The Science Behind Us Vs. Them
Presenter:
Dan Shapiro, Robert Sapolsky & More
Time:
17:06
Summary
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.
Transcript
Is our brain evolved to take what is meaningless and make it meaningful? Everything you do right now is grounded in your assumptions. Not sometimes but all the time through yet kind of hardwired to figure out the intentions of other people, we turn the world into us as them's. And we don't like them very much and are often really awful to them. That's the challenge of our tribalistic world that we're in right.
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 hard wired to make a basic dichotomy about the social world, which is those organisms who count as offices and those who count as them's. And this is virtually universal among humans.