Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

think of as “like us.” This generates , the
greater likelihood that we will hire people like us, be friendlier
to them and form relationships with them, and so on.
We have a bias toward people like us, and the social divisions
that result from this in-group chauvinism only reinforce these
divisions by keeping us around those like us more than we are
around those unlike us. The individual bias leads to cultural
barriers that further insulate us from each other.
In the other direction is the . When
someone who is like us acts in a fashion we deem unacceptable, we
place the blame for the action on the personality of the individual.
But when the person is unlike us and we see the same misbehavior,
we tend to attribute it to members of the community as a whole.
Our minds look for generalizations, and when we see the actions of
in a stereotype we spend our lives building.
If in-group chauvinism leads us to have a rosier-than-rational view
of ourselves and those like us and the fundamental attribution error
leads us to have a darker-than-rational view of those we have been
taught are unlike us, then it seems rational to build higher walls
between us.
But society isn’t static. In the 1960s and 1970s, the walls that divided
society into separate communities were beginning to be taken down.
In the civil rights struggle, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously
said, “The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” He saw
trajectory. He believed that human progress is real, an undeniable
aspect of social reality. But are we really growing and improving?
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