Why ‘Us vs. Them’ Mentality Persists in a World That Should Know Better
And how we can find a way to move past it
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Growing up in post-Soviet Poland, I was drenched in the ‘us vs. them’ mentality.
Although the Iron Curtain — the ideological barrier that divided the Soviet sphere from the West — fell shortly before I was born, the attitudes it had instilled didn’t vanish overnight. My family, like many others across the former Soviet bloc, remained sceptical of the West, viewing it with a mix of distrust, resentment and jealousy.
After all, while we struggled with economic instability and social inequality, the West was raising one gleaming skyscraper after another and enjoying an era of (relative) prosperity. When I moved abroad, this divide only felt more tangible. I certainly wasn’t part of ‘Thems.’
It’s not exactly surprising that this mentality was so pervasive when the flow of information, people, and goods was heavily restricted during Soviet times or that it lingered even after those barriers were dismantled. What is perhaps surprising, though, is why it endures even in an increasingly interconnected and globally aware world.
We know more about one another than ever before, and yet we still insist on drawing lines between Us and Them, in-group and out-group, ‘the people’ (i.e., our kind) and the Others.
Is tribalism simply an inherent part of the human condition? Can we ever really move beyond it?
During the filming of the 1967 science fiction classic Planet of the Apes, something curious happened: actors playing chimpanzees only ate lunch with other chimpanzees. The same pattern emerged among those portraying gorillas, orangutans, and the rest of the set, humans. But this segregation wasn’t planned; it happened naturally. And then it happened again during the production of Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1969.
Humans have a long history of dividing themselves into Us and Them, often based on physical and behavioural differences. This behaviour likely developed to keep individuals committed to their group and wary of outsiders to ensure the group’s survival. Studies of surviving hunter-gatherer communities, such as the Hadza people of Tanzania and the Ache people of Paraguay, confirm that, too.
It was my compatriot, a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor, Henri Tajfel, who, along with his colleague John Turner, first introduced social identity theory to explain this tendency to view the world as a collection of social groups. Their work, later expanded by Turner’s self-categorisation theory, suggests that when people encounter systematic collective differences, they instinctively categorise themselves and others into in-groups (Us) and out-groups (Them). Once these groups are established, they tend to reinforce themselves, sometimes leading to an unequal distribution of resources.
In some cases, especially when powerful members of an in-group perceive the out-group as a threat or competition, this can also escalate into dehumanising the other side. And that’s usually not a pretty picture.
What’s perhaps most fascinating — though equal parts unsettling — is that we make those Us/Them dichotomies with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency. American neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky highlights this in one of his recent books, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst:
Stick someone in a ‘functional MRI’ — a brain scanner that indicates activity in various brain regions under particular circumstances. Flash up pictures of faces for 50 milliseconds — a 20th of a second — barely at the level of detection. And remarkably, with even such minimal exposure, the brain processes faces of Thems differently than Us-es.
In other words, when we see someone we don’t know, our minds instantly make thousands of snap judgments — often wildly inaccurate — based on their appearance, speech, clothing, and, in particular, their social identity markers like race, gender, religion, age, and socioeconomic status.
This has been studied particularly extensively in the context of race. If you’re briefly shown the face of someone from a different race, the amygdala — a brain region associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression — tends to activate more than it does for a same-race face (though this seems to apply only to adults, not children). One study even found that while watching a hand being poked with a needle usually elicits a wince of shared pain, this response diminishes when the hand belongs to someone of a different race. Our tribal instincts can, essentially, dull our ability to empathise across racial lines.
Most importantly, because these reactions occur so quickly and largely subconsciously, the core of Us/Them thinking seems emotional and automatic. We decide who is inferior, who deserves our trust and empathy, and who doesn’t, based on pure feelings.
But here is the worst part: this emotional, automatic process of ‘Them-ing’ is easily manipulated, frequently without our conscious awareness. For example, if you’re shown images of an unfamiliar country accompanied by pictures of fearful faces appearing at subliminal speeds, your attitude toward that country and its people becomes more negative. Similarly, exposure to stimuli that trigger feelings of disgust — like smelly rubbish — can skew some people’s attitudes toward those they perceive as Them, too.
Emotions, especially negative ones, come first. And then we attempt to ‘rationalise’ these feelings, to convince ourselves that we know why we feel this way.
If you feel like political discourse has become increasingly vitriolic in recent years, you’re not imagining it. The use of violent and inflammatory language has indeed surged — not just in the US, known for its deep political polarisation, but all around the globe.
However, while incendiary rhetoric can be found across the political spectrum, it’s more frequently right-wing politicians who use it to capture attention and rile up their supporter base.
A recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research focused specifically on the rhetoric of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and found, unsurprisingly, that his use of violent language has escalated over time, reaching levels higher than any major US party presidential candidate in nearly two decades. Most strikingly, the study also revealed that while Trump’s references to ‘the people’ and ‘us’ have declined since his 2016 election, his usage of the pronoun ‘Them’ to target specific out-groups — such as immigrants and ‘globalist elites’ — and paint them as threats have sharply increased.
It’s then not difficult to see how the combination of violent, derogatory language and constant reminders that it’s Us against Them can heighten people’s fear, effectively creating a demand for a ruthless leader who promises to mitigate the very fears he manufactured. It’s manipulative, but it works.
Still, the rising temperature of political rhetoric and the growing number of people who seek to distance themselves from the perceived ‘others’ — as evidenced, for example, by Gallup’s recent survey — doesn’t exactly happen in a vacuum.
According to findings collected over several years by projects like the European Social Survey (ESS) and Eurobarometer, negative attitudes towards immigration and the general intensification of the ‘othering’ processes often correlate with economic downturns. In other words, and in line with what Tajfel and Turner theorised, when people struggle economically (or perceive that they do), they tend to rally around their in-group (Us), focusing on self-preservation and blaming the outsiders (Them) for threatening their already scarce resources.
Unfortunately, recent global events and circumstances — ranging from the pandemic, soaring prices and housing costs, stagnating wages, ongoing wars, and the frequency of climate disasters — have indeed pushed many people worldwide into a just-trying-to-get-by state. So what now?
Simplifying the word into Us and Them might be hard-wired into our individual and collective minds, something we’ll never entirely overcome. But the hatred and dehumanisation that so often accompany these divisions, especially in difficult times, are not inevitable. No, that’s what a lifetime of biases, of ‘othering’ people who aren’t like us, results in.
And that’s precisely why, time and time again, we sadly fall into this trap of being pitted against each other when we should instead focus on those who direct our anger towards the marginalised and the voiceless to deflect scrutiny from themselves.
As Sapolsky writes:
(…) historically, the truly malignant Thems hid themselves while making third parties the fall guy.
You can just imagine my conservative parents’ shock when, at the age of 8 or 9, I asked why we need to have borders at all. ‘It’s all just lines in the dirt anyway,’ I remember saying. To be honest, my views on this haven’t changed much since. And I still frequently wonder: Why do we continuously divide ourselves? Why can’t we first and foremost acknowledge and cherish that we’re all from here, from this planet?
Years later, my parents experienced quite a shock, again, when they asked me about British attitudes toward Polish immigrants. In the wake of Brexit, xenophobia targeting Poles — one of the UK’s largest immigrant groups — unfortunately got pretty bad and resulted in incidents such as ‘No more Polish vermin’ graffiti and cards being distributed outside homes and schools, including primary schools.
As I noted earlier, this categorisation of Them as less than human — vermin, rats, cockroaches, etc. — isn’t uncommon. Still, my parents didn’t expect that the prejudices they held towards foreigners would be mirrored back at their own daughter. That’s the thing with all this Them’ing. We do it to others. Perhaps we expect others to do it to us, too. But it still comes as a surprise when we, or people in our in-group, become the target of the same prejudice we’re guilty of.
No one wants to be at the receiving end of ‘othering’ because we know what it leads to — exclusion, harassment, and sometimes even dehumanisation and exploitation — and yet so many of us perpetuate it nonetheless.
This tribal mentality was likely helpful to early humans who lived in small, nomadic communities with little to no knowledge about other tribes, which made it difficult to distinguish friends from foes. (Although even back then we weren’t all universally hostile and violent, as some have claimed.) But with the physical threats that made the Us versus Them dynamics useful largely gone now, why does it persist anyway? What exactly do we gain from constantly putting up invisible walls between each other, usually based on entirely arbitrary differences?
Sure, there are plenty of threats today, too. However, the most significant ones we face right now are all collective in nature — such as climate change, pandemics and economic inequality — and yet here we are, quite literally standing in our own way in fixing them because we can’t learn how to work together when it’s needed. Collective threats require collective efforts, though.
The good news is that just as science helps us understand the allure of Us versus Them mentality, it also offers potential solutions for overcoming it. In Behave, Sapolsky proposes several ways for that, too, including:
Bringing Us-es and Thems together, especially for prolonged periods of time. (This is based on psychologist Gordon Allport’s ‘contact theory.’ )
Exposing people’s implicit biases with counter-stereotypical examples or stories focused on Them.
Practising perspective taking — i.e. pretending you’re a Them and imagining how it would feel to walk a mile in their shoes.
Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most effective ways to weaken the automatic categorisation of someone as a Them is to first recognise them as an individual rather than as part of a larger group. As someone who enjoys the same food, listens to the same music or grew up liking the same cartoons as Us.
It’s when we see people up close that prejudices and biases start to evaporate, revealing our shared humanity and everyday experiences.
And before we know it, everyone becomes Us.
One upside of being a perpetual foreigner — I lived abroad for over a decade and in several countries — is realising that all these dichotomies we have in our minds, even the ones that seem inevitable and crucial, can blur or even disappear over time.
Who’s Us to me now? Who’s Them? I feel like I’m part of both, but also neither. There are always things I have in common with fellow humans I meet along the way, no matter who they are or where they come from.
Perhaps it’s just humanness and existing at the very same time and on the very same planet, but isn’t that enough?
It should be enough.
Katie, Thank you so much for this timely observation! While I agree with your message of seeking what connects us as human beings, it's difficult to actually do so in my daily life. Your writing is very helpful and healing for me.
Not feeling particularly qualified to advise, I searched and found these "Words of Wisdom" from Pope Francis (whose job is to Pontificate! ;}
“Unity is often confused with uniformity; with actions, feelings and words which are all identical. This is not unity, it is conformity. It kills the life of the Spirit; it kills the charisms which God has bestowed for the good of his people. Unity is threatened whenever we try to turn others into our own image and likeness. Unity is a gift, not something to be imposed by force or by decree … Conflicts and disagreements in the Church are to be expected and, I would even say, needed. They are a sign that the Church is alive and that the Spirit is still acting, still enlivening her. Woe to those communities without a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’!”—Pope Francis (September 20, 2015)
These "Words of Wisdom" are from the Prophet Muhammad, who (ﷺ) said, "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should not hurt his neighbor and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should serve his guest generously and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should speak what is good or keep silent."
My favorite prophet is John Wooden, the famous basketball coach at UCLA, who said, “The great secret of life is to cultivate the ability to appreciate the things you have, not compare them.”
Best regards,
Joe Hartnett
NYC is very diverse, and I live in Jackson Heights, the most diverse neighborhood in the world. I’ve lived in the city over 20 years, and most people here identify as New Yorkers first, before race, gender, or citizenship, and over time, it’s become more difficult for me to get along with US people from anywhere else except for Philadelphia and Detroit. On a business trip to Denver, something immediately seemed off, and after a few seconds I realized it was because there were nothing but white people, who I don’t have a problem with, but I’m just not used to that kind of saturation. My coworker and I were the only non-white people in the airport.
It’s strange because a part of the reason we’re relatively liberal is because of the diversity, and you see firsthand what should be obvious. It isn’t the immigrants who have even less power than most natives who are screwing us, it’s clearly the wealthy bastards in their gleaming towers.
But at the same time, there’s an argument almost every year that NYC should secede from the Union. Most of us are sick of conservative crap, especially when we’re subsidizing a lot of red states, and we’re also sick of being lectured about race by well off white people from homogeneous states, most of whom are too afraid to come here at all, unless they stay in the areas for tourists.
So while a lot of “thems” became “us,” even in regard to people we meet in other countries, the rest of the US has become “them.” The tourists are particularly annoying, and I’ve met decent people and even lived in other states, but I never could for long. The people are just too different.
An upper middle class woman from a good neighborhood in California told me minorities can’t be bad. I told her they’re the same as everyone else, and capable of the full range of human behavior, including crime and being assholes, and that every poor neighborhood or ghetto in the world is basically the same, but generally much more dangerous in cities like NY, Chicago, and Detroit, and she was offended.
I think education, or learning how to agree on basic facts and attack problems with scientific and mathematical rigor would be a good place to start.
We might see more unity once climate change directly devastates a billion people globally and at least 100 million in the US and Western Europe, but based on what’s happening now, more wars over resources seems more likely.