Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Human-kinds—grouping of individuals based on actual or perceived traits—do not fit a one-size-fits-all label. They are infinitely divisible, situational, have infinite scale, and produce societal effects. Most human kinds do not exist in the real world; they are mental processes. When people act on human-kind beliefs, they affect real people in the real world. Such effects can be both positive and negative, and “[h]uman-kind thinking is an absolute requirement for being human” (16). Berreby explains, “[H]uman kinds—those categories we use to explain human acts on every scale […] don’t depend on what people are, but on what people believe” (17). Most species of animals recognize members of their group, but only humans make decisions based on stated criteria of who obtains group membership. Humans do this by making subjective decisions based on signs and symbols—“crosses, uniforms, peace signs, oaths, and other indicators of a particular human kind” (17).

When answering societal questions, “people don’t start with data and then divide the world into Jews, African Americans, and Hispanics. It’s the other way around” (19). To understand this phenomenon, humans must study mental function—what our rules for thinking are and how we sort perceptions. Humans sort other humans by category and by entity. Category sorting is based on traits, and entity sorting is based on obligations. Most human kinds are comprised of both categories and entities, with changing proportions. Human kinds based on a variety of subjects such as race, sports fandom, politics, musical taste, religion, and hometown feel equivalent because they share the same mental processes. Berreby elaborates, “Your ability to think of people as ‘German’ partly depends on your general ability to categorize anything—to divide a flood of perceptions into birds and trees, gears and gummy bears” (21-22).

Categorization helps humans explain the past, predict the future, and understand the self. People assume individual actions are the result of thoughts in the minds of other persons. People ascribe the same habit to groups of people by saying things like “America is arrogant” and “Buddhists are gentle.” These statements are human-kind labels based on nationality and religion, respectively. Our mental process that groups people into human-kinds is unconscious: “It works outside of awareness, according to rules of its own” (23). Kind-mindedness acts as our minds’ guide for understanding strangers and ourselves, and for judging actions. Humans use it to build societal institutions and form groups like religions, nations, ethnicities, cultures, and genders. Berreby states, “We care about today’s political tribes only because these entities have learned how to speak to the human-kind faculty in its language” (26). A study of human kind-mindedness can have profound impacts on interpersonal relationships, relationships among groups, and societal structures. Scientists are making advances in such study “at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy of mind, and anthropology, where kind-mindedness, once a mystery, has become a problem that science can address” (31). 

Human-kind rules are like grammar. They establish a framework for making human-kind decisions. For example, human-kind codes dictate that family connection is informative while a shared surname is not. Humans recognize this subconsciously because we learn it when young. David Hume recognized over 250 years ago that human-kind perceptions “change very considerably from one age to another” (34), and therefore must represent perceived characteristics rather than actual characteristics of people. Hume realized that no group of people is homogeneous. Any group of people will be the same in some ways and different in others. He said, “[I]nstead of looking for people like you and joining their team, you join a team and then decide its members are like you” (36).

Human kinds have a life cycle: At some point they come into existence and at another point, for a variety of reasons, they fade out of existence. Some human-kinds end officially after scientific advancement yields them obsolete, other human-kinds are recategorized by choice or by force, and others eventually fade in relevance through assimilation. Irish Americans were once not considered white, but through assimilation they now are. Type A and Type B personalities were once psychiatric groupings of people, but scientific advancement rendered them obsolete. “Slave” was once a human kind ascribed to Africans and their descendants in the United States but forced recategorization eliminated that human kind. Further, “A human kind may persist, even when the traits that define it don’t” and “[i]n other cases, the traits of a human kind will persist, though the kind itself vanishes” (41). Both a kind and a trait may survive, but the connection may break.

People use human kinds to learn about groups without the necessity of probing every person. Human kinds are flexible. Berreby explains, “[T]here is no necessary link between the traits that tell us who belongs in a human kind and what that kind is all about” (42). People often use perceptible traits to define human kinds, but such traits often have no relation to expected behavior. This disconnect is important because human-kind beliefs incite human action. Human-kind beliefs utilize “‘hot cognition’—they’re bound up in emotions and actions” (43). Human kinds also inform our individual identities, whether we are a “good” member of our kind, and our morality: “The map of human kinds tells us what and who we are” (44). An understanding of kind-mindedness illuminates the individual self as well as how and why racial, ethnic, and nationality groupings evolved.