Can race (in our minds) be replaced?

– by Oliver Sng & Krystina Boyd-Frenkel

If you think about the last stranger you met, you will likely remember their race. But why do we care and think about others’ race? Laypersons sometimes suggest that humans have evolved to be racist. Evolutionary scholars know that the truth is far more complex. Instead, the somewhat surprising answer (at least to laypersons) is that, without modern transportation, our ancestors rarely encountered individuals who looked phenotypically different enough to qualify as a different ‘race’. As a result, natural selection couldn’t have shaped a psychology for interacting specifically with different races.

Why, then, do people care about others’ race today? One prominent answer has been that race is a cue to coalition—the groups that we work with, compete against, and generally solve life’s problems with. Our families, work colleagues, and political groups are all examples of coalitions. Considerable research has accumulated supporting the race-as-coalition perspective, including replications and re-analyses. Our recent work offers a second, complementary answer to this question: that race is a cue to ecology.

The “race-as-ecology” perspective proposes that people pay attention to and think about others’ race because people assume different races live in different (social) ecologies. In the U.S., people assume that Black individuals, relative to White individuals, live in harsher ecologies. Living in harsh ecologies – where early death from unavoidable causes like disease or violence is common – has been linked to traits including an earlier age of first reproduction, a more present-focused time perspective, and less investment in skill accumulation (e.g., education) (see two recent reviews here and here). If living in harsher ecologies influences people’s behaviors, then knowing about another person’s ecology may help us understand and predict their behavior.

We are aware of the ongoing debates in the life history literature, with important issues such as exactly why and how people respond to harsh ecologies, or whether life history “strategies” exist in our species. However, these do not necessarily affect our current work, as we focus on people’s perceptions of others, based on what people think others’ ecologies are. From our perspective, as long as (1) individuals living in harsher ecologies adopt different behaviors, and (2) certain racial groups are presumed to be living in ecologies of varying harshness, then it follows that (3) people will categorize others by their racial group because they assume different racial groups to be living in ecologies of different harshness. If so, one critical implication is that when individuals of different racial groups are presented as equally living in harsh ecologies (or not), people should care about their race less. In the presence of direct information about another’s ecology, their race isn’t useful information anymore. This is the essence of the race-as-ecology perspective.

In a set of three studies, we test these implications. Using a widely used method in the literature, sometimes referred to as the “who-said-what” method, American participants viewed photos of Black and White individuals paired with sentences presumably spoken by each person. Each Black or White person was randomly presented multiple times. After that, participants were given a surprise memory test, in which they were shown the sentences again, but now tried to remember who said each sentence. In our research, what matters are the mistakes participants make. If a participant misremembered what a Black person said as being said by a different Black person, they essentially confused the two Black individuals (a within-race confusion). However, if the participant misremembered what a Black person said as being said by a White person, they have instead confused two individuals of different races (a between-race confusion). More within-race (vs. between-race) confusions indicate that a person categorizes others by race, mentally grouping Black individuals together and White individuals together.

In our studies, half of our participants saw Black and White individuals presented with just their faces. The critical manipulation is that the other half of our participants saw the same Black and White individuals, but now presented in the ecologies/neighborhoods that they supposedly live in. Importantly, both Black and White individuals were presented evenly in both relatively harsh (or the opposite, referred to as “hopeful”) ecologies (see example photos below).

Sample race-with-ecology photos used in studies

What do we observe? First, participants categorized these individuals by their ecologies. In other words, they were more likely to confuse individuals living in harsh (or hopeful) ecologies with other individuals also living in harsh (or hopeful) ecologies. Second, participants categorized these individuals by their race, but they did so less when the Black and White individuals were shown in both harsh and hopeful ecologies. Hence, ecology information leads to the reduction of racial categorization.

Could just telling people to not pay attention to others’ race have the same effect? Past research has tried this and failed. In fact, getting people to stop thinking about race isn’t easy. The current “race-as-ecology” perspective provides insights into one way in which this can be achieved, complementing work from the “race-as-coalition” perspective.

There are puzzles that remain, and new puzzles that emerge. For example, even when race is paired with ecology, we do not see racial categorization completely disappearing (as is sometimes observed in work from the race-as-coalition perspective). So, people are still categorizing others by their race in the presence of ecology information. This suggests that other processes (like race-as-coalition) are still at play.

So, can race be “replaced”? Our answer is a partial yes. When people see others of different races, but living in different ecologies, they group others by their ecologies. In the minds of perceivers then, race is replaced by ecology. In other recent work, we also find that people hold ecology stereotypes—general beliefs about what individuals who live in harsh ecologies are like—and that these stereotypes exist across multiple societies. To the extent that people around the world think about others in terms of their ecology, there may be a range of other social categories, beyond race, that also have the potential to be “replaced” by ecology.

Read the original article: Sng, O., Boyd-Frenkel, K. A., & Williams, K. E. G. (2024). Can race be replaced? Ecology and race categorization. Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(6), 106630.