The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,318

experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel told participants that they belonged to one of two groups defined by some trivial difference, such as whether they preferred the paintings of Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky.132 He then gave them an opportunity to distribute money between a member of their group and a member of the other group; the members were identified only by number, and the participants themselves had nothing to gain or lose from their choice. Not only did they allocate more money to their instant groupmates, but they preferred to penalize a member of the other group (for example, seven cents for a fellow Klee fan, one cent for a Kandinsky fan) than to benefit both individuals at the expense of the experimenter (nineteen cents for a fellow Klee fan, twenty-five cents for a Kandinsky fan). A preference for one’s group emerges early in life and seems to be something that must be unlearned, not learned. Developmental psychologists have shown that preschoolers profess racist attitudes that would appall their liberal parents, and that even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent. 133

The psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto have proposed that people, to varying degrees, harbor a motive they call social dominance, though a more intuitive term is tribalism: the desire that social groups be organized into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own group dominant over the others.134 A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensiveness of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contrast, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, political progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.

The theory of social dominance implies that race, the focus of so much discussion on prejudice, is psychologically unimportant. As Tajfel’s experiments showed, people can divide the world into in-groups and out-groups based on any ascribed similarity, including tastes in expressionist painters. The psychologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides point out that in human evolutionary history members of different races were separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges (which is why racial differences evolved in the first place) and seldom met each other face to face. One’s adversaries were villages, clans, and tribes of the same race. What looms large in people’s minds is not race but coalition; it just so happens that nowadays many coalitions (neighborhoods, gangs, countries) coincide with races. Any invidious treatment that people display toward other races can be just as readily elicited by members of other coalitions.135 Experiments by the psychologists G. Richard Tucker, Wallace Lambert, and later Katherine Kinzler have shown that one of the most vivid delineators of prejudice is speech: people distrust people who speak with an unfamiliar accent.136 The effect goes back to the charming story of the origin of the word shibboleth in Judges 12:5–6:And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

The phenomenon of nationalism can be understood as an interaction between psychology and history. It is the welding together of three things: the emotional impulse behind tribalism; a cognitive conception of the “group” as a people sharing a language, territory, and ancestry; and the political apparatus of government.

Nationalism, Einstein said, is “the measles of the human race.” That isn’t always true—sometimes it’s just a head cold—but nationalism can get virulent when it is comorbid with the group equivalent of narcissism in the psychiatric sense, namely a big but fragile ego with an unearned claim to preeminence. Recall that narcissism can trigger violence when the narcissist is enraged by an insolent signal from reality. Combine narcissism with nationalism, and you get a deadly phenomenon that political scientists call ressentiment (French for resentment): the conviction that one’s nation or civilization has a historical right to greatness despite its lowly status, which can only be explained by the malevolence of an internal or external foe.137

Ressentiment whips up the emotions of thwarted