The odds of you marrying someone with a different political orientation are also down. The percentage of people who have friends with different political viewpoints is decreasing. TJ: True, but there’s a lot of research suggesting our various identities are lining up more and more, with liberals and conservatives shopping at different stores, watching different movies and television shows, etc. Join us to bridge differences in your work, community, and life. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into “us” and “them,” it’s incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an “us” and who is a “them” at any given moment.įree online, starting October 5, 2021: Learn research-based strategies for connecting across divides. That’s depressing, but the key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. That tells you that “us and them” is a fundamental fault line in our brains. A hormone like oxytocin makes you nicer to “us” and crappier to “them.” What hormones are good at is magnifying things that are already there. Our views about things are driven by implicit (unconscious) processes. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds. Primates are hard-wired for us/them dichotomies. Being disgusted by someone’s personal behavior-the way “they” do stuff-is a much easier entrée to hating them than disagreeing with their views on the trade deficit. The easiest symbols that we grab on to in deciding if someone is an “us” or a “them” are visceral ones. Robert Sapolsky: Absolutely, in a very primate kind of way. First of all, is that an accurate term for the sorting into opposing camps that’s going on today? In a recent telephone interview, he discussed the biological basis of our current political fault lines. Sapolsky has spent much of his career in Kenya, studying baboons (among other primates), and he uses that knowledge to put human behavior into a broader perspective. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.
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