Mates vs strangers — why humans connect and divide

All In The Mind

ABC listen

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's human nature to form groups — families, friends, online communities. We love to be surrounded by people similar to us.

But that can also make us discriminatory and defensive. And social media makes that instinct worse.

Today, we look at how our brains evolved to connect and divide, and what that means for the problems we face in our modern world.

This episode was first broadcast in April 2023.

Looking for something to listen to next? Check out another All in the Mind episode, The Certainty Myth.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07.6	Every high school has its groups.
0:10.1	Athletes, cool kids, nerds, misfits.
0:12.9	It's kind of a cliche, but it's true.
0:15.5	Dr. Mark Williams' group were the truence.
0:19.2	Yeah, my in-group was the wrong in-group for kids at that age to be involved in.
0:24.0	So, yeah, we used to go down, we used to go fishing and smoking pot most days rather than actually
0:29.1	going to school.
0:30.2	Mark grew up in the town of Colac in the Western District of Victoria back in the 70s and 80s.
0:36.0	Very insular town. It was a very rough town.
0:39.3	I've heard it's much better now, but back then it wasn't somewhere that really liked strangers.
0:44.3	And what was your high school like?
0:46.3	It was rough.
0:47.3	One day in his rough high school, in this rough insular town. A new kid arrived.
0:59.5	And he was from Canada and he was picked on brutally.
1:04.5	And within, I would say, a day or two, he was, yeah, picked on because of his accent and because he was different and there wasn't anyone different in our town.
1:08.4	He actually ended up moving out of town very quickly afterwards. His whole
1:11.8	family moved out of town. And so was it mostly just sort of verbal picking on this person?
1:16.9	Or did it escalate to physical as well? Yeah, no, it was physical fairly quickly. I mean,
1:21.3	there was a lot of physical fights at the school. Teachers weren't really out and about much.
1:26.5	And so, yeah, no, it went physical very quickly.
1:28.7	And so how long did he last in the school before he left?
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -145 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ABC listen, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of ABC listen and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.