You think you know what a narcissist is, and you’re right—to a point. They’re the arrogant, the haughty, the boastful, the boastful, coworkers or family members who talk a lot about themselves but whose eyes glaze over the moment you find the light of day and try to talk about yourself. They’re the reality show braggarts, the NFL end zone dancers. They’re the bosses who bully you, the friends who drain you, the lovers who charm you—sometimes literally—and then never call you back.
But narcissists, like it or not, are all of us. You may not be a narcissist and no member of your social circle may be, but collectively—in our communities, our countries, our political parties, our sports team loyalties, and, most terrifyingly, our races and religions—we are all narcissists. Personal narcissism and tribal narcissism—this second type of narcissism may be a global disease.
Tribal narcissism can be wonderful, terrible, beautiful, bloody, life-giving, and life-destroying—sometimes all at once. It’s in the harmless display of banner-waving, face-painted fans at the Super Bowl or the World Cup. It’s in the darker, more patriotic cheers that might accompany a hockey team’s Olympic victory or a poorly planned invasion of Iraq. It’s in every softball game a company has ever played—technology versus sales, design versus manufacturing—and every argument between blue states and red states. It’s Libertarian versus Conservative, Bolshevik versus Menshevik, Union versus Confederate. We deal with soldiers who race into the field, risk their lives, and dodge crossfire to save a wounded comrade, and then, having accomplished their mission, turn their fire outside and take another life with the same determination and pride with which they have just saved another.
Humans are social beings—a crucial adaptation that allows slow, toothless, clawless, delicate earthlings like ourselves to survive. But being social means being in groups, and groups mean favoring yourself over all others. And because we are also rational beings—beings who like to feel good about ourselves and who don’t like to think that we are grabbing land, resources, and mates simply because we are greedy—we tell ourselves that we are the best of our kind because we are smarter, prettier, better, more virtuous, more caring—a superior race of people in a world full of inferior individuals.
These feelings may come naturally to us and are inevitable, but they are also dangerously easy to manipulate—through a national anthem, a cheer, or a small piece of flag. The narcissism of the individual is a focal point—it grows from within to dominate a single mind and personality. The narcissism of the tribe is an attraction—the kind that brings more and more individuals together, and its power increases with its size and mass. Dictators and tyrants may start wars and destroy nations, but they are still merely borrowing their power. They are the engineers in the cab of a hundred-ton locomotive. The people, or tribe, are the machine itself, generating a collective force that can easily go awry.
Countless factors distinguish in-groups from out-groups: clothing, language, customs, music, hairstyle, height, eye shape, and nose length. But nothing draws a brighter dividing line than skin color.
The concept of race began as a set of symbols that reflected little more than the climatic and geographic adaptations that migrating species had to make to survive in a new land—darker pigmentation to protect from the sun in tropical latitudes, lighter skin to absorb the sun’s rays in cold, wet northern regions. “We didn’t start as a multiracial species,” says psychologist Liz Phelps, director of the Learning, Decisions, Neuroscience, and Affect Lab at New York University. “We have races simply because we dispersed.”
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But early in human history, these differences began to take on enormous meaning for us. Like it or not, the tribe you know is more likely to protect you than the tribe you don’t know, whose members see you as a stranger at best and a competitor for resources at worst. Once children are old enough to walk away from a campfire, they develop a keen antenna for difference, recognizing differences they might not have noticed before.
At first, children don’t value the fact that a stranger looks different. They notice, and if they are puzzled by it, it’s not because of contempt or hatred but because of uncertainty. “Love in a group can come without hatred of the other group,” says John Dovidio, a psychologist at Yale University. Sometimes, he explains, it comes with a kind of empathy—a sweet, if misplaced, sense of anxiety. “If you see people who are different, you feel sorry for them because they’re not like you,” he says.
I got a taste of this phenomenon when my oldest daughter was barely 4. She hadn’t yet begun to comment on or ask questions about all the different races and skin colors around her, but she was beginning to evaluate people in ways she hadn’t done before. One afternoon, in line at a crowded Bed, Bath & Beyond, I noticed her staring at the cashier—a young African American woman. I watched her watch, guessed what was going on in her head, and silently begged her not to give a voice to what was going on in her head. But as we got to the register, she did.
“Are you sad because you don’t have light skin?” she asked. I shrank back and then called her name reproachfully, but I couldn’t do more. The cashier could have responded in a thousand different ways—more bad than good, I guess—but she chose something that combined insight and kindness.
“No, dear,” she said. “Are you sad because you don’t have dark skin?” My daughter shook her head. “Well, there you are,” the woman said. “We’re both happy with who we are.”
This innocent, judgment-free stage of childhood doesn’t last long; once even mild instances of racial bias become ingrained in an individual’s or society’s worldview, they’re hard to shake. In 1998, Harvard psychologist and sociologist Mahzarin Banaji co-developed what she called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). People taking the implicit association test are shown photographs of white or black faces in no particular order and asked to press a key that associates white with several words, including joy, love, peace, and happiness, and black faces with words like pain, evil, hurt, and failure. It’s a depressingly quick and easy exercise: press one key for good words and another for bad words, depending on which face appears on the screen. But it gets tricky when people are asked to reverse the associations—pair white with sad or tragic qualities and black with happy qualities. Regardless of what people think about their egalitarian nature, they slow down considerably. Encouragingly, such biases, though terrible, are also changeable, or at least more changeable than they seem. Phelps has conducted studies in which she scanned the brains of white and black people using functional magnetic resonance imaging while showing them pictures of white and black faces. Both races activated the fear and anger centers of the amygdala more when they saw the other race than when they saw their race. But when the other race’s face was friendly or familiar—Will Smith for whites, say, or Harrison Ford for blacks—the amygdala was noticeably quieter. Even more encouraging, when Phelps showed the lesser-known faces more slowly, giving the brain more time to work, there was the same level of amygdala activation, but it was followed by activation of areas of the cerebral cortex—higher, more sophisticated areas that suppress primitive emotions in the amygdala.
But many people are perfectly happy if their upper regions remain quiet, creating stark—even deadly—differences between insiders and outsiders that don’t even require a racial difference. This kind of behavior is found in gangsters who kill indiscriminately but still talk about family with enthusiasm; and in street gangs who fiercely protect their members and their turf and then rain automatic gunfire on their rivals from speeding cars. But it is at its most horrific in war—where the dehumanization of the outsider is essential to mass slaughter. There is a reason why Nazi propaganda films depicted Jews as rats swarming from manholes—the same reason why Hutus in Rwanda referred to Tutsis as cockroaches during the 1994 massacre, and why American propaganda posters during World War II depicted Japanese as yellow-faced apes with fangs and clawed hands. These are monsters, says the semiotics—and vile monsters at that.
Dovidio believes that a dominant group needs to go through three stages to reach a state of mind that allows its members to slaughter: dehumanization comes first; disgust, which animal images help to foster, comes second; and finally, intense fear or anger. The anger part is often stoked by framing the outgroup as an existential threat—and it must be a calculated, conscious threat. An outgroup that unwittingly carries a virus that is deadly to the ingroup will certainly be rejected, perhaps even killed, but its members will not be despised. An outgroup that knows what harm it is doing and does it intentionally is a different matter. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent manifesto published in 1903 that claimed to be the Jews’ secret guide to world domination, promoted such an idea.
The psychologist Robert Sternberg argues that there is a different, three-step process for transforming pure hostility into murderous hatred. This process begins with dehumanizing the target group. Then comes emotion, which adds another dimension of anger to the mix. “Emotion is hot hatred, the kind you see in road rage or coming home to find your wife in bed with someone else,” Sternberg told me in a 2008 Time magazine article about racism.
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Tribalism can be bizarre, hideous, and downright ridiculous—and nothing illustrates this point better than organized sport. It is no surprise that if sporting events are politics by other means, sporting events are war by other means. There are flags, uniforms, bands, songs, bloodshed (often), emotions (always), emotional attachment to the home city, team names, and the symbolic color scheme—the sporting equivalent of red, white, and blue. And the hostility between cities and teams can sometimes spill over into real blood in the stands, in the form of fights and even riots—depending on the progress of the game, and often the amount of alcohol consumed.
The question is not why we care—sports are fun, the spectacles are beautiful, and watching talented athletes perform can be as exciting as watching talented dancers dance. The question is why we care so much because, no matter how passionate we are about the game, we play no role at all in its outcome.
In 1976, psychologist Robert Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University, published his oft-cited study of a phenomenon he called BIRG — or “basking in reflected glory” — as it applies to sports fans. Throughout most of the college football season, Cialdini watched students at seven large college campuses, including Arizona State University, as they looked specifically at what they wore on the Mondays after their team won or lost the previous weekend. Overall, he found, students were more likely to wear an item of clothing emblazoned with their school’s name, logo, or colors after a win than after a loss. On some campuses, the difference wasn’t huge — just a few percentage points. But on other campuses, the difference was huge. Louisiana State University students were about 2.4 times more likely to wear purple and gold after a win; for Ohio State University, the ratio was 2.3. University of Pittsburgh students were about three times more likely to wear the Pittsburgh logo or Pittsburgh colors after a win. You may never get to join the team and wear its uniform, the study suggests, but this way you can at least get close.
In the second part of his study, Cialdini found that the team’s performance also affected the language fans used to describe the game. After a win, the students he studied were nearly twice as likely to talk about the results in the first person plural (“We won,” “We beat them,” “We scored the winning goal in overtime”). After a loss, they were more likely to disown the team and refer to it either in the third person (“They lost”) or simply recite the results and give credit to the other team (“It was 14-6, Missouri”). It wasn’t me who lost, it was them who were pointing, it was those people on the team.
The ultimate expression of tribal narcissism is the one that unites us all—the narcissism of the human species itself, the thing that has made us the undisputed masters of the planet. Dinosaurs once dominated reptiles, but dinosaurs were an entire family—just like mammals—and now they’re all gone. Homo sapiens is just one species within a family, one that’s only been around for a couple hundred thousand years.
It’s hard to know how many other species on the planet could theoretically compete for that crown, and the number has been put at anywhere from three million to 100 million. One of the best studies, published in 2011 by a team led by marine biologist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, puts the figure at 8.7 million—and humans are rapidly shrinking to that number.
In a typical year, we destroy about 25,000 acres of forest, which is 27,000 species lost at the same time. If we continue at this rate, we could easily burn out 8.7 million species in less than 325 years. Mora does not hesitate to describe our willingness to wipe out other species to make room for ourselves as “narcissism,” but he warns that it is a hallmark of almost all life. “If there were a species as powerful as we are, it would probably grab all the resources, too,” he says. “But in nature, there are automatic control mechanisms that prevent overexploitation. We have become so smart, now we are overtaking everything.” It is this expression of narcissism that our self-first, self-loving drive may triumph. Narcissists in the workplace, in relationships, and political offices eventually burn out and leave. But humanity as a whole has no restraint on its selfishness. We may indeed achieve absolute dominance at the expense of everything every narcissist craves. Whether we will love what remains of the planet we have conquered is another matter entirely.
