Harnessing the Power of Social Intelligence Technologies to eliminate

Group-based Violence

Racegap is launching a global program.

We´re moving the social discourse from one of cleverness to intelligence.

Know the difference.

RACEGAPGLOBAL™ (RGG) is an SIT program designed to end group-based violence, from discrimination and racism to war and conflict.

When human activities become too costly, as was recognized with the consequences of human-induced climate change, it is time for innovation and a new vision. Racegap recognizes the same opportunity with group-based violence, which imposes unsound social and economic costs on every society, from discrimination to the war machine. Aside from the human cost, the fear of violence creates significant economic disruptions.

In 2023, the impact of violence on the global economy was equivalent to 13.5 percent of global GDP.

The global economic impact of group-based violence in 2023 was $19.1 trillion.

Global military expenditure was the most significant component, totaling $8.4 trillion, accounting for 44% of the total economic impact.

Society is increasingly challenged to meet even the most basic of our human needs in carrying the rising social and economic costs of group-based violence.

“No country can claim to be free of racism; racism is a global concern, and tackling it requires a universal effort.” —United Nations

Partnerships

RGG elevates and transforms the gap in public-based knowledge on intuitive group-based reasoning.

There are a number of naïve ways the mind construes social reality that, however immaterial, are nonetheless highly behavior-inducing. While such intuitions may have served during the greater than 99% of human ancestral experience in the past environments in which they emerged, some may have been co-opted for reasons other than their evolved functions or are a mismatch today.

At Racegap, we see an opportunity in the emergence of social intelligence and behavior change technology markets to counter the rising economic and social costs of group-based violence.

We are currently in the fundraising and development phase of curricula, software, and interactive online tools and apps that address the public gap in knowledge about group-based reasoning that contributes to our most significant societal issues.

Please let us know using the form if you want to get involved.

Get in Touch

Join Our Global Program.

International Desk

We are also looking for international partners to represent Racegapglobal´s products and services in countries outside the USA.

Ending group-based violence is like fighting climate change. It is a big. It taps deeply held desire and belief. It is politically polarizing, overturns our war and dominance-based economies, the nature of investor demands. Like the shift from fossil fuels that was once ridiculed but is now unstoppable in cleaning up our physical environments, the time is here to do clean up the social landscape.

Careers

We are currently accepting proposals in the following areas:
K-12 Curricula Writing

Business & Legal

Social Media

Marketing

Publishing

App development

Illustration

B2B Sales

It´s time to clean up the social world.

Grow with us.

FAQ´s

What is a Cognitive Analysis? Why do we need it?

A cognitive analysis details mind functions, explaining the “why” of human behavior.

This complements social intelligence research and analyses which are largely observation-based, often analyzing our attitudes, preferences and behavior, according to various demographics. Clicks and votes are recorded through analyses of online behavior and purchasing patterns. People are asked to report on how they think and feel, who they might vote for, and so on.

On the other hand, cognitive analyses and research are theory-based, and tell us why people behave as they do, why they make those clicks as they do, and explains their voting, etc. Cognitive analysis is predictive, not observational, and can explain what underlies explicit reports, attitudes and behavior. This creates new opportunities, choice points for interventions, and new approaches to social issues that are not apparent otherwise.

Furthermore, cognitive analyses explain why various behaviors emerged in the human ancestral past as beneficial to our species and allow us to analyze whether they continue to serve our best interests or are a mismatch for today´s world.

Looking at this another way, any mind process can be thought of as a kind of porous pipeline. Humans have a certain responsiveness to inputs from the environment. So, imagine you are walking down a path and see a snake in front of you, the pipeline might look like:

Inputs (Stimuli) >> Processes >>Outputs (Behavior)

e.g., see a snake, shape, hear the rattle>> feel rush of adrenalin, fear >>jump back, scream, etc.

Another way of visualizing this is:

Why>>How>>Result

Social science often analyzes the result, while cognitive analyses give us the why and often the mechanics of the how come from interdisciplinary data.

At Racegap we assert that an intelligent species capable of self-analysis and reflection will consider the mind function or reason for behavior, and not just exploit the outputs of the system producing the behavior.

Are some of our intuitions a mismatch in today´s society? How do we know?

How do we know that aspects of our intuitive psychology are a mismatch for human success today?

There are many ways this can be evaluated, but when the outcomes of our activities irreversibly harm our species´ ability to survive and reproduce, offend our higher aims, or irretrievably damage the quality of human life, we may question whether some aspects of our intuitive reasoning and behavior are a mismatch in the modern era, i.e.,

When our goods, services and the by-products of our activities are toxic to humans, rendering the recipients disfigured, diseased, infertile or DNA irretrievably altered.
When the technologies used to act on our intuitions for threat or revenge have the far-reaching capacity to eliminate the entire human species.
When we use group-based criteria to violate human rights, creating unequal conditions based on group traits such as race, sex/gender, religion, language, and age.

A "mismatch" refers to a mismatch between the assumptions of our mental models that were conditioned over millions of years in ancestral environments and the structure of the current world. Namely, our far-reaching technologies and creation of artificial superstimuli today.

A mismatch really answers the questions of why humans appear to be so creative and intelligent but have ongoing maladaptive and destructive behavior. We´re always asking why.

LACK OF SAFEGUARDS

Our primal urges don´t appear to have emerged with built-in safeguards against having an abundance of the things we were designed and rewarded to seek out in ancient environments, e.g.. food, power, mates, sugar, revenge, protections, status, etc.

We don´t seem to have intuitions for having too much of a good thing or the moral intuitions to curtail our pursuit of having too much.

ARTIFICIAL SUPERSTIMULI ACTIVATES MIND AND BODY

Artificial superstimuli are the things we create to exaggerate the features of things that elicit mind and body responsiveness and are naturally occurring.

A perfect example is the artificial sugar that is in so many of our foods and junk food that replicates the sugar in ripe fruit that was nutritious and essential to our success in the deep past. Today it is a destructive mismatch because of the human body´s response to it.

Understanding why and how the mind works to construe groups as distinct and narrate beliefs about them can transform our world. This includes the artificial groupings and beliefs that are created to elicit radical and extreme behavior.

Racegap argues that structural change alone does not sufficiently address solutions for the cognitive strategies that generate it. Since cause-and-effect-reasoning of the cognitive niche produced the range of intuitions that generate human behaviors and institutions, only interventions that consider cognitive processes or mentation are sufficient to address societal issues. Solutions must consider both mentation and the environment in which it occurs.

Embracing who we are as a species over who we experience we are, gives us entry to a new phase of human evolution.

Why Prioritize Group-based Reasoning? What is it?

Science makes a powerful, evidence-based argument for distinct processes in our social reasoning about individuals (theory of mind) vs. reasoning about various aspects of individuals as members of groups. Children and adults on the autistic spectrum who do not have capacities for theory of mind, nonetheless, use group-based reasoning to make behavioral inferences based on, for example, race and gender. The mind prioritizes group-level identification for inference, prediction, and action. So, what is it?

Group-based reasoning is the human ability to reason about others based on the idea that they share properties. There can be short, tall, funny, or long-nosed “kinds” of people. There can be fisherfolk, spacemen, entrepreneurs, and pig-farming kinds of people. Of particular importance to group-based reasoning are features that have social relevance, like age, race, religion, sex/gender, and language. Why are these important?

They matter because they set up behavioral expectations and local beliefs. These abilities emerge simultaneously. Yet, neither perceptual information nor mental states provide a reliable guide to group membership. Even when some perceptual information is available, such as age, sex, and kinship, perceptual heuristics are often uninformative of the conceptual bases of the categories.

So, being of a particular sex, age, or race is not picked up by cognitive recognition systems because of how people look. These group-based traits are attended to because they further convey something of social significance and expectations for behavior.

In this sense, group-based beliefs are not self-evident or grounded in material reality but are instantiated through cultural interactions and are culturally variable. While group-based beliefs may sometimes reflect wisdom, they do not reflect an ultimate material truth. Yet, they are often treated as the actual state of affairs and are powerfully behavior-eliciting.

Thus, group-based reasoning can be imagined as cultural affordances, predilections shaped not by personal motivations or direct observations but by an interiorized commitment to cultural expectations. However, although they are culturally construed, group-based beliefs also shape how people feel about various groups as a function of personal interest and concern.

Group-based reasoning has some advantages, such as to help us to know what to expect and how to behave with people. However, the premise of cultural affordances differing according to group membership also allows us to understand where group-based reasoning can go wrong. We have stereotypes about people based on culturally construed group-based ideas. Various human rights violations occur when we create unequal conditions based on someone’s group trait(s), such as being male or female, of a particular religion or race, or a combination thereof. Also, one’s group belonging to one dimension can mean one is included or excluded because of another dimension. For example, initially, women won the right to vote, but not women of color. Group-based reasoning can be inclusive or used as an exclusionary device.

To learn more, please contact us directly or schedule a consultation online.