"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
-Emma Lazarus, 1883 (in reference to the symbolic nature of the Statue of Liberty)

"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
-Abraham Lincoln, 1863, from the Gettysburg Address.

Lazarus and Lincoln's words that kick off this piece have always resonated with me as self-evident premises that serve as the foundation of our country. So you are likely not surprised to hear that I am pretty concerned about the future of our country right now.

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you likely feel that these are scary times.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I wish that xenophobia were not a foundational characteristic of our evolved psychology, But it is (see Wilson, 2019). To the best of our understanding of human evolutionary history, for the lion's share of human evolution, our ancestors lived in small, nomadic clans that were comprised of kin and other familiar individuals. Strangers were rarely encountered and were often to be treated with skepticism.

It is without question that people treat familiar others differently from strangers (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022)—and this fact seems deeply rooted in the evolution of xenophobia under ancestral conditions. While many of us (likely including yourself if you are reading this piece right now) live in modernized, industrialized contexts, our minds still seem to, in so many contexts, often show the hallmarks of xenophobia that evolved during nomadic, small-scale societal contexts (see Stevens et al., 2024).

It turns out that xenophobia can be reduced with diversity

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