Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Racial dichotomies are formed during a crucial developmental period. As evidence, children adopted before age eight by someone of a different race develop the expertise at face recognition of the adoptive parent’s race.10

  Kids learn dichotomies in the absence of any ill intent. When a kindergarten teacher says, “Good morning, boys and girls,” the kids are being taught that dividing the world that way is more meaningful than saying, “Good morning, those of you who have lost a tooth and those of you who haven’t yet.” It’s everywhere, from “she” and “he” meaning different things to those languages so taken with gender dichotomizing that inanimate objects are given honorary gonads.*11

  Racial Us/Them-ing can seem indelibly entrenched in kids because the parents most intent on preventing it are often lousy at it. As shown in studies, liberals are typically uncomfortable discussing race with their children. Instead they counter the lure of Us/Them-ing with abstractions that mean squat to kids—“It’s wonderful that everyone can be friends” or “Barney is purple, and we love Barney.”

  Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by: (a) the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power.

  US

  Us/Them-ing typically involves inflating the merits of Us concerning core values—we are more correct, wise, moral, and worthy when it comes to knowing what the gods want/running the economy/raising kids/fighting this war. Us-ness also involves inflating the merits of our arbitrary markers, and that can take some work—rationalizing why our food is tastier, our music more moving, our language more logical or poetic.

  Perhaps even more than superiority, feelings about Us center on shared obligations, on willingness and expectation of mutuality.12 The essence of an Us mind-set is nonrandom clustering producing higher-than-expected frequencies of positive interactions. As we saw in chapter 10, the logical strategy in one-round Prisoner’s Dilemma is to defect. Cooperation flourishes when games have an uncertain number of rounds, and with the capacity for our reputations to precede us. Groups, by definition, have multiple-round games and the means to spread news of someone being a jerk.

  This sense of obligation and reciprocity among Us is shown in economic games, where players are more trusting, generous, and cooperative with in-group than with out-group members (even with minimal group paradigms, where players know that groupings are arbitrary).13 Chimps even show this trust element where they have to choose between (a) being guaranteed to receive some unexciting food and (b) getting some fabulous food if another chimp will share it with them. Chimps opt for the second scenario, requiring trust, when the other chimp is a grooming partner.

  Moreover, priming people to think of a victim of violence as an Us, rather than a Them, increases the odds of their intervening. And recall from chapter 3 how fans at a soccer match are more likely to aid an injured spectator if he’s wearing home-team insignias.14

  Enhanced prosociality for in-group members does not even require face-to-face interactions. In one study subjects from an ethnically polarized neighborhood encountered an open, stamped questionnaire on the sidewalk near a mailbox. Subjects were more likely to mail it if the questionnaire indicated support for a value of the subject’s ethnic group.15

  In-group obligation is shown by people feeling more need to make amends for transgressions against an Us than against a Them. For the former, people usually make amends to the wronged individual and act more prosocially to the group overall. But people often make in-group amends by being more antisocial to another group. Moreover, in such scenarios, the guiltier the person feels about her in-group violation, the worse she is to Thems.16

  Thus, sometimes you help Us by directly helping Us, sometimes by hurting Them. This raises a broad issue about in-group parochialism: is the goal that your group do well, or simply better than Them? If the former, maximizing absolute levels of in-group well-being is the goal, and the levels of rewards to Them is irrelevant; if the latter, the goal is maximizing the gap between Us and Them.

  Both occur. Doing better rather than doing well makes sense in zero-sum games where, say, only one team can win, and where winning with scores of 1–0, 10–0, and 10–9 are equivalent. Moreover, for sectarian sports fans, there is similar mesolimbic dopamine activation when the home team wins or when a hated rival loses to a third party.*17 This is schadenfreude, gloating, where their pain is your gain.

  It’s problematic when non–zero sum games are viewed as zero-sum (winner-take-all).18 It’s not a great mind-set to think you’ve won World War III if afterward Us have two mud huts and three fire sticks and They have only one of each.* A horrific version of this thinking occurred late during World War I, when the Allies knew they had more resources (i.e., soldiers) than Germany. Therefore, the British commander, Douglas Haig, declared a strategy of “ceaseless attrition,” where Britain went on the offensive, no matter how many of his men were killed—as long as the Germans lost at least as many.

  So in-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well. This is the essence of tolerating inequality in the name of loyalty. Consistent with that, priming loyalty strengthens in-group favoritism and identification, while priming equality does the opposite.19

  Intertwined with in-group loyalty and favoritism is an enhanced capacity for empathy. For example, the amygdala activates when viewing fearful faces, but only of group members; when it’s an out-group member, Them showing fear might even be good news—if it scares Them, bring it on. Moreover, recall from chapter 3 the “isomorphic sensorimotor” reflex of tensing your hand when watching a hand being poked with a needle; the reflex is stronger if it is a same-race hand.20

  As we saw, people are more likely to make amends for transgressions against Us than against Them. What about responses to other in-group members violating a norm?

  Most common is forgiving Us more readily than Them. As we will see, this is often rationalized—we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that’s how They are.

  Something interesting can happen when someone’s transgression constitutes airing the group’s dirty laundry that affirms a negative stereotype. The resulting in-group shame can provoke high levels of punishment as a signal to outsiders.21

  The United States, with its rationalizations and ambivalences about ethnicity, provides many such examples. Consider Rudy Giuliani, who grew up in Brooklyn in an Italian American enclave dominated by organized crime (Giuliani’s father served time for armed robbery and then worked for his brother-in-law, a Mob loan shark). Giuliani rose to national prominence in 1985 as the attorney prosecuting the “Five Families” in the Mafia Commission Trial, effectively destroying them. He was strongly motivated to counter the stereotype of “Italian American” as synonymous with organized crime. When referring to his accomplishment, he said, “And if that’s not enough to remove the Mafia prejudice, then there probably could not be anything you could do to remove it.” If you want someone to prosecute mafiosi with tireless intensity, get a proud Italian American outraged by the stereotypes generated by the Mob.22

  Similar motivations were widely ascribed to Chris Darden, the African American attorney who was cocounsel for the prosecution in the O. J. Simpson trial. Ditto for the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, all Jewish, accused of spying for the Soviet Union. The very public prosecution was by two Jews, Roy Cohn and Irving Saypol, and presided over by a Jewish judge, Irving Kaufman, all eager to counter the stereotype of Jews as disloyal “internationalists.” After death sentences were doled out, Kaufman was honored by the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Jewish War Veterans.*23 Giuliani, Darden, Cohn, Saypol, and Kaufman show that being in a grou
p means that someone else’s behaviors can make you look bad.*24

  This raises a larger issue, namely our sense of obligation and loyalty to Us as a whole. At one extreme it can be contractual. This can be literal, with professional athletes in team sports. It is expected that when jocks sign contracts, they will play their hardest, putting the team’s fortune above showboating. But the obligations are finite—they’re not expected to sacrifice their lives for their team. And when athletes are traded, they don’t serve as a fifth column, throwing games in their new uniform to benefit their old team. The core of such a contractual relationship is the fungibility of both employer and employee.

  At the other extreme, of course, are Us memberships that are not fungible and transcend negotiation. People aren’t traded from the Shiites to the Sunnis, or from the Iraqi Kurds to the Sami herders in Finland. It would be a rare Kurd who would want to be Sami, and his ancestors would likely turn over in their graves when he nuzzled his first reindeer. Converts are often subject to ferocious retribution by those they left—consider Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014 for converting to Christianity—and suspicion from those they’ve joined. With the sense of one’s lot being permanent come distinctive elements of Us-ness. You don’t sign a faith-based baseball contract with vague promises of a salary. But Us-ness based on sacred values, with wholes bigger than sums of parts, where unenforceable obligations stretch across generations, millennia, even into afterlives, where it’s Us, right or wrong, is the essence of faith-based relationships.

  Naturally, things are more complicated. Sometimes an athlete choosing to switch teams is viewed as betraying a sacred trust. Consider the perceived treachery when LeBron James chose to leave the Cavaliers of his hometown, Cleveland, and the perception of his choice to return as akin to the Second Coming. At the other extreme of group membership, people do convert, emigrate, assimilate, and, especially in the United States, wind up a pretty atypical Us—consider ex-Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, with his rich Southern accent and Christian faith, born Piyush Jindal to Hindu immigrant parents from India. And consider the complexities in, to use a horrible phrase, the unidirectionality of fungibility—Muslim fundamentalists who would execute Meriam Ibrahim while advocating forced conversions to Islam at the point of a sword.

  The nature of group membership can be bloodily contentious concerning people’s relationship to the state. Is it contractual? The people pay taxes, obey laws, serve in the army; the government provides social services, builds roads, and helps after hurricanes. Or is it one of sacred values? The people give absolute obedience and the state provides the myths of the Fatherland. Few such citizens can conceive that if the stork had arbitrarily deposited them elsewhere, they’d fervently feel the innate rightness of a different brand of exceptionalism, goose-stepping to different martial music.

  THOSE THEMS

  Just as we view Us in standardized ways, there are patterns in how we view Them. A consistent one is viewing Them as threatening, angry, and untrustworthy. Take space aliens in movies, as an interesting example. In an analysis of nearly a hundred pertinent movies, starting with Georges Méliès’s pioneering 1902 A Trip to the Moon, nearly 80 percent present aliens as malevolent, with the remainder either benevolent or neutral.* In economic games people implicitly treat members of other races as less trustworthy or reciprocating. Whites judge African American faces as angrier than white faces, and racially ambiguous faces with angry expressions are more likely to be categorized as the other race. White subjects become more likely to support juvenile criminals being tried as adults when primed to think about black (versus white) offenders. And the unconscious sense of Them as menacing can be remarkably abstract—baseball fans tend to underestimate the distance to a rival team’s stadium, while Americans hostile to Mexican immigrants underestimate the distance to Mexico City.

  But Thems do not solely evoke a sense of menace; sometimes it’s disgust. Back to the insular cortex, which in most animals is about gustatory disgust—biting into rotten food—but whose human portfolio includes moral and aesthetic disgust. Pictures of drug addicts or the homeless typically activate the insula, not the amygdala.25

  Being disgusted by another group’s abstract beliefs isn’t naturally the role of the insula, which evolved to care about disgusting tastes and smells. Us/Them markers provide a stepping-stone. Feeling disgusted by Them because they eat repulsive, sacred, or adorable things, slather themselves with rancid scents, dress in scandalous ways—these are things the insula can sink its teeth into. In the words of the psychologist Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania, “Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker.” Establishing that They eat disgusting things provides momentum for deciding that They also have disgusting ideas about, say, deontological ethics.26

  The role of disgust in Them-ing explains some individual differences in its magnitude. Specifically, people with the strongest negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups tend to have low thresholds for interpersonal disgust (e.g., are resistant to wearing a stranger’s clothes or sitting in a warm seat just vacated).27 We will return to this finding in chapter 15.

  Some Thems are ridiculous, i.e., subject to ridicule and mockery, humor as hostility.28 Out-groups mocking the in-group is a weapon of the weak, damaging the mighty and lessening the sting of subordination. When an in-group mocks an out-group, it’s to solidify negative stereotypes and reify the hierarchy. In line with this, individuals with a high “social dominance orientation” (acceptance of hierarchy and group inequality) are most likely to enjoy jokes about out-groups.

  Thems are also frequently viewed as simpler and more homogeneous than Us, with simpler emotions and less sensitivity to pain. David Berreby, in his superb book Us and Them: The Science of Identity, gives a striking example, namely that whether it was ancient Rome, medieval England, imperial China, or the antebellum South, the elite had the system-justifying stereotype of slaves as simple, childlike, and incapable of independence.29

  Essentialism is all about viewing Them as homogeneous and interchangeable, the idea that while we are individuals, they have a monolithic, immutable, icky essence. A long history of bad relations with Thems fuels essentialist thinking—“They’ve always been like this and always will be.” As does having few personal interactions with Thems—after all, the more interactions with Thems, the more exceptions accumulate that challenge essentialist stereotyping. But infrequency of interactions is not required, as evidenced by essentialist thinking about the opposite sex.30

  Thus, Thems come in different flavors—threatening and angry, disgusting and repellent, primitive and undifferentiated.

  Thoughts Versus Feelings About Them

  How much are our thoughts about Them post-hoc rationalizations for our feelings about Them? Back to interactions between cognition and affect.

  Us/Them-ing is readily framed cognitively. John Jost of NYU has explored one domain of this, namely the cognitive cartwheels of those on top to justify the existing system’s unequal status quo. Cognitive gymnastics also occur when our negative, homogeneous view of a type of Them must accommodate the appealing celebrity Them, the Them neighbor, the Them who has saved our ass—“Ah, this Them is different” (no doubt followed by a self-congratulatory sense of open-mindedness).31

  Cognitive subtlety can be needed in viewing Thems as threats.32 Being afraid that the Them approaching you will rob you is rife with affect and particularism. But fearing that those Thems will take our jobs, manipulate the banks, dilute our bloodlines, make our children gay, etc., requires future-oriented cognition about economics, sociology, political science, and pseudoscience.

  Thus Us/Them-ing can arise from cognitive capacities to generalize, imagine the future, infer hidden motivations, and use language to align these cognitions with other Us-es. As we saw, other primates not only kill individuals because they are Thems but have negative associations about them as
well. Nonetheless, no other primate kills over ideology, theology, or aesthetics.

  Despite the importance of thought in Us/Them-ing, its core is emotional and automatic.33 In the words of Berreby in his book, “Stereotyping isn’t a case of lazy, short-cutting cognition. It isn’t conscious cognition at all.” Such automaticity generates statements like “I can’t put my finger on why, but it’s just wrong when They do that.” Work by Jonathan Haidt of NYU shows that in such circumstances, cognitions are post-hoc justifications for feelings and intuitions, to convince yourself that you have indeed rationally put your finger on why.

  The automaticity of Us/Them-ing is shown by the speed of the amygdala and insula in making such dichotomies—the brain weighing in affectively precedes conscious awareness, or there never is conscious awareness, as with subliminal stimuli. Another measure of the affective core of Them-ing is when no one even knows the basis of a prejudice. Consider the Cagots, a minority in France whose persecution began in the eleventh century and continued well into the last one.34 Cagots were required to live outside villages, dress distinctively, sit separately in church, and do menial jobs. Yet they didn’t differ in appearance, religion, accent, or names, and no one knows why they were pariahs. They may have descended from Moorish soldiers in the Islamic invasion of Spain and thus were discriminated against by Christians. Or they might have been early Christians, and discrimination against them was started by non-Christians. No one knew the sins of ancestral Cagots or how to recognize Cagots beyond community knowledge. During the French Revolution, Cagots burned birth certificates in government offices to destroy proof of their status.

  The automaticity is seen in another way. Consider an individual with an impassioned hatred for an array of out-groups.35 There are two ways to explain this. Option 1: He has carefully concluded that group A’s trade policies hurt the economy and just happens to also believe that group B’s ancestors were blasphemous, and thinks that group C members don’t express sufficient contrition for a war started by their grandparents, and perceives group D members as pushy, and thinks that group E undermines family values. That’s a lot of cognitive just-happens-to’s. Option 2: The guy’s authoritarian temperament is unsettled by novelty and ambiguity about hierarchies; this isn’t a set of coherent cognitions. As we saw in chapter 7, Theodor Adorno, in trying to understand the roots of fascism, formalized this authoritarian temperament. Individuals prejudiced against one type of out-group tend toward being prejudiced against other ones, and for affective reasons.*36 More on this in the next chapter.