Xenophobia, For Men Only

Very few people fear dandelions. Or violins or sparrows. Or even dangerous things—like Hummers. We may object to outsized automobiles on principle, but the mere sight of them doesn’t make us tremble and sweat and run away. On the other hand, even toddlers show an automatic and powerful fear of snakes, even harmless snakes.

That’s because of eons of evolution among both dangerous and benign things. There is probably no snake phobia programmed into our genetic code, but we do have an evolved mental readiness to be fearful of certain things in our world. Scientists can make you afraid of almost anything—even dandelions—but these conditioned fears rapidly vanish. The mind rejects silly phobias.

Does this cognitive readiness influence our relationships with other people? Psychologists have been studying this question, and the preliminary answer is yes. What they do is condition fears of a variety of other people in the laboratory, and see which fears disappear quickly and which persist. The ones that persist over time are deep-wired—and therefore a potential concern for human society.

Here’s an experiment of this kind, the work of Michigan State psychologist Carlos David Navarrete. Navarrete used mild shocks to make black and white men and women fearful of black and white men and women, each of each. That is, white men were conditioned to be fearful of black men and white men as well as black women and white women, and so forth with the others. Then he observed to see if these fears lasted or not.

The findings, reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, were intriguing and unexpected. It’s known that people are more fearful of “out-groups”—that is, people who are different from them, and this fear of “the other” has been clearly demonstrated with race. But Navarrete found that volunteers’ most persistent fears were reserved for men—that is, male members of the out-group. So white men and women feared black men, and black men and women feared white men; all the other lab-induced fears, including any conditioned fear of women, evaporated into the air.

This is interesting in itself, but Navarrete ran a number of other tests to clarify the results. He tested for blatant racism (Example: "Generally, blacks are not as smart as whites”) and for more subtle, unconscious racism. He also gathered histories of the volunteers’ interracial contact—friendships, colleagues, romantic involvements. It was only these histories that mattered: Those with close relationships outside their own race had less persistent fears than did those with little interracial experience.

Why would gender influence these ingrained fears as much as race? It may be that men were more often the aggressors over evolutionary time, so that male faces became a potent cue for danger. So xenophobia is not an equal-opportunity emotion. Racially different men—and men only—are in this sense like snakes. All the rest are like dandelions and SUVs.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from this blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.