Wu Qi, Tan Chuan, Wang Bo, Zhou Ping
Cognition and Human Behavior Key Laboratory of Hunan Province, Department of Psychology, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.
Department of Psychology, School of Social Development, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2015 Mar 27;10(3):e0122794. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122794. eCollection 2015.
From evolutionary reasoning, we derived a novel hypothesis that ingroup derogation is an evolved response of behavioral immune system which follows the smoke detector principle and the functional flexibility principle. This hypothesis was tested and supported across three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants' group membership was manipulated by using a minimal group paradigm. The results indicated that mere social categorization alone - a heuristic cue that implies the differentiation between "us" and "them" - was sufficient to elicit ingroup derogation among Chinese participants, and, such an intergroup bias was positively associated with the perceived vulnerability to diseases, which was also more consistently associated with ingroup attitudes. Experiment 2 extended and partially replicated Experiment 1 by showing that when there were cues of diseases in the immediate physical environment, Chinese participants exaggerated their attitudes of ingroup derogation. The results also showed that this effect was mainly driven by outgroup attraction. Experiment 3 changed the method of disease manipulation, and found that Chinese participants responded more strongly to disease cues originating from ingroup members and that they endorsed more ingroup derogation attitudes even when the ingroup and outgroup members were both displaying cues of diseases. Taken together, these results reveal the previously unexplored effects of infectious diseases on ingroup derogation attitudes, and suggest an interesting linkage between the evolved behavioral immune system and the ingroup derogation.
基于进化推理，我们得出了一个新的假设，即内群体贬低是行为免疫系统的一种进化反应，它遵循烟雾探测器原理和功能灵活性原理。这一假设在三个实验中得到了检验和支持。在实验1中，通过使用最小群体范式来操纵参与者的群体成员身份。结果表明，仅仅是社会分类本身——一种暗示“我们”和“他们”之间差异的启发式线索——就足以引发中国参与者的内群体贬低，而且，这种群体间偏见与感知到的疾病易感性呈正相关，而疾病易感性也与对内群体的态度更一致地相关。实验2通过表明当即时物理环境中存在疾病线索时，中国参与者会夸大他们的内群体贬低态度，从而扩展并部分重复了实验1。结果还表明，这种效应主要是由外群体吸引力驱动的。实验3改变了疾病操纵的方法，发现中国参与者对来自内群体成员的疾病线索反应更强烈，而且即使内群体和外群体成员都表现出疾病线索，他们也更支持内群体贬低态度。综上所述，这些结果揭示了传染病对内群体贬低态度的先前未被探索的影响，并表明了进化的行为免疫系统与内群体贬低之间存在有趣的联系。
