Prejudices: Managing Perceived Threats to Group Life

From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be viewed as functionally organized strategies designed to manage the threats and opportunities posed by the human forms of sociality. This chapter explores, first, the evolved psychological mechanisms by which individuals (1) identify those who afford fitness threats and opportunities and (2) respond to them in threat-mitigating and opportunity-enhancing ways; these affordance management systems contribute significantly to stigma, prejudices, and discrimination. Second, people create within-group coalitions to counter threats posed by other group members, and the chapter reviews the implications of alliance-based processes for within-coalitional prejudices, group-on-group conflict, and prejudices against foreigners. Last, the chapter discusses the implications of evolutionary approaches for reducing prejudices and intergroup conflict. By identifying new prejudice phenomena and by anticipating undiscovered nuances in known phenomena, the evolutionary approach poses significant challenges to traditional social psychological and sociological approaches.