Category-based perception serves adaptation, explaining why bias is automatic and unacknowledged

Evidence

“The category enables us quickly to identify a related object,” Allport wrote; categories’ “whole purpose seems to be to facilitate perception and conduct – in other words, to make our adjustment to life speedy, smooth, and consistent” (1954/1979, p. 21). Modern social-cognition work built on Allport’s insight by documenting ordinary mechanisms of perception and interpretation that discriminate against outgroups. The latest research emphasizes (a) the unconscious, automatic, implicit, ambiguous nature of prejudgment, which explains why people do not acknowledge their own biases, and (b) the interplay of social motives and cognition, which explains what facilitates and thwarts prejudice. Allport was incredibly prescient and left us an ambitious but wise research agenda. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 283

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to implicit bias research (Greenwald, Banaji) and dual-process models of cognition. — connects to: The situation resembles an evolutionary environment structuring adaptation — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 444; Combining conformist learning with age cues reliably yields adaptive answers. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 183; Kantus exhibit a success-biased copying bias that produces counterproductive plot clustering — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 346 (+1 more)