Here is a story from the real world, and a bloody brutal one at that.
He never stood a chance. His first mistake was looking for food alone; perhaps things would have turned out differently if he’d been with someone else. The second, bigger mistake was wandering too far up the valley into a dangerous wooded area. This was where he risked running into the Others, the ones from the ridge above the valley. At first, there were two of them, and he tried to fight, but another four crept up behind him and he was surrounded. They left him there to bleed to death and later returned to mutilate his body. Eventually, nearly 20 such killings took place, until there was no one left, and the Others took over the whole valley.
So started an article in the famous Foreign Affairs magazine. You could be excused for thinking that this was a tale from the Peloponnesian War, in which “the weak suffer they must”, as the historian of that conflict wrote. 2 Or, maybe, that it was a brutal scene from the Rwanda Genocide in 1994. In fact, it was neither. Though it happened in a place geographically close to the latter. The victim, as it happens, was not even human. He was a chimpanzee. For the male chimps in one group systematically kill the neighbouring males, kidnap the surviving females and expand their territory. Just like humans do. The author of the article even cited some chimp criminology, highlighting that our nearest evolutionary relatives are about 30 times more likely to kill a member of a neighbouring group than a member of their own tribe. On average, eight males gang up on the victim.
We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. So maybe it is not really so surprising that humans also divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, that we too can be cruel, vicious and inhumane. But there is a difference. We are endowed with rationality and reason to a degree that these primate are not. So might we be able to persuade people not to pursue the hatred that gave rise to the chimp murder? And could social neuroscience play a role in this? For if we know for certain which parts of the brain get activated by specific stimuli (advertisements, infomercials and the like), might we be able to persuade people in a positive way and to convince them not to engage in hate crimes, racism and other forms of discrimination? This may seem a vain hope. The following pages will show something else.
