03/25/2021
When Neurology Underpins Human Behavior
About this time last year, Foreign Affairs magazine published an easy-to-read article by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroscientist who had spent much of his career studying primates (especially baboons) and who had earlier authored a best-selling book discussing the biological basis of human behavior, both good qualities and bad.
Sapolsky’s 790-page tome, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, had already been recapped in a March 2018 essay by Tom Jacobs: “Why we engage in tribalism, nationalism, and scapegoating.”
An even earlier, and not entirely positive, New York Times review of Behave was published when the book was released, written by Richard Wrangham in July 2017.
But it was the more recent Foreign Affairs article, “This Is Your Brain on Nationalism: The Biology of Us and Them” that was of interest at Brights Central because of its succinct presentation of the us/them topic, along with its contemporary relevance to the recent rise in nationalism and autocratic leaders across the globe. BC had hoped to share a link to enable Brights easy access to that one.
In the FA article, Sapolsky asks whether humans can overcome the neurological, hormonal, and developmental underpinnings of their tribalism and offers a rather depressing take on nationalism’s cognitive enablers.
“When it comes to group belonging, humans don’t seem too far from chimpanzees: people are comfortable with the familiar and bristle at the unfamiliar. Taming our aggressive tendencies requires swimming upstream.”
The essay surveys elements of human behavior that underpin the tendency to stereotype, to divide into “us/them” categories, and to form “tribes” that thenceforth override other considerations. It's not full-on determinism, however. Sapolsky does offer some prospect that change is possible.
BC had hoped that the FA article would become more accessible (in full, and without a wall) so that we could invite readers to it via the bulletin. To no avail. However, if you are interested in the topic, a short video interview with the professor is available online, touching very briefly (and all too sketchily) on some of the same material.
In such politically divisive times, it can be enlightening to take a hard look at our own biology. It is what we humans are “up against.” In confronting our unhelpful traits, the two aforementioned essay and review articles and the video are places to start.
