"Us vs. Them" Part 1: Nature and Nurture
Clifton Blackwell, a 61-year-old Milwaukee man, got angry at Mahud Villalaz, a U.S. citizen born in Peru, for parking near a bus stop. Villalaz moved his car, but Blackwell pursued him anyway, throwing acid in his face, after shouting “Why did you invade my country?" Charged with multiple counts, Blackwell is a reminder of the danger of "us vs. them" behavior. It’s human nature to see “us” and “them,” but nurture can weaken or deepen those divisions. If we want to limit the danger, we must understand how “us vs. them” comes about.
Cognitive scientist Joshua Greene argues in Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, that the first step in our maturation is defining "me" as different than "you," something children do as they grow. Later, the "you's" we're most connected with become "us" – family, social groups - who we differentiate from everyone else ("them"). Anthropologist Robert Dunbar's research suggests the largest group we can get to know on a personal basis is about 150 people, the limit of our brain's capacity to manage social relationships. Beyond this natural limit, tribalism can result from how we relate to "them."
The biological ability to see "them" appears early. Phyllis Katz, at the University of Colorado, studied black and white children. At six months, before culture had an impact, babies spent more time looking at photos of people whose race differed from their parents, sensing they were somehow not like the people they knew.
Our brains also respond quickly and emotionally to people who are "different." In 50 milliseconds, before reason is engaged, the amygdala (in the brain's emotional center) reacts to other-race faces. It also quickly groups them, subconsciously, by gender and social status.
Oxytocin, released by the nervous system, strengthens social bonding with those we define as "us." Yet, as neuroscientist and MacArthur Genius Fellowship recipient Robert Sapolsky notes (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst), oxytocin can "make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic" when dealing with "them."
What nature primes our brains to do, nurture can deepen or ameliorate. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) demonstrates the power of cultural learning. In the IAT, participants must rapidly associate words (e.g. pleasant, unpleasant) with representations (e.g. faces, names) of people who differ by race, gender, age, sexual preference and religion. Time does not permit logical analysis. For most of us, the associations of positive words with people who are like “us” is done faster than with people who are part of “them.”
Kinship is a significant cultural determinant of how we act toward “us” and “them.” In one study, subjects were asked whether they would save a person or a dog in the path of an onrushing bus. The closer in kinship, the more likely the person would be saved. For a sibling, only 1 percent saved the dog; for a distant cousin, 16 percent saved the dog; for a foreigner, it was 26 percent.
There are many ways culture can lead us unto “us vs. them” behavior. In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott wanted to help her children understand prejudice. She first designated all those with blue eyes the "superior" group, treating them with praise and attention, which was withheld from those with brown eyes. The next week, she reversed the pattern. In both cases, the favored group ("us") got bossy, arrogant, and treated "them" badly.
Authority figures, family, friends, co-workers, and others who are part of “us” can nurture distrust of “them.” As Lt. Cable said in South Pacific, “you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.” That teaching is often deliberate, as we witness with hate groups but also on media platforms that thrive on generating anger.
"Us vs. them" behavior can be so subtle we discount that we do it. In one study, a research subject pretends an injury during an English soccer match. He gets more help if wearing the home team's sweatshirt than one from the opposing team. As Sapolsky recounts, in laboratory economic games, people are more trusting and generous with those in their group, even when told their group's composition is arbitrary. In another experiment, cooperation was greater within "my group," even when that group shared nothing more than being similar in the number of dots members estimated to be in a picture.
While the power of nature and nurture is strong, it is not destiny. History, including our own personal experience, is filled with examples of helping "them." We are a prosocial species, capable of great empathy. In Part 2, we'll explore how to bridge the divide that "us vs. them" can create.
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