Us and Them: How Human Minds Make Human Kinds
Author David Berreby discussed how science is beginning to understand and explain tribal loyalty, the apparently innate human tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them.”
Published February 21, 2006
By Leslie Knowlton
Academy Contributor
Sponsored by: The New York Academy of Sciences and Little, Brown & Co.
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We,
And every one else is They.
— Rudyard Kipling, “A Friend of the Family”
What makes people willing to die—or to kill—for a religion, or a nation, or a race, or a caste? What makes these things as important, or even more so, than friends and family? Or in the words of Rodney King, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
Such questions have recently been on the mind of writer David Berreby, who on his web site, in a blog, and in a new book has been charting the ways in which we identify ourselves with groups. He was joined at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) by anthropologist and psychologist Lawrence Hirschfeld, with New School for Social Research, on November 28, 2005 to present a richly illustrated talk on the subject.
Berreby, whose book is titled Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, told the overflow crowd that any category for people, from race to sports fandom to sharing a commuter bus, can make a person feel “tribal.” That is, he explained, any such category can make people care about who belongs and who does not.
Defining “Human Kinds”
In the book, he uses a general term for all such concepts that describe more than one person but less than all people—”human kinds.” (The term derives from work by the philosopher Ian Hacking and Hirschfeld.) A human kind can be as global as ethnicity or as narrow as the subset of people who ride the same ferry to work. Although such loyalties can wreak havoc in cases of war, racism, and genocide, however, Berreby believes that this human tendency itself is not a subject to bemoan.
“It’s not really possible to be a human being without a sense of where you fit into a past and a community,” he argued. “You can’t really be a person without this sense of attachment to conceptions of collective groups.” Thus, he explained, this tribal loyalty has both its negative and its positive sides. Although it can result in the horrors of war, it also helps create the desire to improve one’s conduct to be a better citizen or better member of a religious community.
Why is human nature this way? Berreby argues that science can suggest new and important ways of understanding the mystery, which should illuminate traditional ideas from the humanities. Already, he said, ample work has cast light on the neurological and psychological origins of tribal loyalty. In the remainder of his talk he described what such studies have revealed about both what this faculty is and what it is not.
How Not to Explain Your Tribal Mind
There are several popular but misguided ideas about this aspect of human nature. Humans do have the capacity to place a group identity over life itself, both one’s own and someone else’s. But the idea that this kind of fervent bonding means that humans are evil or innately bad in a primal sense is wrong. “This is not some sort of upwelling from the unconscious mind,” Berreby said. “In fact, it’s intensified by this rational intensive belief in what one belongs to.”
Furthermore, mass killing, institutionalized oppression and other types of group violence usually require a suppression of innate or so-called “natural” feeling. People actually do know the terrible things they’re doing when at war, he explained, such as dropping bombs on innocent people, but, as one World War II pilot has written, “you have to put it out of your mind to go on and do the work your nation expects of you.”
These orientations are not made without choice. “People are not zombies,” said Berreby. Nor are these perceptions static, such that being of a certain race, nation, or religion means one will always act in some particular way. Rather, people’s self-definition of their membership in any one group or groups is constantly shifting and provisional. “People are members of many different human kinds simultaneously,” said Berreby. “People juggle multiple memberships…Circumstance, not membership, is their guide.”
How Context Changes Perception
Giving an example of how context changed perceptions of membership, Berreby told the true story of Charles Johnston, a white man captured by Shawnee tribe along with a black slave more than a century ago. Johnston reported that whereas under different circumstances he would have kept a distance from this man of a different race and status than his own, he now befriended his fellow captive out of a shared experience of adversity.
Another erroneous idea about tribal loyalties is that people are pushed by their genes to be with people like them. “People are not robot slaves to their genetic programming,” said Berreby. In fact, recent genetic research in Central Asia showed that members of different ethnic groups are no more closely related to each other than they are to other members of their nation. Similarly, the idea that principles which apply to animals can fully explain what humans do is wrong. Unlike animals, people can prefer total strangers to kin, because the strangers are the “right kind of person.” Some animals have friends, but they don’t decide on the basis of symbols.
People’s loyalties can be based on categories such as mothers, old people, or southpaws; they can also be based on credentials such as den mothers, AARP members, and plumbers. People have a large number of affiliations and coalitions that can be brought to mind at different times.
Looping Effects
These identity categories are subject to what Hacking calls “looping effects,” such that a category starts out in someone’s mind, and that person then convinces other people that the category is a good one, and the idea spreads. People who belong to the new category then start using it to guide their behavior, which creates evidence that the human kind is real. For example, Berreby reminded the audience, red states and blue states started out as a way of visualizing electoral results, and grew to stand for a certain type of voter, including an array of their beliefs and practices.
Berreby believes that science could one day reveal that human brains have a domain, or module, that is separate from the one that they have for individuals, a psychological predisposition to form categories of human kinds. Already, he suggested, studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that it is present in all cultures and epochs.
While this faculty is unconscious, however, it can be changed. The faculty is often vicious, as people may associate “them” with death, disease, dirt, ignorance, and/or animality. Yet appeals to this ability can also be noble, enabling people to send help to total strangers, and changing human-kind perceptions for the better.
The Tribal “We”
Citing one example, Berreby played an audio clip of a speech by Robert F. Kennedy before a crowd of mostly African Americans in which he informed them that civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered earlier that day. Kennedy identified himself with the whole group into a tribal “we” by reminding them that his brother had also been killed by a white man, and calling for right-thinking Americans to pull together for justice for all people, regardless of race. The rhetoric of his speech directly appealed to the best kinds of human-kind perceptions, recontextualizing a sense of group belonging to preserve peace.
The faculty of mind that produces this sense of group identity is involuntary, fast, and fills in “missing” information, enabling quick decision making. But human minds are not unitary. Rather, they have multiple parts that sometimes operate independently. For example, law enforcement officials have observed that people who pull over on a bridge to jump to their death often lock their cars as if planning to come back. “The part of you that’s locked the car is not always completely in communication with the part that’s decided to kill yourself,” Berreby said.
Berreby argued that the last several years have begun to reveal a convergence of science related to this concept of a tribal-mind faculty, appearing in a range of scientific disciplines. Scientists in many fields, including anthropology, sociology, physiology, neuroscience, psychology, social psychology, and cognitive science, have begun to study how human minds make human kinds. “It’s an interesting and new development,” said Berreby.
Convergence Does Not Mean Consilience
But convergence does not mean “consilience” in Edward O. Wilson’s sense of a neat fitting together of all the pieces into a total explanation—at least not yet, he added. “The reason I think that it’s dangerous to think in those ways is the only way you can say it all fits together, all makes perfect sense, is if we have a set of terms that are well-defined; that is, that we all know what they mean and they mean the same thing in all places.”
An example of an ill-defined term is the concept of race. Is race real? Some say yes, because the effectiveness of heart medications designed specifically for African Americans suggest the existence of biological racial differences.
Another view holds that race is not real, because it’s not defined the same way in all places. The same person, for example, can be categorized as black in one country and white in another. Moreover, that label ignores different rates of heart failure in lighter and darker skinned African Americans, differences in age groups (over age 65, the racial difference is miniscule), and the influence of geography and environment (racial disparity is much less in Brazil, Cuba, or Trinidad than it is in North America.)
“Race is Not a Very Coherent Concept”
Berreby said that in cases in which it is argued that race “exists,” it is being used as a proxy for something else. “Race is not a very coherent concept,” he said, adding that there are also differences in defining race across scientific disciplines. “To say the geneticist’s ‘race’ is the same as the historian’s ‘race’ or the man-in-the-street’s ‘race’ is to commit a fallacy.” Historian David H. Fischer called this the “fallacy of equivocation,” reported Berreby—it is the mistake of thinking that a word with many different meanings always means the same thing, no matter what the context.
“Human kinds are part of subjective experience,” he said. “Human-kind perceptions depend on who is doing the perceiving, and why.” Still, despite present difficulties in defining key concepts, science is working toward converging on an account of this human-kind faculty of mind. Scientists will continue to have new insights about this subject, Berreby forecasted. “They already are saying very interesting things and I think that will continue and get even more interesting.”
Rethinking These Issues
In remarks following Berreby’s talk, Lawrence Hirschfeld expressed his admiration for the argument developed in Us and Them. “It brings to our attention a kind of promiscuity of group-based thinking in everyday life. People don’t notice often how much they’re appealing to group membership and group affiliation in trying to understand what they are doing and what other people are doing. It takes a massive amount of our cognition.”
Hirschfeld noted that not all group affiliations are counterpoints to other groups, as the idea of “us and them” might imply. “Most of the group-think people engage in doesn’t necessarily mean they degrade other groups.” However, a few human-kind categories such as race and gender “are necessarily defined in counterpoint of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ for risking our own lives or taking someone else’s life.”
He concluded by noting that these categories seem to be tied to a special part of our minds that is not yet very well appreciated in scientific study. “I believe the book will have an extraordinary impact in forcing people to begin to rethink some of these issues.”
About the Speakers
David Berreby is the author of Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Sciences, and many other publications.
Lawrence Hirschfeld, PhD, recently moved from the University of Michigan to the New School for Social Research where he is professor of psychology and anthropology. He is associate editor of the journal Cognitive Science and author of Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. His forthcoming book, Cornelia’s Cradle: How People Who Should Have Known Better Misstepped in Building the Better Child will be published by Yale University Press.
