David Berreby’s popular science book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind looks at the process of dividing people into categories from a cognitive science perspective. It explores evidence suggesting that the process of determining whether someone is “us” or “not us” happens at a very basic perceptual level. This seems like a grim thought, implying that racist and/or tribal thinking is so deeply rooted as to be inescapable. Berreby counters pessimism by suggesting that our tribal sorting mechanism is also highly fluid, dependent strongly on circumstance. Put in a new situation, we don’t abandon “us-not us” sorting, but may at least rapidly adopt new sorting methods.

Incidentally, Berreby also shows that a scientific concept of the early 90s that has filtered into pop culture is already outdated.

We do not, it seems, have a reptile brain which is the seat of primitive response and information, overlaid by a more sophisticated mammalian brain. Nor is the limbic system clearly a storehouse of instinctive responses. Scans of people placed under stress show a much more complex firing pattern, with flares of activity throughout the brain.

As a human, I am happy to see it go. As a writer, not so much, since it was such a vivid image, one I think I’ve drawn on in the past.

Its power as an image no doubt helps to account for its widespread adoption, in the face of iffy evidence.

The best example of this phenomenon, where scientific ideas get taken up by the arts and are held onto even after research sets it aside, is the work of C. G. Jung. Mainstream psychology has moved on from Jung, but his notion of archetypes continues to inform our understanding of narrative. We genre practitioners frequently resort to it, often through the filter of Joseph Campbell, to justify the depth of our escapist heroes.

Berreby doesn’t get into it, but the cognitive science of rapid categorization could restore Jung’s concepts to scientific currency. If we instantly decide all sorts of things about people, placing them into broader types, it’s not such a leap to think that we personalize abstract concepts by granting them personal characteristics and grouping them into archetypes.

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