Evolutionary Theory Essay

Evolutionary theory suggests that in order to prevent contact with harmful pathogens, people identify and avoid heuristic cues that are associated with disease (Schaller, 2011). Further, people who feel most vulnerable to disease tend to associate subjectively foreign out-groups with disease and act more negatively toward them (Faulkner, Schaller, Park & Duncan, 2004). The negative effects of prejudice are both physical and psychological: People who reported being subjected to prejudice also had greater amounts of visceral fat (Lewis, Kravitz, Janssen & Powell, 2011) and ambiguous racism decreased people’s performance in cognitive tasks (Salvatore & Shelton, 2007). Hence, it is of obvious benefit to society to reduce prejudice and alleviate

The authors acknowledge that as the disease threat-condition mentioned that the scarcity of the vaccine, a resource related threat may have been triggered which would correspond with negative responses towards foreigners. This is in line with past research suggesting that prejudice may arise when out-groups pose threats to in-group resources (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005). The extent to which this confounding variable lessons the validity of this study is unknown, however it is certainly possible that both disease and resource threat contributed towards a heightened prejudicial attitude.

In study two, Huang et al. (2011) successfully eliminated the resource based threat as a confounding variable by eliminating any mention of vaccine scarcity and further, they focused on out-group that were not all foreign (e.g. obese people and the homeless) to support their hypothesis that disease threat increase general prejudice rather that simply racism. However, significant limitations in this study decrease the extent that their findings support the theory that prejudice can be reduced through health measures such as

H., & Duncan, L. A. (2004). Evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms and contemporary xenophobic attitudes. Group Processes Intergroup Relations, 7, 333–353. DOI: 10.1177/1368430204046142

Huang, J. Y., Sedlovskaya, A., Ackerman, J. M. & Bargh, J. A. (2011). Immunizing against prejudice: Effects of disease protection on attitudes towards out-groups. Psychological Science, 22, 1550-1556. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611417261

Lewis, T. T., Kravitz, H. M., Janssen, I. & Powell, L. H. (2011). Self-reported experiences of discrimination and visceral fat in middle-aged African American and Caucasian women. American Journal of Epidemiology, 173, 1223-1231. Retrieved from http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/

Salvatore, J. & Shelton, J. N. (2007). Cognitive costs of exposure to racial prejudice. Psychological Science, 18, 810-815. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01984.x

Schaller, M. (2011). The behavioral immune system and the psychology of human sociology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 366, 3418-3426. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0029

Schaller, M., Park, J. H., & Mueller, A. (2003). Fear of the dark: Interactive effects of beliefs about danger and ambient darkness on ethnic stereotypes. Journal for Personality and Social Psychology, 29, 637-649. DOI: