The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (24 page)

US VERSUS THEM

In his 1954 book
The Nature of Prejudice
, Gordon Allport pointed out the natural inclination of human beings to divide themselves into homogeneous groups, into “us” versus “them” categories. He regarded this social categorization as a normal extension of our ability to form and use categories about everything. Just as we group together chairs and see them as different from tables, the same categorization process is applied to groups of human beings. Allport's insights have been confirmed and extended by social psychologists over the past half century.
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Categorization is a fundamental aspect of cognition. Both human and nonhuman minds organize objects, events, and life forms into groups based on their perceptual similarity. Categories simplify our ability to cope with a complex world by allowing us to ignore differences that do not make a difference. Instead of treating every object, event, or plant or animal that we encounter as a unique individual, it is easier to treat each as a member of a category. In this way we can quickly and automatically perceive, understand,
and respond to the things we encounter. Categories thus guide our interactions with the environment with a minimum of cognitive effort. So it should not surprise us that we categorize other members of our species into easily identifiable groups on the basis of perceptual characteristics. Skin color, facial features, and hair texture provide means for lumping together individuals into “racial” categories, just as sex characteristics divide us into male and female gender categories.

Knowing who belongs to one's group—who is familiar—is a basic cognitive function adapted for survival. The unfamiliar is inherently risky even to the point of being potentially life threatening. The amygdala buried in the limbic system serves as an early warning device for novelty, precisely so that attention can be mobilized to alert the mind to a potential danger and to prepare for a potential response of flight or fight. Categorization of other human beings as either familiar members of the in-group or novel members of the out-group provided a simple cue for triggering the amygdala. Neuroimaging of the amygdala reveals greater activity when faces of the out-group are presented, even when the racial identity was irrelevant to the task.
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For example, when asked to judge the gender of a series of faces, Caucasian Americans revealed heightened amygdala activations when viewing African American faces. This was especially true for
White individuals whose implicit or unconscious racial attitudes were biased against Blacks, though it is interesting to note that their explicit or conscious attitudes were unrelated.

The same finding occurs when Whites categorize Black faces according to their age. Whether it is age or gender, both judgments aim to put someone quickly into a social category. As Allport observed, this kind of quick sizing up of another person is useful for getting a fast assessment of how to interact with the person—whether to approach or avoid at the most basic level. But it is also possible to perceive the faces of other human beings with the goal of seeing in what way the person is unique as an individual rather than as a member of a category. When the study was repeated with a goal of individuation, the amygdala was not activated at an elevated level when Whites perceived Black faces.
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To encourage individuation, the participants in the study were asked to decide whether the person viewed would like or dislike a particular vegetable, such as asparagus, broccoli, carrot, and so on. This judgment
required one to think about individual personality conveyed by the facial features. It was not a simple categorization of gender or age, but a complex elaboration of a person's likes and dislikes. The goal held in working memory thus inhibited an otherwise automatic activation of the amygdala.

The capacity of modern human beings to use symbols, including words, in their thinking facilitates divisions into us versus them. Flags as symbols of nationalism are an illustration. When the American flag, for example, is desecrated by members of an out-group, it is regarded as an attack on the nation by those with strong feelings of loyalty and patriotism. It is not just a piece of cloth. An attack on the flag is a symbolic attack on the in-group. Logos, uniforms, emblems, or pins worn on clothing serve similar symbolic functions of strengthening feelings for members of one group. This is why we have school colors, for example. Like the arbitrary nature of words in a language, the symbols of group identification are similarly arbitrary or at least accidents of history. The Democratic Donkey and the Republican Elephant certainly have a history, but it is hard to argue that they are logical choices. Similarly, it appears arbitrary to associate blue states with Democratic control and red states with Republican control.

Symbols alone can be used to foster a feeling of group identification and loyalty. Social psychologists can study the us-versus-them phenomenon in a controlled laboratory experiment by forming novel groups that have nothing to do with real-life group identity. Members are randomly selected and then given a common symbolic identity, such as a name or a symbol to wear, and the symbol drives the two groups apart. This effect comes so naturally to human beings that it can readily be seen even in children. For example, in one study grade-school children were randomly assigned to one of two groups that differed only in tee-shirt color.
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Half of the students were selected to wear a red shirt and half a blue shirt. At the outset, students in the red group were no different in their attitudes or views of each other, because they were after all randomly assigned to one group or the other. However, over time the symbol of shirt color was perceptually salient and became a basis for group identification as the teachers used the color groups to organize the classes in terms of their activities, bulletin boards, and the like. After several weeks of the experiment, the “Reds” came to see themselves as more similar to one another and different from the “Blues,”
who in turn showed the same in-group bias. Each group evaluated its own competence and performance as superior to the other group.

In Nazi Germany, the out-group Poles and Jews were demonized through language. Through a deliberate program of propaganda, the state described Jews as less than human:
Untermenschen.
Using the symbols of graphic posters, Jews were identified as vermin who deserved the scorn of society as much as rats in the sewer. Yet the Nazi definition of “the other” as a biological category was doomed to failure, as even science of the 1930s had begun to hint. Although DNA had not yet been discovered and genome comparison was unknown, German scientists knew they had a problem on their hands. To separate Aryans from Jews required the explicit use of symbols because the biological phenotypic distinctions were so shaky. As Mark Mazower described in
Hitler's Empire:

The “Breslau school” believed in tracking blue eyes and blond hair, but Otto Reche and Fritz Lenz—two luminaries of academic racism—thought physical characteristics were crude markers since most individuals were themselves mixed racially. For Hans Günther, a popularizer of Nazi science, even Germany contained strains of all the major European races—the Nordic, East Baltic, Alpine and Dinaric—as well as fortunately small quantities of Mediterranean and Inner Asian blood…. A few heretics solved the problem by matching up the categories of race and
Volk
by talking about a “German race,” but this was criticized by most academics as unscientific…. All of this spelled enormous confusion, regarding not only the Germans but also the Jews.
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It was difficult to tell Germans from Poles from appearance, so difficult in fact that the Nazi regime forced Poles to wear markers, such as a violet letter
P
, so that the Germans could avoid fraternizing with them. Similarly, those of Jewish descent were required to wear a yellow Star of David as a means of identification. A truly perverse result of our symbolic capacities is our rendering them in the service of racist ideology. Without the help of such symbols, the pogrom would have been hobbled for lack of convenient ways of identifying “the other.”

Language provides a simple dichotomy for keeping straight our in-group bias. We label the in-group as good and the out-group as bad. The Implicit
Association Test (IAT) capitalizes on this labeling process as a way to identify the degree to which people are biased toward or against various groups. For example, in the IAT for race, people make rapid judgments about pictures of faces and words. Half are White faces and half are Black. Half of the words are words associated with positive meanings (e.g., joy, love, peace, happy) while the other half are words associated with unpleasant meanings (e.g., agony, terrible, horrible, evil). The test measures how quickly one can process the faces and words when Black faces are paired with good versus bad compared with when White faces are similarly paired. The idea is to detect whether there is a natural association that speeds processing when one race or the other is paired with good versus bad. This test can be used to detect racial bias against either Blacks or Whites. For example, bias against African Americans would be detected if Black (but not White) faces are responded to more slowly when they are paired with good words compared with bad words. The person taking the test is typically unaware that his or her responses are fifty, one hundred, or two hundred milliseconds slower when Blacks are linked to good compared to when they are linked to bad. Test takers may not even consciously report any racial prejudice at all. Compared to IAT measures, self-reported measures of racial attitudes turn out to be poorer predictors of actual interracial behavior.
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This is not generally the case, for biases in attitudes and behavior regarding consumer products or political preferences are readily predictable by just asking people what they think.

The language used to derogate other human beings serves to reify the abstraction of “the other” into a concrete subhuman or demon. Words allow us to hold concepts in verbal working memory that can be reflected upon, judged, and despised. The words themselves amplify the prejudice by becoming an integral part of one's thoughts and interpretations. A member of an out-group can become more than just another disliked human being; hateful language can reify the out-group member such that he or she comes to be seen as truly a monster. Seeing the target of one's prejudice as just another human being is hard when the mental image is shrouded in hateful words that are so easily brought to mind. Even at the conclusion of the most horrific violence the world had yet known, the delegates participating in the 1919 peace settlement at Versailles, which ended World War I, denigrated the peoples
of whole regions of the world. The racist language called for colonizing lands in the Middle East, Africa, the subcontinent of Asia, and the Pacific on the grounds that the inhabitants were not yet capable of independence.

Legal and political theorists talked about tiers of sovereignty and they distinguished between “civilized,” “barbarian” and “savage” people&. At Versailles the victor powers had bestowed sovereignty upon the “civilized” peoples of eastern Europe and created a set of “New States” there, subjected only to the conditional oversight of the minority rights regime. In the Middle East, they had established League mandates to usher the Arab peoples towards independence and full statehood, a process that brought freedom (of a kind) to Egypt and Iraq before the outbreak of the war (though not to Syria or Lebanon). Only among the “savages” of Africa and the Pacific did they justify colonial rule into the indefinite future.
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The virulence of prejudice is amplified into hatred and violence because of the interactive effects of the modern ensemble of mental parts. When racial prejudice drives human beings to find in the out-group a scapegoat for all the problems of a nation, hatred and horrific violence can follow. What begins as apprehension and fear of “the other” can end in dehumanizing and even murdering entire populations of human beings in acts of genocide, as human history keeps reminding us. The intensity of intergroup conflict in human beings is a direct consequence of the very mental capabilities that set us above other species. The planning of revenge for past grievances would not be possible without the executive functions of human working memory. Only human beings are capable of symbolically representing the in-group and the out-group, through flags, coats of arms, and other visual images, and of characterizing the good of the in-group and the evil of the out-group in the abstractions of language. Only human beings remember the atrocities encountered earlier in their lives by mentally traveling backward in time to reenact the pain all over again. Through oral and written history, our unique capacity for language can keep alive hurtful memories possibly indefinitely and certainly for centuries. Only human beings can commemorate the dead and keep alive the hate through the symbols of monuments, paintings, texts, and other external forms of memory. In short, the mental ensemble of the modern mind is the reason
for the culture that sets us free from a purely animal existence and, at the same time, ensnares us in conflict and violence far exceeding any found elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

The usual causal inferences ground out by the left-hemisphere interpreter are integral to racial prejudice. The interpreter is biased in its own way. It tends to see the causes underlying the self's behavior as changeable and situation specific. By contrast, the interpreter assigns explanations to the behavior of other people based on permanent and pervasive factors, such as the fixed, immutable traits of biology and personality. If you cut off another car in heavy traffic on the freeway, your interpreter explains that it was an accident, a temporary lapse of attention, one never to be repeated. But when another person cuts you off in the same situation, the interpreter infers without hesitation that the other driver is a lunatic, has an antisocial personality, or should have his or her license revoked. Although we attribute to our own behaviors some transient, situational cause, the interpreter sees nothing but unvarying, permanent traits as the cause of other people's behaviors. This
fundamental attribution error
—as social psychologists label it—will prompt one to see members of the out-group as bad people because of their biology and permanent disposition, not because of the circumstances in which they temporarily find themselves.