The idea of this post came while
I was chatting with a Dutch gentleman who mentioned several times that people
in the East of The Netherlands are much more xenophobic and racist than people
in the West of the Netherlands. Now, to better understand the context of this
statement, you have to know that The Netherlands is quite a small country and
from East to West it spans over approximately 250 km, which is not that much.
At the same time, the biggest cities (and there are quite many) are in the
Western part of the country. Here there are big cities such as Amsterdam,
Rotterdam and The Hague.
As you might have guessed already,
most foreigners and immigrants are established in the western part where the
major cities and industries are.
The exact extent of xenophobic
and racist attitudes among people in the eastern part of the country is not
known to me. At the same time, I have heard this from more than three people in
The Netherlands, so a grain of truth must be there.
Now, let’s see how this works. As
the story goes, people who have met very few foreigners and immigrants have
strong negative attitudes toward them. This is quite surprising since these
people have attitudes about something that they don’t know too much about. To
the gentleman that told me this story this was very surprising. In addition to
his surprise was the fact that people who live in the areas where there are
many foreigners and immigrants have more favorable attitudes towards these
groups.
To the naïve observer this is
really surprising; people who know very little about foreigners and immigrants
have strong negative attitudes towards these groups, while people who know
considerably more about these groups have more favorable attitudes towards
them.
The surprise comes from the
(flawed) assumption that in order to have a strong attitude one has to have
solid knowledge on the subject. This assumption is coherent (seems to make
sense), but is not necessarily true. In some cases having a lot of knowledge on
a topic leads to having a strong attitude towards that topic (thing).
At the same time, in order to
have an attitude it is not necessary to have knowledge on the subject of the
attitude. For example if you go on the street and start asking people what do
they think about human life in space (such as on the International Space
Station), you will get a lot of opinions. We have to acknowledge that most
people (including ourselves) have very little knowledge on human life in out of
space. However, knowing very little on something does not directly imply that we
have no opinion on the topic or we have no attitude towards it.
If we agree that in order to have
an opinion or an attitude towards something we need not have a lot of knowledge
on it, then the question that arises is why have a negative attitude? The
answer is quite simple and in order to find it, I suggest taking an imaginary
trip back in time to the times of human evolution.
Going a few million years back in
time, we will see that humans (or pre-humans) were living in small and isolated
communities. As Geoffrey Miller says, most likely people from one community would
not meet people from another community unless they would go to war against
them. Living in these small isolated communities lead to the evolution of “fear of new
things”.
The evolutionary rationale of “fear
of new things” is quite simple. On all the things that are “old” namely that I
know I have knowledge if they are dangerous to me (and to the community) or if
they are not. In other words, I know that a cat is more or less harmless; I
know that a lion is very likely to be harmful; I know that people who look like
my and speak like me are (most likely) not going to kill me. On the things that
are “new” namely that I don’t know, I have no knowledge whether they are
dangerous or not. I believe that the evolutionary mechanism worked very simply
in the sense that people who did not fear “new” things, eventually found
something new that was dangerous and died.
Now you might say that this guy
is advocating racism and xenophobia. In no way I do so. What I’m trying to explain
is that the fear of what is new and what is different is something very natural
for most humans. This fear is based on the lack of knowledge on the level of
danger that “the something new” presents.
Foreigners and immigrants are by
their nature “new things”. For people who have never encountered foreigners and
immigrants it is normal to have a negative attitude towards these groups simply
because they are “new” or “different”. By the same rationale, people who have
met foreigners and immigrants and got to know them at least to the level of “they
are not posing a threat to my life” have much less negative attitudes towards these
groups simply because they are neither “new” nor “potentially dangerous”.
Again, I’m not advocating negative
attitudes towards certain group, rather I am saying that the issue is not the
attitude in itself, but the lack of knowledge on the group.
In the XXI century it is
virtually impossible to have zero knowledge on a certain group of people or on
any given topic, even life in the International Space Station. In the information
era people get information on various topics with or without their conscious
awareness.
In the case of people who don’t
encounter other groups of people such as immigrants and foreigners, there is
some information available on these groups. Let’s assume that Hans is a gentleman
who lives in a relatively isolated community in the East of The Netherlands. He
has never encountered a foreigner or immigrant in his community. At the same
time, Hans has some knowledge on these groups acquired mainly from mass media
and word of mouth.
I assume that this scenario is
more than plausible, right? Now, if we think about how Hans got the information
on immigrants and foreigners, it is not that hard to imagine that most of the
information was more of a negative nature. This is a clear case of “availability
heuristic” or as I like to call it “observation bias”.
Usually in the mass media and
subsequently in public conscience information on immigrants and foreigners is
negative. There is news on how a certain immigrant did something bad, or that a
group of immigrants were planning something bad and the police caught them and
so on. When this news reaches people who live in relatively isolated
communities, it somehow finds a place in public conscience and is established
as truth.
The truth is that some immigrants
and foreigners do bad things and this gets reported by the media. At the same
time, the media never presents the large majority of immigrants and foreigners who work hard and
live normal lives. You will never see a news report about the thousands of
immigrants who work 6-7 days per week to support their families. You will never
see news about foreigners who hold highly skilled jobs and are part of the “engine”
of the economy.
In the case of people living in
areas where there are more immigrants or foreigners, this type of news is
generally counter-balanced by their own experiences. For example the city I
live in, Rotterdam, is the most cosmopolite city in The Netherlands. Dutch
Caucasians represent about 50% of the population. If you would live in
Rotterdam, you would encounter a lot of people of different ethnicity,
different race, different religion and so on. If you would hear news about an
immigrant who did something bad this news will blend into your existing
knowledge on foreigners and immigrants. Since you live in a very diverse city,
you know that immigrants and foreigners are generally OK people who live normal
lives and work hard. This implies that your knowledge on foreigners and
immigrants would be very little influenced by the news on the immigrant that something
bad.
Combine the general lack of
knowledge on a social group with the natural “fear of new things” and the
little information available in the mass media and public conscience mostly of negative
nature and the result is that people in more isolated communities tend to have
very negative attitudes towards groups of people about which they know almost nothing.
Lack of knowledge or in other
words ignorance is a major source of xenophobia and racism…
It’s not despite not knowing too
much about immigrants and foreigners, it’s because some people know very little
about these groups that they have very negative attitudes towards them.
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