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.
Themes
Human Kinds
Human kinds are categories, groups, and beliefs formed by mental codes combining real world signs and symbols with mental circuits to form perceptions. Human kinds allow people to infer from symbols, create shared culture, and exchange with large and disparate groups of strangers through shared culture. Humans are the only animal with this ability. Human kinds enable our dominance as a species; they also cause harmful beliefs like racism and prejudice.
Darwinism
Darwinism is the evolutionary theory of natural selection originated in Charles Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species. Human kinds are a product of human evolution, so evolutionary details on genes, pluralism, and altruism are relevant to understanding human kinds and the mental codes that create them.
Mental Codes
Mental codes, or neural codes, are the mental processes which translate information into perceptions, memories, meanings, emotions, intentions, and actions. Mental codes create human kinds by translating signs and symbols into perception, which humans use to extrapolate multitudes of nonobvious and nonvisual information. Mental codes exist within the mind and operate via complex circuits spanning the brain in mental maps.
Categories/Human-Kind Categories
Categories are divisions of things perceived to share characteristics. Human-kind categories divide based on perceived, unscientific traits. Human-kind categories are typically inaccurate divisions based on stereotypes, but they are useful in understanding the world and solving problems.
Stigma
Stigma is a negative trait applied to a human-kind group and prevented, either naturally or through force, from evolving. Nature locks some in stigma through an inability to interpret and transmit social and cultural mental codes. Societal rules designed to prevent members from altering their human-kind perception of the group forcefully paralyze others in stigma. Stigma has negative psychological and physical effects on the stigmatized.
