"The tendency toward homophily, toward flocking together with birds of your inner and outer feather, gives rise to a harmonious sense of belonging and shared purpose, to easy laughter and volumes of subtext mutually, wordlessly, joyfully understood. But homophily, researchers said, is also the basis of tribalism, xenophobia and racism, the urge to 'otherize' those who differ from you and your beloved friends in one or more ways... One recent study from the University of Michigan had subjects stand outside on a cold winter day and read a brief story about a hiker who was described as either a 'left-wing, pro-gay-rights Democrat' or a 'right-wing, anti-gay-rights Republican.' When asked whether the hypothetical hiker might feel chilly as well, participants were far more likely to say yes if the protagonist’s political affiliation agreed with their own. But a political adversary — does that person even have skin, let alone a working set of thermal sensors? 'Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?' Nicholas Christakis of Yale University said. 'I have struggled with this, and read and studied a tremendous amount, and I have mostly dispiriting news. It’s awful. Xenophobia and in-group bias go hand-in-hand.... In order to band together, we need a common enemy'...."
From
"Friendship’s Dark Side:'We Need a Common Enemy'" by Natalie Angier (NYT).
This is important and useful, but watch out for the idiots who will seek to ban friendship. We're already seeing some efforts in schools to break up "best friends."
This is from a column in U.S. News last January, by the psychologis Barbara Greenberg:
I am a huge fan of social inclusion. The phrase best friend is inherently exclusionary... A focus on having best friends certainly indicates there's an unspoken ranking system; and where there is a ranking system, there are problems. I see kids who are never labeled best friends, and sadly, they sit alone at lunch tables and often in their homes while others are with their best friends.
My hope is that if we encourage our kids to broaden their social circles, they will be more inclusive and less judgmental. The word "best" encourages judgment and promotes exclusion....
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66 comments:
OMG! And does the sun come up in the east every morning?
Favoring those who are like you is the starting point. Then the negotiations can begin. Trade offs of acceptance for acceptance is The Art of the Deal. The Social Circle is a political term. Make more friends than those who exclude you from their circle, and your circle wins.But it starts with feeling accepted.
I bet those idiots are all on the left
Next step is assigning people you have to be friends with.
"Diversity and Inclusion" is right up there with "Arbeit Macht Frei" for murderous doublethink.
"Diversity" = false difference imposed by force
"Inclusion" = false sameness imposed by force
The idea that we must hate the other is BS. Modern society proves that conclusively. There's another, actually dark, aspect of the human psyche at work that leads people to do the most complaining in scenarios where they have the least to complain about and then conclude that it's the worst because it gets the most complaints.
"Diversity + Proximity = War"--Chateau Heartiste
What you are wishing for promotes violence.
"Let 'em all go to hell except Cave 76"
What could go wrong with this?
The beginning of wisdom is discernment. I doubt today’s educators are helping students to become discerning.
Althouse, America hath need of thee.
It starts with best friends, then moves on to why be exclusive with a spouse? Then on to favoring one's child is nepotism to be eliminated.
"We're trying to prevent a recurrence of Nazi-ism, so we have the right to be nosy busy bodies... for your own good."
This appeal to "We've got to prevent the next Hitler" thing is pretty stale, isn't it?
Althouse justifies Marxist feminist scolding again. But she isn't a Marxist feminist, get it? You'd be crazy to think she is.
She's just trying to get you thinking about what the Marxist feminist "experts" think you should do with your personal life. You really need to think about that, don't you?
We can't just live our lives according to custom and comfort, can we? We must keep focused every day on preventing the next Hitler. And you're a Nazi if you don't think so.
'Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?'
"Hate" is the wrong word. Words like "mistrust" or "suspect" are closer.
"Love" is also the wrong word. "Rely upon" or "trust" are closer.
It is a matter of Darwinian survival. We trust those we have verified as being like us. Yes, it is at some level a tribal aspect of normal human nature.
Race doesn't matter if you think alike, is the result.
Lock her up! Lock her up!
White people like Uncle Toms. Proving race doesn't matter.
These people never learn, do they? This time we're going to succeed in creating the New Soviet Man!
Breaking natural family bonds, forbidding real friendship, burning a culture's past to the ground in the name of the glorious future where all men will be brothers - and succeeding in creating the more vicious, murderous, exclusionary, heretic-hunting sorts of tribes that humans are capable of forming.
I think it's interesting that they chose to make the Republican anti gay. I think that speaks to their own biases.
People tend to like people who like them. In fact, one way to get someone to like you is to demonstrate that you like them. I should have been a psychologis.
Give us stuff or we'll burn the place down is not a good start at thinking alike.
right down to the moment-to-moment pattern of blood flow in the brain.
I doubt it. "Blood" was not mentioned again in the article for some mysterious reason.
But a political adversary — does that person even have skin, let alone a working set of thermal sensors?
Why yes, they do. More than half the people treated "adversaries" the same as they treated as allies.
"'Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?'
The referenced studies don't describe any hate or enemies, so it must be the case that if you make melodramatic statements about small differences you get more air-time and funding.
FWIW, all the participants were college students, not normal people.
What societies prize is absence of violence. So you can use a threat of violence to get stuff, a payoff.
Payoffs are in proportion to access to violence. The biggest threat is paid off the most, or else he'd opt for the violence instead to get more.
This is why dysfunctional nations persist when the economic tricks to getting a high standard of living are all known. They're stable with the payoff system, and the payoff receivers won't accept reform. It's payoff or violence.
Some of that has been imported into the US system as civil rights groups, MLK's dream gone bad; some of it as corrupt government, as in the deep state.
It's not about thinking alike at that point, but what's a stable system of spoils.
Give us our stuff or you burn.
What Trump has been doing, with Russia, China and NK, is sanctioning the payoff receivers, which is a novel approach to breaking up the spoils system. The spoils receivers are then better off with reform, because it's suddenly no good for them now.
Barry Weingast on violence, spoils and stability
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/08/weingast_on_vio.html
But apply it now to the US interest group system, and Trump's foreign policy sanctions.
'Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?'
Love of one's own doesn't imply hatred of the other. Normal reactions to "them" range all over the place: indifference, curiosity, normal social discomfort in being among strangers where one doesn't know the rules, normal prudent wariness, recognition of opportunity for mutual benefit (trade in goods, technology, art, etc.), all the way to hostility and hate when resources are being fought over and the outcome is a zero-sum game, or people among whom their are irreconcilable cultural differences are too close together and in each others' faces too much.
You gotta wonder how much projection is going on in people who believe that preference for one's own automatically equals hatred for others. (Why are they always otherizing people who understand that good fences make good neighbors?)
Why do good fences make good neighbors? Is it cows?
I have to check the poem.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Caldwell Titcomb IV said...
I doubt it. "Blood" was not mentioned again in the article for some mysterious reason.
Cerebral blood flow is what they are measuring in these studies, using fMRI. It is a surrogate for changes in neuronal electrical activity.
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
― Jesse Jackson
Another unreplicable social studies "experiment."
I talked to a guy in Cuba this morning, and our blood flow was in sync for the ten seconds it took. We both liked morse code.
rhhardin: I have to check the poem.
The poet doesn't think good fences make good neighbors. Thus suggesting that poet flakiness and spergitarian economist flakiness are perhaps not that far apart after all.
Btw, good posts re "payoff receivers, above.
Though the Cuban as sending preformatted messages, the ritual stuff at 50wpm and the individual part at 25. I was paddling all of mine out by hand. So we differed on plasures.
robother: Another unreplicable social studies "experiment."
It's probably replicable, because it's not telling us anything that we didn't already know. It's the extrapolations (OMG! Nazis!) that aren't "replicable" in any scientific sense. Though they do get repeated an awful lot.
"You can borrow from the Devil
You can borrow from a friend
But the Devil'll give you twenty
When your friend got only ten"
Imagine there's no Lefties.
It isn't hard to do.
Here's a happy folky tune that should help bring us all together on this beautiful Sunday morning. Unfortunately he's Canadian, but I think we can overlook that for a few minutes.
The War on Individualism never stops. It’s all they know. They being people who think they are always right and should have unlimited power to make people better. Their motto is “We’re better than this”. Their scold is “Don’t be on the wrong side of history”.
I know it's easier for me to make friends with people from the pro-freedom camp than with "liberals" and other statists. I find it hard to feel feelings of warmth toward someone pointing a gun at my head. But hey, that's me.
Same old crazy boring stupid big think piece from the NYT- ever think about getting out of your NYT/ Wapo bubble?
You and I travel to the beat of different hemato flow
Oh can't you tell by the way my brain
Hemorrhages when you make eyes at me...
You can tell by the way I pump my blood
I'm a woman's man, got the time to pud.
I love how one of the authorities on the possibly inevitable hatred in groups/out groups is the white Yale house-master professor of the Great Yale Halloween Brouhaha who was literally standing in the center of angry black students screaming at him for making their living situation violent because his wife, at the request of other students, wrote a memo suggesting that Yale students were old enough to choose their own Halloween costumes.
On further thought, this one on "best friends."
One formal institutions that discourages special friendships is convents/abbeys. The idea is that you are separating yourself from the things of this world and devoting yourself to the love of God. That might seem odd to outsiders but there's a clear reasoning within this group, based on sayings from Jesus himself, that by choosing to be in the group you are also choosing to separate yourself from the ordinarily human.
For a psychologist of ordinary kids to think that ordinary human beings can be nudged not to be attracted to someone else who shares their interests (or what you wish were your interests) shows a profound misunderstanding of human nature.
Getting off my high horse now to get another cup of coffee.
After reading the following two posts I realize that I want a friend like Ivana who will drink Purell as a stress reliever.
What were the results with a pro-gay Republican and an anti-abortion Democrat?
Oh, goody, a social engineer who thinks they can deflect generations of evolution based on dubious science.
This will end well. Again.
On social issues, the Left pretends that everybody can be a winner in life through a socialist society.
And when it comes to the free market, the Right pretends that everybody can get rich through capitalism.
But unless you live in some future 24th century society without limits, everybody CANNOT be a winner at life.
Not everybody can have a large support network.
Not everybody can strike it rich in the stock market.
Etc.
In fact, it's losers that give winning its meaning.
Without losers, winning would be meaningless.
Losers define the lowest common denominator that everyone tries to exceed (but not everyone will).
Guess I'm an outlier, as I've been xenophilic all my life, seeking out people different from myself.
". . . the Right pretends everyone can get rich through capitalism." Weirdly, I've been on "the Right" probably longer than the writer has been alive, moving from "fusionist" conservatism to libertarianism; travelled in conservative and libertarian circles; read all the major pro-freedom writers and many of the more esoteric ones; and yet never encountered anyone who took that position.
Guess I'm an outlier, as I've been xenophilic all my life, seeking out people different from myself.
If you're sui generis that's all you can do.
who was literally standing in the center of angry black students screaming at him for making their living situation violent
The "mismatch problem" is coming to a head.
They know they are in trouble and haven't yet figured out that it is them, not us.
mockturtle said...
"Guess I'm an outlier, as I've been xenophilic all my life, seeking out people different from myself."
When the other tribe has managed to kill or drive off all your tribe's adult men, they kill the young males and induct the fertile females into their tribe. You can read about it in the Old Testament. So xenophilia can be a survival strategy for fertile females. Not such a good idea for males. That's why we're so big on "winning". The alternative is losing.
I thought Nicholas Christakis was a Halloween costume supporting manifest hater, who had no standing to comment.
The hunter gatherer in the forest who could recognize differences and realize that the face peering back at him through the foliage was not a member of his own tribe and who could then put his fight or flight needle into the red zone the quickest, he would be the one to survive and reproduce.
We still have that subconscious process affecting our interactions today.
I thought homophily was a gay bar on Broad Street.
And if they want to convince our school systems the children are not allowed to have best friends, children will never learn to have someone in whom they can confide and that will make it a lot easier for the totalitarians to turn everyone into a state informer.
Bonkti said...
"I thought Nicholas Christakis was a Halloween costume supporting manifest hater, who had no standing to comment."
Yeah, he doesn't seem to be too quick on the uptake. What part of "Shut your fucking mouth you White Devil" is he having problems understanding?
Angel-dyne: Does anyone doubt that the UM students in that sociological experiment knew the "right" answer the professor wanted?
Most failures to replicate in Social Sciences involve randomly non-pre-selected groups answering the question.
So they're going to be forced to have conservative friends?
This is choice.
They could start with conservative speakers at school.
My friends are "diverse" in the leftist sense (i.e. color, sex, etc.).
Despite their "diversity", they do bear a high correlation in character and principles.
"Xenophobia and in-group bias go hand-in-hand" Correlation does not equal causality. I suspect that there are many people with no friends who dislike everybody. Human beings tend to be tribal. Our brains are hardwired to form social relationships with people that we perceive to be, or can be, part of our tribe. The problem is not that we treat our tribe members too well; it's that we tend to demonize people who are outside our tribal group. That's the big problem with politics today. It's human nature to dehumanize and demonize the other side and the internet and our advanced technology are accelerating that process. We need to be taught to treat people who are not in our tribes better, rather than being taught that it's bad to have tribes.
Michael K said...
"The "mismatch problem" is coming to a head.
They know they are in trouble and haven't yet figured out that it is them, not us."
Not so sure about that. I suspect that the anger and desperation you see in these bizarre protests is due to the realization that this supposed prize you have won is defeating you. You didn't actually win it, someone stole it and gave it to you. Now it is slipping through your hands, there is nothing you can do to stop it, and all the people who were so proud of you are going to be vastly disappointed. Note that one of the standard demands they now make is to cancel finals.
Hmmm...not a single friend I've ever had has looked anything like me.
I do have many family members, and a couple of friends, whose political and other views do not resemble mine.
@Robert -- Have you examined the blood flow of their brain?
I have many friends who map to my political conclusions, but very few who resemble my political thinking. But then I have family who come to completely different political conclusions, but whose thinking I understand.
I also, increasingly, think that part of what makes for weird political disagreement really is age.
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