Us and Them – Our Tribal Minds
If we humans ever were to introduce ourselves to an alien civilization and had to select a member of our scientific community to lecture the little green men (or octopi, depending on the science fiction you read) on the nature of human behavior, there would probably be no better and more qualified choice than Stanford biologist and neuroscientist Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky. As a glimpse into his outstanding work, Dr. Sapolsky’s article ‘This Is Your Brain on Nationalism – The Biology of Us and Them’, published in Foreign Affairs, reminds us of the astonishing -and somewhat scary- way our human minds work.
The article introduces us to our brains’ mechanism of constantly forming dichotomies when dealing with other people, of dividing our fellow humans within milliseconds into Us and Them categories. Not only do we learn that the depth of this us-versus-them thinking has been scientifically proven, but that this tribalistic thinking is particularly prevalent in the context of race. And the really hard thing to accept is that up to the point where the impulse-controlling part of our brain -the prefrontal cortex- kicks in, we don’t really have a say in the matter, as we are all made to “declare allegiance” to a specific group identity before we even have a chance to contemplate it.
So does this mean that we humans are inherently racist and prone to hostility towards anyone different from ourselves? Thankfully, things are not necessarily that primitive, because Sapolsky also tell us that the formation of us-them dichotomies, although quite inevitable, is not exclusively tied to human attributes such as race. The mind, in its quest to distinguish friend from foe, will attempt to detect all kinds of cues to let it know how the social playing field looks like and what may count as familiar. Thus, the attribute of race might become completely irrelevant when the mind detects, say, two baseball players with different uniforms (“Oh my god, he’s one of the Red Sox!”). Total strangers become the same as us, as long as they are cheering for the right team. Nevertheless, and as history makes abundantly clear, the danger surrounding group identity formation is very real. Indeed, Sapolsky describes the recent resurgence of nationalism as the “potentially most destructive form of in-group bias”. Towards the conclusion of his excellent analysis, Sapolsky argues that nationalism might perhaps not need be condemned or fought at all. Rather, the dynamics of us-them dichotomies could be harnessed to incentivize cooperation and empathy. I like that idea very much; to accept the hand that was dealt and play it in a decent, dignified and ultimately wise manner. But as Dr. Sapolsky reminds us at the end of his article, we still have a long way to go.
Featured post image: Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash