Humans are biologically wired to connect with each other. Disconnection and isolation are not motivators to human growth and wellbeing. Medical journals today provide ample scientific evidence to implicate that disconnection, isolation, loneliness, etc., are associated with multiple health risks that we can think of, including, cognitive decline to emotional and psychological imbalances, personality disorders, memory related issues, cardiovascular complications and early mortality.
While social connectedness is our ‘default mode’ of being humans, enjoying longer span of life and health, some show a penchant for questionable social behaviours that promote a form of selective social disconnection. That is, we choose to cut off, disconnect with and even hate individuals who are not members of our ‘in-group’, the so-called ‘our-tribe’. The growing hate campaigns, the stereotypes of biases and prejudices we harbour along the lines of race, culture and religion are just a few examples of our selective preference for social disconnection and isolation. At this particular juncture of human history, when health sciences make breakthrough revelations on the developmental benefits of improving our social connectedness and expanding our ability for embracing diversity, it is absolutely pathological, that we continue to engage in pernicious and ugly social discourses that trigger us merely to galvanize our psyche with the divisive thinking of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘in-group and out-group’, ‘our tribe and their tribe’ classifications.
The ‘Cognitive Hurdle’
Neuroscience has been making giant leaps in the study of human brains, their functioning, and how they control and fashion individuals with their unique personal preferences in the distinct make up of their personhood. In mapping human brains, neuroscientists made a substantive discovery that even when our brains are resting between cognitive activities, they are oriented to social connection, of trying to reach out to others. This default mode of connection is the core of our being as humans, about which Martin Buber, a very renowned twentieth century philosopher, wrote so long ago: “Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.”
The striking discovery about the deep-seated human disposition for interconnectedness is certainly a very promising piece of information as it could serve us with a lofty vantage point in accelerating global collaboration in the areas of conflict resolution, settlements of wars, environmental protection and establishment of peace.
There is however, a huge challenge, a ‘cognitive hurdle’ in understanding humans as innately connection seeking. If the default mode of humans is irrefutably social connectedness, how could we account for the disconnection and isolation we create, particularly, with individuals who are different from us culturally, racially, and religiously? How could connection seeking beings openly tout for the extermination of the so-called ‘out-group’ through hate campaigns and hate speeches? Where and when does the shift from connection to disconnection and isolation take place along their developmental journey?
Perhaps two important hypotheses of psychology, could be of great value in addressing these questions: the ‘Other-Race Effect’ and the psychology of hate.
The Other-Race Effect
The real-life phenomenon of people relating easily with those who are like them and not so naturally with those who are different, has been a topic of study in social psychology for decades, which gradually led to the birth and construction of the Other-Race Effect hypothesis. In a study conducted in infants as old as three to nine months indicated that infants of nine months old displayed a preference for faces of the people of an in-group who resembled them, over an out-group who were different. Significantly, the infants of three months and six months old did not show this preference. This selective instinctual preference, which scientists call as the ‘Other-Race Effect’ sometimes also called the ‘Own-Race Bias’, point to the fact that though we are basically connection seeking people, but our continuous exposure to homogeneity and the lack of exposure to diversity at home stifles us with a psychological shortcoming, namely, we feel threatened by and defensive towards those who are different. This is to say, nurture eclipses nature! The scientific explanation neuroscience provides to support this view is that when we think the same thoughts again and again, the brain creates neural pathways of these thoughts that they become a habitual behaviour. It, simply, means that our lack of exposure to diversity, makes us feel connected to those who are similar to us and hostile to those who are different from us.
The Psychology of Hate
Hate is a searing emotion and its nature and dynamics cannot easily be understood. We are not referring to hate here in a simplistic and plain sense, as we would say, “I hate that dress”, “I hate that snooty guy who thinks great of himself”, etc. Everyone gives into this kind, sometime or another.
Hate is applied here in a broader and complicated sense, particularly, in the in-group out-group context. From this perspective, psychologists argue that hate is stronger than other negative emotions like anger and contempt. A distinguishing characteristic is that hate transmits itself faster, even from one generation to another.
Exploring the psychology of hate, Allison Abram, a New York based psychotherapist, contends fear as a major underlying component. In her analysis, both ‘fear of the other’ (others are different from us and they are opponents to us) and ‘fear of the self’ (there are things about ourselves which we don’t like in us) take the form of what Freud called the mechanism of projection onto others. Bringing in culture as an added component to this discussion, she quotes Silvia Dutchevici, a fellow-psychotherapist, “We live in a war culture that promotes violence in which competition is the way of life. We fear connecting because it requires us to reveal something about ourselves. We are taught to hate the enemy -meaning anyone different than us…”
People who hate those who are not members of their in-group, in fact, are struggling with serious personality issues. Perhaps the one who understood it well was the great Martin Luther King Jr. who experienced so much of racial hate directed to him throughout the American Civil Rights Movement, yet he took a radical personal stance of connection and love, as he famously wrote: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
The Psychology of Connection: Adapting Diversity at Home
In this time and age, as science is stretching its wings for the sky of optimal human growth and life satisfaction, it is not fitting for us to keep living blindly with our biases and prejudices that leave us as captives to the old misunderstanding, as famously written by philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre “hell is other people”. Ours is a new time, and our unique construction of how we live our lives requires to be defined in line with the trustworthy evidence we receive from the cutting-edge findings of the contemporary health and life sciences.
Connection seeking is certainly the innate nature of humans for we are biologically wired for it. This relational instinct however, could remain dormant due to the lack of exposure to diversity in our immediate living circles. In the cocoon of our homogeneity at home, if hate speeches and hate campaigns are what we are constantly fed with, we tend to carry forward these experiences for the rest of our lives, unless we are confronted with a different life defining experience that challenges our biases and prejudices. The impact of this new experience could broaden the horizon of our cognition, shed light on the underlying psychological shortcoming that is limiting our ability to live fully, freely and satisfactorily. Families could certainly prevent and attenuate their members carrying forward the negative impact of the Other-Race Effect or the Own-Race Bias, provided they are mindful of maintaining their homes with a robust balance of homogeneity and diversity.
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