3 ms·

The article mentions studies done with fMRI on people recognizing "Us" vs. "Them". Anyone know of similar studies done on neuro-atypical people? I'm particular

• jerf 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome#Social_and_psychological https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome#Social_and_p... , right at the end. As I write this, it's footnote 44. This is also my meta-answer for those who think that even today the us/them mechanism has no value. I've read some accounts of trying to raise children with Williams Syndrome. Truly defaulting to 100% trust is pathologically dangerous even in the safest places you can imagine in the US. People who are imagining that they are open and trusting still don't realize how much they are defending themselves, until they compare themselves to someone who seems to truly lack those mechanisms. Which doesn't invalidate the idea that we may need less us/them than we currently have, but that doesn't prove or even provide a lot of evidence for the idea that the correct amount is zero. (Long before the singularity arrives to wipe us all out, we face a greater danger from someone managing to successfully socially engineer the population, and in their infinite wisdom, doing something very, very stupid, such as setting our outgroup trust to 100% all the time, with no way to modify it based on experience, and rendering the entire population trivially exploitable by the first parasite that comes along or something.)