http://imnews.imbc.com/news/2011/health/article/2815983_8444.html
Human Prejudice Has Ancient Evolutionary Roots
ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2011) — The tendency to perceive others as "us versus them" isn't exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110317102552.htm
The evolution of intergroup bias: Perceptions and attitudes in rhesus macaques.
Abstract
In particular, do our strategies for dealing with other groups emerge in the absence of human-specific experiences? One profitable way to answer this question has involved administering tests that are conceptual equivalents of those used with adult humans in other species, thereby exploring the continuity or discontinuity of psychological processes.
We examined intergroup preferences in a nonhuman species, the rhesus macaque (
In addition, we observed that macaques spontaneously associate novel objects with specific social groups and display greater vigilance to objects associated with outgroup members (Experiments 4–5).
Finally, we developed a looking time procedure—the Looking Time Implicit Association Test, which resembles the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995)—and we discovered that macaques, like humans, automatically evaluate ingroup members positively and outgroup members negatively (Experiments 6–7).
These field studies represent the first controlled experiments to examine the presence of intergroup attitudes in a nonhuman species. As such, these studies suggest that the architecture of the mind that enables the formation of these biases may be rooted in phylogenetically ancient mechanisms.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/100/3/387/
(Cayo Santiago)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayo_Santiago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico
cayo : A rock, shoal or islet in the sea; key
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islet
A free-ranging colony of rhesus macaques was established in 1938 on an island in the Caribbean. Introduced to Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, rhesus macaques have been studied under semi-natural conditions for almost 70 years and have provided an unprecedented resource for information about behavior, population demography, and long-term histories of individuals' social and physical development (Rawlins & Kessler 1986a). Furthermore, with the establishment of this colony of free-ranging macaques came the birth of a new field of study, sociobiology, pioneered by Stuart Altmann who observed rhesus monkeys on Cayo Santiago and worked with notable sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (Bercovitch pers. comm.).
(Rhesus Macaque)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhesus_Macaque
http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/entry/rhesus_macaque
(Laurie Santos)
http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Santos.html
http://www.yale.edu/caplab/Main/Home.html