Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [28]
Brewer’s little girl was already dividing the world, as everyone does, into us and them. Us is the most fundamental social category in the brain’s organizing system, and it’s hardwired. Even the collective pronouns us and them are powerful emotional signals. In one experiment, in which participants believed their verbal skills were being tested, nonsense syllables such as xeh, yof, laj, or wuh were randomly paired with either an in-group word (us, we, or ours), an out-group word (them, they, or theirs), or, for a control measure, another pronoun (such as he, hers, or yours). Everyone then had to rate the syllables on how pleasant or unpleasant they were. You might wonder why anyone would have an emotional feeling toward a nonsense word like yof or think wuh is cuter than laj. Yet participants liked the nonsense syllables more when they had been linked with in-group words than with any other word.26 Not one of them guessed why; not one was aware of how the words had been paired.
As soon as people have created a category called us, however, they invariably perceive everybody else as not-us. The specific content of us can change in a flash: It’s us sensible midwesterners against you flashy coastal types; it’s us Prius owners against the rest of you gas guzzlers; it’s us Boston Red Sox fans against you Los Angeles Angels fans (to pick a random example that happens to describe the two of us during baseball season). “Us-ness” can be manufactured in a minute in the laboratory, as Henri Tajfel and his colleagues demonstrated in a classic experiment with British schoolboys.27 Tajfel showed the boys slides with varying numbers of dots on them and asked the boys to guess how many dots there were. He arbitrarily told some of them that they were overestimators and others that they were underestimators, and then asked all the boys to work on another task. In this phase, they had a chance to give points to other boys identified as overestimators or underestimators. Although each boy worked alone in his cubicle, almost every single one assigned more points to boys he thought were like him, an overestimator or an underestimator. As the boys emerged from their rooms, the other kids asked them “Which were you?” The answers received cheers from those like them and boos from the others.
Obviously, certain categories of us are more crucial to our identities than the kind of car we drive or the number of dots we can guess on a slide—gender, sexuality, religion, politics, ethnicity, and nationality, for starters. Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity, and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles floating in a random universe. Therefore, we will do what it takes to preserve these attachments. Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism—the belief that our own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others—aids survival by strengthening our bonds to our primary social groups and thus increasing our willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them. When things are going well, people feel pretty tolerant of other cultures and religions—they even feel pretty tolerant of the other sex!—but when they are angry, anxious, or threatened, the default position is to activate their blind spots. We have the human qualities of intelligence and deep emotions, but theyare dumb, they are crybabies, they don’t know the meaning of love, shame, grief, or remorse.28