Are Humans Hardwired to Be Cruel to Each Other?

Are we really hardwired to hate one another? It’s a big question that a lot of people ask themselves but there seems to be a little catch in it. Who we hate is easily manipulated, why we hate them is influenced by the social hormone oxytocin and the environment. Have you ever wondered why you are more friendly to your fellow sports team fans or why when you are at a big concert or venue having drinks you seem to be bestfriends with people you just met? Here’s why!

Dr Robert Sapolsky breaks it down like this… So when you look at us, us as humans or mammals. When you look at some of the most appalling realms of our behavior much of it has to do with the fact that social organisms are really really hardwired to make a basic dichotomy about the social world, which is those organism that count as us’s and those organisms that count as them’s. This is virtually universal among humans and this is virtually universal among all sorts of social primates that have aspects of social structures built around separate social groupings. We turn the world into Us’s and Them’s and we don’t like the them’s very much and are often very awful to them, and the us’s we exaggerate how wonderful, generous, affiliative and how they are just like siblings to us. One of the greatest ways of seeing biologically how real this fault line is, is there’s this hormone oxytocin, oxytocin is officially the coolest hormone on earth because what everyone knows is it enhances mother infant bonding, it enhances pair bonding in couples, it makes you more trusting, empathetic, emotionally expressive and charitable. However, it only does those things for people that you think are apart of the “us’s”. For the “them’s”, it makes you more crappier to them, more aggressive, less cooperative in an economic game. What oxytocin does, is it enhances this us vs them divide. So theres that, along with other division findings such as skin color, sex, age, socioeconomic class… your brain process these us/them differences on the scale of milliseconds, a 20th of a second your brain is already responding differently to an us vs them. Okay, so collectively this seems depressing as hell… Like oh no, we are hardwired to divide people into us’s vs them’s and the world won’t ever be able to unite and break down all the barriers that divide us… Right? WRONG! There is a catch… we are incredibly easily manipulated as to who counts as an us and who counts as a them. So those fault lines that we view as oh my god, how ancient can you get… that say somebody of a different skin color evokes limbic responses in us to start the they are a them and you are an us… well then you do something like have faces of someone with the same skin color and someone of a different color and either they are or aren’t wearing your favorite sports team hat, and all the sudden you completely redefine who is the us and who is a them, and skin color becomes absolutely irrelevant, and we completely ignore the skin color, and all that matters is if they like the same sports team as you. Great news about all of this, is we can manipulate us out of the social norms of who is an us, and who is a them… essentially we can complete re categorize the human race as an US and make the them outside of the Human race, unifying humans and breaking the dichotomy of the human race.  Bad news is we can be easily manipulated by all sorts of ideology and opinions as to deciding that people who seem just like us, really aren’t and making it seem so different that they count as a them.