53 pages • 1 hour read
David BerrebyUs and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Inventing Tradition in Oklahoma, or What I Did on My Summer Vacation”
In the summer of 1954, the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif conducted a summer camp for 22 fifth graders in Oklahoma that doubled as an experiment on “the birth, life, and death of human-kind feelings” (157). In the mid-20th century, accepted wisdom on “mob violence, war, persecution, prejudice, and genocide” was individual predilection for “death and destruction, which escaped whenever they could, like steam from a cracked boiler” (159). This explanation relies on human depravity to explain societal ills. It ignores an actor’s situation, surroundings, and goals. Modern historians and psychologists believe violent groups “behave much like any other collection of people who come to see themselves as one” (161).
Sherif’s experiment tested his idea that because people’s definitions of human kinds change, “people’s list of essential traits for groups can be changed” (163) with changes in situational or systemic conditions. The traditional view was that human-kind feelings are unalterable elements of a person’s psyche. Sherif reasoned that because stereotypes do change, experiences must affect human-kind beliefs. Sherif concludes that stereotypes are neither a description of the person being stereotyped or merely in the mind of the person stereotyping: Rather, “[w]hat stereotypes really describe is the relationship between those two parties” (164). Berreby explains, “Are stereotypes ‘good statistics about real people?’ Obviously not. Are they, then, fantastic, arbitrary notions? Obviously not. Human kinds emerge from relations between people” (165).
For example, slaves have been subject to similar stereotypes by masters throughout history, whether in ancient Rome, medieval England, or North America. The slaves suffering similar stereotypes are derived from many cultures spanning centuries, as are the masters applying the stereotypes: “The common thread was the relationship of master to slave” (165). Sherif’s observation shows stereotypes are inaccurate and reveals that the human-kind code concerns “facts about how we relate to […] people at the moment we categorize them” (166). The information feeding human-kind codes is about actions, not things.
Sherif conducted an experimental summer camp in Oklahoma with 22 fifth grade boys. Sherif divided the experiment into three stages. In the first stage, two separate groups of boys arrived at the summer camp, each unaware of the others’ presence. Each separate group, upon becoming aware of the other group’s presence, stereotyped the other group. Berreby explains, “To place an unfamiliar person, that code has to begin with what it already knows: the human kinds that are already on its map” (168). Threatened by the unknown group, members of each group engaged in racial stereotypes of the other. When both groups were informed that the other group was the same perceived race and gender, the slurs switched to other common categories for the time: communist, sissy, cheat, baby, and dirty shirt—“every undesirable human kind a ten-year-old white boy could think of in their time and place” (169). Berreby explains, “When it comes to human kinds, all differences are equal: equally minor, because we can find differences so easily between any two people; and equally grave, because once a difference is taken seriously, it has power to alter thoughts and feelings” (170). The boys formed social norms and forced those norms on their members, created traditions and symbols, and altered their behavior to conform to the group. They expressed a desire to view themselves as and be a part of a good-kind, and to avoid membership in a bad-kind.
Sherif then devoted the second week to producing friction between the groups, to sour their bilateral relations. Sherif found that after mild encouragement through competitive tasks, counselors did not need to encourage conflict any further. After 14 days in the camp, “these look-alike boys, all born around the same time, from look-alike households” (173) were enemy tribes. In the third stage of the experiment, Sherif integrated the now enemy tribes to demonstrate the change in situation could influence them to abandon their human-kind beliefs of each other and reform the relationship. Over the course of a week, “Sherif was able to create a reconciliation with no more difficulty than he had created the two tribes and their hostility” (177). Sherif’s experiment shows that human-kind beliefs do not trend positive or negative, but that circumstances influence such beliefs. Berreby summarizes, “[P]eople use identity, not the other way around” (180). Each person’s reality is created by their mind, influenced by their unique notions of human kinds established according to a framework of rules. People can easily manipulate such rules and have throughout history.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Them, We Burn”
Societies transmit regulations on behavior by communicating rules to children, with a morality attached to them. This is how societies teach children the codes for “their people:” “we want them to learn the rules and respect them. We don’t want them to see that the rules don’t always apply” (183). Rules connect mental codes with societal codes and permit people to coexist by establishing a framework for accepted human interaction. We call this “culture.” Cultural rules and exclusivity are a tradeoff: “[Y]our culture excludes experiences that don’t fit, that might teach useful lessons. The compensating gain is that, thanks to your culture, you did not have to figure out the world from scratch” (184).
Through culture, humans achieve shared solutions that individual brains cannot devise. Every culture has different rules, but every culture imposes its rules through child rearing so “the local culture feels right and obvious” (186). Parents create a world in which rules are consistently followed and connected to strong emotions. Strong emotions connote the importance and urgency of rules. Obedience to rules is expressed in terms of “good” and “bad,” attaching morality to the rules and defining who is a “good” kind of person (someone who follows the rules). Berreby elaborates, “[A]ny ethical code automatically leads you to think about an especially important human kind: moral people” (188). The human kind “good people” overlaps with the human kind “our people.” Good people are people who obey the rules of our people, even if the rules are arbitrary and meaningless.
When societies try to enforce stigmatized groups and human-kind stereotypes, “[l]ife is organized in a number of ways to prevent alternative human kinds from forming in anyone’s mind” (191). This is accomplished by attaching morality to benign human-kind traits. Humans connect moral values to food, clothing, music, and other naturally nonmoral things. We do this because of the cultural rules we learned as children. Moral sense functions like other mental codes: “automatic, unconscious, and shaped by innate biases” (192). Our moral decisions are situational; they change based on the human kinds involved and their relationship to our kind. Human-kind-sight permits us to make moral judgments. Some psychologists believe moral judgments have a dedicated subconscious code involving many mental activities. Specialized messages can manipulate this code by speaking to that part of the mind. By framing nonmoral categories to overlap with moral categories, people can attach morality to nonmoral human kinds. Berreby concludes, “Many of our feelings about right and wrong are actually feelings about Us and Them” (200).
Chapter 10 Summary: “‘Our Common Humanity Makes Us Weep’”
Human-kind switching is not limited to perceptions of others. People frequently shift perception of their own human kind. A person’s sense of human kinds constantly subconsciously responds to signals in its own code. It is more difficult for a person to maintain one human kind than it is to change. Internal human-kind switching can alter a person’s actions. Because human-kind codes are subconscious, they do not operate as we or societal leaders desire. Therefore, “realistic conflict theory” cannot be accurate: Human-kind codes do not follow rational perceptions of the real world, such as “my kind’s hatred of your kind must derive from some dispute over tangibles” (205). Human-kind beliefs do not always agree with reason; they are perceptions, which can be formed independently of rational concerns.
Henri Tajfel coined the phrase, “groups […] are processes, not things” (206). Human kinds are the result of “the mind’s interaction with its surroundings” (206). Tajfel’s experiments show that people form strong human-kind beliefs even for trivial matters, such as whose paintings they prefer, and that people will act on such beliefs to favor their group at the expense of an opposing group. Berreby explains, “[S]tudies have found a similar bias in favor of ‘our gang’ even in nonsensical circumstances” (207). Once categories become real to people, regardless how arbitrary, automatic mental codes treat the groupings as real human kinds. Sherif’s work shows that “daily experiences […] organized to make those categories relevant and useful” generate our human-kind beliefs, and Tajfel furthers this analysis by showing that society’s politics and traditions influence our minds in subtler ways than Sherif believed (209).
In a study of ethnic group loyalty and outsider hatred among 186 traditional societies, anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan learned “[t]he one type of information that could predict hostility to outsiders […] was […] how much violence and hostility people felt within a society, toward each other” (212). A high opinion of one’s own tribe does not cause hostility toward others. A person’s love for their group does not require or lead to contempt for other groups. People do not belong to one single group: “Each of us is simultaneously a member of many different human kinds, and each of us is capable of inventing new ones” (212). We group ourselves into the human kind that matters in the moment. Berreby concludes, “Understanding human kinds, then, is a matter of seeing how this ever-changing mental dance produces the permanent-feeling human kinds we call tribes, races, religions, and nations” (212).
The distinction between “us and them” is not about people; it is about the mind. “In-group” and “out-group” do not represent reality but are relevant to the mind’s perception of reality. This process can guide us as we continually adjust our human-kind and perceptions, functioning as a feeling and not a calculation. Such processes are unstable because they respond to symbols rather than physical indicators, inferring the meaning of such indicators: “The mental codes that tell you who you belong to converge with codes that interpret signs and symbols” (214). This ability to place strangers according to their relationship to “us” through implicit signals is central to humanity and largely responsible for human evolution: “Instead of knowing 150 people, our ancestors could know thousands, by knowing their kinds” (221). This information informs people who is worthy of exchanging goods, services, information, and emotions, enabling humans to build vast communities.
The continual shifting of these groups is much of human history. For example, in World War II, the Russians were in-group with the United States and the Germans were outside. Shortly after, and ever since, Russians have been out-group with the United States and Germans have been in-group. Our human kinds changed because the relevant criteria shifted from allies and adversaries at war to economic allies and adversaries. Political control can prevent human-kind groupings from shifting. This produces stigmatized out-groups enforced by culture, custom, and laws.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Sherif’s summer camp experiment shows that human-kind beliefs are not fixed inherent truths; they change, and people can easily manipulate them by crafting situations. People can manipulate human-kind beliefs positively and negatively, as Sherif did with the campers. Societies manipulate human-kind codes through cultural rules. Societal rules create culture, which dictates individuals’ human-kind beliefs. Culture makes it easier to figure out the world by prescribing rules for what is and is not allowed. Rules attach morality to culture, which provide strong emotional incentive for them to be followed: “Good” people follow the rules, “bad” ones do not. People use this information to determine with whom to exchange information, goods, and emotions. Shared culture allows societies to grow by permitting strangers to interact. Societies create stigma by enforcing rules that prevent human-kind codes from naturally changing. Stigma uses cultural rules to paralyze groups in negatively perceived human kinds. The morality attached to otherwise benign cultural rules permits stigma.
