Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

“So kind-mindedness is not ‘really’ something else in disguise. It is itself—the mind’s guide for understanding anyone we do not know personally, for seeing our place in the human world, and for judging our actions. This human-kind psychology is a source, not just a consequence, of institutions: national governments, religious authorities, promoters of ethnic, racial, class, or gender pride. We care about today’s political tribes only because these entities have learned how to speak to the human-kind faculty in its language.” 

Kind-mindedness is its own function. It is the result of the real world colliding with our mind. We use it to create societal institutions, which further inform our kind-mindedness through looping effects. Human social groups don’t inform our beliefs; our beliefs create social groups, which further define themselves. 

“When you understand your own kind-mindedness, then, you don’t just see yourself more clearly; you also see how ethnicities, nations, and all the other kinds can come to be. And you start to ask what it is about the mind that makes us see these human kinds, and believe in them, and fight about them.” 

Understanding that kind-mindedness exists is the first step to understanding how and why we create human kinds. Understanding kind-mindedness is understanding how we view the world. Once individuals understand their own human-kind perceptions, we can better understand the perceptions of other people and societies.

“Human-kind beliefs, then, are not just composite portraits of the people we’ve encountered or heard about. If they were, stereotypes would not be contradicted by the logical categories we’ve created for computers and institutions like the Customs Service. And if rules for classifying people don’t come from information about those people or from logical thought, then they must have another source. And there is only one candidate left to be that source: our brains. In other words, human kinds are what happens when the real world meets the human mind. They aren’t just perceptions. They’re beliefs.” 

Human-kind beliefs are not logical representations of the world as it exists. Human-kind beliefs cannot be discussed without including the mind, which uses filter and subconscious biases to shape reality into perception. When we combine objective reality with our mental perceptions, we form beliefs.

“Thanks to looping effects, people who believe in a human kind will act as if it is real, which is all that’s required to make a human kind have practical effects in the world. Founder effects help people tell one human kind from another, helping to make those human kinds feel real (and helping them forget other equally logical ways to divide up the human race). And invented tradition gives to the resulting belief a reassuring flavor of timeless essences—the gut feeling that ‘things were always this way.’ The convincers that I’ve just described—looping effects, founder effects, inventions of tradition—are mental amplifiers, making some human kinds seem important. Other categories, like ‘people on the same bus’ and ‘left-handed people’ and ‘soccer fans,’ don’t get the same treatment.” 

Looping effects, founder effects, and invented tradition are mental amplifiers that help create, develop, and refine human kinds. These terms describe physical and mental processes that influence our minds’ perception and affect our beliefs.

“Asking if race is real, then, is like asking if money is real. Both questions are meaningless without a framework. At the political and cultural level of analysis, races are real enough, because people believe them to be. So is the value of the bills in your wallet, for the same reason. Genetics, though, is a different framework of knowledge. At the genetic level, most African Americans have European ancestors as well as African ones; genetically, almost all variations in human DNA are found in all races. As the chemistry of ink on your money gives no clue to its economic value, so human genetics doesn’t support today’s notion of race. Is race a valid idea? That question doesn’t make sense without a second one: Valid for what?” 

The issue with erroneous human kinds is often not whether they are valid, but whether they are valid for “what.” It is wrong to say that race is not real. Race is real because human societies claim it is real, structure societies around it, and individuals act on their belief in it. The inquiry often should not be whether a human-kind belief is real, but if it is the best way to categorize. Race being real does not mean that it is the best trait around which to structure societies; it is real but not appropriate.

“Codes are rules that establish a correspondence between one world and another, which lets you perceive the not-obvious and not-physical realms. They give you a way to see objects or events as signs of other, less-obvious knowledge. And these codes are, quite literally, in your brain, where 100 billion cells create them and maintain them. Code after code after code has transformed the light that reached your eyes from this page into your awareness of the book—as an object, as a collection of inky shapes on paper, as words, and as ideas.” 

Humans are born with everything they need to interpret codes from objects. We are born with the codebook and, when provided with the right information, can interpret the world. Codes permit our minds to correspond with the real world, like travelling between universes. Without the ability to interpret code, we could not perceive the world.

“What kind sight lets us do, as I mentioned, is learn and follow intricate rules for treating people just as, and only as, they should be treated—given the kind of person they are, and the kind we are, in the situation we meet them. These rules have to be complicated because there are many different human kinds, and what is appropriate for one is not for another.” 

Human kinds are not static. We change human kinds many times throughout the day, and we alter our human-kind beliefs as well. We change human kinds according to rules established by culture. Cultural rules speak to our human-kind code interpreter and inform who we are and who others are in the specific situation of the moment.

“Once you see that stereotypes depend on perceived relationships among different human kinds, the question of how objectively accurate they are disappears. We think the human-kind code is based on facts about people. Instead, it’s based on facts about how we relate to those people at the moment we categorize them—what we want, or expect, or fear from them. Mental codes interpret human kinds as if they were things that have dimensions and persist through time. But the information that makes the codes work is not about things. It’s about actions—what we’re doing and planning to do as they relate to what other people are doing.” 

Human-kind interactions involve relationships, not facts. Our beliefs about people are the results of how we relate to them when we categorize them. Formed this way, those beliefs can change often. Stereotypes are meant to be universally applicable truths, but that cannot be if our beliefs about each other are the result of our specific relationship at one precise moment in time, and can change as time and our relationship both progress. Stereotypes must be erroneous.

“This desire to transmit regulations appears to be a universal human trait, found in all societies. Some anthropologists believe it is a sign of an important link: between, on the one hand, that part of the cortex that notices and obeys rules and, on the other hand, the cultural authorities who devise laws for ‘our people’ to follow. It’s the connection, in other words, between mental codes that support vision, language, and music, and societal codes—of conduct, of law, of honor.” 

All societies transmit regulations in the form of rules. We perceive the regulations as culture, laws, and norms. Regulations communicate that one group’s teenagers rebel while another group’s do not; one group punishes homosexuality while another group’s rules allow it; one group incorporates spices in their food while another group eats food bland. These regulations connect mental codes with societal codes. They help societal members learn to function as humans by eliminating the need for every newborn to start from scratch, but they also restrict our ability to engage in perfectly normal activity that is not permitted by a society’s regulations, such as eating food with spices.

“This feeling—what is not ‘us’ is not moral—should strike people as deeply weird, but it doesn’t. We are so used to it in our own lives that it doesn’t seem odd. Thanks to the human kind faculty, we grow up applying moral emotions to people and actions in which there is no moral issue. Many of our feelings about right and wrong are actually feelings about Us and Them.” 

Cultures attach morality to nonmoral regulations, so members treat the regulations as serious. The positive aspects of shared culture require this, but we can pervert it to produce harmful results. For example, homosexuality is a naturally nonmoral trait. Nothing about homosexuality inherently speaks to morality. Culture attaches moral feelings to preferences, which societies enforce through regulations, which ascribes morality on a nonmoral trait. Powerful people can then use the morality attached to the trait to stigmatize.

“Yet there is a problem with realistic conflict theory. It suggests that human-kind codes follow rational perceptions about the real world, that my kind’s hatred of your kind must derive from some dispute over tangibles, like oil revenue or political patronage. But if human-kind codes have their own rules, there is no guarantee that they will agree with reason. The key to my human-kind thinking about you is my perception of how my kind relates to your kind (once I have decided which kinds we belong to for this particular place and time). But that perception of mine might be shaped by human-kind rules, without reference to politics or economics.” 

Realistic conflict theory argues that all disputes are over objective, tangible things, even if the parties claim the dispute is about beliefs. Berreby argues that human-kind codes don’t allow this because they don’t agree with reason. Human-kind codes don’t communicate objective realities, and human-kind beliefs don’t represent objective realities, so disputes cannot concern only objective realities. Human-kind conflicts must address perceptions and beliefs.

“Sherif had demonstrated how politics and culture don’t create our maps of human kinds directly. He suggests that we don’t believe in racial and religious and national divisions because we’re told to but rather because our daily experiences are organized to make those categories relevant and useful—and to make other ways of sorting people useless. […] Tajfel suggested that your categories for people may be quite separate from such realities. That doesn’t mean you’re free from society’s politics or its traditions. But it probably means that those politics and traditions work on your mind in subtler ways than Sherif imagined. It doesn’t take wars or riots or unfair laws to make you believe in particular human kinds and then act on those beliefs. Your mind responds to much slighter cues. Those cues, Tajfel argued, came from the mere act of sorting people. His emphasis was on classification—the way human kinds are seen so easily as important categories that tell a lot about the people in them.” 

Sherif argued that humans choose the categories that their experiences deem useful. Tajfel suggested society’s politics and traditions influence our experiences subtly. Simply sorting people, even in arbitrary categories, creates subconscious biases and morality attachments.

“We-feeling is good for your health. It lowers your heart rate, reduces stress hormones, makes you sleep better and think more clearly. Conversely, a sense of being Them is bad for you. A sense of being Them, a nonrecognized nonpart of human community, pushes your mind and body toward jumbled thinking, anger and sadness, and a shorter life span. So an innate preference for good human-kind feelings over bad ones, for feeling like Us and not like Them, is no sideshow. It’s one of life’s main events.” 

Stigma has profound effects. Inclusion brings out the best in people; exclusion brings out the worst. Stigma impairs physical and psychological health, intelligence, relationships, and shortens lifespan. Arbitrary groupings produce “Us-Them” relationships that actively bolster the in-group while harming the out-group. 

“Food preferences probably originated as mental codes that serve the body: to keep an animal from being poisoned or made ill. But when our circuits for eating right are summoned to work with the human-kind code, their meaning changes. Those feelings about the body are in essence transferred to a new object: instead of being disgusted by bad food, we can be disgusted by bad action, deeds unworthy of our kind. Rozin has delineated this process of ‘moralization’ in the realm of disgust, but he and his colleagues note that such connections also involve other basic emotions. That is, no doubt, one of the ways in which the realm of nations, religions, tribes, and political parties connects to the realm of fears, hopes, loves, and pains of the individual mind.”

The evolutionary importance of food preference to survival caused strong mental codes relating to food and taste rules. The importance of those codes influenced the mind to attach morality to otherwise nonmoral codes. This moralization transfers from “good” and “bad” food to “good” and “bad” people: People who eat “good” food are “good,” and people who eat “bad” food are “bad.” Once morality transfers from food to people, we can apply morality to other elements of the out-group’s culture, labeling everything about the out-group as “bad” and the in-group as “good.”

“You could argue that stigma imposed on one person can be justified; it might be (and often was) punishment for a crime. But stigma imposed on an entire population can’t be just, because it falls on babies and other innocents. At the population level, stigma isn’t about justice or about people and their actions at all. It is a kind of mental curare for the human-kind faculty. Stigma paralyzes the normal shifting process by which people might see another person as a fellow citizen in one context, a typical man in another, and a Christian in a third. Stigma tries to lock its victim into one human kind, all the time, in all contexts.” 

Stigma cannot be justified. It is based on human-kind beliefs, categories, and rules, so it is not objective truth. Stigma does not punish, it locks people into human kinds, so it also cannot be justified punitively. Stigma’s function is to paralyze a group to exclude them from society.

“The combined effect of architecture, clothing, speech, and behavior all nudge the unconscious mind to think stigma about ‘those people’ is true. These techniques speak in the language of Us-Them codes, making them confirm for the rest of the mind that those people really are ‘not right.’ And so the societal rules, which would be hard to maintain by force alone, come to feel like the natural order of things. A child does not simply hear that ‘those people’ aren’t quite right; the child experiences it with his or her eyes and ears.”

Stigma can only be maintained through experience. Stigma can be initiated through labeling and categorization, but our human-kind faculty is designed to shift frequently. People naturally change beliefs with changing situations, which ends stigma. Stigma is maintained by forcing behavior on people through architecture, clothing, speech, and other cultural rules. Behavior tells our “Us-Them” mental code that the stigmatized are in fact “Them.”

“So despised groups may disappear as the mental map that includes them vanishes from mind after mind and those who fit the category are simply seen as something else. Despised groups may persist but be undespised, as have the Irish immigrants to North America in the beginning of the twentieth century or Chinese immigrants at the end. A human kind may pass through a period of stigma, leave it, and reenter it (as did the Jews of Europe over the past two millennia). The brain is always in mental motion, always checking its code against its circumstances. This also means, though, that human kinds that were not stigmatized can be turned into despised groups, by the application of these techniques. As a spoiled identity can be unmade, so it can be made.” 

Groups transition in and out of stigma. Methods of creating and erasing stigma are natural processes facilitated by the human-kind mental code. Paralyzing stigmatized groups is unnatural and requires force. By better understanding human-kind mental codes, we can better understand how to avoid stigmatizing groups and how to destigmatize groups. 

 “For people who aren’t in abject poverty, material advantage doesn’t correlate with measures of health and stress. People who see themselves at the bottom of a rich society are in worse shape than those who see themselves at the top of a poor one. This is one of the reasons that measures of overall health don’t favor the wealthiest societies—why the people of Greece have lower incomes but longer life expectancies than Americans. If you want low cortisol levels and a healthy outlook on life you’re better off being in the elite of a poor nation than trudging off to a no-respect McJob in a wealthy one.” 

Beliefs dictate our physical state more than objective realities. Our human-kind view of ourselves influences our psychology and physical state more than the objective conditions of our reality. 

“However, it’s not just perception that must be rearranged to make a new tribe. Emotions must be changed as well; this new group wants not just your recognition but your loyalty. It is supposed to replace or at least take precedence over your old ones. And emotions don’t respond to reason. They listen to the body and its day-to-day experience. If my goal is to take people of many different human kinds and make them one, then I’m going to need to inflict a little social death.” 

Human-kind codes are rewritten for good and bad reasons. The same processes which produce stigma can increase group loyalty and pride. Societies rewrite these codes by eliciting emotional responses through manipulation of experiences. Such manipulations are structured to destroy a person’s former human kind and replace it with a new one.

“So stigma as an institution is not just a matter of creating stereotypes and maintaining people’s belief in those stereotypes. The same conventions that make a stereotype seem true to the onlooker also have an effect on the mind and brain of the target. The traditional methods of stigma that appear across many times and societies are those that efficiently do both kinds of work. These practices make onlookers believe that the target people are ‘not our kind’ because of their looks and behavior. And the same practices also make the targets more likely to be the sort of people the stigma predicts.” 

To perpetuate stigma, stigmatizers must convince the stigmatized to view themselves in such a way, comporting with the stigmatizing traits. This causes the stigmatized to act in accordance with their labeled traits and appear as such to other members of society. Mere labeling cannot sustain stigma—people must see and feel the stigma.

“Pluralism is not the absence of standards; it’s just the recognition that standards are created by the problems, which are set by human beings. The human context of any question—who is asking it? Why are they asking it in that way?—has to be taken into account. The opposite of pluralism in science is a belief that, ultimately, context doesn’t matter. In the long run, goes the argument, the human race will find that all the levels of analysis fit together.” 

Various disciplines ask different questions and solve different problems. Pluralism is the belief that answers to similar questions in different disciplines need not correlate. Pluralists believe scientific research can function without interdisciplinary correlation, and that such correlation is not achievable. A pluralist believes a social psychologist can theorize that race is real because humans structure societies around race, while a geneticist theorizes that race is not real because it is not reflected in the genetic codes of human DNA. Both are true; they are two different correct answers to two different questions. 

“Darwin saw that pure and simple natural selection, acting on each individual creature, should stamp out this kind of behavior. Nonaltruists, who were not giving up any advantages, should live longer and have more offspring than self-sacrificing animals, until, eventually, altruistic behavior disappeared. He reasoned that natural selection must work on whole groups, not just individuals. Of course this would be true of people as it was of other creatures.” 

Species evolve in groups, not as individuals. “Survival of the fittest” references traits that enable group, not individual, survival. Altruism comports with Darwinian evolution theory because, while it decreases an individual organism’s chances of survival, it increases the group’s ability to survive. 

“So perhaps an ‘ultimate cause’ explanation for human-kind thinking is coming together. The selfish gene creates self-sacrificing people because reciprocal altruism succeeds in the long run. The mind is set to make sacrifices for those who will, in turn, return the favor. The human-kind code is so powerful because it tells you whom to trust for that kind of trading; in other words, whom you can trust with you genes. This is why it triggers such strong emotions. Meanwhile, the thinking, classifying, symbol-using power of the human mind makes this codemaker different from the ones that animals use in their prides, flocks, and herds. The human version is more flexible; it offers a way to treat any human being as either one of Us or one of Them. And the human version can perceive a continuum of Usness and Themness, rather than a simple on or off choice.” 

The human-kind code informs people through symbols of shared culture who they can trust to reciprocate altruistic acts. This allows humans to form large societies that comport with Darwinian theories of evolution. Humans’ mental codemaker allows us to form groups as large as our species and work together under shared rules for survival and evolution of the species.