Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

This chapter explores our tendency to form us/them dichotomies from a biological perspective.

Many species bristle at the sight of strangers of the same species—outgroup members, or “Thems.” Some species, such as chimps, will fission into multiple sub-groups when the situation demands it, with previous conspecifics now belonging to different groups becoming hostile to each other. In humans, studies show we automatically associate outgroups with negative concepts and ingroup members with positive concepts. Such thinking emerges as early as three to four years old, suggesting it is not just culturally but also evolutionarily conditioned. Even infants recognize same-race faces better than different-race faces.

Us

Creating Us/Thems usually involved “inflating the merits of Us concerning core values—we are more correct, wise, moral and worthy” (393), and of inflating the importance of the arbitrary markers that indicate “Us”: our food, taboos, religion, parenting style, etc. Being an Us also means a shared expectation of reciprocity based on the cultural rules we know each other to participate in. Often, these codes of assistance to our in-group equal hostility to an out-group: It is “good” to kill in war.

Them

We tend to view “Thems,” as threatening, angry, and untrustworthy. This has serious social ramifications for our blended society: “White subjects become more likely to support juvenile criminals being tried as adults when primed to think about black (versus white) offenders” (398).

Thems can evoke disgust, routed through the insular cortex just like gustatory disgust in other animals. People with lower tolerance for disgust have lower tolerance for people of other groups, and people with higher degrees of authoritarian temperament tend to see out-groups as more repugnant. Thems are also typically viewed as simpler and more culturally homogenous.

The process of Us/Theming can be conscious and cognitive. Predominantly, however, Us/Theming is emotional and automatic. Experiments with priming show the automaticity of these thoughts: If primed with negative associations, people will express more negative feelings about other groups, even though they have had no changes in conscious deliberation. However, people will also tend to use rationalization, or cognition after the fact, to try to explain these automatic responses logically.

The automatic aspects of Us/Theming is in part due to the role of the amygdala and insula in making dichotomies before cognition occurs. Reminding us of this fact connects the evidence Sapolsky is mounting in this chapter to information he provided very early in the book on the structure of the brain and roles of the amygdala in creating fear and controlling reflexive processes to fear, like running away or shooting an unarmed man. In what we can understand as Part 2 of Behave, Sapolsky takes the basic, neutral information about how our brain works that science has given us and applies it to understanding some of the most fundamental problems of human existence: hatred and racism.

Unique Realms of Human Us/Them-ing

There are several aspects to Us/Theming that are unique to humans: (1) We all belong to multiple categories of Us; (2) all Thems are not evaluated as the same, and different Thems get different responses; (3) we can feel guilty for and conceal Us/Theming; and (4) cultural mechanisms can sharpen or dull the urge to dichotomize.

Multiple Us-es

Individuals belong to multiple groups at the same time. Each of these identities is a specific Us/Them dichotomization. We shift which dichotomy about ourselves or others is most important to us based on context—including tending to emphasize whichever group we rank highest in or have the best chance to survive within in any given situation. Such switching of dichotomies is particularly evident in historical studies of wars, where soldiers on one side often find momentary identification and solace with soldiers of the other side over shared upbringing, nationality, etc.

Different Thems

We tend to categorize out-group members along two axes: warmth (are they benevolent or malevolent?) and competence (can they carry out their intentions?). This produces a matrix of four possible states: high warmth, high competence (HH); high warmth, low competence (HL); low warmth, high competence (LH); low warmth, low competence (LL). Who is HH: Us. HL: the mentally impaired and elderly. LH: colonists and successful immigrant groups. LL: the homeless and the poor.

Each of these categories evoke different feelings. HH: pride. HL: pity. LH: envy. LL: disgust. Furthermore, shifting people between these categories in our appraisals requires them or us to exhibit specific behaviors. For instance, killing of the homeless or mentally ill (LLs) in Nazi Germany occurred unceremoniously, but the killing of Jews (LH) required first their degradation to LL status through public humiliation.

Feeling Guilty

Cultures often correct for or feel ashamed of prejudice. Notably, young children do not. Understanding prejudice is only acceptable in some contexts only begins around age 10. Such cognitive corrections on automatic reactions are the domain of the PFC damping amygdaloid responses. The FC also plays a role since when the FC is under more cognitive load, we are more likely to express automatic prejudices.

Cultural Mechanisms

Priming overt cognitive strategies can help people resist or embrace the Us/Them trap. Prime someone with aggressive music associated with another race, they will rank images of people of that race as more threatening. Prime them with images of celebrities from that race (i.e., counterstereotypes), they will be less threatened. Encouraging perspective-taking or active consideration of counterstereotypes reduces stereotypical thoughts. Being reminded of our similarities with others via shared goals as well as priming toward non-essentialist thinking reduces prejudice.

Can we eliminate Us/Theming? The depth of its automaticity suggests not. Furthermore, we may not even want to: “Some of the most exquisitely happy moments of my life have come from feeling like an Us, feeling accepted and not alone, safe and understood” (423). How do we combat the nastiness of Theming? “Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization…focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective-taking” (423).

The first part of this chapter on automatic amygdaloid response effects on Us/Them behavior showed us how some very basic, animalian aspects of how our brains structure our culture (the amygdala is part of the mid-brain, but sits just above the brain stem and exists in all mammals). In the second part, Sapolsky provides us with a survey of aspects of Us/Theming unique to our species. Importantly, this does not make these aspects less open to biological study; they simply correspond to different brain regions and functions evolved in our species. These unique behaviors are related to our ability to rationalize and use logical thought, which is associated with the upper brain region of the cortex. The complex relationships between the “higher” cognitive functioning of the cortex and the more automatic “lower” functions of the amygdala remind us of two things. One, like all other species, we are the subject of our evolutionary inheritances and 2) just because we are smarter than other animals does not mean we are better: We can just use our higher functions to rationalize away our automatic behaviors. Being better means choosing to use those rational functions to break down those automatic responses instead.