Sepideh’s Reviews > Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity > Status Update

"After WWII researchers found that contact was the only thing that reliably reduced intergroup conflict."

The trait that people high in Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) & Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) overwhelmingly share is their extreme intolerance toward outsiders who seem to threaten their group identity.
People with SDO are threatened by outsiders competing for dominance over their group, while people with RWA are threathened by outsiders who do not represent "the oneness & sameness that makes 'us' an 'us' ".

"The human self-domestication hypothesis suggests our worst behaviors toward other groups cannot be explained as mere 'negative feeling' toward others.It suggests we also evolved the ability to dampen the activity of the mental network that produces the unique features of our theory of mind. This allows us to blind ourselves to the humanity of people outside our group when we feel threatened."

"As our species was shaped by self-domestication, our increased friendliness also brought a new form of aggression.
A higher availability of serotonin during human brain growth increased the impact of oxytocin on our behavior. Group members had the ability to connect to one another, and the bonds among them were so strong, they felt like family. Caregiving behavior extended to a variety of social partners."

But our friendliness has a dark side.When we feel that the group we love is threatened by a different social group, we are capable of unplugging the threatening group from our mental network, which allows us to dehumanize them.
Incapable of empathizing with threatening outsiders,we can't see them as fellow humans and become capable of the worst forms of cruelty.We are both the most tolerant and most merciless species