In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics Quotes

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

People inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control.

Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel.

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

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.

Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here.'

I am extremely conscious of my tribalism. And when you talk about tribalism, you talk about living in a black and white world. I mean, Native American tribalism sovereignty, even the political fight for sovereignty and cultural sovereignty is a very us versus them. And I think a lot of people in this country, especially European Americans and those descended from Europeans don't see themselves as tribal.

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