We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on Earth we come.”
Bruce Woodley & Dobe Newton
AJ Jacobs has a lot of cousins, and the number keeps growing.
He’s the man behind the Global Family Reunion, aiming to break the world record for the biggest family reunion and crowdfund for Alzheimer’s research (you can watch his TED talk on the subject here).
Beyond these aims, the reunion has important implications for how we view and treat each other, and offers another path to a more compassionate world.
Some concepts from evolutionary biology and social psychology show us how the Global Family Reunion can manipulate our innate biases and nudge us to be kinder to others.
Kin altruism
Family means nobody gets left behind, or forgotten.”
Stitch – Lilo & Stitch
We’re kinder and more helpful towards our relatives than we are to strangers. Stories abound of humans and animals even risking their lives for the safety of their own kin.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes, “The only way to ‘win’ at the game of evolution is to leave surviving copies of your genes.” We’re wired to act in a way that promotes the survival of our genes, and of course, our families also share a big chunk of our genes.
Research has shown that kinship doesn’t need to be real or even consciously understood to make us behave better towards others. A 2002 study found that participants were more likely to entrust money to people whose pictures had been slightly altered to resemble their own faces. Another study in the same year found people were more willing to help strangers who had the same surname as themselves, and a 2008 study showed that the greater number of perceived relatives in a group, the more cooperative people became.
The Global Family Reunion ultimately wants to connect the whole world into one giant family tree.
If we can clearly map how we’re related to each other, draw attention to how we are interconnected, our sense of kinship will grow.
With that, hopefully, we will behave better towards others.
Expanding the in-group
There are many other ways that people form and identify groups in society besides family. Friends, colleagues, nations, gangs, sports teams and political parties are all examples of social groups that we use to define ourselves and our relationship to others.
If you’re not part of the group, you’re an outsider. And perhaps unsurprisingly, we tend to behave better towards members of our group (the in-group) than outsiders (the out-group).
Beyond this, we also see more individuality within our group, and tend to reduce the individual qualities of people in groups we don’t belong to. We see them as more similar than they really are.
This is the source of many stereotypes about other groups, and it can lead to oversimplification, depersonalisation, discrimination, and dehumanisation.
If you are not one of us, you are one of them.”
Morpheus – The Matrix
“You’re either with us, or against us.” These attitudes have been used to initiate conflicts, justify mistreatment of other groups, rationalise atrocities.
The Global Family Reunion, on the other hand, rests on the assumption that we are all, however distant, part of the same massive in-group. It shows us how we all fit together.
It’s harder to dehumanise someone if you know they are connected to you.
You look back at history, and a lot of the terrible things we’ve done to each other is because one group thinks another group is sub-human, and you can’t do that anymore. We’re not just part of the same species. We’re part of the same family.”
AJ Jacobs
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