>>13706950Robert Sapolsky, a Liberal, Jewish professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, has spent his entire life studying primate tribalism, aiming to uncover the biological basis of human tribalism. Much like a Medieval siege engineer spends his entire life studying castle wall architecture, Sapolsky’s only interest in tribalism is its absolute destruction. In an exasperated 2018 telephone interview with Pacific Standard, he concluded that:
https://psmag.com/social-justice/why-we-engage-in-tribalism-nationalism-and-scapegoating“Primates are hard-wired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds. Our views about things are driven by implicit (unconscious) processes. It’s depressing as hell. A hormone like oxytocin makes you nicer to “us” and crappier to “them.” What hormones are good at is magnifying things that are already there. That tells you that ‘us and them’ is a fundamental fault line in our brains.”
His statement has been corroborated by countless scientific studies. For example, Giving is self-rewarding for monkeys (2008)
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13685.longfound that capuchins are selectively kind and generous towards members of their own group: “[pro-social behavior] increased with social closeness, being lowest toward strangers and highest toward kin.” The study concluded that as long as certain criteria are met (e.g. that the primates belong to the same tribal in-group), “delivering benefits to others seems gratifying to nonhuman primates.”
