Synonyms
Definition
Discrimination elicited by negative stereotypes that highlights race/ethnicity as a social badge of threat and reduces subjects to a set of negative characteristics, feelings, and behaviors associated with their race/ethnicity
Introduction
Many contemporary social problems are related to processes of discrimination that lead to exclusion and conflicts. Human psychological processes emerged as adaptations to environmental pressures throughout evolution and so evolved sensitive psychological mechanisms that promote avoidance and caution in regard to out-group members (Kurzban and Leary 2001; Neuberg and Schaller 2016). In social psychology, the perspective that people automatically recognize and take into account someone’s race is dominant (e.g., Devine 1989). From an evolutionary perspective, categorizing individuals by race is a by-product of the adaptive mechanism for coalitions and alliances and is not...
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References
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de Almeida Segundo, D.S., Vilanova, F. (2019). Racism and Prejudice. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_445-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_445-1
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