TOEFL: A clip describing a study that shows how even young children show tribal instincts.
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We are fundamentally very tribal. The instinct to both belong to a group and to exclude to other groups is one of our deepest most fundamentally rooted instincts. And I'd like you to describe a study that you talk about in the book, which is what happened when researchers just gave children red shirts and blue shirts. Because I think it's such a great example of how deep this runs in us.
Well this is astonishing. They took a group of random kids, I don't know between the ages of 5 and 10 I think, and they just randomly assigned half of them red t-shirts and the other half blue. And then they put them at these computer docks and showed them pictures of very similar kinds of kids, but some wearing blue t-shirts and some wearing red t-shirts. And they investigators, the researchers, asked a bunch of questions.
And it was absolutely astounding. These children, without knowing a thing about the people you know whose pictures that we're seeing, would consistently say that the people wearing the shirt color that was on their quote unquote team, even though they never met these people, they would rate them as smarter better more moral. When told stories about both groups, they would systematically remember all the good things about the people wearing their shirt color and all the bad things about people wearing the other shirt color.
So what this shows is just how hard-wired we are to want to sort ourselves into these groups even along the flimsiest of lines. I mean these people don't even know each other. And when you intensify these studies, it gets it gets a lot worse. I mean this is just kind of a light-hearted example.