Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Communities function through shared rules. People who cannot interpret or transmit a community’s rules cannot join; they are outsiders, foreigners in their own society. Some humans are “locked into foreignness by practices that give them no way to escape” (254), while others’ inability to interpret relevant codes naturally locks them into foreignness (persons on the autism spectrum, sociopaths, etc.). Foreignness has negative mental effects. Berreby explains, “Being seen as human means being seen as someone who knows what to do, who can give and receive love and hate, respect and disrespect. If you can’t do that, you’re not there” (255). Family members unable to transmit proper codes feel like strangers, while actual strangers who send the right signals feel like family. Inability to escape stigma affects people physically. Such effects pass to future generations: “[A] stigmatized mother is under stress, and a stressed mother is more likely to give birth to babies with physical and emotional difficulties” (257).

Chemical and electrical signals travel between the brain and the rest of the body. These signals shape paths they frequently travel. Pathways to frequently felt emotions become easier for signals to travel while pathways to infrequently felt emotions become difficult. Years of stigma reduces pathways, making it difficult for people to achieve positive emotions. It becomes increasingly easy to achieve negative emotions for which clear pathways have formed. Thoughts trigger the “fight-or-flight” response, not objects or events. Our mental codes for stress are bottom-up, not top-down—not governed by rational thought. People stress over non-imminent, imagined uncertainties. Berreby elaborates, “[Y]our stress response is not guiding your ‘upper’ mental capacity. Quite the opposite. The part of your mind that imagines tomorrow […] is often guiding your stress response” (259). Put succinctly, “Most animals feel stress when they sense danger. Humans feel stress when they imagine danger” (259). Stress is a balancing of immediate and long-term needs. Situations dictate which to prioritize and brain chemicals like adrenaline aid this process. Such processes are beneficial in short-term emergencies but are harmful if prolonged.

Stigma prolongs stress responses and causes many harmful physical effects. Research on the health of people who are poor versus people who merely perceive themselves to be poor in relation to others shows this. People who perceive themselves to be low in status in relation to their peers suffer stress-related health problems more frequently than those who are objectively lower in status, but do not perceive themselves to be. Wealthy people in poor countries have better health than poor people in wealthy countries, even though poor people in wealthy countries have better access to medicine and hospitals and are in fact wealthier than wealthy people in poor countries. Berreby states, “[P]eople’s perception of their status, not poverty or lack of education, is the important element” (263). Stigma causes “social death.” Psychological therapy sometimes speaks to the same “Us-Them” code in a way that signals “Us” group membership. 

Societies forcibly convert their members’ human kinds for many reasons, not always for stigmatizing purposes. Teams, militaries, and professions utilize human-kind conversion techniques like manipulating physical appearance (shaving one’s head when joining the military), name (ascribing a number and/or nickname when joining a sports team), or schedule (office hours, seminars, work events). Such manipulations produce stigma when unwelcome and label someone “Them,” but have the opposite effect when used to embrace someone in a welcome group. The purpose of such measures is to alter the person’s emotions to promote in-group loyalty and establish precedence over old groups. Because emotions don’t respond to reason, a person’s experiences must be shaped to promote in-group loyalty. Berreby explains, “That may be why the features of training and initiation, both traditional and modern, have recognizable parallels to the creation of slaves” (273). The mind learns its familiar codes no longer apply and external pressure forces learning new codes to achieve “Us” feeling. The mind does not distinguish between good and evil purposes; it simply wants to be “Us” and not “Them.”

Evolution did not program humans for the “pecking orders” that other animals use. Primitive human societies were egalitarian, and the mechanisms of such societies preserved egalitarianism. Pecking orders negatively affect all members of human societies. Members at the bottom understandably suffer, but members at the top also suffer more stress defending their position. Berreby elaborates, “What is especially stressful to a troop of primates—be they baboons, monkeys, or people—is the uncertainty of testing to establish a pecking order” (275). This is a primate stress inducer called “lack of control over life circumstances.” Inability to decipher life’s rules stresses humans. Stigma works in conjunction with pecking orders and lack of control over life circumstances. Stigma communicates the stigmatized are stuck at the bottom of a pecking order unable to advance because they either do not know the rules, or the rules are beyond their grasp. The cure is “we-feeling.”

Non-stigmatized groups often empathize with stigmatized groups and embrace elements of forced stigma as “cool.” When this occurs, stigmatizers push back: “You get in trouble, because authority wants to keep control of the meaning of these signs of stigma” (178). Stigmatizers aren’t afraid people adopting the symbols of stigma will join the stigmatized group (they wouldn’t want to), but rather that the symbols of stigma will lose their power. Stigmatizing not only affects onlookers, but also the minds of the stigmatized. Stigma becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. If societal rules prevent others from remapping stigmatized people, the stigmatized can manipulate their own human-kind codes to “recast themselves and their kind” (280). Further, “[i]f a stigmatized person can’t redefine himself as a member of some other kind, then he redefines the kind in which he is trapped” (281). Such measures cannot free someone from stigma: “True freedom from stigma does not depend on simply changing the terms applied to your human kind; rather, it consists in your freedom to ignore that human kind in favor of other categories for people” (281).