Definition
People show a set of tribalistic tendencies such as ingroup favoritism and outgroup discrimination since they were adaptive in the past environmental conditions. In other words, groups that showed stronger ingroup favoritism and outgroup discrimination were more likely to survive in the past selective pressures. Therefore, prejudice can be seen as a reflection of our evolved tribalist psychology.
Introduction
The finding that people cooperate more with members of their own group and thereby show tribal tendencies has been established in many different areas of research (Balliet et al. 2018; Fowler and Kam 2007; Yamagishi and Mifune 2016). For example, Ben-Ner et al. (2009) showed that when people share an identity (religious, political, etc.), they tend to make clear distinctions between ingroups and outgroups in their intended and actual social behavior. Other research shows that newborns show preferential...
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Yilmaz, O. (2019). Prejudice as an Expression of Tribalism. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3807-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3807-1
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