Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

“What is true about our hunches about personality types and occupations is true as well of our beliefs about other categories for human beings—cultures, nations, ethnic groups, races, religions, castes, and political affiliations, to name a few types. Our intuitions may be good enough for day-to-day life, but they don’t square with what scientists are learning about how brain and mind work.” 

Our human-kind beliefs are based on commonsense “folk” psychology that does not comport with real science. Our beliefs are not reflections of the real world. Our groupings tend not to reflect things closely related but use arbitrary traits to lump things together.

“So kind-mindedness is not ‘really’ something else in disguise. It is itself—the mind’s guide for understanding anyone we do not know personally, for seeing our place in the human world, and for judging our actions. This human-kind psychology is a source, not just a consequence, of institutions: national governments, religious authorities, promoters of ethnic, racial, class, or gender pride. We care about today’s political tribes only because these entities have learned how to speak to the human-kind faculty in its language.” 

Kind-mindedness is its own function. It is the result of the real world colliding with our mind. We use it to create societal institutions, which further inform our kind-mindedness through looping effects. Human social groups don’t inform our beliefs; our beliefs create social groups, which further define themselves. 

“When you understand your own kind-mindedness, then, you don’t just see yourself more clearly; you also see how ethnicities, nations, and all the other kinds can come to be. And you start to ask what it is about the mind that makes us see these human kinds, and believe in them, and fight about them.” 

Understanding that kind-mindedness exists is the first step to understanding how and why we create human kinds. Understanding kind-mindedness is understanding how we view the world. Once individuals understand their own human-kind perceptions, we can better understand the perceptions of other people and societies.