Chimp Wars, the Out-Group, and Brexit

In 1974 a researcher working in Tanzania tracked a group of seven chimpanzees, six males and one female, as they moved swiftly and silently through the jungle. They ignored the calls of another group of chimpanzees in the neighbouring territory and stalked towards the border dividing their territory from that of their neighbours.

Just over the border a chimp known as Godi was eating alone in a tree. By the time he realised that the seven outsiders had entered his territory it was too late for him. Godi was pinned to the floor, beaten and mutilated, and then left to die of his wounds as his attackers escaped back into their own lands, hooting and screaming with excitement as they went.

This was the first time that chimpanzees had been observed behaving in this way. Violence of this kind, violence that was not directed towards prey or undertaken as part of some sort of ritual behaviour, had been thought to be the preserve of human beings¹. The killing of Godi seemed to serve no purpose.

In 1954 twenty-two eleven year old boys were taken to a Boy Scouts of America camp. The boys were divided into two groups, neither aware of the existence of the other. The two groups spent a week hiking and swimming and bonding over team based tasks. One group called themselves ‘the Eagles’, the other called themselves ‘the Rattlers’.

In the second week the two groups were brought together and were encouraged to compete at various wholesome activities such as baseball and tug-o’-war. Other situations were contrived to stimulate more friction between the groups, for example one group was brought late to a picnic to find that the other group had eaten the food already.

Things turned dark quickly. The Rattlers had won the baseball game and claimed the pitch as their own, planting a flag on it and making threatening remarks about what they would do to any Eagles found trespassing. The Eagles burned the Rattlers’ flag and the Rattlers responded by raiding the Eagles’ cabin, ransacking it, overturning beds and stealing their property. Soon the researchers running the experiment had to physically separate the two groups, so out of control had their aggression become², ³.

Both the chimps and the boys were displaying aggression towards an ‘out-group’. The presence of this behaviour in our closest evolutionary relatives, and in the children of our own species, demonstrates what a deep seated biological impulse this is. From an evolutionary standpoint it makes good sense that we, and other animals, compete aggressively to survive against those who may otherwise take our resources but the readiness with which we and the chimpanzees act upon it, and the violence with which we act, is startling.

Psychologists have managed to experimentally create discriminatory behaviour in people by dividing children in a classroom according to their eye colour⁴ or by arbitrarily dividing people into the roles of prisoner and prison guard⁵ as in the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment which was terminated early because of the violent behaviour developing between the ‘guards’ and the ‘prisoners’.

This is the troubling flip-side to the love and loyalty we display towards our ‘in-group’ that was discussed in a previous blog. We readily feel love and loyalty to our immediate group – family, school, club – but the larger and more abstract the group with which we identify is – county, country, continent – the more difficult it is to foster this sense of loyalty. The existence of independence movements in Scotland, Wales, even Cornwall, despite hundreds of years of shared history shows how difficult it is to create a supra-national identity which is why the result of the Brexit referendum should have come as no surprise.

Tempting though it is to deny or ignore this dark side to our nature, it is important that we don’t. The above experiments show how easy it is to stoke up these impulses and this has been exploited by demagogues through history, notably in recent years during Trump’s election campaign, the European migrant crisis of 2015, and the Brexit referendum.

This is not to say that this impulse is in some way irresistible, we resist it all the time in order to benefit from the obvious advantages of forming large social groups, for security, trade, and delivery of healthcare for example, but we need to be aware that as we increase the size of our social groupings we may inadvertently create tensions. The potential for these tensions needs to be taken into account in any big policy decisions that affect social structure and the underlying, biologically driven, anxieties need to be addressed. Get it wrong and the results can be disastrous. Get it right and we create loyalty and social cohesion because, after all, just as our impulse to show aggression towards an out-group can be exploited, so too can the impulse to express loyalty and devotion to a group that we are made to feel a shared identity with.