Robert Sapolsky Quotes

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.

I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.

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

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.

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

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

Random, meaningless groups can adopt an us-versus-them mentality.

It shows 'us vs. them', and I'm on the 'us' side.

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

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.

Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.

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.

People are first and foremost Republicans, first and foremost Anarchists, first and foremost a man or woman, and that is a mistake. It hurts the individual and it hurts the whole.

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

Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.

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.

When someone is in our tribe, I think it's particularly easier for us to tell them apart, because we're used to their facial features.

Tribalism is the most powerful force in the world.

The associations inside the group become more important than those outside.

People want to be with their own and want to be separated from others.

Human evolution relies on cooperation, which is why identity politics feels so backward.

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.

Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.

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

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