Overcoming Tribalism

Are humans destined to hate each other? You might think so, given the current tribal passions that sharply divide the country. Whether it’s our political affiliation, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, racial or ethnic background, it’s hard to think of a time in recent memory when we have been so pitted against each other.

Well, I have some good news: there is nothing inevitable or hardwired about our specific prejudices or biases. In fact, recent neuroscience research suggests that tribalism is, to a great extent, socially constructed and that there is much that we can do as clinicians to combat the forces that divide us—and our patients.

For example, take racial prejudice. Early brain imaging studies of adults showed that when white subjects looked at pictures of black faces, they got a robust activation of their amygdala, suggesting the experience evoked some degree of fear and threat. You might be tempted to think that this threat response and obvious racial bias are innate and unchangeable—but you’d be wrong.

Our sense of tribe is far more malleable than most people realize. A more recent study by Eva Telzer at UCLA and others scanned a group of children and adolescents with fMRI and discovered that the children showed little or no amygdala response to racial cues. The brain’s fear response to these cues could not be elicited until the kids were 14 and older, strongly suggesting that this neural bias toward race is not hardwired at all; rather, it seems to be learned and acquired over time. Bigots appear not to be born but bred.

It is not really surprising if you consider that we’ve spent most of our history living together in small groups of hunter-gatherers with very little exposure to people outside our clan. Encounters with people of a different race is a relatively recent experience that comes with the mobility of modern life, so our negative response to members of other races is highly unlikely to be the result of any evolutionary adaptive advantage—it is more likely to be acquired.

Consider that teens who had more cross-race friends showed far less activation of their amygdala than peers from less racially diverse backgrounds. So just having exposure to people from a group outside your own while you are growing up can reduce the sense that they are a feared “other” to your brain. This is what the psychologist Gordon Alloport posited in the 1950s with his “contact theory.” It would take effort, but studies like this suggest that if we all had some level of sustained contact with people outside our own race, it could lessen the racial divide.

Intriguingly, there is little reason to think that the amygdala response to group differences is innate. Indeed, the amygdala response to African-American faces has been demonstrated not only in European-American subjects, but also in African-American subjects, who would obviously not consider blacks as Other. Clearly the same social influences are effectively “teaching” the brains of whites and blacks alike to fear black faces.

Also, it is surprisingly easy to override the brain’s fear response to the Other. Susan Friske, a psychologist at Princeton, did an experiment in which subjects were asked whether the people they saw in a photograph would enjoy a certain vegetable. This encouraged subjects to imagine the particular tastes and experience of the person in the picture, for example, as they cooked and savored the vegetable. Under these conditions, the subjects’ amygdala did not activate—even if the face the subject viewed was of a different race. Just a simple but powerful suggestion that someone consider an outsider as an individual with distinct characteristics instead of an anonymous member of a group made the supposedly hard-wired xenophobic response in the brain disappear.

How might we use this basic neuroscience to counter tribalism in everyday life? If, for example, you wanted to convince a xenophobe to feel empathy for a young undocumented immigrant facing deportation, impressive statistics demonstrating the irrational and harmful nature of current immigration policy wouldn’t help because impersonal data turn the person into a category. It would be far more effective to present a real and poignant case of a Dreamer, whose future and family life are imperiled by such policy.

Using vivid personal stories, as opposed to sterile data, we instruct our amygdala that people outside our particular group are real, live individuals and not categories to be feared. This, in part, is the antidote to President Trump’s relentless messaging to the nation’s collective amygdala that we are all members of different tribes who should fear and hate one another.

When our patients reveal their racial or ethnic prejudice to us, we should avoid blanket disapproval. Far more useful, I think, is to ask them what kinds of personal experiences, if any, they’ve had with people of other races or ethnic groups and encourage them to be curious about the origins of their negative feelings. More likely than not, they will have had few cross-race or ethnic friends or acquaintances.

There is still more we can do. When people are primed to think that racial differences, for example, are genetically based, their prejudice increases—and the converse is true. In one study, subjects were randomly assigned to read an essentialist view of race (Scientists pinpoint the genetic underpinnings of race) or a nonessentialist model (Scientists reveal that race has no genetic basis). Then they were asked about how accepting they were of existing racial inequality. Those exposed to the essentialist view reported more explicit prejudice and were more accepting of the lower status of blacks than the nonessential group.

In the end, we are a clannish species and can demonize any group when it suits our purpose. But there is little essential difference between our fear or hatred of a person’s race and ethnicity or their political party or their being a Yankee fan. If we’ve learned anything about the nature of tribalism and bias, it’s that humans can be easily encouraged and acculturated to fear—or tolerate—the Other. Perhaps there is hope for us. ■

This article was reprinted in part with permission from Psychiatric Services and the author. The full version with references can be accessed here.