The mind also is equipped with a predisposition to understand other people and to get along with them. We attach this ability to team up with others to our sense of human kinds. We decide that someone is trustworthy not because we know him but because "he's a Mormon" or "she's a surgeon." There, too, we're applying a general habit to the special realm of human kinds.

So it's not too surprising that football fandom and race and nationality and religion can be talked about with the same words. These human-kind perceptions have different fates in society, but they come from shared pathways in the mind.

Yet that doesn't explain why people, unlike other creatures, have such elaborate categories for one another. Robins are a kind of bird, and Christians are a kind of person, and so those two concepts must share categorizing processes in the brain. But the category "Christians" also taps emotions and thoughts that don't arise when classing birds. It's likely, then, that there's a second major reason all human kinds feel alike: they draw on a special piece of the mind, which is dedicated only to them.

What might this special human-kind maker be like? One safe bet is this: it is not based on the rules of logic. It works outside of awareness, according to rules of its own. It is not at all like the rigorous study of causes and effects that people call science.

After all, much of what people say about human kinds is, as a matter of measurable fact and logic, meaningless. A soccer fan says, "We have a good chance of getting to the playoffs," but he'll have no effect on the matches, because he isn't on the team. A corporate spokesman says, "We're sorry that our product was defective," though he had nothing to do with making or marketing it. An African American preacher says, "We came to this continent as slaves," yet neither he nor anyone he knows was ever in shackles. A devout Shiite weeps and flagellates himself in grief on the tenth of Muharram for the death of Imam Hussein at Karbala; but that martyrdom took place more than thirteen hundred years ago, in the year 680 C.E., and no one alive today could have seen it.

These nonliteral ways of saying "we" aren't logical, but obviously they aren't meaningless. People understand them, and distinguish them from nonsense. That means people use some set of rules to decide that a sentence like "We Americans fought a war with Spain" is comprehensible, while "We left-handed folk are a generous people" is twaddle. These aren't the rules of science, but so what? They do different work for the mind and heart.

Language, though, has its own rules, which don't respect this distinction. Grammar doesn't reveal when we're speaking logically and when we're speaking - often with the same words - in the special code of human kinds. So we're inclined to think the same word means the same thing all the time. That hunch is wrong.

The way it's wrong reminds me of the story of an awkward lunch in 1944 where the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, met Mr. Berlin.

Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and historian, had been serving as a diplomat in New York and Washington. Churchill had been impressed with his work. He asked: "Berlin, what do you think is your most important piece you've done for us lately?"

A little hesitantly, his guest replied: "'White Christmas.'" He was the wrong Mr. Berlin - Irving, the songwriter, not Isaiah, the polymath. In that instance, one word - Berlin - certainly did not mean one thing. Human-kind words often exhibit this variability. Just as a screwdriver in the toolbox is different from the screwdriver you order from a bartender, so "we" in a sentence like "We Americans beat Spain in a war" is different from the "we" in "We Americans number about 290 million."

One of those two meanings - we the citizens of the United States, as defined by law, who are alive today - fits into the framework of science. It describes physical objects that can be measured. The other idea - we Americans, including people who no longer exist because they died a century ago; we Americans, including people who did not experience the war - comes out of different rules for defining we.

If human kinds have their own rules, separate from those of logic or human institutions, and if those rules operate outside of our awareness, then the scientific study of human-kind beliefs will have some weird implications. For one thing, trivial, meaningless, ephemeral human kinds - if they meet the requirements of the hidden rules - could make and unmake people's lives with the same force as the human kinds we respect, like religions, nations, and ethnicities.

It's a strange idea. Could human kinds like "Star Trek fan" and "Porsche owner" ever weigh as heavy in a human heart as a religious tradition, with all its culture and moral seriousness? If that were so, then history would afford examples of oddball academic ideas that turned into the basis for mass murder; it would include instances of people changing their lives, even killing and dying, for sports teams or handkerchiefs.

Most peculiar. Yet this has happened throughout history. That too is part of the evidence that human kinds have a separate realm in the mind.

In the nineteenth century, linguists and anthropologists took a Sanskrit word for noble and turned it into a term to describe a family of ancient languages. So the human kind called "Aryans" was born. Languages were all it referred to, wrote the German scholar Max Müller: "I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair, nor skull." Nonetheless, as Müller's protest shows, this academic term quickly took on tribal trappings. A few decades later, reinforced by other newly created human kinds, like National Socialist and "expert" on Jewish matters- assigned by law to every government office under Hitler - Aryan was a life-and-death human kind. Nowadays, in the form of gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood in American prisons, it continues to be a category that gets people killed.

In 1969 Honduras and El Salvador went to war over a soccer match. Today gangs of "soccer hooligans" shadow games in Europe, where they maim and occasionally kill each other in the name of their teams. A study of such violence in Holland in the 1990s found that these soccer tribes were racially mixed and drew poor, working class, and higher-income men. In other words, members' devotion to their teams wasn't a stand-in for some supposedly more serious loyalty to class or race. The human kind for which they risked their lives was the soccer gang.

As sports wars go, these recent instances are unremarkable compared to combat between "fans of the green team in the chariot race" versus "fans of the blue." The fighting over those two kinds of person spanned centuries in the Byzantine Empire, as the opposed groupings grew into political, cultural, and organized-crime institutions. One of these outbreaks of mass violence, at Constantinople in 532 C.E., killed thirty thousand people.

A human kind need not acquire tribal myths, as "Aryan" did, nor gather people under team colors, as sports fans do. Banal, practical human kinds have also been made fatal. One way to be targeted during the Cambodian genocide of 1975-79, for example, was to be the kind of person who wears eyeglasses.

This was not because the country's traditional human kinds were forgotten. The Yale historian Ben Kiernan has documented how the Khmer Rouge's genocidal policies hit-and were intended to hit- Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham people harder than Cambodian Khmers. Nonetheless, more than 1 million Khmer perished out of approximately 1.7 million people killed in this atrocity; being Khmer was not in itself enough to protect anyone. To be spared, one had to be the right sort of Khmer. To wear glasses was to show the sign of being the wrong sort - a person who had received an education under the old regime. A happenstance human kind became a means to sort the living from the doomed.

Many don't want to believe people kill, or die, for a mere mental pigeonhole. So they turn to the other levels of explanation: wars over soccer games and chariots must "really" have been about other, respectably economic and political matters.

Certainly soccer wars and chariot races did not blot out Salvadoran thoughts or Byzantine schemes. But people belong to many human kinds at once; he who is proudly Dutch in many circumstances may nonetheless die fighting other Dutchmen, in the name of Rotterdam's team. In that moment, in that place, it is not nation or race that determines who is murdered, but soccer fandom. In that moment, it's the warrior's belief that counts. An economist may find causes for mob violence that the mob never heard of; the fact remains that the people killing and dying in ancient Antioch were talking chariots, not economics.

So kind-mindedness is not "really" something else in disguise. It is itself - the mind's guide for understanding anyone we do not know personally, for seeing our place in the human world, and for judging our actions. This human-kind psychology is a source, not just a consequence, of institutions: national governments, religious authorities, promoters of ethnic, racial, class, or gender pride. We care about today's political tribes only because these entities have learned how to speak to the human-kind faculty in its language.

Speaking the right human-kind language, you can make any happenstance collection of people feel tribal, even one like "women on the 8:15 ferry." In fact, in 2003 a documentary filmmaker made a movie about just that group-women who spent their morning commute together chatting, putting on makeup, and relaxing in the ladies' room of the 8:15 Staten Island Ferry. When the film came out, the women told reporters their membership in that particular human kind meant a lot to them. And their earliest response to the filmmaker had been to wonder who this outsider was and why she was hanging out in their territory.

Then, too, even a trivial human kind, defined by nothing more consequential than what people buy, can call up the intense emotions supposedly reserved for the serious tribes. That's what happened to one owner of a Porsche 911 sports car after he learned that the company had started to make sport utility vehicles. "Every SUV I've seen is driven by some soccer mom on her cellphone," he told a reporter. "I hate these people, and that Porsche would throw me into that category made me speechless. Just speechless."

Speechless! Kind-mindedness can be downright embarrassing. It lacks gravitas. It goes its own way. That's a good reason for scientists to shun the whole business. Who wants to be yelled at for supposedly equating race and religion with soccer hooligans and Porsche owners?

And yelling there will be. Aside from being messy conceptually, human kinds are sticky, emotionally. There's no place to stand outside of them, to look on them without feeling. All people are members of human kinds, and so whenever human kinds are the subject, the conversation feels personal. Reading the news in the morning, we're pained to learn that studies show "our people" are fat, or do poorly on math tests, or don't spend enough time with their children. We're proud and pleased when our athletes win at the Olympics, or when we read that our troops acted nobly. We're scared when we learn about a human kind that threatens ours. Presented with any list of human kinds - in a newspaper article, on a Web site, on a restaurant place mat with the Chinese zodiac printed on it - always, inescapably, a part of us wonders: Which one fits me? Am I metro or retro? Gobbler or nibbler? Snake or horse? Human-kind thoughts are impossible to separate from your feelings about yourself.

Some scientists' distaste for human kinds as a research subject may come from a desire to avoid thoughtless, factless passion. They want to stay within the framework of science, confining themselves to matters their methods can address. Outside that realm, many feel, science can't venture, and scientists shouldn't. As the great physicist Richard Feynman said, "A scientist looking at a non-scientific problem is just as dumb as the next guy."

And what could be less like science than talk of race and nation and religion, family and sexual identity and sports - veined as it always is with vague words and strong emotions? Human kinds are gnarly, demanding, and perplexing, like intimate life. If a human kind matters, people will talk of it as if it were a family: the "brothers and sisters" of houses of worship, union halls, and political rallies; the "children of God" of the preachers; the "brothers" who went through war, or college, or prison together; the friendly office with the family atmosphere.

This doesn't mean, of course, that we think of such groupings as literal families, or that we wish they were. If you call your sexual partner "baby," it doesn't indicate you'd rather have sex with an infant. But it is an expression of something everyone learns as groups sort themselves on the playgrounds of early childhood: being part of a human kind, or excluded from one, can alter your life. Such consequential changes, wrought by being in a human kind, can be conscious and deliberate, as it is for Christians who ask themselves, "What would Jesus do?" Sometimes, though, the effects of human-kind thinking take place outside awareness. In one experiment, for example, Asian American women students at Harvard who were reminded that they were Asian did better on a math test than Asian American women who were reminded that they were women.

Math may be the most rational of activities, but it's apparently not free of the sort of human-kind thinking that tells you women aren't so good at it, while Asians are. This does not mean that all human kinds make you change; it does mean that they have that potential, and being a human being, you know it.

Professionally, as I've mentioned, many scientists want nothing to do with such an emotional and conceptual swamp. Human-kind categories are fine for life outside the lab - sure, set up a committee to attract more minorities into our field; yes, let us try to make our nation a leader in stem-cell research. But nations, minorities, creeds, professions, as an object of scientific research? Leave that to colleagues with a screw loose or, worse, to cranks and journalists. This is not to say that scientists are less tribal than anyone else. The passions of Us and Them affect them too. In fact, feelings about nation, religion, culture, tradition, and other human kinds have helped to motivate scientific work, as they have helped to motivate almost all organized activities, for good and for ill, from Olympic athletics to mass murder.

For example, modern neuroscience rests on the successes of the great Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who finished publishing his masterpiece on the brain and nervous system in 1904. In another example of the ever-changing character of scientific knowledge, Cajal's work ended a long debate about whether the human brain consisted of distinct cells at all. He championed the neuron doctrine - that the brain, like every other organ, was made up of millions of distinct cells, the neurons. (Nowadays the brain is described as neurons and glial cells, but the central argument, which Cajal won, was that it was not organized differently from the rest of the body.)

When the book was published, Spain had just lost a war to the United States, and that unscientific fact was much on the author's mind.

"Above all," Cajal wrote in his autobiography, "I wanted my book to be - please excuse the presumption - a trophy to be laid at the feet of our prostrate national science and an offering of fervent devotion by a Spaniard to his scorned country." Clearly, Cajal valued his fervent devotion. Yet he did not study patriotic neurons or Spanish neurons, but all neurons. He saw brain cells as a scientist, but apparently he saw his book about cells as a patriot.

Well, as the cognitive scientist George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley has put it, ask different questions, you get different answers. The rules of patriotism and the rules of the lab aren't the same. The best way to live with different systems of rules is not to try to fit them together, because they don't align. It's quite enough work to keep clear about how each system is different from the others.

On the one hand, philosophy and psychology, at least in the West, have largely focused on the individual soul. In these fields there was never as great an interest in how people came to believe in mass entities, like nations, religious communities, and social classes. For instance, Sigmund Freud's interpretation of "group psychology" stresses the fears and frustrations of the unconscious mind, which, he held, is formed in early childhood. By this light, today's experience is far less important than the earliest days of one's life. Armies, churches (Freud's examples) as well as race, religion, nationality, and all the other "groups" are turned into fodder for the psychoanalytic apparatus that explores your dreams and your attitude toward masturbation.

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.

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Copyright © 2005 by David Berreb

Tags: Society

About the Author

David Berreby was born in France, raised in the United States, and educated at Yale. He has written on scientific and cultural issues for the New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, Lingua Franca, The Sciences, and Discover, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. More