Cosmides,+et+al.+(WK4)

Here's your wiki for Cosmides, et al.

As humans we experience “race encoding” – the seemingly automatic and mandatory use of race as distinguishing characteristic between people. It bears no resemblance to long-standing/folk theories of race and the possibility of genetic difference correlating to racial difference. There are no expressed genes that are found solely in one race and not in others. Race does not equal genetic difference. (I loved this and found it fascinating!)
 * "Perceptions of Race"**

It is interesting to note that race coding (noticing and remembering race) is not the same as race-based stereotyping. The coding happens first and seem less voluntary. Then, after a race is noticed, the racially motivated behavior can occur it the individual decides to act that way.

The memory confusion protocol experiment shows that people encode the race of the people in the test as an overarching distinction (participants in the experiment were more likely to make within-race errors rather than across race errors).

At this point in the article I started thinking about why we have race encoding and to me it seems logical that we notice overall distinguishing features to category experiences in our minds… if we didn’t notice the color of peoples’ skin or their features, what would we describe? (I was wondering the same thing. And the article doesn't seem to address why this is part of our makeup.)Clothes change every day. I am often identified as a redhead or as having freckles, but those are some prominent identifying features and I feel like it has less to do with my race… however I think that in some situations race can be used as a stereotype and can have more negative approaches. Some of the negative approaches of stereotyping include inferring a person's personality, goals, morals, and behaviors based on race. [Word. That was my issue with using shirts to see if people encode color regardless of team affiliation etc. to see if coding race was a color issue. When describing someone to another person so they will know who I'm talking about later, I never use clothing unless they will see the person very soon. I would be interested to see an experiment conducted where the subjects are asked to provide a description of a person with only three or four identifying features for someone going directly into the room they just came out of and using colored clothes for that - especially unique colors. Would race be as important if you could describe someone as "the only man in the room wearing a fuschia suit"?]

Cosmides, et al. write that humans rely on vision more than most animals and that we also have good color vision. So it is possible that race encoding could be automatic of ordinary operations of our visual and correlation detecting systems. Though race encoding could also be a by-product of evolved inference mechanisms in various sub-populations depending on factors such as history, beliefs, and culture. Is race encoding a by-product of selection for something else, then?

This article relates very well with chapter three of //Decartes' Baby//. Bloom writes about essentialism which appears to be, "a basic component of how we think about the world" (D.B. Pg. 48). Essentialism is the reason why notions of race are shown even in three year olds. A child takes a category that is "largely determined by social practice and treats it as a thing of nature" (D.B. Pg. 51). This is what Bloom calls "bad essentialism".

The article briefly mentions that children who know racial terms do not sort individuals into categories on perceptual features used by adults (Pg. 176). I feel this should be further explained. There are concepts other than appearances children will eventually learn about race, so what kind of categories do children create? Even though the book expresses that racial encoding seems to be natural process, the article explains that only until after children are told that there are different kinds of people, do they start encoding people into members of groups. Most of our classifications are influenced by language and culture; how would we look at something new (like an animal) if we were never told what it was?

Bloom also writes about why we classify. Our minds have evolved to put things into categories and to ignore what makes things distinct. Without categories, everything would be perfectly different from everything else and nothing could be generalized or learned (D.B. Pg. 40). Both the article and the book state that race is created in our mind. Racial coding can be very destructive. As humans with a natural desire to classify, how do we remove damaging stereotypes?

The author states that racial encoding may be byproducts of other mechanisms that evolved for different purposes. The article is split up into three possible explanations for this phenomenon.

1." Is race encoding a byproduct of **perceptual/correlational systems** ?

Many species, including humans, appear to have computational machinery that is well-designed to pick up correlations between perceived features and events. Given that humans rely on vision more than most animals, and that we have good color vision, could it be that race is automatically encoded merely as a byproduct of the ordinary operation of our visual and correlation-detecting systems?"

2. "Is race encoding a byproduct of **essentialist reasoning** ? The way people reason about natural kinds – tigers, oysters, gold, oak trees – is different from the way they reason about arbitrarily deﬁned categories, such as ‘white things’... If two things are both judged to be members of the same natural kind, we infer that they share many properties in common, including no nobvious or even hidden ones. "

3. "Is race encoding a byproduct of **coalitional psychology** ? The (apparently) automatic and mandatory encoding of race is instead a byproduct of adaptations that evolved for an alternative function that was a regular part of the lives of our foraging ancestors: detecting coalitions and alliances. Hunter-gatherers lived in bands, and neighboring bands often came into conﬂict with one another [29 – 31]. Moreover, there were also coalitions and alliances within bands [32] (a pattern also found in related primate species [33]). To foresee the likely social consequences of alternative courses of action, and to navigate their social world successfully, our ancestors would have beneﬁtted by being equipped with neuro-cognitive machinery that tracked these shifting alliances."

Coalitional Psychology- based on the idea that in the times of hunter-gatherers, distinguishing features were defined within and between bands of people, which helped track and sort coalitions, alliances, and possible conflict.