Categorização de grupos na formação de alianças e coalizões: uma análise evolucionista

Abstract

Categorizing is a human ability that allows us to ordinate, or to classify into categories, starting from existing differences of a given entirety. As social minded beings, humans also use this ability to classify its own species. We aggregate things by the similarities and we discriminate by differences. A great number of cues shared by the groups may be used to execute this mental task. These shared cues range from socio-cultural ones (clothes, language, beliefs) to phenotypic ones (skin color, facial and body similarities). Individuais of our species also have the capacity to detect cues that indicate altruistic predisposition in others. Evolutionary Psychology proposes this is a human universal trait that consists in specific programs (us versus them) that evolved from our hunter-gatherers ancestors to modulate cooperation inside a given coalition as well as the competition between coalitions. This way, when activated, these cognitive programs lead people to evaluate their group-mates (perceived as we) more favorably than out-group members (perceived as they). In this thesis are written three empirical articles and a theoretical one approaching these ideas. There is still another article which aims to introduce a new research technique, the IAT (Implicit Association Test), a technique that is still not widespread in Brazil. The empirical articles show that the categorization of the adversary group is influenced by its own behavior and at least one trait of the observer, like sex. Collected data show that women emphasize negative aspects of the adversar}' group, in a given situation conflict, more strongly than men do. Furthermore, it has been observed that when attenuating conflict cues were present the negative categorization was reduced. The last empirical article demonstrates that the skin color is used by people as a cue of social categorization (race perception) and that this perceptual standard changes depending on the social contexts.