Quotes About Group

oxytocin made men more willing to hurt other teams (in a prisoner's dilemma game) because doing so was the best way to protect their own group.

This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson catalogues the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary

Morality binds and blinds.

Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.

If the hive switch is real—if it's a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding—then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual & ideological diversity.

Atrocities committed in the name of religion are almost always commited against out-group members, or against the most dangerous people of all: apostates (who try to leave the group) and traitors (who undermine the group).

conservative caring is somewhat different—it is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who've sacrificed for the group.12 It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.

The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: "In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not 'What's in it for me?' but rather 'What's in it for my group?' "36 Political opinions function as "badges of social membership."37

When the "tribe switch"30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group's moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves.

Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing

It's the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people.

We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins.

the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: "In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not 'What's in it for me?' but rather 'What's in it for my group?

creating a temporary superorganism. Muscular bonding enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and then crush less cohesive groups.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

We have so separated ourselves, person from person and group from group, in the city, that we have made hatred a dreadfully easy emotion. It comes to us as lightly and insidiously as the symptoms of an unconsciously harboured disease.

As "teenager" became a group identity, a distinctive teen ethos and identity emerged; youth culture, as it became known, was born.

throughout the contemporary world, the more religious the group the higher its birth rate, and we see the power of religion to sustain community over time.

All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. Primates do this by grooming, stroking one another. But this degree of intimacy is possible only in a relatively small group. Humans, by using language as a substitute for embrace, can manage more relationships and thus build larger groups.

speech was seen in Judaism not simply as a means of conveying information, though it is that as well, but also and essentially as a means of holding the group together without coercive force.