This is a fun title for a serious blog.
I hear a lot – all of us hear a lot – about the prevalence of Us-vs-Them dynamics. We as a nation certainly believe ourselves to be polarized, though it does seem that when you look local instead of national there is less Us-vs-Them than we often perceive.
But here’s what I also hear about Us-vs-Them: This is just the way it is, the way we are, the way humans are hard-wired. People are inherently tribal – and tribal in an inevitably antagonistic way. This is Us-vs-Them as destiny.
I am wary of the fatalism of Us-vs-Them as destiny to the degree that I’ve started thinking of it as the Us-vs-Them bogeyman – put out there for the purpose of scaring us. (1) I’m simply not convinced that Us-vs-Them as destiny is real; and (2) believing that it is freezes us into inaction.
As to the slicing and dicing, somehow the default on our family TV has come to be America’s Test Kitchen. So, a cooking approach naturally sprang to mind.
Yes, it’s a bit of a mixed metaphor, but it gets the job done!
Here are my 7 slices and dices:
- The most convincing accounts I’ve come across about human nature and history say that our evolutionary superpower is our capacity to be flexible and adapt to fast-changing and widely-varying environments. We do this not as individuals but in groups, and the way we adapt is by developing different cultures – different ways of interacting. MANY different ways of interacting. So, I’m skeptical generally about assertions that any particular social dynamic – including Us-vs-Them – is universal.[i]
- The malleability of who is Us and who is Them also has me scratching my head. The history of racial classifications in this country, for example, is a master class with the lesson that who was “Us”/people-categorized-as-white, and who was “Them”/people-categorized-as-not-white, was an astoundingly arbitrary determination that varied from place to place and time to time. The textbook example of this is John Rolfe’s progeny with Pocahontas being legislated white in Virginia…just because…[ii]
- More fundamentally, there’s evidence that the social psychology of groups changes over time in response to the situations those groups find themselves in, including prevailing social norms. For example, noted psychologist Solomon Asch “established” a baseline of a high level of social conformity among Americans in 1950. Decades later, however, “the Asch effect diminished and then disappeared.” What was going on??? “Historical circumstances may have altered this supposedly rock-bottom condition.” How humans are isn’t set in stone.[iii]
- For some time, I’ve been asking folks who I think might have useful insights about this question of the inevitability of Us-vs-Them. Recently, a public health colleague shared that he thinks of Us-vs-Them as we’re experiencing it today as a kind of auto-immune disease. Like our immune system, a certain level of carefulness vis-à-vis unknown folks may serve a protective purpose, but at a certain point it can go into overdrive and have the opposite effect. And, as with many diseases, Us-vs-Them is treatable: Leading with curiosity (engaging in a civity conversation, for example!) can have beneficial effects.[iv]
- If Us-vs-Them is so ingrained in humans, how is it that not all differences trigger the reaction? We all have a multiplicity of identities and belong to many different social groups. The fact that only a few of these take us into Us-vs-Them territory makes me wonder if there’s something more going on than a simple “this is who we are.” Maybe, for example, certain differences get a “push” toward Us-vs-Them by people who benefit from that dynamic…[v]
- Us-vs-Them is such a binary! And yet with respect to many differences, most people might actually be a muddly mixture of Us and Them. We hear a lot from and about people at the extreme ends of various spectrums (NIMBY and YIMBY; political activists on both left and right), but what about all the folks who have friends who are both Us and Them or who see themselves as sort of Us and also kind of Them? I tend to be leery of either-or when so much of the world is both-and.[vi]
- If Us-vs-Them is baked in, why is it so easy to move people out of that mindset? A few years ago, Civity participated in the Stanford-based Strengthening Democracy Challenge, which invited people to submit 8-minute-or-shorter virtual interventions to reduce political polarization. The Civity Storytelling intervention did well, but what’s important here is that 23 out of 25 of the interventions tested reduced partisan animosity! The Us-vs-Them dynamic dissipates when people start to see “others” as real human beings.[vii]
And so I wonder: Why the Us-vs-Them bogeyman?
My best guess is to keep us from connecting with each other. Division serves some people’s ends by confusing us, making us fearful, and ultimately draining our power.
And yet civity still grows.
[i] Mary Clark, In Search of Human Nature (2002); David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).
[ii] Seeing White, Episode 4, “On Crazy We Built a Nation,” (March 30, 2017). Also David Bernstein, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America (2022).
[iii] Robert D. Putnam & Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again 185 (2020). Also Geoffrey L. Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides (2022).
[iv] Conversation with Andy Wessel, Community Health Planner, Douglas County Health Department, Omaha NE (2025).
[v] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 47 (1990).
[vi] Malka Ranjana Kopell & Palma Joy Strand, “Civity Stories: Going to the “Heart” of NIMBY Resistance to Affordable Housing,” Civity (2025); Megan Brenan, “U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically,” Gallup (January 16, 2025) (“In 2024, as in recent years, Americans at the extremes of the ideological spectrum — those identifying as very conservative or very liberal — were about equal in number, with each accounting for roughly one in 10 U.S. adults.”) (emphasis added).
[vii] Jan G. Voelkel, Michael N. Stagnaro, & James Y. Chu, et al, “Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” Science 386, eadh4764 (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adh4764.