Comment by dfsegoat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfsegoat | Hacker News Reader

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> I really wish people would start viewing Racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command, rather than a binary attribute you either have or don't.

This. Some Childhood development studies have born out that children preferentially treat their own 'ingroup' preferentially over those of an 'outgroup' [1]. This is before they really are "impressionable" as I understand it, so it shows something of an inbuilt mechanism. Though they made this distinction:

“Racism connotes hostility and that’s not what we studied. What the study does show is that babies use basic distinctions, including race, to start to cleave the world apart by groups of what they are and aren’t a part of.” [2]

1 - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0175...

2 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/107705...

I am completely against this reclassification, because I think it is crude and wrong. Racism isn't equivalent to prejudice and the distinction they made is pretty feasible. Racists think of themselves as superior due to their race. I like to keep these issues separate and the lizard brain theory is just laughable.

At least some of the people conducting the studies on children are guilty of child abuse, for they tried to correct the behavior of infants with their infantile theories.

"preferentially treat their own 'ingroup' preferentially"

It might make interesting reading to learn about people who don't have an ingroup or who don't prefer their ingroup.

Or then again, it might just be depressing.

From what I remember from pop-psychology books, people create their in-groups on the spot when the situation allows them to also identify an out-group.

This was the classical experiment I remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb....

People who don’t have an ingroup are called psychopaths. I know at least one person who (claims to have) reasoned themselves into something resembling utilitarianism from that starting point but that’s a minority end point to not having a capacity for group loyalty.

White liberals have strongly negative in-group bias: https://www.tabletmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/AA2.jpg

I can't gather any information from that chart alone. It lacks all context, which is important.

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