After providing all the funding for The Brain from Top to Bottom for over 10 years, the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction informed us that because of budget cuts, they were going to be forced to stop sponsoring us as of March 31st, 2013.

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Bruno Dubuc, Patrick Robert, Denis Paquet, and Al Daigen




Monday, 4 April 2022
How to avoid our natural tendency to divide the world between “us” and “them”

This week, I’d like to talk about two articles on the work of Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist and neurobiologist who published the superb book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst in 2017. In that book, Sapolsky stylishly and eloquently examined the many factors that have influenced our behaviours from the time of our primate ancestors through to the modern societies of today. He focused especially on our identity behaviours—the ones that make us divide the world into “us” and “them” and that so many politicians now exploit to try to capture our votes.

The first of these articles is an interview with Sapolsky published in 2018, with the title “The Biology of the Modern Political Divide” and the sub-title “Robert Sapolsky reveals the biological basis for our most unfortunate traits—and insists change is possible.”

In this interview, Sapolsky ranges from shocking, depressing observations such as this:

If you get to the point where citing ‘thems’ causes your followers to activate neurons in the insular cortex—the part of the brain that responds to viscerally disgusting things—you’ve finished most of your to-do list for your genocide.

To objective statements such as:

Primates are hard-wired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.

And more nuanced, hopeful reflections such as:

[I] don’t really believe in free will, but [I think that] we nevertheless have an obligation to try to understand our behavior and make things better.

The second article, written by Sapolsky himself and published in 2017, also explores the issue of “us versus them” but is more systematic and instructive. Entitled “Why Your Brain Hates Other People and How to Make It Think Differently , it offers plenty of surprising findings, summaries of fascinating experiments and the shock statements for which Sapolsky has such a knack. Here are just a few examples to whet your appetite.

Considerable evidence suggests that dividing the world into Us and Them is deeply hard-wired in our brains, with an ancient evolutionary legacy. […] The automatic, unconscious nature of Us/Them-ing attests to its depth.

Our visceral, emotional views of Thems are shaped by subterranean forces we’d never suspect. And then our cognitions sprint to catch up with our affective selves, generating the minute factoid or plausible fabrication that explains why we hate Them.

We all have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, evaporate in an instant.

Replace essentialism with individuation: In one study, white subjects were asked about their acceptance of racial inequalities. Half were first primed toward essentialist thinking, being told, “Scientists pinpoint the genetic underpinnings of race.” Half heard an anti-essentialist prime—“Scientists reveal that race has no genetic basis.” The latter made subjects less accepting of inequalities.

Distrust essentialism. Remember that supposed rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces we never suspect. Focus on shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate.

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