Click here for the full Washington Post Article
" 'Humans have a kind of tribal psychology,' said Joseph Henrich, a biologist at Harvard University who studies the species's evolution.
In particular, humans tend to assume that if one group is getting more, another group must be getting less. We have a hard time understanding that two groups can both be getting more of something at the same time. Call it a cognitive blindspot, or a psychological illusion.
Henrich believes this zero-sum outlook could be a result of millennia of competition among our ancestors for limited resources such as land and mating partners. "You can find some degree of it in every human society," he said. "It varies dramatically across societies and populations, but it does pop up everywhere."
There is also evidence that this possibly ancient predisposition is shaping American politics today. Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, has found that on average, whites now view discrimination against members of their own race as a larger problem than discrimination against blacks.
His explanation is that whites see competition between groups as zero sum. Whites assume that they must be worse off, since the legal and economic situation for blacks has improved. Research also suggests that white voters with stronger prejudices against African Americans are more likely to support the conservative GOP faction known as the tea party.
Norton speculates that antipathy toward Latino immigrants has the same psychological source.
"What Trump is tapping into is the mindset of a zero-sum game," Norton said, which he called an "intuitive" way of looking at the economy and society."
No comments:
Post a Comment