A new account of the conditioning bias to out-groups

摘要

In classical fear conditioning, a neutral stimulus, once paired with an aversive event for several times, can induce fear reaction by itself. Compared with fear-irrelevant stimuli such as birds and butterflies, fear-relevant stimuli such as spiders and snakes are more readily associated with aversive events. This prepared learning phenomenon is highly resistant to extinction, insensitive to cognitive manipulations, and could be acquired in only one trial (Seligman, 1971; Öhman and Mineka, 2001). From an evolutionary perspective, human beings and non-human primates are predisposed to learn to fear spiders and snakes because such preparedness conferred a selective advantage to our ancestors over conspecifics that were not prepared.