The science behind ‘us vs. them’ | Dan Shapiro, Robert Sapolsky & more | Big Think

The science behind ‘us vs. them’
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From politics to every day life, humans have a tendency to form social groups that are defined in part by how they differ from other groups.

Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, author Dan Shapiro, and others explore the ways that tribalism functions in society, and discuss how—as social creatures—humans have evolved for bias.

But bias is not inherently bad. The key to seeing things differently, according to Beau Lotto, is to "embody the fact" that everything is grounded in assumptions, to identify those assumptions, and then to question them.
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TRANSCRIPT:

0:00 Intro
0:30 Robert Sapolsky on the hardwiring of social creatures and the “runaway trolley problem.
4:53 Alexander Todorov on typicality and how we perceive faces.
6:46 Dan Shapiro on when tribe loyalty supersedes logic.
8:00 Amy Chua on the importance of grouping our identities.
8:47 Dividing into groups is inevitable,says Sapolsky, but how we divide is fluid.
10:44 Beau Lotto and Todorov discuss how our brains evolved for assumptions and the psychological functions of first impressions.

Our brain evolved to take what is meaningless to make it meaningful. Everything you do right now is grounded in your assumptions. Not sometimes, but all the time.

We are kind of hardwired to figure out the intentions of other people.

We turn the world into us's and thems. And we don't like the thems very much and are often really awful to them.

That's the challenge of our tribalistic world that we're in right now.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: When you look at some of the most appalling realms of our behavior, much of it has to do with the fact that social organisms are really, really hardwired to make a basic dichotomy about the social world, which is those organisms who count as us's and those who count as thems. And this is virtually universal among humans. And this is virtually universal among all sorts of social primates that have aspects of social structures built around separate social groupings, us's and thems. We turn the world into us's and thems and we don't like the thems very much and are often really awful to them. And the us's, we exaggerate how wonderful and how generous and how affiliative and how just like siblings they are to us. We divide the world into us and them. And one of the greatest ways of seeing just biologically how real this fault line is is there's this hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin is officially the coolest, grooviest hormone on Earth because what everybody knows is it enhances mother infant bonding, and it enhances pair bonding in couples. And it makes you more trusting and empathic and emotionally expressive and better at reading expressions, more charitable. And it's obvious that if you just spritz the oxytocin up everyone's noses on this planet, it would be the Garden of Eden the next day. Oxytocin promotes prosocial behavior, until people look closely. And it turns out, oxytocin does all those wondrous things only for people who you think of as an us, as an in-group member. It improves in-group favoritism, in-group parochialism. What does it do to individuals who you consider a them? It makes you crappier to them. More preemptively, aggressive, less cooperative in an economic game. What oxytocin does is enhance this us and them divide. So that along with other findings, the classic lines of us versus them along the lines of race, of sex, of age, of socioeconomic class, your brain processes these us-them differences on a scale of milliseconds. A 20th of a second, your brain is already responding differently to an us versus them.

So fabulous studies showing this, this double-edged quality to oxytocin. and this was a study done by a group in the Netherlands. And what they did was they took Dutch University student volunteers and they gave them classic philosophy problem, the runaway trolley problem, is it okay to sacrifice one person to save five? Runaway trolley. Can you push this big beefy guy onto the track who gets squashed by the trolley but that slows it down so that five people tied to the track... Standard problem in philosophy, utilitarianism, ends justifies means. All of that. So you give people the scenario and people have varying opinions. And now you give them the scenario where the person you push onto the track has a name. And either it's a standard name from Netherlands, Dirk. I think he was a Pieter, which, this is like a meat and potatoes Netherlandish name or a name from either of two groups that evoke lots of xenophobic hostility among people from the Netherlands. Someone with a typically...

[timeisup]

Robert Sapolsky touches on this topic extensively in his lectures at Stanford and various interviews.

[felonious_c]

All these videos on cognitive bias are really making an impact on my day to day interactions. It's hard to be unbiased, much harder in practice than on paper.

[peetsnort]

During my younger years I have been arrogant.
Now 61 i realise that we all need each other whether we want it or not.
Every scew pot has a lid and we're all cogs in the clock of life

[PBAmygdala]

Oh, it's DAN Shapiro. Dan.

The alternative would've been too ironic.

[FutureMindset]

This is really important to understand, especially during our age where the political divide is absolutely insane.

So much of what we do and think is determined by our primitive instincts that evolved to historically aid in our survival. Humans have survived in small tribes and groups and been hostile to members of opposing tribes because it was essential to our survival and while these conditions don't necessarily apply to our world, the instincts have remained.

[arthurwieczorek]

"Nothing interesting begins with knowing, it begins with not knowing", that is, a question or query line.

[heavymeddle]

I have a story about racism. I'm Swedish, 49, so it's safe to say that I've had my fair share of immigrants and racism around me. Now I live in Thailand since 8-9 years and now I'm the different one. I'm not a person. I am the "farang". People stare and talk when they think I don't see. Some don't even give a rats about that. Maybe you think that I'm full of shit but I'm not making it up. I experience that every day. Its not easy. Drives me insane sometimes. And I have the choice to go back. The immigrants in Sweden don't have that option. Long story slightly shorter... I'm going to think twice when I look down upon people from different parts of the world from the day I get back home. Really eye opening. And I've never been intentionally racist. Everyone should get a dose of racism before they look down upon any other brother or sister. That's what we are. No matter religion or colour. Sounds clicheish... I know. But... 😊

[cassieoz]

As soon as you label someone 'other', your brain sees 'lesser', and that justifies your bad behaviour to them.

[Mussetrussen]

Well we might be very quick to judge based on first impressions, but as Daniel Kahneman showed us in Thinking fast and slow, knowing that this is how we work, we can be skeptical of our own first judgements, and think again. We can choose to ignore our first impulses, get more frontal lobe involved, and make more well though through decisions and actions. Acting like this, and continuing to get better at this, for me, feels like a sort of will-driven personal evolution.

[Lhorez]

I thought one of the speakers was Ben Shapiro. That would have blown my mind... and broken the irony meter.

[I---I]

This was by far the best piece that I’ve seen from this channel.

[stheday]

Modern world requires different tribes to get along. Peace and prosperity depend on it. The ideas in this video are probably more important than anything else at this point in human history.

[AceofDlamonds]

Possibly the most important topic or set of topics on Big Think. The ability to recognize your own biases and innate tendencies is something no other living being does, and it is key to creating a better world.

[medhachakraborty]

We criticise others of being evil while we nourish devils within ourselves .

[hifibrony]

Seventeen astonishingly brilliant and informative minutes.

[jaq]

This actually emphasises the importance of representation and mindful portrayal of others, particularly in the media or in books etc which some people are actually fighting against.

[bharatapat]

The summary:
Technically we are always associating people like us (in-groups) and them (outgroups). This division that we create in the brain is enhanced by Oxytocin in the brain. We become closer to our people and away from others because of it. It's classically seen in many movies where the heroes are always someone like us, living with us and villains are them, the aliens, the non-English speakers, etc.

We tend to like people who look like people around us. Most Indians will like Indian faces more than American faces. Here also we create a sense of us and them while trusting people.
We can be easily manipulated to change who is us and who is them. Example: In general you will likely say Indians are us and Americans are they. Now let's say you like Chennai Super Kings. Then the Americans and Indians who support CSK are us and those who don't are they.


The dividing line is extremely malleable, the good thing is we can have empathy for 'them' because of this, while the bad thing is we can be manipulated to believe who is us and who is them easily.


We are hardwired to judge people at the first look. In absence of information, we make assumptions about things in a fraction of seconds. We can not wait to know if a reptile with sharp teeth has the intention to hurt us or not, we assume it hurts and we act accordingly. But this hardwiring is malleable. We can change our mind when we are safe and have more information about the reptile. In the first instance, Batman's Joker seems evil, but as we learn more about him, we can empathise with him.

[justinkarlin]

Superb video. Oxytocin is not a panacea. Beware the dangers of careless compassion.

[timkemmerling]

What a great compilation of great thinkers. Awesome lecture on social organisation! So much to read up on.

[Calligraphybooster]

The point Prof. Amy Chua brings up is very simple, but significant because branding and algorithems are aiming at molding us into identities we did not even choose ourselves, but seperate us from others.