Robert Sapolsky Quotes

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

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.

What everyone knows" is the line between us and them.

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.

We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can - music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.

We're a social species, and we want to get along with the people we like and who are like us. That's just good adaptive behaviour. We're more likely to accept something if we hear it from a friend, whereas we're sceptical of people who are not like us - which is what leads to racism, nationalism, sexism and all forms of bigotry.

Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.

It's a clique that I've never been a part of. It's not like I identify them in a negative way.

Some social scientists say that in-group/out-group biases are hard-wired into the human brain. Even without overt prejudice, it is cognitively convenient for people to sort items into categories and respond based on what is usually associated with those categories: a form of statistical discrimination, playing the odds.

There can be no self without other, no identity of group A without a group B.

It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our heads says, "I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew." Meaning: I may be me- but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.

Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.

A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.

In my family, I'm the middle of three, and I'm like a lot of middle children. I was one of those kids that floated from group to group. I liked being able to be included in all the groups - the bad kids, the smart kids.

Kids will always find something to pick on, whether it's your color, your religion, the way you look, your size. You try and stand up for yourself, but it's really difficult when you've got 20 or 30 girls against you.

One of us... One of them... One of us... One of them... A rhythm playing like train wheels on a circular track -- never ending but going nowhere.

I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships... the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. ...And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs

We have different expectations for different groups of people. We tend to modulate the degree with which we're forgiving or punitive depending on how well we know folks, or how much we consider them peers, or how much social capital we've invested in them. That has to do with race, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. We have a tendency to bend over backwards to forgive folks we think of as part of "the us." The question of who we define as "the us" is a lot of what constitutes how we punish who we punish.

My high school, like most high schools, had a pretty rigid stratification system. Kids were clustered into groups - the studious ones, the athletes, the popular ones - and we never crossed paths with each other. You stayed in your air-tight group, and you were suspicious of people in other groups.