Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

People are designed to become experts in other humans. Berreby explains, “The basic structure of a mammal brain has not changed that much over evolutionary time, and primate brains are very similar” (118). People first develop the codebook to observe hands, faces, and other things. We develop the codebook to see other people’s minds later. It takes us a few years to even realize people are more than just their bodies—“that there are minds moving the bodies” (118). Other animals do not have this code for understanding minds. We use this code to interpret the minds of others—to deduce what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It tells us “the actions of other people are about something […] that thoughts and feelings are better explanations than the actions you can literally see” (120).

People on the autism spectrum lack this mindreading code. It is difficult for them to navigate the world of interpersonal connections and social interactions. Berreby explains, “Not being able to read the codes for other minds means not being able to read the signals that pass effortlessly among other people” (121). They cannot interpret unspoken social cues and elements of communication, such as tone, intonation, and social rules. Their interactions are “full of meaningless, random, unrelated noises and signs that other people read as related signs of a coherent something” (122). Because they can’t receive these signals, they cannot transmit them, which makes their communication strange and difficult to interpret. The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen termed this condition “mindblindness.”

Humans are also “kind” readers. We use kind-reading to sort others into categories and groupings. Kind-reading answers the questions “What is this person? What type does she belong to? What knowledge about human kinds can I bring to this encounter to help me understand it?” (123-24). We mind-read individuals. It requires attention, detailed knowledge, and preliminary information. Kind-reading requires less knowledge of individual people and utilizes “person construal” to categorize others and ourselves. Like mind reading, people who lack the kind-reading code suffer socially. “Misidentification syndromes” such as Capgras syndrome “are instances in which some part of the chain that links perceptions, thoughts, and feelings has broken” (126). These arise from brain injuries and can result in a variety of conditions including belief that people aren’t real and inability to recognize their own selves. The physical nature of these syndromes means the codes depend on specialized and dedicated brain circuits. Berreby concludes, “If a particular way of perceiving, thinking, or feeling has its own mental apparatus, it should be found in everyone, localized in the brain, fast, and not under conscious control” (127).

Humans have a mental code for groups, which determines when multiple people should be seen as an entity rather than as individuals. Our mind-reading code responds to signals even when they aren’t transmitted by minds (or humans). Our code similarly responds to signals communicating multiple people acting as one entity. Like other codes, this code has rules: obvious, visible similarity; common objective, direction, or “fate;” synchronicity or group coordination; efficient information-sharing. Each signal indicates a grouping of people is one entity rather than separate individuals. Berreby states, “When people are arranged to seem similar […] then they satisfy your mind’s syntax for a thing made of people. That prompts you, looking on, to feel those people are acting as a single being” (132).

In 1922 the journalist Walter Lippman coined the term “stereotype” as an oversimplified, often secondhand generalization that its holder imagines applies to every member of a human-kind group. Psychologists have since studied the contrast between what people claim to believe and more accurate measurements. The psychologist Gordon Allport learned, “Some stereotypes […] were complete falsehoods; others were based on a ‘kernel of truth,’ but all were errors” (136). Stereotypes operate subconsciously and often contradict stated beliefs: Americans favor white over black and male over female, even among subjects with stated commitments to equality. Berreby explains, “Coding is triggered by messages that go right past the rational parts of the mind. And if they’re evoked that way, they’re probably created that way too […] the process is automatic” (139). 

Memories are the convergence of disparate information types: “They glue together different codes, the results of fusing signals for sights, sounds, body states, and emotions” (141). Much of this convergence occurs in the brain’s temporal lobes, where differing information is related. Each temporal lobe connection is a potential memory, but only connections the mind’s codes determine are important become memories. Those codes usually describe a physical or emotional state. Emotions like fear and grief create “‘flashbulb memories:’ intense recollections of the sights and sounds that happened to converge on us at the same time as the awful emotions” (142). Flashbulb memories can be inaccurate or subsequently revised, but they are strong. Humans possess both short-term and long-term memory. Temporal lobe removal eliminates short-term memory.

The brain is not divided into isolated areas performing specific functions, as was once thought. All “aspects of the self are comingled” (144) in the brain. Attempts to regionalize brain functions suffer from two flaws: (1) regional definitions are imprecise; (2) regions cannot be linked to specific emotions, which simultaneously involve multiple regions. Berreby summarizes, “[P]eople do have an emotional brain, but it does not consist of a neatly separate emotion sector distinct from regions dedicated to perceiving, acting, or thinking” (145). A description of the physical brain does not sync with labels for mental experiences. The brain as a physical organ must be analyzed with different categories than the mind. “Folk-psychological” concepts like memory, perception, thought, and emotion are distinct from physical elements of the brain, such as neurons, amygdala, and neural codes. The concepts are incompatible.

Individual mental processes span the entire brain’s network. Human-kind circuit maps are not divided into isolated regions performing specific tasks. Scientists researching the human-kind circuit study how “the brain links concepts of human kinds to bodily states” (148). The human-kind circuit permits categorizing people to affect our physical bodies. The brain has a “‘law of reciprocity:’ if region A has nerve fibers connecting it to region B, then B will have its own, separate pathway back to A” (149). This enables complex mental processes with multiple brain functions working in conjunction. For example, thoughts require emotions and emotions require thoughts: They function together. Human kinds are more than mere categories: They are guides, defining perception and informing action. Three mental processes are required for the mind to act as a guide: “classifying things, learning rules, and evaluating oneself” (150). These processes occur in the amygdala, hippocampus, temporal lobes, visual processing regions, somatosensory centers, prefrontal cortex, ventromedial cortex, dorsolateral cortex, cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex.

If a brain code is specialized, damage to an area of the brain may eliminate the ability to interpret that code while the brain maintains the ability to interpret other codes. Conversely, someone can experience severe impairment in unrelated regions of the brain while preserving the ability to interpret the specialized code. This is observed in amygdala damage, which results in high-functioning people unable to form human-kind groupings. People with amygdala damage “feel that everyone is ‘my kind,’” and sociopaths feel that “no one is ‘my kind’” (153). They lose the ability to interpret human-kind codes but maintain all other brain functionality. Among sociopaths, “what it has removed, it seems, is the code for literal and metaphorical kindness” (154).

Kind-sight enables people to learn and follow rules for treating people in a manner their society deems appropriate “given the kind of person they are, and the kind we are, in the situation we meet them” (154). Such rules are complicated and require constant alterations for changing situations. Sociopaths and others unable to interpret human-kind codes possess the human-kind map, but lack the rules required to use it.