Cross-cultural Research, Evolutionary Psychology, and Racialism: Problems and Prospects

Received 9 October 2015; Revised 10 January 2016; Accepted 2 March 2016

Abstract

Philosophers defending evolutionary/cognitive accounts of racialism argue that cross-cultural psychological research has discovered similar patterns of racial reasoning around the globe. Such research, they hold, simultaneously supports the existence of an underlying cognitive mechanism for essentialist thinking while undercutting social constructionist accounts of racialism. I argue that they are mistaken for two reasons. First, evolutionary/cognitive researchers are unfamiliar with constructionist accounts of global racialism which explain similarities and differences in racialism. Second, evolutionary/cognitive accounts that make cross-cultural claims shoulder probative obligations for showing the independence of the cultures being compared, and these obligations have not been met. I argue that further evolutionary/cognitive research on racialism must account for constructionist models of global racialism while meeting the argumentative obligations of cross-cultural research.

1. Introduction

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race” (Appiah 1990, 4-5).[1] In particular I want to defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances” (Machery and Faucher 2010b, 1015; see also Mallon 2010, 272). The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological (CEP) approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist (SC) approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism.

There are several competing cognitive mechanisms proposed in the CEP literature as to the exact nature of the module that causes racialism (for a summary of these competing approaches see Machery and Faucher 2005b, 1016–1020). What all these accounts share is the claim that “racial cognition is the by-product of a mental mechanism that evolved for some other purpose” (Hochman 2013, 995). For my purposes, the exact nature of this proposed mechanism is not as important as how the cross-cultural evidence is rallied to support its existence by CEP researchers. The CEP research program on racialism calls upon three lines of evidence: first, developmental studies of children which seem to indicate that even infants can distinguish between races (e.g. Hirschfeld 2012); second, a historical argument that identifies racialism in antiquity or non-Western cultures before contact with Europeans (e.g. Mallon 2010); third, a cross-cultural argument that holds that there is a similarity in racialism across the globe because “the social constructionist approach does not explain why races are cross-culturally thought of as biological kinds” (Machery and Faucher 2005b, 1016), and thus some kind of cognitive module is needed to explain such similarities. My focus in this paper is only on the third line of evidence. Thus, evidence such as that provided by Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides (2001) is not part of my critique because their experimental subjects were all University of California, Santa Barbara undergraduates. Only if such a study were replicated elsewhere and an argument offered that claimed that such a “cross-cultural” finding was evidence for a cognitive mechanism would my argument here apply. On the other hand, Hirschfeld’s enrollment of a “small flood of studies” across the globe that indicate that “infants are hardly blind to race” (Hirschfeld 2012, 18) is critiqued here, not because I am interested in the fact that he is calling upon developmental studies per se but because he is enrolling such studies in a cross-cultural manner. I will expand on my reasons for this in Section 3 below, but, in short, I am critiquing CEP researchers’ employment of cross-cultural data regardless of the specifics of their proposed cognitive mechanisms.

I would like to specify two ways in which the position I will defend can be considered constructionist. First, social constructionism, Ian Hacking reminds us, tends toward nominalism. “Constructionists,” he writes, “tend to maintain that classifications are not determined by how the world is, but are convenient ways in which to represent it. They maintain that the world does not come quietly wrapped up in facts. Facts are the consequences of ways in which we represent the world” (Hacking 1999, 33). A key part of my argument defending radical social construction hinges on this very point: we must be nominalists about “different” cultures. If we choose to name cultures we should always bear in mind that the names we give to them are products of our own invention and do not inhere in the actual structure of the (human) world. The position I defend has long been articulated in anthropology. In 1936, Robert Lowie argued:

Second, I will defend a broad sense of “diffusionism” which holds that “it is not fundamental essential characteristics of human beings that explain history but the accidents of who we are with and have been with.... Talk of ‘construction’ in the social sciences is a reformulation of diffusionism” (Bloch 2005, 7–8).[2] Again, my position is neither new nor radical. At the end of the nineteenth century Franz Boas argued against environmental determinism of culture by claiming that “Not one observed fact can be brought forward in support of this hypothesis [of environmental determinism] which cannot be much better explained by the well known facts of diffusion of culture; for archeology as well as ethnography teach us that intercourse between neighboring tribes has always existed and has extended over enormous areas” (Boas 1896, 906).

I will show that the global similarities in racialism are better explained by constructionist models of diffusion than by CEP models of an underlying cognitive mechanism. I proceed as follows: First, I outline the CEP argument that global, cross-cultural similarities in racialism are evidence for the existence of an underlying cognitive mechanism that explains such similarities. Second, I outline the underlying reasoning process that warrants CEP philosophers’ claim that they explain this cross-cultural similarity. Additionally, I show how they attempt to assign probative obligations to their intellectual opponents that they themselves should be assuming. Third, I briefly review SC models of diffusion, interaction, and relations of racial thinking in modernity. I show that these models explain the very similarities that CEP researchers claim to have found. Fourth, I outline what is necessary for CEP to sustain claims of cross-cultural findings that would actually support CEP’s case for an innate, domain-specific, and species-typical mechanism that supports lineage-essentialist reasoning about human groups. I argue that they have failed to produce such evidence and outline what is entailed by an attempt to do so.

2. CEP and the Cognitive Mechanism Underlying Racialism

Philosophers sympathetic to the evolutionary cognitive approach to racialism have argued that their approach to racialism is a needed supplement to social constructionist accounts of racialism because of the existence of similarities in racialism among unrelated cultures. According to CEP philosophers, psychological research has given us evidence that people generally hold beliefs that

CEP philosophers further argue that “racial essentialism is a product of an innate, domain-specific, and species-typical mechanism” (Mallon 2013, 86). The mechanism is not designed specifically to classify people by race. Rather, racialism is a product of a specific cognitive module selected for some other social cognitive function (Kelly, Machery, and Mallon 2010, 440).

My particular target in this essay is the cross-cultural evidence they have rallied to support their case. CEP philosophers point to what they claim are similarities of racialism across time and space and conclude that “Evolutionary psychologists hold that people in many cultures and historical epochs have relied on skin color and other bodily features to classify their fellows, and have further believed that such classifications also group together people who share underlying biological commonalities” (Kelly, Machery, and Mallon 2010, 441). This common similarity is explained by cognitive/evolutionary psychology:

The existence of such cross-cultural patterns in racial thinking points to an explanatory failure of social constructionist (SC) accounts of racialism. Social constructionists, CEP philosophers claim, hold that racial thinking is a recent and local phenomenon, not a global and ancient pattern of thought. CEP philosophers claim that the SC account thus fails in the face of global similarities in racialism: Machery and Faucher maintain that “if something like the concept of race appears in many nonrelated cultures, the radical [SC] thesis is falsified” (Machery and Faucher 2005b, 1015, my emphasis). Thus, “traditional social constructionist explanations are ill-equipped to explain the stability and distinctiveness of racial representations” across the globe or through time (Mallon and Kelley 2010, 512). CEP, however, can explain these things by positing a common cause located long ago, before the human population dispersed over the planet.

Pleas for interdisciplinary cooperation are common among CEP researchers. Machery and Faucher lament that “Social constructionists and evolutionary-minded social scientists avoid interacting with each other. This is detrimental and unjustified” (Machery and Faucher 2005a, 1217). CEP’s philosophical defenders often note that the refusal to incorporate psychological explanations of racialism into constructionist accounts displays an anti-psychological bias. Constructionists, they argue, concerned with uncovering the institutional and social foundations of racialism, ignore the possible harmony between their proposed psychological models and the social institutions that concern constructionist accounts (Mallon and Kelly 2012, 522–523). It is certainly true that many in the social sciences are suspicious of “reducing” complex institutional structures to individual cognition (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Duster 2006; Wellman 2007). In the United States this constructionist stance stems at least in part from what SC scholars perceive as an overemphasis on psychological explanations during the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties (for this retreat from psychological and toward structural accounts of racialism see Jackson 1990; Steinberg 1995, 2007). CEP’s defenders argue that these concerns are misplaced and that their psychological approach is a useful and necessary supplement to constructionist accounts (Machery and Faucher 2005a, Mallon and Stitch 2000) and that a politically powerful antiracist agenda would be enhanced by recognizing the psychology behind racialism (Kelly, Machery and Mallon 2010; Machery, Faucher and Kelly 2010; Kelly, Faucher and Machery 2010; Mallon and Kelly 2012).

Yet, constructionists’ possibly misplaced fear of imperial cognitivists does not tell the whole story of the failure to integrate CEP with SC accounts of racialism. Machery and Cohen recently defended the evolutionary behavioral sciences against its critics by noting that the critics often limit their criticisms to a handful of well-cited articles. They argue that it is a mistake “to extrapolate from these few alleged paradigmatic articles to a whole field” since research programs seldom follow the strictures laid out in such articles. Moreover, these paradigmatic articles were often dated, having been published at the “end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s” (Machery and Cohen 2012, 186). Unfortunately, CEP researchers fare equally poorly, or perhaps even worse, for engagement with the research program of constructionist researchers. In an article where they bemoan the lack of communication across disciplinary boundaries, Machery and Faucher (2005a) show little knowledge of constructionist theories of race. Of thirty-five sources cited in their article, two articles are made to stand for the entire program of social constructionists. These articles total less than fifty pages of reading and were woefully out of date when they were cited in 2005 (Banton 1970, Omi and Winant 2002 [actually a reprint that was first published in 1986]). Such a pattern of citation is not uncommon in the CEP literature. Not only are the cited SC pieces often dated, but they tend to be the same pieces again and again. An example is their reliance on an essay by Collete Guillaumin (1980) which was first cited by Hirschfeld in 1994 (140). This essay is repeatedly cited in CEP literature as an example of the social constructionist position on racialism (Gelman 2003,14, 299; 2009, 9; Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999, 403; Hirschfeld 1995, 1419; 1996, 22; 2002, 622; Kelly, Machery and Mallon 2010, 442; Mallon 2013, 80; Mallon and Kelly 2012, 513). Guillaumin’s essay is a fine piece of work, but it is thirty-five years old and hardly represents recent thinking on the social construction of race. Another example is that the only work of the long career of George Fredrickson used by CEP’s philosophical defenders is Racism: A Short History (2002; see Machery and Faucher 2005b, 1012; Mallon 2010, 277; Mallon and Kelly 2012, 513; Mallon 2013,77), which is a short survey of the topic, hardly representative of Fredrickson’s complex ideas (1971, 1981, 1995, 1997), and even less representative of the entire research program on the construction of racialism.

Two key claims made by CEP philosophers are completely undocumented. The first is that “the social constructionist approach does not explain the commonalities between the culture-specific concepts of race, e.g., the concepts of race in contemporary North America, in nineteenth-century France, in Germany during the Nazi era, and so on (Machery and Faucher 2005a, 1209–1210; see also Kelly, Faucher and Machery 2010, 441; Mallon 2010, 281). It is telling that these assertions of the failure of SC researchers are just that: assertions. There is no documentation of SC researchers declaring their frustrations in explaining these commonalities. Indeed there is a rich body of scholarly writing that explores the commonalities among the three examples offered by Machery and Faucher (e.g. Kühl 2004; Hecht, 1999, 2000; Malik 1996). As I will show, SC researchers have little problem explaining similarities in racialism all over the globe.

The second common claim that is virtually unsupported in CEP writings is that there is evidence that racialism “is found in representations of human groups independent of the European American tradition of scientific racialism that came to a head in the nineteenth century” (Mallon 2013, 83, my emphasis; see also Mallon 2010, 277-278; Kelly, Machery and Mallon 2010, 441; Machery and Faucher 2005a, 1212–1114; Machery and Faucher 2005b, 1015). Assertions of “independent” or “non-related” cultures are key parts of the CEP argument, because such assertions allow them to find the common cause in the distant past. Significantly, however, there is never an argument advanced to establish that this particular culture is “independent” from that particular culture. The idea “that human groups form distinct empirical entities” is widely seen by SC researchers as one of the “fossils of an earlier age” that has been abandoned in the last three decades (Bloch 2009, 14). By ignoring SC research, CEP researchers repeat methodological errors that have long been recognized in the comparative social sciences. I begin unpacking this argument in the next section.

3. The Reasoning Behind CEP’s Cross-cultural Claims

Machery and Faucher (2005a) survey the different CEP approaches to racialism outlining the strength and weakness for Hirschfeld’s Human Kind Module, Kurzban, Cosmides, and Tooby’s coalitional model, and Gil-White’s ethnies model. For each case, Machery and Faucher note how much cross-cultural evidence is cited, and in each case they call for more to be done to substantiate the claims made by the researchers. Comparative research can have many aims, one of which is to establish causal connections (Kocka 2003, 40). CEP researchers use comparisons to establish a causal connection between racialism across the globe to the common environment in which humans evolved. This is an application of Mill’s method of agreement: “If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon” (Mill 1851/2008, 396; see also Ember 1991). In the CEP version, it runs like this: racialism has appeared in what appear to be unrelated cultures. Since the cultures are otherwise unrelated, the cause of the racialism must be the only thing that the cultures share: the environment in the Pleistocene when they evolved the underlying cognitive mechanism for generalization. Thus, pointing to the cross-cultural evidence amassed by CEP researchers, they conclude that it is “best explained by the hypothesis that racial categorization results from a specialized, species-typical cognitive system that, even if it did not initially evolve to deal with racial categorization, has been recruited for this purpose” (Kelly, Machery, and Mallon 2010, 444).

Variations in racial thinking or even its absence entirely in some cultures cannot, in CEP’s view, count against the existence of the underlying cognitive mechanism since it can be expressed in a variety of ways or even overridden altogether by culture and learning (Mallon 2013, 86; Kelly, Machery and Mallon 2010, 442). On first glance, this stance would seem to immunize CEP’s claims from possible falsification: counterexamples to global racialism can be accounted for in the model, while any examples of global racialism serve as evidence in favor of the existence of the cognitive mechanisms. Rather than searching for counterexamples to the prevalence of racial essentialist thought, I will show how the link between global racialism and a cognitive mechanism that developed during the Pleistocene can be undercut by a demonstration of confounding causal variables that explain global racialism. Simply: if the people living in these cultures came into contact with other people who taught them to think racially, then there is no case that the cause of racial thinking lies in our distant evolutionary past and that therefore CEP researchers have failed to establish their case for the existence of an underlying mechanism. By examining SC models of the diffusion of racial thinking since modernity I will show that CEP has ignored such confounding causal variables in making their case. These SC models demonstrate that the contemporary societies CEP researchers often claim to be “independent” or “unrelated” are embedded in a global, racialist culture.

4. Against a Billiard Ball World

In 1982, anthropologist Eric Wolf published Europe and the People without History (1982/2010). In this massive, sprawling book Wolf charged any number of disciplines—history, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, linguistics. among others—with, as he put it, “turn(ing) names into things” (Wolf 1982, 3). By reifying such concepts as culture, society, nation, etc., these disciplines distorted the reality of human experience. “We create false models of reality,” Wolf argued, by treating the world as if it is constituted by “externally distinctive and bounded objects.” By so doing “we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” (Wolf 1982, 6). Wolf argued for replacing our static models of reality with a study of processes: of diffusion, transfer, sharing, conquering and resistance:

Wolf refocused scholarly attention on processes, and what emerged was a picture of the world as a single, unified system. “The more ethnohistory we know, the more clearly ‘their’ history and ‘our’ history emerge as part of the same history” (Wolf 1982, 19). Wolf’s book was a signal event in reorienting entire fields away from static models of self-contained units and toward dynamic models of processes that connected people with one another (de Munck 2000, 282). Those who studied race and racial thought were especially attuned to the way racial thinking was exported and imported across the globe (Verkuyten and Ter Wal 2000, 4). Since the nineteen eighties, scholars have been busy sketching the “complex processes of diffusion, transfer, adaptation, and transformation of racial ideas in various parts of the world, including their interaction with indigenous traditions” (Berg and Wendt 2011, 2). I will sketch two models to show how the appearance of racial thinking across the globe poses no specific challenges for SC models of racial formation. Some models about the global interconnectivity of the world are, ironically, seen as imperialistic ideologies that read the world through the eyes of European thought (Wacquant 1997, Swyngedouw 2004). In response, more recent formulations of global models of racialism have been careful to track how the commonalities of racialism are tailored by local agents to fit local conditions.

Frank Dikötter argues for an interactive model that avoids the pitfalls of models of diffusion that portray recipients of new ideas as merely passive containers of Western imperialist ideas about racialism. In his view, “the interactive model of interpretation proposed here emphasizes the worldviews constructed by local historical agents, analysing the complex cognitive, social and political dimensions behind the indigenization and appropriation of racist belief systems: put briefly, it highlights inculturation where others see acculturation” (Dikötter 2007, 1482). Pointing to his own work on China, Dikötter shows how Western ideas about race found fertile ground in seventeenth-century China onwards because of already existing ideas about patrilineage, increasing militarization which reinforced a social order based on kinship, and other ideas. These ideas, he argues, “were crucial to the emergence of new racial vocabularies, which flourished better in a cultural environment prepared to emphasize real or imagined physical differences between people” (Dikötter 2007, 1484). Such views only intensified in the nineteenth century in the face of demands for equality, which caused a retrenchment of the social order based on an increasingly racist discourse appropriated and modified for local circumstances (Dikötter 2007, 1486–1494). Dikötter’s interactionist model does exactly what CEP authors claim SC models cannot do: it explains the similarities between West and East. It does so by focusing on the channels which made possible the transfer of ideas across the globe rather than taking cultures as discrete entities to be compared. By so doing, Dikötter’s model explains the similarities in ideas, while simultaneously explaining significant differences in those ideas, by recognizing the agency of local actors who reshaped those ideas to fit local circumstances. CEP writers often look to Dikötter’s work to support their argument that racialism in China is evidence for an innate, species-typical cognitive mechanism (Machery and Faucher 2005b, 1015; Mallon 2010, 278; Mallon 2013, 83). They need to come to grips with Dikötter’s own explanatory model which actually undercuts their claims by interposing confounding causal variables between the Pleistocene and the flowering of racialism in China.

A similar, though distinct, model has been offered by David Theo Goldberg who criticizes Dikötter’s interactionism because it demonstrates interactions “among already constituted discrete national configurations” (Goldberg 2009, 1274). In contrast, Goldberg offers a relational model that centers on the “constitutively relational aspects" of racial conceptions. While granting that the exact arrangement of these aspects are “no doubt deeply local in the exact meanings and resonances they exhibit,” he argues that they are “nevertheless almost always tied to extra- and transterritorial conceptions and expressions, those that circulate in wider meaning and practice" (Goldberg 2009, 1273). Embracing this relational view of racialism explains local variations in discourse, because racial ideas are adapted and modified to local needs and power structures. At the same time, however, “racial ideas, meanings, exclusionary and repressive practices in one place are influenced, shaped by and fuel those elsewhere. Racial ideas and arrangements circulate, cross borders, shore up existing or prompt new ones as they move between established political institutions” (Goldberg 2009, 1274). Refocusing scholarly attention on the relations between racial practices and ideas inverts normal conceptualization of racialism. “This, in short, might better be characterized as the globalization of the racial than as the racialization of the globe” (Goldberg 2009, 1275).

I have only sketched Dikötter’s and Goldberg’s ideas here in order to illustrate that SC scholars are more than up to the challenge of explaining both the local and the global appearance of racial ideas. Nor are these the only two models available to SC scholars, as this kind of thinking has flourished in the past three decades. In a recent survey of such theories, methods, and studies, Rogers Brubaker argues that “a growing body of work has reframed the study of ethnicity, race, and nationalism in broader and more integrated terms ... that construes ethnicity, race, and nationhood as a single integrated family of forms of cultural understanding, socialization, and political contestation” (Brubaker 2009, 22). The important point for my present argument is Brubaker’s conclusion:

By rejecting the billiard-ball notion of independent cultures, SC theorists can account for racial similarities across the globe. Two points follow. First, when SC theorists find examples of racialism in different places, they do not need to supplement their accounts with psychological accounts about generalizing cognitive mechanisms because such mechanisms are, as Hochman argues, “explanatorily redundant” (Hochman 2013, 1002). To do so would be “as if someone proposed to account for the pattern of motor traffic in London with an explanation of how the internal combustion engine functions” (Bloch 2005, 14). Second, and more fundamentally, the appearance of similar racial ideas across the globe cannot serve as evidence for the existence of general psychological mechanism because there are confounding causal variables relating to the diffusion of racial ideas across the globe.

The methods employed by SC researchers who treat the globe as a single culture and those of CEP researchers conducting cross-cultural/comparative research are very different. The process of comparison treats examples as “independent cases that are brought together analytically by asking for similarities and differences between them. In other words, the comparison breaks continuities [and] cuts entanglements” (Kocka 2003, 41). This method is in tension with the notion of “entangled histories” which “is interested in travelling ideas, migrating people, and transnational commerce” (Kocka 2003, 42; see also Kolchin 2009, 579). CEP’s program, which treats cultures as independent ontological entities, faces vexing problems. In the next section I will demonstrate these problems.

5. Galton’s Problem: An Unsolved Problem in the CEP Program

Anthropology was the discipline in which comparative/cross-cultural research was most fully developed, and there were two methods of comparative anthropological research. First are those methods which made a statistical comparison of a large number of cases in which cultural traits were abstracted and fitted into a taxonomy developed for the purposes of such a comparison. George Murdock’s Cross-Cultural Survey at Yale’s Institute of Human Relations is the most developed and famous example of this approach. Murdock had data on three hundred societies that he placed in seven hundred categories as he sought cross-cultural generalizations. The second approach took a much more limited number of cases and performed a careful and controlled comparison of cultures within a carefully specified region. British structural functionalism was the best example of this approach. Each tradition declined at (least in part) for reasons outlined above: the increasing recognition that modernity and capitalism, and their child imperialism, had interconnected the world in such a way as to frustrate the ambitions of such approaches (Brettell 2009, 651–653). The same problems that frustrated these two research programs remain for any proposed CEP research program that wants to claim evidence from cross-cultural research.

What is important for my present purposes is that the cross-cultural approach of CEP does not seem to fit neatly in either of these traditions: it has not generated enough examples of racialism to make a statistical comparison meaningful. However, its method of seeking out only markers of racialism alone, rather than deep understandings of an entire culture, means it does not really fit the second method either. What I will show in the remainder of this paper is that CEP researchers have thus failed to meet the probative obligations that accompany the kind of claims they are making about the existence of their psychological mechanism.

CEP theorists have a number of cross-cultural examples where they have claimed to have discovered racialism. Lawrence Hirschfeld has pointed to experimental evidence from North America, China, Israel, Ethiopia, and Korea that infants recognize race and prefer their own race. He claims that this literature is “refreshingly global in scope” (Hirschfeld 2012, 18). We can add to his list perhaps a few more nations from the CEP literature, such as Gil-White's study in Mongolia (Gil-White 2001a), but not many more. Nineteenth-century anthropologists would have sneered at this tiny sample size. In what is considered the very first work of comparative anthropology, Edward B. Tylor formulated a theory of the “formation laws of marriage and descent” based on data he had collected from “between three and four hundred peoples, ranging from insignificant savage hordes to great cultured nations” (Tylor 1889, 246). When he presented his paper, the very first question, posed by Francis Galton, deflated his results. “It was extremely desirable for the sake of those who may wish to study the evidence for Dr. Tylor's conclusions,” Galton argued, “that full information should be given as to the degree in which the customs of the tribes and races which are compared together are independent” (Tylor 1889, 270). “Galton’s problem,” as it came to be called, would vex comparative methodologies from that time forward.

Several statistical solutions have been proposed for Galton's problem, but there is no firm consensus as to its solution (Naroll 1961, Strauss et.al. 1975, Ember, Ember and Peregrine 2015). The statistical version of the problem does not (yet) arise for CEP, because they do not have enough examples to make statistical analysis such as these possible. But Galton’s problem also involves cultural, not statistical, independence, and this problem does arise for CEP. If cultures are related to each other, then the similarities among them could be explained by cultural rather than psychological causes. In order to make cultural invariance count as evidence for an evolved psychological mechanism, CEP must show that there are cultures without a shared cultural environment, in order to trace the cause back to the Pleistocene.

Even so, as Hochman argued, “we should be wary of easy arguments from the universality of a trait to the existence of an adaptation dedicated to that trait. Just as not everything that has evolved is universal, not everything that is universal has evolved” (Hochman 2013, 999). Nor is universality necessarily proof of cultural diffusion from a common source; facts such as dogs making dogs and cats making cats can be learned in different ways. As Hochman concludes, “what science tells the North American students, experience tells the Itzaj [in South America] (Hochman 2013, 999). This too, is an old idea in the human sciences, dating back at least to Franz Boas's dictum that “unlike causes produce like effects” (Boas 1887, 485). “It is of very rare occurrence that the existence of like causes for similar inventions can be proven,” Boas argued in 1887; “on the contrary, the development of similar ethnological phenomena from unlike causes is far more probable, and due to the intricacy of the acting causes” (Boas 1887, 485). Put simply, the global distribution of racial thinking carries with it two sets of probative obligations: first, to show that racialism has a common cause at all and, second, to show that diffusionist models cannot explain global racialism. Accepting CEP explanations for psychological mechanisms depends on a demonstration of the “the failure of rival explanations” (Sesardic 2003, 430; also Hochman 2013, 995). In terms of their cross-cultural claims, CEP theorists have not met these obligations.

To demonstrate the unmet probative obligations on CEP research, I will examine a recent case made by a CEP philosopher, Ron Mallon's (2013) “Was Race Thinking Invented in the Modern West?” Mallon argues that “lineage essentialism,” a key part to racialism, appears in two different cultures and that these cases provide good evidence for the existence of an underlying cognitive mechanism. I will examine each case to show two things: first, that there is no evidence that the cultures, Brazil and Madagascar, are “independent” of European/North American racial traditions.; second, that a more nuanced understanding of the cultures should make us doubt that CEP researchers have understood the “racialism” they have claimed to discovered.

6. Conclusion

The cross-cultural evidence for the existence of a species-typical cognitive mechanism that accounts for racialism faces significant problems that CEP researchers need to address. Moreover, the methods of cognitive psychology are hardly uniform in their findings. More recent studies have been much more equivocal in their findings about the very areas of the world that I have examined here: Latin America and Madagascar. Denis Regnier found that, among other ethnicities in Madagascar, lineage essentialism did not arise until the colonial period on the island, just as SC research would predict. Regnier’s psychological experiments to uncover the source of racialism could not be interpreted to show the existence of a cognitive model that accounts for it (Regnier 2015). More recent research fails to find evidence of any underlying cognitive mechanism for racialism. Tamara Hale's psychological experiments among the Yapatera of Peru showed their cognitive processes were in line with their non-essentialist ideology of race:

Such research should continue in the future, but it must be done in closer conversation with the methods and theories of social constructionist research. I agree with the plea of CEP researchers that the evolutionary cognitive researchers and social constructivist researchers need to be in closer communication. However, rather than faulting SC researchers for neglecting CEP approaches, I argue that the opposite is a much greater problem. CEP researchers make claims about “independent” cultures without coming to grips with the probative obligations that are concomitant with such a claim. These obligations, I should stress, have been well understood for over a century. I agree with two anthropologists who are sympathetic to CEP approaches when they find that “behavioral scientists should pay more attention to the work of cultural/social anthropologists, since these are the scientists who have made human variability their main focus,” because “the solution cannot be ... to administer studies upon studies to the billions of (poor) people around the world who remain untapped by the behavioral sciences” (Astuti and Bloch 2010, 84). Rather, it requires researchers to be sensitive to the complexity of human culture and cognition—a sensitivity that can only arise from a true collaboration between evolutionary/cognitive psychologists and those working in anthropology, history, and sociology.

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Notes

1. Appiah distinguishes “racialism” which is the belief that races can be distinguished from each other from “racism” which adds value judgments to establish racial hierarchies. Machery and Faucher (2005a, 1208) follow this line as well. Hochman (2013) critiques the distinction on the basis that racialism cannot be so easily separated from racism as value judgments may be constitutive of racialism itself. I agree with Hochman and return to this point in section 5.1.2 of the present paper.

2. Bloch does suggest that diffusionist explanations are overused in the social sciences, however.

Acknowledgements

Early versions of this paper were read and critiqued by Matthew Kopec, Mark Largent, and Tamara Hale. Any remaining errors are my own.

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