Excerpt from Us and Them by David Berreby, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So, for example, a contemporary Freudian, the psychoanalyst and writer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, argues that racism "exemplifies hysterical prejudice, by which I mean a prejudice that a person uses unconsciously to appoint a group to act out in the world forbidden sexual and sexually aggressive desires that the person has repressed."

While psychology shunned the tribal aspect of human kinds, the traditional political and cultural disciplines haven't wanted to address the individual mind. If your work involves comparing Spanish and German culture, you wouldn't want to confuse the issue by looking into what makes a person feel more Spanish or less, in the course of a week, and what made her forget her Spanishness and think of herself instead as a Madrileno last Tuesday night. Ignoring individual psychology and variety, this mass approach yields theories for analyzing collective action, for instance, to explain why France conquered much of Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Yet it was not France that fought wars, literally. It was people who considered themselves French and who considered Frenchness important enough to fight for and die for - or, at least, who considered it a sensible enough concept that they did not rebel when they were organized to fight in its name. If psychology seems to neglect the fact that people see themselves as more than individuals, history seems to ignore the fact that individuality does matter. The mind sciences now offer a way across this chasm - methods for describing how collective human kinds and individual human minds depend on one another.

Today, perhaps for the first time in human history, large masses of people recognize that human kinds are made, not discovered. Globalization is showing people that "our side" is determined by beliefs, not facts. It's now obvious that human-kind violence belongs to no one religion, nation, race, culture, or political ideology; it's equally obvious that a "good man" at home can be a torturer at work and that supposedly ancient hatreds can disappear, even as supposedly peaceful societies can turn genocidal. All of this has led to a hunger for new ways to think about human kinds.

Meanwhile, the politics of science - or rather, the way science is used in politics - creates a different kind of pressure for new ideas. The prestige of science around the world is so great that almost everyone wants to get some on his side. Science has been invoked for claims that melanin makes black people more intelligent. Science has been invoked to support the opposite claim too: that black people have smaller skulls than whites and therefore must be less intelligent. Science has been called in to support the idea that some people are "genetically programmed" to be hostile to Croatia.

If scientists don't come up with a good science of human kinds, it's clear they'll be stuck with a bad one - claims about racial, ethnic, national, and religious superiority supposedly "proven" by biology. Much as mind scientists might have preferred those fine abstractions, Everyone and The Individual, the problem of human kinds is not going to wait.

So the moment for new ideas has arrived. Despite a certain discomfort with the subject, mind science is working on kind-mindedness. The work takes place on a level of explanation above the isolated individual but below the abstract sphere of nations and cultures. It's being made at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy of mind, and anthropology, where kind-mindedness, once a mystery, has become a problem that science can address.

Copyright © 2005 by David Berreby.  No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.