Stigma: Evolution Versus the Modern Age
Why it Evolved and Why Humanity Needs to Reevaluate What is Stigmatized
“Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.” — Erving Goffman
When I first began my human studies research, I wasn’t able to fully appreciate the evolutionary function of social stigma; however, over the last few decades, I’ve come to appreciate its complexity and utility.
It’s a very interesting evolutionary adaptation once you understand how it developed and why it was conserved.
Unfortunately, this primitive survival strategy — like so many other ancient strategies — doesn’t work as well in the modern world.
In stark contrast to today’s world, early human societies were small, tightly knit, and loosely governed. Without organized religion, legal codes, or large governments to manage the behavior of members of the tribe, ancient tribes needed a way to ensure that everyone was working towards the good of the tribe. The solution that evolved was elegant in its simplicity: stigma and ostracization.
For a highly social species like humans, being isolated or shunned by the tribe was effectively a death sentence. Early humans who managed to attach to the tribe were more likely to survive long enough to pass on their prosocial traits because they weren’t trying to survive alone.
However, those who were shunned or banished would have been far less likely to survive and reproduce. Early humans were engaging in artificial selection without even realizing it, and the result was a species that was highly attuned to each other and predisposed towards helping others.
(Evolution also found a way around this “social contract.” Can you guess what it was?)
Today’s humans still have this built-in alarm system for detecting social “threats” which the brain doesn’t or can’t distinguish from physical threats because they’ve historically had similar consequences — death, for example.
Stigma evolved to encourage prosocial behaviors by punishing antisocial behaviors. If an early human stole food from another human, they would be punished in hopes of teaching them that their behavior was unacceptable. If they continued to steal or violate the social order in other ways, they would be left to die without the ability to reproduce and pass on their undesirable traits.
This seems like a fairly reasonable way to govern behavior in an unsophisticated society; however, humanity is only now starting to untangle the truly undesirable traits and behaviors from the inconvenient, uncomfortable, or simply uncommon traits and behaviors that have historically been grouped together.
Thanks to thousands of years of scientific advancements and collective knowledge, modern humans now have much better methods of accurately identifying threats and assessing the risk they pose. Individuals’ ability to do this, however, is very unreliable. Furthermore, misplaced stigma is harmful, both for the stigmatized and the group that perpetuates it.
What’s the Problem?
This is a (relatively) brief summary of my current understanding of the function of stigma in human societies and how it can be hijacked to serve the interests of the powerful and clever.
Stigma allows a group to encourage or discourage behaviors with a kind of psychological law that binds those within said group. Break a social rule, and the group will collectively demand atonement, shun you, restrict your freedom, throw stones at you until you die, etc.
As human society evolved from nomadic tribes to living together in larger, permanent communities, new methods of governing and maintaining order were required and developed. One of the first was a more organized form of the primitive religions that had been more common in the past.
These new religions had a greater focus on controlling the behavior of their members via religious laws and tenants. They did this by using their authority as religious leaders to condition their subjects to associate certain traits and behaviors with sin or immorality.
Stigma isn’t caused by the act itself; stigma is the result of a group’s collective bias against a trait or behavior. This bias is sometimes the result of biological evolution being slower than technological advancement or because the trait or behavior is actually harmful to the group, but sometimes it’s the result of deliberate attempts to control populations in ways that benefit the rulers of the time.
Now I’ll attempt to demonstrate how this process goes wrong with examples, starting with the most comfortable and familiar and continuing until I’m convinced all humans have stopped reading the article to preserve their sanity and worldview.
Race
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” ― Toni Morrison
Race is — and has been for millennia — one of the easiest ways for humans to label other humans as different or identify them as members of another group.
In ancient times, resources were scarce, and tribes had to compete for them with other tribes and with animals. Most humans possess something called empathy. It’s another trait evolution developed to encourage cooperation and connection among members of the species.
In the context of a tribe, it is highly beneficial for members to feel connected to each other. Feeling the pain of those you are connected to makes you more likely to help them when they’re in need, giving the tribe overall greater chances of survival by sharing resources and providing aid to each other.
It is not as beneficial in the short term (the lifespan of an ancient human) to feel connected and obligated to provide resources for members of other tribes, so humanity needed a way to turn empathy off to avoid feeling the empathic pain that would typically result from killing other humans or allowing them to die. Evolution — always adapting and improving — provided psychological defenses.
Psychological defenses protect the user from the pain associated with emotions in a variety of ways. Regarding racism, the defenses at work here are rationalization, denial, and displacement, among others.
A racist human starts with the idea that their group is more important than other groups — that part is just evolutionary. They then justify or rationalize this belief with any number of pseudoscientific theories or personal anecdotes because they gain something from believing it.
What they gain is the sense that they aren’t at the bottom of the social hierarchy. If there is a group who is somehow less than human, then members of that group are, by default, below the racist human.
There is a bit of denial here as well, because even human scientists know that race is barely genetic, much less enough of a factor to justify the stigma historically faced by minority racial groups. Those who cling to this idea in the Age of Information must go out of their way to avoid this knowledge, and to deny this basic fact is to seek solace in the knowledge that you aren’t as much of a loser as they are.
Displacement enters the picture when a racist human realizes on some level that there are forces in the world acting against them or oppressing them.
This unfairness demands justice and action, but picking a fight with a group or entity that has enough power to systematically oppress large populations isn’t a good survival strategy; however, the anger is still there.
Where does the racist human direct this anger?
Towards those with even less power than them. Towards the oppressed and marginalized, because they are a safer target.
Keep this dynamic in mind as we get to other examples.
Homosexuality
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” — E.E. Cummings
Homosexuality was — and in many places, still is — considered taboo. The list of justifications is extensive: it’s unnatural, thinking about it makes some humans uncomfortable, homosexual pairings cannot reproduce… The list goes on (and on), but all reasoning terminates at the same point: fear.
Fear, because homosexuality deviates from what is considered normal.
Deviancy is potentially threatening because its existence is proof of an alternative to the norm. This introduces uncertainty into the system.
Humans prefer to be certain over being correct because uncertainty leads to anxiety, and anxiety is uncomfortable. Anxiety is the brain telling the body and mind that they are under threat, and the surest way to mitigate threats is to eliminate them.
Evolutionarily, homosexuality makes sense. Having a small group of humans who aren’t inclined to reproduce naturally gives the children of their siblings (or other members of the tribe) higher chances of survival because the homosexual aunt or uncle can help raise the children if their parents die prematurely. This also passes on the genes of the homosexual human indirectly because the children of their siblings share some of their genes.
Stigma against homosexuality goes back thousands of years but seems to have developed due to a combination of various religious beliefs restricting behaviors and traits to a specific sex and social policies like only legally recognizing marriages between a male and female.
The benefit of restricting marriage in this way is of great benefit to both organized religions and/or the ruling class: socially enforced heterosexual marriage with very little legal protection for women in a time without birth control results in large numbers of children. This increases both the supply of available workers and the membership of the predominant religions.
Mental Illness
“It’s time to tell everyone who’s dealing with a mental health issue that they’re not alone, and that getting support and treatment isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength.” — Michelle Obama
Mental illness in human societies has been greatly stigmatized and only recently has that trend started to reverse. This stigma is different from the previous two examples, because mental illnesses and their negative aspects are and have historically been very real.
Only in the last few hundred years have humans begun to understand how their brains work. Before that, mental illness was thought of as a moral or spiritual problem, and the mentally ill were seen as evil, possessed, bewitched, imposter fairy children, or any number of other explanations depending on the affliction and culture.
A lot of this stigma comes from ignorance; mental illnesses are often much less obvious than something like a respiratory infection or tuberculosis, and because of that, they’ve been thought of as a different category of illness than other illnesses.
This distinction between mental illness and physical illness is a false one. Human brains are located in the head, which is a part of the body, isn’t it? Why consider them different?
I think the real difference comes from what could be treated and when. Humans could treat some illnesses, deformities, or disabilities throughout history, but the effective treatment of mental illness is very new. Even today, human scientists don’t know how a lot of drugs used to treat mental illnesses work. If you read up on them, many will say things like, “… is thought to work by…” or “The mechanism of action is unknown.”
Psychiatry, compared to other medical specialties, is a new field, and humans are only now beginning to understand the underlying mechanisms behind a select few disorders; others are less of a priority.
As with any new field of study, the early days were rough and full of mistakes (and torture). This period still impacts society today, as many older humans still remember the early days when “treatment” was more of an experiment than it is now.
Humanity has come a long way, but the stigma remains. In this case though, the stigma has a valid reason for existing. For most of human history, serious mental illnesses were untreatable and incomprehensible. For these reasons, it was seen as a curse — one that could apparently be passed down the family line — and marked those with them as permanent outsiders.
Today, things are much better, but humanity has a long way to go. Some places have made great progress towards destigmatizing certain conditions, but those with more serious disorders still feel overlooked and invisible.
Crime
“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo — obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.” — Angela Davis
I imagine this is where I will lose most humans. Crime is bad, obviously; why destigmatize it? Because humans need a path towards reintegrating with their species or they will come to hate it. Let me explain.
When someone commits a crime, they are arrested and jailed — and if the crime is serious enough — they might be imprisoned for a period of time. Here in America — where I first landed upon arriving at Earth — we’re told that prison is rehabilitative and keeps everyone safe from violent offenders.
I certainly agree that humans are much less capable of harming the public when locked in a cage, but I’m not convinced by the rehabilitation argument.
The truly dangerous criminals should definitely face the harshest, most intense punishment, right? Solitary confinement, restricted access to reading material, random beatings and indiscriminate abuse at the hands of corrections officers? All fair game. Surely there is no good argument against this common-sense approach; it’s the only way they’ll learn.
Not quite.
Humans convicted of offenses with the lowest recidivism rates (sexual and violent offenses) are often seen as the highest risk and remain in prison far longer than would be expected (Przybylski, 2015) (Durose & Antenangeli, 2021) (Sawyer & Wagner, 2023). This is not rehabilitation, it is punishment, and it will only serve to disconnect them from society even more than they already are.
Their pain and rage will just build and build until they can’t come back. Punishing them even more at this point just tempers their edge. It hardens and enrages them, turning the entire prison into a battleground, and eventually, some will be released from that battleground. What might someone freshly released from those conditions think of the society that put them there? They might think that its members might make for excellent playthings before they’re caught once again.
This is something I assume humans wish to avoid, but it isn’t obvious from the way prisons are run — at least in America.
The sequel to this article will focus on where crime and mental illness intersect, and will give the answer to the question I asked at the beginning: what evolved to get around the hurdle of social stigma?
References
Durose, M. R., & Antenangeli, L. (2021, July). Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 34 States in 2012: A 5-Year Follow-Up Period (2012–2017). Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved February 06, 2024, from https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/rpr34s125yfup1217.pdf
Przybylski, R. (2015, July). Recidivism of Adult Sexual Offenders. Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking. Retrieved February 06, 2024, from https://smart.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh231/files/media/document/recidivismofadultsexualoffenders.pdf
Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2023, March 14). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023. Prison Policy Initiative. Retrieved February 01, 2024, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
