Pregiudizio. Un approccio antropologico

In this chapter (“Prejudice: an anthropological approach”), the argument starts from a general model of action: every living being must cope with environmental complexity through action-schemata, and as organisms become more complex these schemata require increasingly context-sensitive activation. Culture is defined as an activating device for non-innate (or only weakly specified) action-schemata, shaping generic dispositions into locally specific competences and, at times, eliciting practices that can appear deeply “unnatural” from a purely biological standpoint. Within this framework, prejudice is proposed as a specific cognitive move: the attribution of a learned, culturally patterned schema to “instinct”, that is, the naturalization of acquired behavior. In that sense, prejudice overlaps with a broad field of ethnocentrism, understood as the tendency to experience one’s own ways of acting and evaluating as more “natural” than those of others. A first layer is developed through embodied and “grounded” cognition. The chapter reviews classic experimental findings suggesting that bodily states can bias social judgment (for instance, physical warmth shaping interpersonal warmth judgments), and it generalizes the point: cognition is not a sealed mental process but an ongoing feedback system involving body, environment, and learned interpretive frames. Cultural codes then “piggyback” on embodied mechanisms. What feels like an immediate, quasi-natural reaction (for example, aversion to a perceived violation of mourning codes) is often the product of culturally stabilized associations that are experienced as obvious precisely because they operate below reflective awareness. On this basis, prejudice is framed as both unavoidable (because it is rooted in elementary cognitive economy) and highly variable (because its concrete contents depend on local histories, norms, and political arrangements). The text then moves from embodiment to learning and imitation. Drawing on an experiment with preverbal infants, it argues that imitation is not merely “irrational copying” but a sensitivity to the perceived meaningfulness of actions: when a model performs an unusual action without apparent constraint, observers tend to infer that the oddity itself carries a reason, and they reproduce it. This is treated as a window onto a broader social dynamic: trust, authority, and perceived group membership modulate which behaviors are taken as meaningful and worth replicating. Cultural markers become cues for selecting whom to learn from; conversely, marked “others” may have their behavior discounted as strange or wrong even when it is instrumentally effective. A further step links these processes to ignorance, overconfidence, and the social circulation of low-resolution representations. The chapter discusses the Dunning–Kruger effect and related notions of meta-ignorance to describe how weak competence can produce strong, polarizing judgment. In social settings saturated by rapid information exchange, such dynamics can feed a prejudice that delegitimizes expertise itself: disagreement is reinterpreted as proof of the other side’s stupidity, bad faith, or malign intent. From here, the core claim is formulated explicitly: prejudice is structurally tied to the “us/them” distinction. The chapter situates this in evolutionary terms (kin selection and the extension of caregiving dispositions into broader cooperation), and it introduces the “green beard” logic as a model for how visible markers can trigger preferential altruism toward perceived in-group members without requiring actual genetic relatedness. In humans, symbolic competence vastly amplifies this mechanism: societies continuously manufacture, refine, and politicize markers of similarity and difference, multiplying opportunities for boundary-making and hierarchy. The final sections address the politically consequential forms of these mechanisms, including evidence that rapid categorization by race can be neurologically salient, that empathic responses can be modulated by perceived group membership, and that categorization can be experimentally redirected by changing which marker is made salient. The conclusion is not that prejudice is destiny, but that it is a fundamental feature of human social cognition whose targets and intensities are plastic. In complex societies, the nation-state is presented as the most elaborate institutional apparatus for organizing belonging and exclusion: it stabilizes categories, distributes rights, and simultaneously negotiates contractual membership and affective identity. Prejudice, in short, is treated as cognitively grounded but politically governed: moral justifications often follow boundary-making rather than producing it, and a serious critique of prejudice must therefore address both its embodied-cognitive roots and the institutional conditions that cultivate or constrain it.