Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  The strongest evidence that abrasive Them-ing originates in emotions and automatic processes is that supposed rational cognitions about Thems can be unconsciously manipulated. In an example cited earlier, subjects unconsciously primed about “loyalty” sit closer to Us-es and farther from Thems, while those primed about “equality” do the opposite.* In another study, subjects watched a slide show of basic, unexciting information about a country they knew nothing about (“There’s a country called ‘Moldova’?”). For half the subjects, faces with positive expressions were flashed at subliminal speeds between slides; for the other half, it was negative expressions. The former developed more positive views of the country than the latter.37

  Conscious judgments about Thems are unconsciously manipulated in the real world. In an important experiment discussed in chapter 3, morning commuters at train stations in predominantly white suburbs filled out questionnaires about political views. Then, at half the stations, a pair of young Mexicans, conservatively dressed, appeared each morning for two weeks, chatting quietly in Spanish before boarding the train. Then commuters filled out second questionnaires.

  Remarkably, the presence of such pairs made people more supportive of decreasing legal immigration from Mexico and of making English the official language, and more opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants. The manipulation was selective, not changing attitudes about Asian Americans, African Americans, or Middle Easterners.

  How’s this for a fascinating influence on Us/Them-ing, way below the level of awareness: Chapter 4 noted that when women are ovulating, their fusiform face areas respond more to faces, with the (“emotional”) vmPFCs responding more to men’s faces in particular. Carlos Navarrete at Michigan State University has shown that white women, when ovulating, have more negative attitudes toward African American men.*38 Thus the intensity of Us/Them-ing is being modulated by hormones. Our feelings about Thems can be shaped by subterranean forces we haven’t a clue about.

  Automatic features of Us/Them-ing can extend to magical contagion, a belief that the essentialism of people can transfer to objects or other organisms.39 This can be a plus or a minus—one study showed that washing a sweater worn by JFK would decrease its value at auction, whereas sterilizing one worn by Bernie Madoff would increase its value. This is sheer irrationality—it’s not like an unwashed JFK sweater still contains his magical armpit essence, while an unwashed Madoff sweater swarms with moral-taint cooties. And magical contagion has occurred elsewhere—Nazis killed supposedly contaminated “Jewish dogs” along with their owners.*40

  The heart of cognition catching up with affect is, of course, rationalization. A great example of this occurred in 2000, when everyone learned the phrase “hanging chads” following the election of Al Gore and the Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush.* For those who missed that fun, a chad is the piece of paper knocked out of a punch-card ballot when someone votes, and a hanging chad is one that doesn’t completely detach; does this justify disqualifying the vote, even though it is clear who the person voted for? And obviously, if one millisecond before chads reared their hanging heads, you had asked pundits what would be the hanging-chad stances of the party of Reagan and trickle-down economics, and the party of FDR and the Great Society, they wouldn’t have had a clue. And yet there we were, one millisecond postchads, with each party passionately explaining why the view of the opposing Thems threatened Mom, apple pie, and the legacy of the Alamo.

  The “confirmation biases” used to rationalize and justify automatic Them-ing are numerous—remembering supportive better than opposing evidence; testing things in ways that can support but not negate your hypothesis; skeptically probing outcomes you don’t like more than ones you do.

  Moreover, manipulating implicit Them-ing alters justification processes. In one study Scottish students read about a game where Scottish participants either did or didn’t treat English participants unfairly. Students who read about Scots being prejudicial became more positive in their stereotypes about Scots and more negative about Brits—justifying the bias by the Scottish participants.41

  Our cognitions run to catch up with our affective selves, searching for the minute factoid or plausible fabrication that explains why we hate Them.42

  Individual Intergroup Interactions Versus Group Intergroup Interactions

  Thus, we tend to think of Us as noble, loyal, and composed of distinctive individuals whose failings are due to circumstance. Thems, in contrast, seem disgusting, ridiculous, simple, homogeneous, undifferentiated, and interchangeable. All frequently backed up by rationalizations for our intuitions.

  That is a picture of an individual navigating Us/Them in his mind. Interactions between groups tend to be more competitive and aggressive than are interactions between individual Us-es and Thems. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, writing during World War II, “The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.”43

  There is often an inverse relationship between levels of intragroup and intergroup aggression. In other words, groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conflict. Or, to spin this another way, groups with high levels of internal conflict are too distracted to focus hostility on the Others.44

  Crucially, is that inverse relationship causal? Must a society be internally peaceful to muster the large-scale cooperation needed for major intergroup hostilities? Must a society suppress homicide to accomplish genocide? Or to reverse the causality, do threats from Thems make societies more internally cooperative? This is a view advanced by the economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute who has framed this as “Conflict: Altruism’s Midwife.”45 Stay tuned.

  UNIQUE REALMS OF HUMAN US/THEM-ING

  Despite other primates displaying rudimentary abstractions of Us/Them-ing, humans are in a stratosphere of uniqueness. In this section I consider how:

  we all belong to multiple categories of Us, and their relative importance can rapidly change;

  all Thems are not the same, and we have complex taxonomies about different types of Thems and the responses they evoke;

  we can feel badly about Us/Them-ing and try to conceal it;

  cultural mechanisms can sharpen or soften the edges of our dichotomizing.

  Multiple Us-es

  I am a vertebrate, mammal, primate, ape, human, male, scientist, lefty, sun sneezer, Breaking Bad obsessive, and Green Bay Packers fan.* All grounds for concocting an Us/Them. Crucially, which Us is most important to me constantly shifts—if some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn’t, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, like me, loved playing Twister as a kid.

  —

  We all belong to multiple Us/Them dichotomies. Sometimes one can be a surrogate for another—for example, the dichotomy of people who are/aren’t knowledgeable about caviar is a good stand-in for a dichotomy about socioeconomic status.

  As noted, the most important thing about our membership in multiple Us/Thems is the ease with which their prioritizing shifts. A famed example, discussed in chapter 3, concerned math performance in Asian American women, built around the stereotypes of Asians being good at math, and women not. Half the subjects were primed to think of themselves as Asian before a math test; their scores improved. Half were primed about gender; scores declined. Moreover, levels of activity in cortical regions involved in math skills changed in parallel.*46

  We also recognize that other individuals belong to multiple categories, and shift which we consider most relevant. Not surprisingly, lots of that literature concerns race, with the core question being whether it is an Us/Them that trumps all others.

  The primacy of race has a lot of folk-intuition appeal. First, race is a biological attribute, a conspicuous fixed identity that readily prompts essentialist thinking.47 This also fuel
s intuitions about evolution—humans evolved under conditions where different skin color is the clearest signal that someone is a distant Them. And the salience of race is seen cross-culturally—an astonishing percentage of cultures have historically made status distinctions by skin color, including in traditional cultures before Western contact, where with few exceptions (e.g., the low-status Ainu ethnic minority in Japan) lighter skin tone confers higher status both within and between groups.

  But these intuitions are flimsy. First, while there are obvious biological contributions to racial differences, “race” is a biological continuum rather than a discrete category—for example, unless you cherry-pick the data, genetic variation within race is generally as great as between races. And this really is no surprise when looking at the range of variation with a racial rubric—compare Sicilians with Swedes or a Senegalese farmer with an Ethiopian herder.*

  The evolutionary argument doesn’t hold up either. Racial differences, which have only relatively recently emerged, are of little Us/Them significance. For the hunter-gatherers of our hominin history, the most different person you’d ever encounter in your life came from perhaps a couple of dozen miles away, while the nearest person of a different race lived thousands of miles away—there is no evolutionary legacy of humans encountering people of markedly different skin color.

  Furthermore, the notion of race as a fixed, biologically based classification system doesn’t work either. At various times in the history of the U.S. census, “Mexican” and “Armenian” were classified as distinctive races; southern Italians were of a different race from northern Europeans; someone with one black great-grandparent and seven white ones was classified as white in Oregon but not Florida. This is race as a cultural rather than biological construct.48

  Given facts like these, it is not surprising that racial Us/Them dichotomies are frequently trumped by other classifications. The most frequent is gender. Recall the finding that it is more difficult to “extinguish” a conditioned fear association with an other- than a same-race face. Navarrete has shown that this occurs only when the conditioned faces are male; gender outweighs race as an automatic classification in this case.* Age as a classification readily trumps race as well. Even occupation can—for example, in one study white subjects showed an automatic preference for white politicians over black athletes when they were primed to think of race, but the opposite when primed to think of occupation.49

  Race as a salient Us/Them category can be shoved aside by subtle reclassification. In one study subjects saw pictures of individuals, each black or white, each associated with a statement, and then had to recall which face went with which statement.50 There was automatic racial categorization—if subjects misattributed a quote, the face picked and the one actually associated with the statement were likely to be of the same race. Next, half the black and half the white individuals pictured wore the same distinctive yellow shirt; the other half wore gray. Now subjects most often confused faces by shirt color.

  Wonderful research by Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiske of Princeton showed how categorization is shifted, studying the phenomenon of amygdala activation by pictures of other-race faces.51 In one group subjects tried to find a distinctive dot in each picture. An other-race face didn’t activate the amygdala; face-ness wasn’t being processed. In a second group subjects judged whether each face looked older than some age. Amygdaloid responses to other-race faces enlarged—thinking categorically about age strengthened thinking categorically about race. In a third group a vegetable was displayed before each face; subjects judged whether the person liked that vegetable. The amygdala didn’t respond to other-race faces.

  At least two interpretations come to mind to explain this last result:

  Distraction. Subjects were too busy thinking about, say, carrots to do automatic categorization by race. This would resemble the effect of searching for the dot.

  Recategorization. You look at a Them face, thinking about what food they’d like. You picture the person shopping, ordering a meal in a restaurant, sitting down to dinner at home and enjoying a particular food. . . . In other words, you think of the person as an individual. This is the readily accepted interpretation.

  But recategorization can occur in the real world under the most brutal and unlikely circumstances. Here are examples that I find to be intensely poignant:

  In the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate general Lewis Armistead was mortally wounded while leading a charge. As he lay on the battlefield, he gave a secret Masonic sign, in hopes of its being recognized by a fellow Mason. It was, by a Union officer, Hiram Bingham, who protected him, got him to a Union field hospital, and guarded his personal effects. In an instant the Us/Them of Union/Confederate became less important than that of Mason/non-Mason.*52

  Another shifting of Thems also occurred during the Civil War. Both armies were filled with Irish immigrant soldiers; Irish typically had picked sides haphazardly, joining what they thought would be a short conflict to gain some military training—useful for returning home to fight for Irish independence. Before battle, Irish soldiers put identifying sprigs of green in their hats, so that, should they lie dead or dying, they’d shed the arbitrary Us/Them of this American war and revert to the Us that mattered—to be recognized and aided by their fellow Irish.53 A green sprig as a green beard.

  Rapid shifting of Us/Them dichotomies is seen during World War II, when British commandos kidnapped German general Heinrich Kreipe in Crete, followed by a dangerous eighteen-day march to the coast to rendezvous with a British ship. One day the party saw the snows of Crete’s highest peak. Kreipe mumbled to himself the first line (in Latin) of an ode by Horace about a snowcapped mountain. At which point the British commander, Patrick Leigh Fermor, continued the recitation. The two men realized that they had, in Leigh Fermor’s words, “drunk at the same fountains.” A recategorization. Leigh Fermor had Kreipe’s wounds treated and personally ensured his safety through the remainder of the march. The two stayed in touch after the war and were reunited decades later on Greek television. “No hard feelings,” said Kreipe, praising Leigh Fermor’s “daring operation.”54

  And finally there is the World War I Christmas truce, something I will consider at length in the final chapter. This is the famed event where soldiers on both sides spent the day singing, praying, and partying together, playing soccer, and exchanging gifts, and soldiers up and down the lines struggled to extend the truce. It took all of one day for British-versus-German to be subordinated to something more important—all of us in the trenches versus the officers in the rear who want us to go back to killing each other.

  Thus Us/Them dichotomies can wither away into being historical trivia questions like the Cagots and can have their boundaries shifted at the whims of a census. Most important, we have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, have their importance evaporate in an instant.

  Cold and/or Incompetent

  That both a gibbering schizophrenic homeless man and a successful businessman from a resented ethnic group can be a Them demonstrates something crucial—different types of Thems evoke different feelings in us, anchored in differences in the neurobiologies of fear and disgust.55 As but one example, fear-evoking faces cause us to watch vigilantly and activate the visual cortex; disgust-evoking faces do the opposite.

  We carry various taxonomies in our heads as to our relationships with different types of Others. Thinking about some Thems is simple. Consider someone who pushes all our judgmental buttons—say, a homeless junkie whose wife threw him out of the house because of his abusiveness, and who now mugs elderly people. Throw ’im under a trolley—people are most likely to agree to sacrifice one to save five when the five are in-group members and the one is this extreme of an out-group.*56

  But what about Thems who evoke more complex feelings? Tremendously influential work has been done by Fiske, with her “stereotype content model.”
57 This entire section concerns that work.

  We tend to categorize Thems along two axes: “warmth” (is the individual or group a friend or foe, benevolent or malevolent?) and “competence” (how effectively can the individual or group carry out their intentions?).

  The axes are independent. Ask subjects to assess someone about whom they have only minimal information. Priming them with cues about the person’s status alters ratings of competence but not of warmth. Prime them about the person’s competitiveness and you do the opposite. These two axes produce a matrix with four corners. There are groups that we rate as being high in both warmth and competence—Us, naturally. And Americans typically view this group as containing good Christians, African American professionals, and the middle class.

  And there’s the other extreme, low in both warmth and competence—our homeless, addicted mugger. Subjects typically hand out low-warmth/low-competence assessments for the homeless, people on welfare, and poor people of any race.