So when you look at us—us as humans, as apes, as primates, as mammals—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 and more charitable.
And it’s obvious that if you just, like, spritzed 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/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 the scale of milliseconds, a twentieth of a second, your brain is already responding
differently to an Us versus Them.
Okay, so collectively this is depressing as hell.
Oh my god, we are hardwired to inevitably be awful to Thems, and Thems along all sorts
of disturbing lines of: "Oh, if only we could overcome these Us and Them dichotomies!
Oh no, are we hardwired to divide the world along lines of race and ethnicity and nationality
and all those disturbing things?"
And what becomes clear is, when you look closely is: it is virtually inevitable that we divide
the world into Us’s and Thems and don’t like Thems very much and don’t treat them
well.
But we are incredibly easily manipulated as to who counts as an Us and who counts as a
Them.
And those fault lines that we view as, “Oh my god, how ancient can you get?” that say,
somebody of another race evokes limbic responses in us, commensurate with they are a Them,
they respond, they motivate automatic responses—"Oh my god, is that just the basic fault line?"
And then you do something like have faces of the same race versus other race, and either
they are or aren’t wearing a baseball cap with your favorite team’s logo on it, and
you completely redefine who's an Us.
Us is people who like the Yankees and Them are Red Sox fans.
And suddenly you’re processing, within milliseconds, what damn baseball cap they have, and race
is being completely ignored.
“Oh my god, we are inevitably hardwired to make really distressing Us/Them...”
We’re manipulated within seconds as to who counts as an Us and a Them.
Good news with that: we can manipulate us out of some of our worst Us/Them dichotomies
and re-categorize people.
Bad news: we could be manipulated by all sorts of ideologues out there as to deciding that
people who seem just like us "really aren’t.
They’re really so different that they count as a Them.”
Okay, so a fabulous study 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 a 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 don’t...
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 the Netherlands, Dirk I think, 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 German name—oh yeah, World War II, that’s
right, that was a problem—or someone with a typically Muslim name.
So now they’re choosing whether to save five by pushing Dirk onto the track or Otto
or Mahmoud and, in general, give them those names and there’s no difference in how people
would rate them if they were anonymous.
Give people oxytocin, where they don’t know that they’ve gotten it—control group has
just placebo spritzed up their nose—give people oxytocin and, kumbaya, you are far
less likely to push Dirk onto the track, and you are now far more likely to push good old
Otto or good old Mahmoud onto the rails there.
And you are more likely to sacrifice an out-group member to save five, and you are less likely
to sacrifice an in-group member.
All you’ve done there is exaggerate the Us/Them divide with that.