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one-balled nipple jockey
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Dirty Souf Biatch
Posts: 22,033
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This is also from Fareed Zakaria
It might be taboo but I think understanding the biology behind racism might help us get past it
This is a professor from Stanford
Quote:
SAPOLSKY: When you look at the neurobiology of how we process "uses versus them," there's some incredibly hard-wired stuff going on. Flash up faces of people that somebody has categorized as either an "in group" or an "out group" and, in a fraction of a second, your brain is differentiating between them. If it's a "them," parts of your brain that are related to fear, aggression, disgust, activate. Parts of your brains that normally process faces don't activate as much as normal. Parts of your brain related to empathy don't activate as much as normal, if it's a "them." We've got this gigantic fault line in our heads as to who counts as an "in group" member, who evokes empathy, who evokes concern and who's a "them" who just gets us bristling.
ZAKARIA: And you talk about how it's very easy, as a result of this dynamic, to scape-goat. You say scape-goating is a, kind of, very human response?
SAPOLSKY: Well, one of the more interesting parts of the brain that's pertinent to this, an area called the insula -- the insula, if you're a normal mammal, what it does is tell you if you've bitten into some disgusting food. It keeps you from getting poisoned. And in humans it does that, but in addition it also activates at morally disgusting acts, at people whose actions we consider to be disgusting.
What it does is give this tremendous viscera to who we think is appallingly different. And what that winds up meaning is we're incredibly easy to propagandize into "thems" as vermin, "thems" as malignancies, "thems" as cockroaches, all these historical examples of genocides being built around, sort of, dehumanizing "thems."
And, basically, if you're some autocratic tyrant, if you can get your followers to activate the insular cortex as soon as they contemplate the "thems," you've just checked off half of your to-do list on your, like, ethnic cleansing shopping list.
ZAKARIA: You know, you've studied this all, you know, very deeply. But you also talk about how you -- you've come to this even personally. You grew up in a very small, insular Jewish community that was suspicious often of the outside world. Is this something that one can do anything about?
SAPOLSKY: Well, there's -- there's some good news lurking in there. It's some very fragile good news. But it's one of the ways in which we're different from your typical chimp or baboon going about an "us- them" dichotomy. We belong to multiple groups. We belong to multiple groups, and thus we have multiple "thems" in our heads. And who counts as a "them" could change in a fraction of a second.
ZAKARIA: So the hope is that we, kind of, embrace the idea that everybody has multiple identities; we're -- we belong to many different groups, that no one can -- you know, people can't just be put into a box. Is that right?
SAPOLSKY: Well, the hope is that could be used for good. Of course, we have no shortage of examples of it being used for the worst. During the Rwandan genocide, Tutsi and Hutu people there, who had been neighbors for years, suddenly a neighbor, a classmate, a student, a parishioner, all of those were transformed into a "them," thanks to the propaganda of that. Insofar as we are a smart species that can juggle lots of categories in our heads at once, we are species that could be terribly vulnerable to manipulation.
I think it's fair to say we are fairly hard-wired into dividing the world into "uses" and "thems" and not being very thrilled about the "thems." But who counts as an "us" and who counts as a "them" could change in a fraction of a second. ZAKARIA: Wow, sobering stuff. Professor Sapolsky, pleasure to have
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