Societies are tearing apart, but they can be brought together

By K.N.C.

CONFLICTS AMONG people are rife around the world, whether it is the mass murder of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, antisemitism in Europe or violent racism in America. How can these conflicts be overcome—and may recent findings in cognitive neuroscience play a role?

Adam Waytz is a social psychologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, and the author of “The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World” (Norton, 2019). In the book, he looks at how people can not only learn to exist amid algorithms and computers, but peacefully live alongside each other as well.

As part of The Economist’s Open Future initiative, we are publishing an excerpt from the book on the nature of group conflict and how to reduce tensions. We also conducted a short interview with Mr Waytz, probing the idea of using social psychology to bring people together.

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The curse of intergroup conflict

From “The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World” (Norton, 2019) by Adam Waytz.

If human-machine conflict represents society’s newest challenge, intergroup conflict represents its oldest. Conflict between ethnicities, nationalities, religions, ideologies, and tribes has raged for millennia and research on such intergroup conflict largely provided the foundation for my (relatively young) home discipline, social psychology.

A flurry of intergroup conflict research followed the Second World War, with social psychologists in subsequent years attempting to explain events such as the Holocaust, Bosnian genocide, or Rwandan civil war. Yet perhaps social psychology’s most important insight on intergroup conflict came from a summer camp. Psychologists Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Sherif famously studied competing factions of Boy Scouts of America campers in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma in the early 1950s. Among several important findings, their key contribution was showing that they could reduce conflict between these groups by highlighting shared goals between them. Decades of research that followed focused on the benefits of superordinate goals (that supersede any particular group’s interests) including goals to fight a common enemy or to create a common identity. Common identity, common goals, and common villains highlight the human needs of “them” to reveal that they are surprisingly like “us.”

Before scrutinizing these common ground–oriented attempts at creating shared humanization, let us first look at dehumanization’s role in intergroup conflict more broadly. Of course, conflict can occur without dehumanization, but I believe it is central to conflict. Let’s revisit some fundamental assertions to explain why.

Dehumanization represents the failure (either deliberately or not) to consider another person as having a mind capable of thinking and feeling. Dehumanization, therefore, can enable violence and other forms of aggression in the following way: given our strong aversion to harming other humans, construing an out-group as lacking emotion or reason means that aggression toward that out-group does not constitute harm any more than slamming a notebook on a table does. In addition to enabling harm, people also use dehumanization to justify intergroup violence post hoc, excusing aggression already done (e.g., “they were not really humans, so the crime is not so severe”). This sort of post hoc dehumanization can then license subsequent violence toward the group, as it is easier to be aggressive toward someone that you have already mistreated.

As merely one of several mechanisms underlying conflict, I believe dehumanization is nonetheless fundamental to intergroup conflict because of how we cognitively process the self and others. A set of core psychological mechanisms leads us to dehumanize other people virtually by default, leading to outsized dehumanization of out-groups. Let’s look at how these mechanisms operate sequentially.

First, people inherently perceive themselves to have greater mental capacity than others. This phenomenon is what Nick Epley, Juliana Schroeder, and I have collectively termed the lesser minds problem. This problem occurs not merely because we think we are mentally superior to or smarter than others but also stems from a basic feature of cognition—that is, we have direct access to our own minds but not to other people’s minds. As a result of this indirect access to other people’s minds, these other minds seem lesser—that is, dimmer, weaker, more inadequate—than our own. Several lines of research document this phenomenon across various judgments about others’ mental states. For example, studies show that people perceive themselves to have more free-will than others. People also believe they experience embarrassment more frequently than others. And people believe that they are more capable of rational thought (i.e., being impermeable to cognitive bias) than others. That we perceive our capacities for intention, emotion, and reason as more robust than others’ means that we fundamentally see ourselves as more human than other people. [...]

And yet we do not perceive all other minds as equally lesser. People view in-group minds, those minds belonging to members of our family, religion, country, and ethnicity, as similar to themselves and, therefore, as being reasonably human. Getting into the minds of in-group members is somewhat manageable because we share experiences, histories, and values with these people that allow us to easily approximate their mental states. By contrast, out-groups are inherently dissimilar from our in-group in appearance, values, shared history, and cultural norms, making those minds harder for us to access. And because of the simple contrast effect between those who look and act like us and those who do not, we mostly view out-groups as less mentally capable and thus less human than in-group members.

This contrast between in-group and out-group represents the second psychological mechanism that produces intergroup dehumanization. What the lesser minds problem and this in-group–out-group contrast phenomenon demonstrate is that animosity between groups is not necessary for dehumanization to occur. (Animosity does, however, exacerbate the contrast between in-group and out-group.) These processes simply result from how vision and attention operate—that is, we are more capable of noticing the mental complexities of the self than of others. Because perceiving out-groups as less than human is an inherent psychological tendency, dehumanization tends to be the starting point from which intergroup interaction occurs, establishing the ideal conditions for conflict to proceed.

Real, blatant intergroup dehumanization is not a relic of the past when violence was more frequent and severe. Government leaders and military members strategically use dehumanizing rhetoric toward out-groups to highlight the contrast between “us” and “them” and to perpetuate conflict among their constituents. The current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, is rife with dehumanization of this type, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent years likening Muslims and non-Israeli Middle Easterners as “wild beasts” and “dangerous animals.”

Historian Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht illustrated this dehumanization in describing a 1981 report on the Israeli military’s treatment of Arabs on the West Bank. In this report, issued by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, Feuerlicht details “information that came from Israeli army reservists who were troubled by what they had experienced. One reservist reported that when his unit arrived in Hebron they participated in an orientation session on the Arabs. The orientation instructed them that Arabs ‘are not like human beings’ and should be treated like ‘animals.’” Pervasive dehumanizing rhetoric in this conflict contributes to its intractability because it lessens the moral burden of harming other humans.

Dehumanizing rhetoric also thrives in other long-standing conflicts such as Hindu-Muslim tension in India. In late 2017, Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, called Muslims a “crop of two-legged animals that has to be stopped.” Such description is intended to spur his militant Hindu youth organization to avenge what they perceive to be past wrongs perpetrated by Muslims. When delivered by a powerful politician such as Adityanath, these statements fuel the fire of long-standing bitterness between certain Hindus and Muslims in India.

Dehumanization of this type also plagues Myanmar, where the military has undertaken large-scale ethnic cleansing of the majority-Muslim Rohingya people. This conflict stems from post–World War II fallout, after the Rohingya fought on behalf of the British, whereas many Buddhists, who represent Myanmar’s majority population, fought on behalf of the Japanese against the British. In a 2017 New York Times article describing how high-ranking Buddhists encouraged this conflict over several decades, Jeffrey Gettleman writes, “Some influential Buddhist monks said the Rohingya were the reincarnation of snakes and insects and should be exterminated, like vermin.” This demonizing view of Rohingya as a pest, in need of extermination, has fueled reactionary responses from the Rohingya with horrific violence resulting.

Beyond these prominent stories, scientific evidence for such inter-group dehumanization is widespread and multifaceted. For example, research shows that people see out-groups as less evolved and more animalistic than in-groups. People often believe in-group members can experience uniquely human emotions such as nostalgia and optimism, whereas out-group members can only experience baser emotions such as panic and fright, which people often believe are emotions shared with lower animals. Related work shows that people across different ethnicities perceive their out-groups to lack traits considered uniquely human or essential to human nature.

Dehumanization also dominates stereotypes and perceptions of racial and ethnic minorities. Psychologist Philip Goff and colleagues have shown that people associate images of apes more readily with black faces than with white faces. […] So robustly do people underestimate nonwhites’ experience of pain that, according to one study, pharmacies in nonwhite neighborhoods understock opioid analgesics compared to pharmacies in primarily white neighborhoods.

As another illustrative example of this racial bias in a medical context, consider African American tennis icon Serena Williams. Shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Williams nearly died because of inattention to her reports of pain. Williams describes how she began experiencing shortness of breath and asked a nurse for a CT scan and blood thinner to treat what she believed to be blood clots. The nurse assumed she was confused, and a doctor soon arrived only to perform an ultrasound of her lower body. After an inconclusive ultrasound, she finally received the CT scan, which indeed revealed blood clots in her lungs. Williams’s encounter is sadly emblematic of medical professionals’ propensity to overlook the pain of black patients, a tendency that may even contribute to African American women dying at a disproportionate rate after childbirth.

[...]

Finding Common Humanity

The examples above illustrate how the lesser minds problem initiates dehumanization and how the intergroup divide exacerbates this problem. Other minds are less accessible than our own and therefore appear lesser. Out-group minds are even more distant from and dissimilar to the self and therefore appear considerably lesser. If these processes represent the steps to dehumanizing out-groups, then the solution to reducing intergroup dehumanization seems simple: focus on reducing the social distance between people, making them more self-like and, thus, perceptibly more human. Although the recommendation sounds easy, in practice it is far messier. Important research has shown the benefits of trying to find common humanity across groups and subsequent work has provided an important caveat to the idea of common humanity as a panacea.

[…]

Our research shows that the tendency to focus on out-groups’ perceived hatred rather than their capacity to love their own drives conflict. Liane Young, Jeremy Ginges, and I found that amid political conflict, American Democrats and Republicans believe out-group hate motivates the other party rather than in-group love. We also found the same pattern among Israelis and Palestinians. When we surveyed nationally representative samples of Israelis and Palestinians to ask them what motivated their own group to support conflict and what motivated the other group, both replied similarly. Palestinians and Israelis each said that their group was more motivated by love (of their own side) whereas the other group was more motivated by hatred (of the other side). We also found that the strength of this perceived hate-love asymmetry predicted opposition to conciliatory action such as peaceful negotiations, or, in the case of Israelis, voting for a two-state solution. When, in one study, we incentivized one side in a conflict to recognize that their out-group was driven by in-group love, they became more optimistic about reaching a resolution and more willing to negotiate.

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Excerpted from “The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World” by Adam Waytz. Copyright © 2019 by Adam Waytz. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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An interview with Adam Waytz

The Economist: How can findings and techniques in social psychology be harnessed to bring people together at a time when they are pulling farther and farther apart? Can “in-groups” (people of the same group) be brought closer to “out-groups” (people who are not part of one’s group)?

Adam Waytz: I think ironically, the way to bring people together is to focus less on bringing people together and more on appreciating and accepting differences between them. Much of the early work on conflict resolution in psychology was geared around this idea of bringing people together to find common ground—common goals, common identity, or common enemies.

I think this aim is admirable as a first step, but we have since learned that bringing people together is not only difficult, but can sometimes be counterproductive. This is because in any two-party conflict, often the two parties differ in how much power they have, and this power asymmetry means two parties often have fundamentally different interests and concerns pertaining to the conflict.

Thus, successful conflict resolution strategies apply different approaches to low-power groups and high-power groups. For example, work shows that whereas high-power groups develop warmer feelings toward an out-group after considering that group’s struggles (perspective-taking), low-power groups warm toward their out-groups after communicating their struggles to the other side (perspective-giving).

Other work shows that whereas high-power groups seek to maintain a positive reputation low-power groups seek status. Groups are most willing to reconcile when their respective needs are met. In short, strategies that attend to power asymmetries tend to fare better.

The Economist: Will it really work? The forces of division seem way too vast, from partisan media and un-empathetic political leaders to the polarising din of social media.

Mr Waytz: It will work if both groups are enthusiastic about trying, but I’m pessimistic because it requires groups that are high in power (that is, political power, power in socioeconomic status, or power simply because of demographic factors) to potentially give up some of their power, and we know that high-power groups don’t even like talking about power in the first place.

That is why, when a conflict emerges between two groups, you often see high-power groups calling for “unity” or asking people to “come together.” If you are ignorant to which side has more power in a conflict, just listen for which group issues a “call for unity”—nine times out of ten it will be the high-power group. We need to be more comfortable with celebrating difference rather than melding into some homogeneous mass.

The Economist: Which institutions would be most useful to apply these techniques? Tech platforms? Media companies? Schools? Governments? Celebrity musicians and athletes? Corporate brands? And how would it work?

Mr Waytz: I’m skeptical about putting any sort of responsibility to forge connections in the hands of tech platforms, corporations, or governments. One institution where I see some promise is schools. This is because of research led by Betsy Levy Paluck who has presented promising strategies for schools to reduce bullying, a core component of much of the conflict we see in the world. The work essentially shows that middle school and high school kids will do as others do—that is, they follow social norms.

So, if you target a few of the popular kids to communicate anti-bullying messages and behaviours, these attitudes essentially go viral, and other kids adopt anti-bullying attitudes as well. This means if you can identify the “brokers” in any social network—the people who are well-connected and respected—training them to communicate anti-conflict messages can have a multiplicative effect.

The Economist: What if the “other side” doesn’t want to be “interdependent” and “coexist” or aspire to the other virtues that you vaunt—they rather enjoy a fight. In fact, they even think it’s moral to fight, and crucial to win. What then?

Mr Waytz: I think we need to be comfortable to celebrate our differences than push for a full-on melting-pot style coexistence. However, those who enjoy a fight are a different story. The people who are most resistant to peace and progress will only change their minds if they feel that they are being left behind by the rest of society. That is why I think it makes more sense to focus reconciliation efforts on people who are more open to reconciliation in the first place.