Abstract
We often pigeonhole our surroundings into dualistic categories. This capacity to function as reductionists may help us problem-solve when pressed in terms of survival or reproduction. Alternatively, binary categories may be reflective of certain socioecological conditions, and thus social constructs. This study explores classifications of nonhuman primate taxonomy via the coding of human–primate boundary categorizations during 16 years of UK newspaper reporting (1995–2010) to explore whether societal concepts of simianity reflect sociopolitical events – in other words, cultural influence resulting in ingroup boundary enforcement, with less inclusionality under more turbulent scenarios. The results indicate that societal shakiness accounts for the minimization of “human” ingroups at the expense of other primates. Human–primate infrahumanization possibly reflects a cognitive adaptation towards outgroup-directed dichotomous thinking in stress states. That said, the fluidity of the results in the context of societal change also suggests cultural influence on categorical dichotomous sets often accepted as “natural.”
Humans love to dichotomize (Oshio, 2009), seeking to comprehend concepts via dualistic categories: rich/poor, sick/well. This capacity-turned-tendency to function as reductionists may have evolved to help us problem-solve when pressed in terms of survival or reproduction (Trivers, 2011). Evidence suggests we categorize with more flexibility under less threatening circumstances (Bryson, 2017; Demoulin et al., 2005; Morton et al., 2009), and herein I argue such patterns are upheld in regard to human attitudes towards our fellow great apes.
Why humans believe oppositional subsets of split sets to be “true” involves essentialism. Categorization deals with either/or thinking – objects either belong to one group or not. Either/or thinking is dependent upon a category holding within itself a “true” essence, an unchangeable, unprovable, hidden kernel that defines categorical sets (Fuss, 1989; Ross, 1951). Because essences are what Fuss calls “immutable,” they do not overlap; all outside a categorical prescription therefore must be something “other” (Gelman, 2003). This essentialism results in dichotomization, a split into two distinct elements, and acceptance of such subsets as “true” categories, or psychophilosophical concepts known as “natural kinds” (Gelman, 2003). Such semantic considerations receive some support from the Sapir-Whorf theory, which suggests that language limits (or determines) thought (Whorf, 1956), though the same evidence also can be used to argue that language reflects preexisting biases: For example, females (who are, in Western contexts, less privileged than males) are often animalized in negative contexts (Rodríguez, 2009; Roylance et al., 2016; Tipler & Ruscher, 2017) – though arguably males are too during wartime (Bruneau & Kteily, 2017). Countries with more sexism also have more gender distinctions in their native languages (Lewis & Lupyan, 2020).
Dichotomous thinking often is found within structuralism, a theory of culture founded by linguist de Saussure in the mid-1900s and used by anthropologists Lévi-Strauss and Mauss. Structuralism involves accepting that the artificial structures that form our mental, physical, and linguistic environments are themselves the “real” roots of a society (importantly, unseen and scientifically unprovable, and potentially related to essentialist hiddenness; Fuss, 1989). Post-structuralists – among them the French-diaspora philosophers Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze, and Baudrillard – would argue that structures are not in themselves self-sufficient; the viewpoints of the builder (read: artist, writer, musician, architect, etc.) are not as significant as those of all who experience the structure, not just the creator(s) (Harrison, 2006).
Prescribed binarism has been challenged not just in human–animal studies and philosophy, but in arenas as diverse as anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as in critical, women’s, gender, ethnic, and AI studies. Academics who have championed more essentialism-rooted arguments have fielded cross-disciplinary arguments from animal rights advocates such as Gary Francione, primatologists and philosophers of science such as Jane Goodall and David Buller, posthumanist David Ronen, cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, postcolonial studies theorist Edward Said, and psychologists such as Susan Gelman and Nick Haslam, amongst many notable others.
It is important to note that while within philosophical and social-science paradigms it could be argued that there exists an implicit power-differential between so-called human and animal poles (including, more granularly, between human and nonhuman apes, and between human and nonhuman primates, cf. Vasava, 2014; Wolfe, 2003), there is no debate regarding this in materialist scientific terms: Humans are classified as animals, primates, and apes. Formal biology also classifies humans as great apes, belonging to the family Hominidae (humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans; Groves et al., 2005) – although very occasionally Hominidae is described as being made up of “humans and great apes.” There are those who move the magnifier ever nearer and argue that humans, common chimpanzees, and bonobos should be classified together as subtypes of either a Homo or a Pan genus (Sommer & Schmidt-Salomon, 2011; Wildman et al., 2003). This study, however, draws the (perhaps artificial) boundary at humans-are-great-apes in terms of our “simianity” (the quality of being a monkey or ape), as this is in agreement with current mainstream scientific classification.
We sometimes emphasize our linked kinship through invocations of genetic language: “close kin,” “cousins.” Nonhuman great apes occupy a liminal position, as they can be property or (semi-)persons (Haraway, 1989). Semantics, too, are often employed to keep chimpanzees and bonobos – the apes most closely related to human apes – apart from humans. We see it when psychologists label similar behaviors as “traditions” in chimpanzees and “culture” in humans (Whiten, 2005). Denying other animals “human” capacities is not only often unscientific (similar homologous morphology via ancestry and similar analogous morphology via convergence would be expected, including behavior), but at times functions as a gate-keeping device dividing cultural concepts of “human” and “animal.” Denying shared capacities leads to privileging the human animal over all others. Challenges to these mechanisms in terms of nonhuman animal cognition have been labeled the “cognitive turn” of ethology (Griffin, 1976).
Therefore, what is scientifically moot becomes culturally relevant. Historically, anthropologists have stressed differences regarding chimpanzees/bonobos and humans by “dehumanizing” the former and their capacities. I use the phrase “dehumanization” throughout this article as it is the accepted psychological term for the process of denying “human” traits such as empathy or complex emotions such as grief to fellow humans, although I intend an applied meaning of “de-person-ization.” Within humans, there exist well-proven links between such “othering,” or “infrahumanization” (i.e., “my ingroup is more human than your outgroup”) (Demoulin et al., 2008) and exploitation. Multiple studies suggest stereotyping individuals essentialize social groups as natural kinds (Gelman, 2003; Morton et al., 2009; Rothbart & Taylor, 1996). This is significant when we look at our dynamics not just with our fellow apes, but all nonhuman animals. We appear to be comfortable dehumanizing (depersonizing) other animals enough to kill them for meat or sport; the West lacks words for animal-directed murder and uses euphemisms for nonhuman animal slaughter and dead bodies (Beirne, 2018).
Due to nonhuman great apes’ close genetic relationship to humans, Vasava (2014) suggests humans may favor apes over other nonhuman animals (see also Small, 2012). There is evidence for this: Some results suggest that humans mentalize more with mammals than with birds and invertebrates (which follows kinship theory; Nakajima et al., 2002; cf. Hamilton, 1971); other studies suggest we mentalize perhaps most of all with other great apes, “overrepresented” in primate-focused U.K. media articles (Most, 2008). Yet there is also ample evidence that such mentalization patterns do not always occur along “pure” phylogenetic lines (Mitchell & Hamm, 1996), e.g., in Japan, humans ascribed the more distantly related monkeys more human-like cognition than gorillas (Nakajima, 1992). Moreover, there appear to be temporal changes in applications of “humanness” to apes and monkeys (Sommer, 2000). Similarly, I argue here that social dynamics are complex, for as animals we also protect our environmental niche most strongly from those who are “almost” like us due to similar resource-competition strategies (Gil-White, 2001). We become more precise about scientific “human” definitions when species get closer (Wildman et al., 2003) – distinctions we do not apply to beetles and multiple other nonhuman species, as Wildman et al. (2003) point out. Rather than being always-favored kin, at some levels nonhuman apes threaten the perceived human–primate boundary, potentially triggering a primatological “uncanny valley” (Bryson et al., 2020) – a term coined by Mori (1970), describing the revulsion humans feel when robots come close to being perceived as humans, but not quite – humans are more comfortable with beings either clearly robotic or human. This elides with observed dehumanization patterns of perceived-as-threatening outgroups: Sociological studies have indicated a high correlation between essentialism by more enfranchised parties and societal instability that “emerged only when the dominant group was threatened by the prospect of social change” (Morton et al., 2009, p. 663).
As I am most interested in the borderlines that trigger infrahumanization, I concentrate here on the closest liminal space in genetic terms: chimpanzees and bonobos at the expense of other nonhuman great apes. The study explores classifications of nonhuman primate taxonomy and the rigidity – or fluidity – of the exemplary human–primate alterity. This is done via coding human–primate boundary categorizations from articles over a 16-year period of UK newspaper reporting (1995–2010) to see whether societal concepts of simianity potentially reflect political events – in other words, cultural influence that results in ingroup boundary enforcement, as such perceptions would be sensitive to particular cultural contexts.
My use of the human–primate binary as fueling my search terms is intentional and strategic, “as it would not be possible to explore the potentially changing dynamics of the use of these binaries without naming them” (Bryson et al., 2019, p. 4). My hypothesis that societal concepts of evolutionary links with nonhuman primates will shift with wider sociopolitical changes – with less inclusionality under more turbulent scenarios – was an a posteriori working hypothesis.
This study is part of a wider project that also investigated human–animal, human–machine, heterosexual–homosexual, and male–female dichotomization/essentialism (Bryson, 2017; Bryson et al., 2019, 2020) via different quantitative analyses. It has substantial (though not entire) structural overlap with the other studies regarding the following methods section.
Materials and Methods
Rationale for a 1995–2010 U.K. Slice
This study investigates a dichotomy that appears often in evolutionary science: categories regarding humanity and/versus animality. Therefore, it was necessary to restrict explorations to a particular time and place. Journalists are proxies for the wider human ingroup, as they do not operate in a cultural vacuum (Fowler, 1991; Miljan & Cooper, 2003). Moreover, popular media is likely to reflect social constructions of categories (Etzioni, 2001).
The rationale for this time-slice was not only due to digital-collection restraints, but also because it encompassed periods of war and economic rises and plummets; in other words, the societal instability I hypothesized would influence essentialist and infrahumanist attitudes towards nonhuman animals.
A five-year interval is the norm in longitudinal studies in the social sciences (Ruspini, 2000) and likely captures social shifts and stasis. My research does not cover the same cohort of persons but instead the same cohort of news outlets, with individual journalists acting as representative members. The study’s design is therefore pseudo-longitudinal or repeated cross-sectional. I selected six different newspaper groups, evenly divided between tabloids and broadsheets as well as between liberal versus conservative outlets (Table 1). The term “liberal,” though more common in the United States, is, in the U.K. context, broadly akin to left-wing, whereas “conservative” corresponds to right-wing or centrist (Smith, 2017).
Classification of British newspapers mined for 1995–2010 articles with inclusionary/exclusionary reporting about the human–primate dichotomy
Citation: Society & Animals 2024; 10.1163/15685306-bja10120
To gather semi-quantitative data on boundary perceptions, I focused on a 16–year period of U.K. print newspaper reporting (1995–2010), sourced by the U.K. version of digitized newspaper database LexisNexis (detailed below). The decision to concentrate on this restricted geographical circulation area of newspapers was based on various reasons, both academic and pragmatic:
My native language is English; I am an insider in what one might call “current British culture” and able to detect linguistic, political, and social subtleties.
The research is based on a selection of three tabloid groups and three broadsheet groups (Table 1). Tabloids are more “sensationalist,” whereas broadsheets are considered more “serious” and “respectable.” The selection included both left-leaning and right-leaning reporting. Mining both sources allows a more holistic reconstruction of the political, social, and socioeconomic landscapes and subcultures of Britain.
Some significant British newspapers have been digitally archived, which facilitates systematic searching for keywords and phrases within a vast array of text. This would not have been possible with other media such as television, radio, or books. However, newspapers are “supplemented” by these other media (McQuail, 2002), as reflected in reviews of broadcasts and books.
A cross-sectional comparison of newspaper reporting was only possible from 1995 onwards at the time of analysis. This restricted the period of research to 15 years. The alternative, a purely internet-based approach, would have meant an even more restricted timeframe, given that, although online sources became popular within the last 20 years, internet reporting is much less regionally identifiable and “standardized” than printed newspaper articles.
In addition to these logistical considerations, the period from 1995 is relevant with respect to research into categorical boundaries, as these are likely to be sensitive to significant additions to surrounding societal narratives. The period includes the gear-up to a millennium turnover concurrent with global economic and societal instability. It immediately precedes significant geopolitical upheavals brought about by a post-cold-war shift of Western politics to the right, reinforced by the 9/11 event in the U.S.A. in 2001, and ensuing military and economic conflicts.
Mining British Newspapers: Coding LexisNexis
LexisNexis – originally concerned with legal documents – is currently the world’s largest electronic private database. University College London [UCL] holds a subscription to the U.K.-centered branch, called NexisUK, which was used for the research herein.
The search strategy focused on the “human–primate” boundary division, investigating if humans were being categorized as primates or indeed as apes. I restricted the search to articles that referred to animalistic subcategories of “primates,” “monkeys,” and “apes.” This means I was asking if humans were perceived as being animals and then primates of these kinds. The search string was Boolean, meaning articles could be detected containing multiple connections to a given central keyword, in this case, “human.” Consequently, I searched for articles that mentioned “apes” or “primates” or “monkeys” and humans. Particular species or genera, e.g., “baboon,” would turn up under such a search method, as the articles initially were tagged with “primate” or “monkey,” etc. when initially uploaded by NexisLexis.
The wider search term “animals” was not used, because “animals” plus “humans” generated more than 3,000 entries in NexisLexis. However, most “animal”-related entries would have been irrelevant, as they overwhelmingly referred to humans consuming domestic animals or having companion animals. Nevertheless, “animal” cropped up many times within the primate-oriented search. If it related to human beings, this entry was coded as described below. The search for “humans” connected to “primates/apes/monkeys” returned roughly 6,000 results when congregated; therefore, the search was parsed three ways to enable retrieval:
“Letters to the editor” (LTE) were discarded because writings of journalist-as-authority were more relevant.
Often, categorization was by implication. For example, “a missing link between apes and humans” [CT-D 19Nov94] was categorized as “humans are not apes,” as it implied humans and apes are distinct. I did not code “apelike” as “humans are not apes” when distinctions between ancient apes and modern apes were not clear, nor when articles referred to apelike behavior post-split from ancestral Pan, as hominins described as “apelike,” such as ancient Homo, Australopithecus etc., were considered as embodying both humanlike and apelike qualities.
Articles about ape- and monkey-related movies (e.g., Congo, Curious George) were mined when they went beyond mere plot summaries. Note that the article writer counted as ultimate authority: e.g., if interviewee biologist Desmond Morris referred to humans as animals throughout, but the writer referred to animals as something separate from humans, it would be coded as “humans are not animals.” If journalists did not argue the category, it was assumed they tacitly accepted said classification by cited scientific experts.
Quantifying the Human–Primate Dichotomy
A sample was quantitatively assessed from the overall batch of roughly 6,000 articles. The first three classifications of relevant articles for each month were analyzed, using five-year intervals: 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010.
There was no NexisUK archive for conservative-leaning Sun/News of the World for 1995–2000 at the time of analysis (and nothing existing on the private pay-for archive for 1995 belonging to these newspapers, either). Thus, samplings were replaced by Evening Standard, which might best be described as a conservative intermediate state between a tabloid and a broadsheet. For 1996–2000, the online private pay-for Sun/News of the World archive was sampled. If there were not enough samples for a particular month, articles up to two months ahead were sourced from leftover articles (but only once the first 3 articles for the alternative month already were coded), followed by two months previous, followed by either an extra “tabloid” or an extra “broadsheet” from a different publication. For early 1995, it was necessary to go as far back as six months. Replacements were required to give equal weighting to all newspaper groups and publication type in terms of broadsheet vs. tabloid, conservative vs. liberal, etc. Replacements were like-with-like, as in tabloids for tabloids and broadsheets for broadsheets. This procedure was necessary for a minority of samples (21%); most substitutions were for adjacent months.
Samples were manually coded, i.e., a total of 864 articles (6 [newspapers] × 3 [first entries] × 12 [months] × 4 [5-year periods]). If an identical classification appeared more than once in the article, only first instances were coded. For example, the wording “humans belong to the order primates” and the later mentioning of “scientists consider humans to be primates” would return a single entry for the category “humans are primates.”
Multiple or contradictory classifications within the same article were coded separately. Because of such double- or even triple-codes, 864 sample articles led to 976 codings. For example, one article [LB-G 05Jul95] had both “now paying for both animal and human to survive” (“humans are not animals”) and “Forest covered volcanoes where the great apes live, as on an island, was once home to the Twa Forest pygmies, too” (“humans are not apes”).
Codes were subsumed under different “degrees of animality” in relation to classifying humans, using the Linnaean hierarchy of taxonomy. Then, codes were broken down into three boundary sectors. The first two were dichotomized: “exclusive” (humans are not apes, humans are not primates, humans are not animals) versus “inclusive” (humans are apes, humans are primates, humans are animals). The inclusive category also harbors reverse wording, i.e., statements implying “apes are humans.” The third sector embodied “ambiguous” classifications, in which clear distinctions were lacking, e.g., articles that discussed human and chimpanzee behavior, but made no explicit statement as to whether humans were/were not animals, primates or apes (“zero statements”).
To ascertain a consistent level of subjectivity, a classification exercise by the lead author was repeated two years after the initial 2012 codings for 200 masked sampled articles randomly selected across all four years and for a set of four dichotomies investigated as part of a wider project that made use of the same human–primate dataset (human–animal, human–machine, heterosexual–homosexual, male–female). Since temporal changes and weight of specific variables were measured rather than a sum total, as long as the biases remained constant, the results too would remain robust. The rate of variation in repeat classification was low, at 0.04, meaning biases, if any, remained consistent through time.
Results
This pilot study is based on 864 articles (three articles per publication per month sampled for 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010) that resulted in 976 codings. Overall, about a quarter of codes reflected “inclusionality” (26%), whereas statements of “exclusionality” (37%) and those expressing “ambiguity” (37%) were slightly more prevalent.
Typical statements of inclusionality read:
“What makes humans so different from other apes is the complexity of our behaviour” [LB-I 18May95] (humans are apes).
“The line between animal and human being can sometimes be very thin. So thin, indeed, that (unlike Ai the chimpanzee) it does not count” [LB-I 07Jan00] (implied: humans are animals).
“There is something disturbingly human about an orang-utan, which is hardly surprising when you discover that they share 96.4 per cent of our genes” [LT-M 15Oct05] (orangutans are human).
Typical statements of exclusionality were as follows:
“Darwinian descent – from bacteria to apes to us” [CB-T 06Jun10] (humans are not apes).
“[F]rom the point of view of the Gardners … they and primates had been introduced” [LB-G 12Jul95] (humans are not primates).
“It has become easier to raise sympathy (which often translates into money) for animals than for humans” [LB-I 08Jun05] (humans are not animals).
Ambiguous statements can be illustrated by the following examples:
“Macaques started to copy the human visitors” [LT-M 02Jul10] (zero statement).
“[M]onkeys who took part in a similar trial had died” [LB-G 24Jan00] (zero statement).
“The company has also purchased the right to puts its name to a recently discovered species of monkey” [LB-I 07Jun05] (zero statement).
The resulting codings can be analyzed in a longitudinal manner (across the timeline, from 1995 to 2010), and cross-sectional (within a given year).
As for longitudinal distribution (Table 2, Figure 1), inclusionality started out high during 1995 (37%) but dropped steeply toward 2000 (19%), followed by a slight recovery (23–21%). Exclusionality remained steady for the first decade (28%) but dipped during the last decade (21–22%). Ambiguity towards simianity, on the other hand, stayed virtually constant, with only a slight dip (27% in 1995 to 24% in 2000).
Human–primate divide: longitudinal trend in 1995–2010 newspaper article
Citation: Society & Animals 2024; 10.1163/15685306-bja10120
Human–primate divide: visualization of longitudinal trend in 1995–2010 newspaper articles
Citation: Society & Animals 2024; 10.1163/15685306-bja10120
For cross-sectional distribution, 1995 started out with high values for both inclusionality (35%) and exclusionality (39%), while ambiguous statements were less prevalent (25%). This pattern shifted drastically in 2000 as inclusionality plummeted (19%) while ambiguity statements became much more common (40%). The high ambiguity values increased even more during the next decade (41–43%), while exclusionality lost ground (33–35%) compared to the 2000 value. Inclusionality, on the other hand, recovered from its low 2000 values during the next decade (25–23%).
Cross-sectional trends can be expressed as ratios (Table 3), when the dramatic shift in the run-up to 2000 saw a doubling of exclusionality in relation to inclusionality as well as a corresponding drop of inclusionality in relation to ambiguity. During the remaining decade, these disparities leveled off in the above-described ways. The evidence for these results was supported by a study using the same database that measured animality (not simianity) via multinomial regressions and showed similar temporal patterns of peaking year-2000 infrahumanization (Bryson, et.al., 2020).
Thus, 2000 seemed to represent a watershed, given a dramatic drop of codes for inclusionality. This drop was not so much caused by an increase in exclusionality, but rather a corresponding rise in rates for ambiguity. The most noticeable change during the subsequent decade was represented by a drop in exclusionality, while inclusionality rose.
Human–primate divide: cross-sectional trend in 1995–2010 newspaper articles
Citation: Society & Animals 2024; 10.1163/15685306-bja10120
Overall, about a quarter of codes reflected inclusionality (26%), whereas statements of exclusionality and those expressing ambiguity were slightly more prevalent.
The Year 2000
In 2000, inclusionality plummeted while ambiguity statements became much more common. High ambiguity values increased in the next decade (41–43%), while exclusionality lost ground (33–35%). Inclusionality, on the other hand, recovered from its low 2000 values during the next decade.
Ratios
A dramatic shift in the run-up to 2000 (Table 2) saw a doubling of exclusionality in relation to inclusionality and corresponding drop of inclusionality in relation to ambiguity.
Using ratios, we see a forced-dichotomy polarization ratio for exclusionality compared to inclusionality in 1995 (a ratio of 1:1) – lower than in 2005 (1:3), as there are higher 2005 ambiguous-response percentages of what could have otherwise been “stronger” (exclusive/inclusive) assessments. Due to direct exclusionality/inclusionality comparisons, we can view the polarization in terms of clear inclusion (or exclusion) of nonhuman primates. Therefore, I would argue the 1995 message was not one of exclusion and rather one of less ambiguity, with other years scoring much higher in ambiguous responses (perhaps hedging their prejudices/favoritisms). When we “force” direct comparisons for the other years, we see the exclusion rate for all years is substantially higher than for 1995.
Discussion
There is evidence that mass media is not just reflective of a wider society’s biases both in terms of negative bias and favoritism, but also, in part, creates society via its prejudices (in its most extreme form, via propaganda). Here arguments diverge in terms of media as reflection or as causal agent. I argue it is like false “nature or nurture” arguments in evolutionary theory – it is actually nature and nurture, as humans, like any other animal, react to their environments – including so-called artificial human-constructed environments, environments that serve to shape later biological and cultural adaptations in a systematic feedback loop first theorized by co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace. If we rightly consider mass media “an environment,” it is impossible to assign either a chicken or an egg, as causal/reactive processes are bound to each other.
That said, certain forms of mass media (such as the internet or printing press) are novel both in terms of invention (modern humans having spent roughly 99.5% of their existence as a species without such tools) as well as in terms of cross-cultural saturation that reaches large amounts of people simultaneously (as opposed to gossip or a town crier). There is evidence for language and political and academic structures reflecting – versus causing – inherent biases such as sexism within particular cultures (cf. Lewis & Lupyan, 2020). Moreover, a tendency to essentialize “human” qualities/descriptors is associated with preexisting prejudices (Hegarty, 2010). I therefore lean towards reflective arguments, where mass media mirrors already-existing societal biases.
Pre-Millennial Simian Acceptance
Authors of the 1995 sampled sources often emphasized the lack of kinship with other animals with distinguishing language: “‘You have mankind on the one side of the river, and apes on the other” [CB-T, 15.03.1996]. Inclusive human–animal assessments were also common, as were mixed or neutral comparisons.
In 1995, Western attitudes were ones of aspirational internationalism (Goldmann, 1997; UNDP, 1994). The Cold War was over, and for the first time since 1945 – due to the success of the Gorbachev-backed Soviet political wave glasnost – the looming specter of global nuclear war had faded. With right-wing governments retreating, this meant political power-shifts toward the left, exemplified by the second term of President Clinton in the U.S., Social Democrats in power in Germany, New Labour and the imminent defeat of the Conservative Party in the U.K.
This sea-change seems to be reflected in coding results for 1995, when journalists were comfortable grouping humans with fellow primates. Perhaps Western humans felt safe(r). We extended our human hand down from the sky to embrace the apelike Other (albeit an “other” with a remarkably similarly shaped hand). Here, for instance, is an example of such inclusivity within a sampled article [CT-E 26Aug94]: “We are all animals, and we must never forget the fact” (humans are animals).
By 2000, something shook the monkey branch. Why did we become less tolerant? There are some possible explanations for why the relative degree of inclusionality decreased while ambiguous responses to simianity increased, with both recovering by the mid-to-late 2000s.
Wider Societal Unrest Leads to Millennial Simian Rejection
As anthropologist Gil-White (2001) argues, outgroups – including outgroup-humans and nonhuman animals – may be treated as different “species” as they are potential threats to perceived ingroups and rivals in terms of resources (Huxley, 1943). With nonhuman animal specificities, societal shakiness could account for the minimization of “human” ingroups, where we react to threat-states with increased essentialism and dichotomous thinking (Demoulin et al., 2005) and, when under stress, dehumanize (“animalize”) those who do not belong to our perceived – and often flexible – group (Harris & Fiske, 2006; Murrow & Murrow, 2015; Tipler & Ruscher, 2017). This mechanism is prevalent during economic unrest, societal instability, genocide, war, slavery, sexual exploitation, etc., a hypothesis I argue herein (Harris & Fiske, 2006, 2008; Murrow & Murrow, 2015; Peterson, 2013).
A general sense of uneasiness and danger – in Western terms – manifested itself after George W. Bush’s controversial election in December 2000 and the 9/11 attacks the following year in New York City, with the global aftermath ushering in more shaky times geopolitically and economically.1
Newspapers in near-millennium years were more likely to refer to mass suicides as “doomsday” cults, whereas in the 1970s, they would have been referred to as “satanic” cults (Jenkins, 2000). There was a widespread fear of the “millennium bug” – the code in all binary computers that allegedly lacked the ability to change numerals denoting years from “19XX” to “20XX,” causing planes to drop from the sky, global stock markets to collapse, and nuclear reactors to melt down if computers were not made “millennium-ready” before January 1, 2000. While public fears of the millennium bug might be understood as a modern-day doomsday (“chiliasm”; cf. Glaber, 1989/985) equivalent, it likely was not causal to simianity exclusionality, but rather a proximate symptom of wider social turmoil.
As noted above, there is strong evidence that ingroup boundary protection against fellow humans increases in turbulent times. Similar 2000 patterns have been observed in unrelated studies. U.K. left-wing sentiment plummeted in 2000 (UDG, 2006). Also in the U.K., negative attitudes towards homosexuality rose sharply circa 2000, then recovered (Wilkinson, 2010). Further afield, American fears of global warming peaked circa 2000 (Jones, 2011) as did the immediately premillennial murder rate (Enten, 2012). American willingness to accept a female president dipped directly before 2000 (Malone, 2016), and the popularity of homophobic and misogynist rap music soared in 2000 (Powell-Morse, 2014). In Italy, xenophobic language towards the Roma surged in 2000 (Tewksbury-Volpe, 2013). Revealingly, similar infrahumanist patterns occurred with speciesism via human-ingroup protection against both nonhuman animals and machines rising during 2000 (Bryson et al., 2020). It is likely that the millennial shift therefore is part of a generalized Western suite of xenophobic attitudes towards multiple types of “others” that became more visible in 2000 due to social unrest.
Notably, our observed millennial rise in ambiguous classifications and the corresponding fall of the previously prominent inclusionality seemed to foreshadow some geopolitical events, e.g., 9/11. This would perhaps indicate that people already felt less safe by 2000, and this fear-state was somehow associated with an increasingly politically destabilized society – with the rapid rise of new information-dispersing tools such as the internet potentially contributing to unease (Brosnan, 2008).
Yet these decreases were not correlated with a rise of exclusionality, but ambiguity. One could have expected societal year-2000 angst to influence increased exclusionality. That this did not happen may be due to a reasonably strong buffer effect exerted by an avalanche of new scientific information that would be hard to ignore for the relatively enlightened U.K. public – e.g., the draft sequence of the Human Genome Project, finished in late 2000 and published in February 2001, with its imminence trumpeted for quite a few months prior (NHGRI 2000), and the same draft sequencing for the chimpanzee genome scheduled for 2005. The public – here proxied by journalists – may have hedged its bets by retaining some uncertainty rather than stating unreservedly that animals are not humanlike.
Decrease of Social Turbulence Leads to Post-Millennial Simian Acceptance
Millennial rejection of simianity became less expressed as socio-political pressures eased somewhat circa 2005. The ambiguity index retained the high 2000 level while exclusionality, which had not changed much in the lead-up to 2000, fell from 2000 until 2005, with a corresponding moderate recovery of inclusionality. From 2005 onwards, we see a more stable position for all three designations: compared with 1995, low levels for both inclusionality and exclusionality, and high ambiguity levels.
Conclusion
Primates likely make us uneasy in terms of taxonomy because they occupy a liminal zone between “human” and “primate” natural kinds (Haraway, 1989; cf. Gelman, 2003), and in turbulent and conservative times our tendency to protect the category of humanity is strengthened (Aosved & Long, 2006; Capozza, 2009) via infrahumanization (Leyens et al., 2000). Societal shakiness could account for the minimization of the human ingroup at the expense of other primates. Human–primate infrahumanization that allows for ingroup/outgroup sorting might be based on natural-kind categorizations, reflecting a cognitive adaptation (Atran, 1998); this essentialism also seems sensitive to cultural change.
Are we alone in our flexibly prejudiced stances? Are chimpanzees chimp-exceptionalists, or dolphins, dolphin-exceptionalists? What is a crow’s point of view – do they think in terms of themselves (“people”) versus other animals? Do they think in terms of male/female (likely), heterosexual/homosexual? It is difficult to arrive at concrete conclusions given we cannot experience the qualia/consciousness of another human being (Dawkins, 2012), let alone that of a bat (Nagel, 1974). That said, gorillas and orangutans divide “natural kinds” (insects, reptiles, fish, birds, and mammals) into different sets (Vonk, 2013). There is evidence too that chimpanzees may also essentialize behavior associated with biological sex (de Waal & Pokorny, 2008). And, from the dog’s point of view and not just our own, dogs appear to regard guardian humans as family, as revealed by MRI scans and scent tests (Berns et al., 2015), which suggests a canine ingroup salience that trumps species-specific sets.
Similarly, humans are not bound to think in divisions required by folk taxonomies. We could welcome instead a paradigm of interconnectedness with other animals based on shared traits rather than diverging ones, similar to conceptual constructs in sociological theories (Hyde, 2005) or the gradualist sets theorized by Wittgenstein (1999/1953). Crucially, to move towards such egalitarianism(s), we must retreat from the exceptionalism implicit in dividing humans from our fellow primates, a cognitive bias that rears up during periods of societal unrest and likely will continue to do so unless explicitly addressed.
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