Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Humans don’t need to know why they feel certain emotions or hold specific opinions for those to be real. Emotions, opinions, and beliefs are sincerely felt and have real consequences to other humans, so they are real even if their cause is misguided. Commonsense explanations for human behavior rely on stereotypes of virtue and evil, but these stereotypes describe perception, not reality. Berreby explains, “[S]cientists today are studying race, ethnicity, nationalism, and other tribalisms, but their results don’t confirm what we like to believe about those concepts” (4). Social psychologists have conducted many experiments that show human devised groupings of people are not accurate predictors of traits, conduct, morality, or other characteristics. Human-kind groupings are based on traits obvious to human senses, not scientific criteria for distinguishing persons.

Human-kind groupings also suffer other flaws, such as ignorance of situational factors. Humans rely on “supposedly unchanging traits to explain others’ behavior” (6) while explaining their own behavior by circumstances. Our commonsense explanations for human behavior that rely on races, religions, cultures, and political groups do not comport with scientific research on the functioning of the brain and mind. Unlike commonsense explanations though, science does not operate in terms of “certainty,” and “[b]ringing science to the conversation about race, ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and the rest of the