Page 22 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Chapter 1
simple heuristics can come in the form of categorizing for instance other individuals into pleasant or unpleasant, and familiar or unfamiliar, and are driven by a cognitive system that automatically evaluates the environment (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Indeed, in the human literature, these unconscious evaluations are called implicit associations, and they guide our daily behavior. Emotions regulate these implicit social evaluations, making them stronger or weaker based on an individual’s current state (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
Most of the work on implicit associations has been done in social psychology and has examined in- and outgroup implicit associations using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures unconscious associations between certain concepts (e.g., objects, individuals) and evaluations (e.g., “good” or “bad”, “positive” or “negative”) (Greenwald et al., 1998). Implicit attitudes can for instance entail an unconscious preference for one’s ingroup over an outgroup, as well as having negative associations with outgroups. Notwithstanding the importance of uncovering the cognitive mechanisms underlying intergroup biases in humans, to date, relatively little research has looked at where these processes come from in the first place. The pervasiveness of negative implicit attitudes towards outgroups (paving the way for phenomena such as prejudice and discrimination) suggests an evolutionarily old origin.
Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides (2001) hypothesized that implicit negative attitudes towards for instance individuals of another ethnicity may be a byproduct of adaptations that once evolved to help detect coalitions and alliances in our hunter- gatherer ancestors. For quick and efficient processing of the social world, the cognitive mechanism underlying this alliance-detection becomes sensitive to otherwise meaningless markers such as physical traits to create social categories. Recently, this alliance hypothesis of race was further strengthened by direct experimental evidence (Pietraszewski, 2021). Given that other animals show sensitivity to intergroup biases in attention and mimicry, we may find that certain animals also implicitly evaluate other individuals.
Primates have group structures that closely resemble ours, including intergroup conflicts, hierarchies, and social categories (i.e., based on biological traits such as sex, kinship, age, etc.). Yet, we do not fully grasp the emotional and cognitive processes that drive intra- and intergroup social interactions, and evidence for intergroup biases in judgments and associations is currently limited to humans. Finding ways to probe implicit associations in animals might prove useful in progressing our understanding of the link between emotions and implicit attitudes. Having a method that probes implicit attitudes in animals can not only help us study a negative bias
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