from segregationist voters. He very well might have thought he was doing the right thing as well, in which case it would be an example where intrinsic and instrumental motivations were both in play.
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Davis, T., Kelly, D. A Framework for the Emotional Psychology of Group Membership. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00561-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00561-6