PSYC12H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Health Management System, Natural Selection, Asian Americans
Document Summary
Lecture 6 the evolutionary underpinnings of prejudice & how stereotyping legitimizes social hierarchies. Informed speculations about our evolutionary prehistory have led to hypotheses about contemporary prejudice. Evolutionary approaches to psychology assume that psychological phenomenon that are observable today served some useful function in ancestral times fear has an evolutionary basis because it served an important function during a vast period human evolution history. For the past several million years of evolutionary history, ancestral populations lived in social groups. Did prejudicial ways of thinking and acting confer adaptive benefits within ancestral environments: explains why prejudicial ways of thinking and acting may persist, even though contemporary environments are very different in very many ways. Prehistoric dangers & contemporary prejudices: schaller et al. Two evolutionary models for contemporary prejudice discussed by schaller et al. Empirical support for intergroup vigilance theory: encounters with members of ethnic out-groups are often associated with physiological indicators of fear and anxiety .
