Why do we like some people and hate some others ?
In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. People may for example identify with their peer group, family, community, sports team, political party, gender, religion, or nation. It has been found that the psychological membership of social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of phenomena.
- by Henri Tajfel and colleagues during his work in formulating social identity theory. [Source: Wikipedia]
It is believed that early humans lived in small communities that cooperated with each other for gathering food, raising children and protecting themselves from external threats. The size of the group was limited to the resources available near them to support their existence.
Yuval Noah Harari argued in this book ‘Sapiens’ that belief in common myths like ‘religion’, ‘state’ etc led to large scale cooperation among humans for the first time. Large areas of fertile land near rivers and efficient agriculture also supported the formation of larger communities.
Fast-forward to now and we can still observe instances where, even with advanced education that trains us to think objectively, we still maintain a distrust towards people who look differently, speak a different language, pray to different gods, have different food habits, or live within different political boundaries. We have even seen some politicians or governments perform intelligent social engineering to sometimes reduce some of this distrust, but many a times to add fuel to this distrust and transform it into hatred.
Perhaps no society in the world, no matter how advanced, is totally immune to this feeling. It manifests in different forms as xenophobia, racism, communalism, nepotism and so on.
Schellings model of segregation showed that even when individuals (or “agents” in the model) didn’t mind being surrounded or living by agents of a different race, they would still choose to segregate themselves from other agents over time. It means even if you have a mild preference of being with people like you, at a macro level the society ends up being segregated.
In a way, this could be an evolutionary trait that would have helped certain groups survive and certain others extinct. Groups that were too naive were slaughtered by invading tribes. Groups that were too small and did not trust anyone were not able to cooperate at a scale large enough to survive adverse conditions.
The interesting fact is that humans at micro-level and societies at macro-level can be influenced and moulded through many different ways. Books we read, movies we watch, friends with whom we go to school with or play with, our neighbours — all of these influence us. With the advent of social media and this continuous deluge of information that we are exposed to, at each moment we are undergoing a micro-influence. This interconnectedness through social media can make us fall into our in-groups at scale and make us stay in that filter-bubble forever.
A pandemic like the one we are currently in should have made us aware of the need to deliberately cooperate at a global level. However, it doesn’t look like that is happening. We still find people or groups to blame, for the discomfort caused by an invisible strand of RNA. And we find the ones to blame, based on our existing mental model and minimising our cognitive dissonance.
[Disclaimer: Views, thoughts and opinions expressed above are my own and not that of my current employer or any organisation that I was previously part of.]
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