Group-Identity Thinking is Killing Us. But Can We Overcome it?

Not only is it possible, it happens all the time and we don’t even notice it.

Humans love to categorize things, there’s no denying that.

We especially seem to love categorizing other humans.

Psychologists have shown that the first things we notice about each other are categories: race, gender, and age. (Although, so conspicuous by its absence is sexual attraction/mate selection that I wonder if they even tested for it).

But they’ve also shown that when we categorize each other along completely arbitrary lines, say, identifying a group of people who love pizza, versus those who love spaghetti, we are more likely to reward our own perceived group (the “Us” group) and withhold reward from perceived “Them” group.

In a different time of a couple of decades ago, this was known as “prejudice” or “bias” and it was seen as a flawed way of thinking — a thing to be identified in oneself, and overcome.

These days, we call it inevitable.

It’s as if we’ve completely abandoned the project of bettering ourselves as human beings and as a species, identifying our biases, working past …