Glimpses into the Out-group Homogeneity*

Wes Nisker ('99) posits that in the journey to self-discovery and understanding of our behaviors, the fundamental place to start with is to pose the question: “Who am I?” This is not about me, the teacher, the footballer or what have you. It is about getting some idea to the questions: Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? The answer to “Who am I?” is “…of vital importance to our happiness and well-being. How at ease we feel in our body, mind and the world, as well as how we behave toward others and the environment all revolve around how we view ourselves in the larger scheme of things.”

Scientific researches are increasingly proving what has long been hypothesized that beneath the veneer of civilization and culture, our behaviors are functionally primal and inclined towards basic survival and procreation as a means of gene succession.

Take the case of Ugandans: Most of us have received formal education and many make claims to religious faith. The majority pay allegiance to Christianity whose basic tenet is “Love thy neighbor.” However, from the same mouth that sings the glory to the Christ, the champion of ‘Love thy neighbor,” also gushes morbid coded venoms, such as: “Those people,” “You people,” “The Anyanya (not the ones of the 50’s and 60’s Sudan),” “A good Muganda is a dead one,” or “Biological substances (forgetting we are all biological organisms).” We have insulted one another, we have killed one another, and we have hogged power and suppressed others.  All the while saddling the other with being primitive. All the while some have been good parents, good sons, good friends, good church goers, good priests and imams, and may have even been generous to a fault. What is going on?

It is seems that we are not one Self. We have multiple selves or rather may be sublevels of or forms of the mundane Self. Often we negotiate each sublevel appropriately for the occasion. Often we don’t and, at the extreme end, may even be pathological.

And this brings us back to “Those people,” a euphemism for painting the “others” with one brush of Out-group Homogeneity—“you have seen one, you have seen them all.”  In my childhood eyes, for example, I could not figure out the physical differences between people in the Indian community. This persisted until eventually I began to recognize individual differences. What was happening was that I could only use my limited cognitive resources to interactions and differentiations within the larger in-group of the black population of my lottery win.

As an adult, did this phenomenon of seeing no differences in the out-group disappear or still lies dormant somewhere in the labyrinthine hard-drive of my amazing brain?

It seems the Out-group Homogeneity has been horned over millions of years for survival: Those people came from over the river and brought diseases. So, stay way from them. When they came, our crops failed. Their women are witches. Those people came and rampaged through the village, killing males and old women, and carrying away young girls. They are our sworn enemy; never marry into their clan.

While Out-group Homogeneity has served us well, it also has its dark sides. Princes of darkness and demagoguery can take it and use it to destroy a group. History is full of it. The latest mayhems in Bosnia and Rwanda are testimonies to that. Many Acoli in Uganda and abroad feel that they have been subjected to the same. We risk relationships when we dismissively say it never happened, which then feeds into the “they-and-us” divide. Similarly, carping in discordant harangues may not win sympathetic ears and has the same “they-and-us” effect.

So, it doesn’t seem that my childhood outlook vanished from my mind. It is undercover and could easily pop up as a default state at times of stress. Whether I use it or not, depends on whether I train myself or somebody has trained me to use alternative skills in conflicts. If I do, and you do, it will mean “taking whole” in the situation and we become super-cooperators**, which seems to be a much stronger and elegant survival tool.

*Douglas T. Kenrick, ‘11

**Nowak & Highfield, 11