A neurological basis for group cohesion? But who’s in my group?

In stating a moral basis for limiting immigration and not offshoring jobs, I said this:

It is moral to give preferences to in-groups over outsiders, nuclear family over extended family, family over other community members, members of one's religion, political party, union, or other organization over non-members, tested and loyal members over applicants and probationary members, etc.  Neither our civilization nor even our species can survive without cohesive groups whose members are loyal to and support each other to the partial or total exclusion of others.  The ability to form and maintain groups of composition, function, and commitment appropriate to life's difficulties, perils, and threats is fundamental. 

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam started with the same Darwinian premise and found that oxytocin, which is thought to promote feelings of love and trust, promotes such feelings toward in-groups but not toward out-groups, as reported in the NYT Science section today. The researchers even found the effect in the lifeboat dilemma I discussed in my October 14, 2010 update.

The researchers labeled as ethnocentrism their finding that Dutch college students were more favorably inclined to Dutch names than to German or Muslim names. It would be interesting to know if the discrepancy is also observed across other socio-economic and political divides, e.g., this one discussed in a post by Peter Radford today:

Buried in the Atlantic Monthly article Konczal quotes from, is an even more worrying material. The social divisions opening up in America are viewed with disdain or equanimity by those at the top. The new "global elite" feel energized by their ability to exploit worldwide business, and have reached a point where local problems, such as the high wages of the American middle class relative to the emerging middle class elsewhere, is seen in cynical business school terms. As one interviewee in the article says: tough. Maybe the American middle class needs to face up to reality and accept lower wages. Or, worse, if we create four middle class jobs in China, but lose one in the US, we are still ahead.

Just who is the "we" in this statement?

The elite.

This new elite thinks it is above what it sees as local, and therefore lesser, issues. It is based in places such as New York, London, Moscow, Hong Kong or Mumbai, and sees workers the world over as one big labor pool. Differential wages, and cultural matters are nuisances.

The Atlantic piece is linked in the quotation; Mike Konczal's post at Rortybomb is here.

Update on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 08:53AM by Skeptic

The notion that there is a genetic basis for sacrificing one's own life or well-being for close relatives--but not for strangers--was formalized as "kin selection" in the 1960s and has identifiable pre-cursor notions appearing as early as the 1930s in the work of J. B. S. Haldane and others.  Other evolutionary biologists have studied "group selection" wherein the idea is that gene selection in individuals is influenced by the fitness advantage the genes confer on groups without regard to benefit or detriment to individual group members.

Update on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 01:11PM by Skeptic

David Brooks discusses a possible genetic tendency to form groups in Nice Guys Finish First.