"Nazi Germany had the strictest laws in the world regarding the dignified treatment of animals and the application of euthanasia. Dogs died with much better suffering than their owners," says Boria Sax in Animals in the Third Reich : Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust , which shows to what extent we are tribalists: the Nazis murdered, along with their owners, supposedly contaminated "Jewish dogs".
That is, they considered the Jews so pernicious that they even infected animals or things. Such a degree of ethnographic tribalism cannot be only cultural: naturally, it emerges from our biology. Therefore, depending on the hormonal cycle of a woman, it can be more or less accentuated .
Ovulation and racism
When they are ovulating, white women show more negative attitudes towards African American men (and they see Barack Obama more white). In other words, the intensity of our tribalism, our racism and our xenophobia are also modulated by our hormones .
The first assumption stems from a study conducted by Carlos Navarrete , from Michigan State University. This happens, in part, because while ovulating, their spindle-shaped facial areas respond more to faces, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex responds more to the faces of men in particular.
In a later study , similar aspects were examined that had to do with a particular person: Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. Participants in the study were presented with various samples of shades of brown to ask which one of them best fit them. Obama’s skin color. And, as Robert Sapolsky explains in his book Behave :
Women who saw him whiter were much more likely to vote for him around the time they ovulated; those who saw it blacker showed just the opposite. It must be said that these are small effects effects. Eligibility depends on the glass with which it is viewed (and the hormonal status of the observer).
Due, then, to that clear biological substrate , we are all racists, classists and discriminators … but less than before, because our institutions, laws and moral codes hold us back, as you can see in the following video: