David Berreby custom essay

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summary the paper, easy sentence. no grammar error

150 words,no quotations and no paraphrase, directly contact to the content,no “I think…,in my opinion”.

Summary is a vital tool for a writer. To be able to quickly and effectively communicate another’s argument is a fundamental building block in constructing arguments. For this assignment you will summarize David Berreby’s It Takes a Tribe. In 150 words, try to communicate the shape and content of Berreby’s argument to a reader who is unfamiliar with the text and unfamiliar with gender studies. Do so with no quotations—you must rely upon paraphrase. Be sure to include a clear thesis that you believe communicates the writer’s central claim. The goal is to communicate the target essay’s content, not to express your own opinion.
—150 words
—no quotation
—include a thesis statement
—strive for accuracy and completeness —submit the best version of the paper you can
the requirement for the urgent case

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New York Times Higher Education Supplement, August 1, 2004
Rituals and Traditions; It Takes a Tribe
By DAVID BERREBY
Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Co.
Reprinted with permission
WHEN the budding pundit Walter Lippmann coined the term
”stereotype” back in 1922, he offered several examples from the America
of his time: ”Agitator.” ”Intellectual.” ”South European.” ”From the Back
Bay.” You know, he told the reader, when a glimpse and a word or two
create a full mental picture of a whole group of people. As in ”plutocrat.”
Or ”foreigner.” Or ”Harvard man.”
Harvard man? We know, thanks to Lippmann, that stereotypes are part of
serious problems like racism, prejudice and injustice. What is Lippmann’s
alma mater doing on such a list? (He even added: ”How different from the
statement, ‘He is a Yale man.”’)
Spend time on a campus in coming weeks, though, and you’ll see what
he meant.
At colleges across the country, from Ivy League to less exclusive state
schools, students who are mispronouncing the library’s name this month
will soon feel truly and deeply a part of their college. They’ll be singing
their school songs and cherishing the traditions (just as soon as they learn
what they are). They’ll talk the way ”we” do. (Going to Texas A&M?
Then greet people with a cheerful ”howdy.”) They’ll learn contempt for
that rival university — Oklahoma to their Texas, Sacramento State to their
U.C. Davis, Annapolis to their West Point.
They may come to believe, too, that an essential trait separates them from
the rest of humanity — the same sort of feeling most Americans have about
races, ethnic groups and religions. As the writer Christopher Buckley said
recently in his college’s alumni magazine: ”When I run into a Yale man I
somehow feel that I am with a kindred spirit. A part of that kindred-ness
comes from his gentility and his not being all jumped up about it. It’s a
certain sweetness of character.”
All this sentiment comes on fast (a study last year at Ivy League
campuses found freshmen even more gung-ho than older students). Yet
college loyalty, encouraged by alumni relations offices, can last a lifetime
— as enduring as the Princeton tiger tattooed on the buttock of former
Secretary of State George P. Shultz, or the Yale sweater sported by evil
Mr. Burns on ”The Simpsons,” a number of whose writers went to
Harvard.
New identities are forged within the university as well, in elite groups like
Skull and Bones at Yale or the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M or
Michigamua at the University of Michigan; in sororities and fraternities;
even in particular majors and particular labs. Students don’t just attend a
college; they join its tribes.
”What endlessly impresses me is people losing sight of how arbitrary it
is,” says Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist who specializes in the
links between social life and stress. ”Students understand how readily they
could have wound up at another school or wound up in another lab.” Yet
every year, he adds, ”they fall for it.” For most, what Professor Sapolsky
calls that ”nutty but palpable” onset of college tribalism is just a part of
campus life. For social scientists, it’s an object of research, offering clues
to a fundamental and puzzling aspect of human nature: People need to
belong, to feel a part of ”us.” Yet a sense of ”us” brings with it a sense of
”them.”
Human beings will give a lot, including their lives, for a group they feel
part of — for ”us,” as in ”our nation” or ”our religion.” They will also harm
those labeled ”them,” including taking their lives. Far as genocide and
persecution seem from fraternity hazings and Cal versus Stanford, college
tribes may shed light on the way the mind works with those other sorts of
groups, the ones that shape and misshape the world, like nation, race,
creed, caste or culture.
After all, a college campus is full of people inventing a sense of ”us” and
a sense of ”them.” As one junior at the University of California, Los
Angeles, told her school paper before a game against the University of
Southern California: ”School spirit is important because it gives us a sense
of belonging and being a part of something bigger. Besides,” she said,
”U.S.C. sucks in every way.”
In an e-mail interview, Professor Sapolsky writes that ”Stanford students
(and faculty) do tons of this, at every possible hierarchical level.” For
instance, he says, they see Stanford versus Harvard, and Stanford versus
the University of California at Berkeley. ”Then, within Stanford, all the
science wonks doing tribal stuff to differentiate themselves from the
fuzzies — the humanities/social science types. Then within the sciences,
the life science people versus the chemistry/physics/math geeks.” Within
the life sciences, he adds, the two tribes are ”bio majors and majors in
what is called ‘human biology’ — former deprecated as being robotic premeds,
incapable of thinking, just spitting out of factoids; latter as fuzzies
masquerading as scientists.”
Recent research on students suggests these changes in perception aren’t
trivial. A few years ago, a team of social psychologists asked students at
the University of California at Santa Barbara to rank various collections of
people in terms of how well they ”qualify as a group.” In their answers,
”students at a university” ranked above ”citizens of a nation.” ”Members of
a campus committee” and ”members of a university social club” ranked
higher than ”members of a union” or ”members of a political party,”
romantic couples or office colleagues working together on a project. For
that matter, ”students at a university” and ”members of a campus
committee” ranked well above blacks and Jews in the students’ estimation
of what qualifies as a group.
Much of this thinking, researchers have found, is subconscious. We may
think we care about our college ties for good and sensible reasons —
wonderful classes! dorm-room heart-to-hearts! job connections! — when
the deeper causes are influences we didn’t notice.
Some 20 years ago, researchers asked students at Rutgers to describe
themselves using only words from a set of cards prepared in advance.
Some cards contained words associated with Rutgers, like ”scarlet,” the
school color, and ”knight,” the name of its athletic teams. Others, like
”orange,” were associated with archrival Princeton. Some students took
the test in a room decorated with a Rutgers pennant; others took it under a
Princeton flag. A third group saw only a New York Yankees banner.
Students who saw a Princeton or Rutgers emblem were more likely to
use Rutgers-related words to describe themselves. They also mentioned
that they were students at Rutgers earlier than those who saw only the
neutral flag. They didn’t consciously decide to stand up for Rutgers.
Outside their conscious minds, though, that identity was in place, ready to
be released by symbols of the tribe.
More recently, three social psychologists at Harvard looked at another
example of subconscious tribal beliefs. Mahzarin R. Banaji, who led the
study, argues that people in similar, equivalent groups will place those
groups into a hierarchy, from best to worst, even when there is no rational
basis for ranking them. The psychologists tested Yale sophomores, juniors
and seniors, who live and eat together in ”residential colleges.” Students
know that these colleges are effectively all alike and that people are
assigned to them at random. Still, the team found, Yalies did indeed rank
them from best to worst. (In the interests of peace and comity, the colleges
were kept anonymous.) Moreover, students assigned to the less
prestigious units were less enthusiastic about their homes than those from
the ones with a better reputation.
What this suggests, Professor Banaji says, is that taking one’s place in a
tribe, and accepting the tribe’s place in a larger society, are mental acts that
happen regardless of the group’s purpose or meaning. Once people see
that they’ve been divided into groups, they’ll act accordingly, even if they
know that the divisions are as meaningless as, oh, the University of
Arizona versus Arizona State. ”We know that human beings identify with
social groups, sometimes sufficiently to kill or die on their behalf,” she
says. ”What is not as well known is that such identity between self and
group can form rapidly, often following a psychological route that is
relatively subconscious. That is, like automata, we identify with the
groups in which we are accidentally placed.”
Not all researchers agree that people care about so-called nonsense
groups with the same passion they give to religion, politics or morals.
Another theory holds that the subconscious mind can distinguish which
groups matter and how much. One example comes from a much-cited
experiment, performed, naturally, on college students.
In 1959, the social psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills asked
undergraduate women to join a discussion group after a short initiation.
For one set of participants the initiation required reciting a few mild sexual
words. The other group had to say a list of much saltier words about sex,
which embarrassed them no end (remember, this was 1959). The
discussion group was dull as dishwater, but the women who suffered to
join rated it as much more valuable than those who had a mild initiation
(and higher than a control group that didn’t have to do anything).
A subconscious clue for perceiving a tribe as real and valuable, then, may
be expending sweat, tears and embarrassment to get in. The political
activist Tom Hayden recently recalled just such a rite at the University of
Michigan, in an article on the left-wing Web site alternet.org. He was
complaining about the lock that Skull and Bones has on November’s
election (President Bush and the Democratic nominee, Senator John
Kerry, are members).
”As a junior, I was tapped for the Druids,” Mr. Hayden wrote about his
own campus clan, ”which involved a two-day ritual that included being
stripped to my underpants, pelted with eggs, smeared with red dye and
tied to a campus tree. These humiliations signified my rebirth from lowly
student journalist to Big Man on Campus.”
As for Professor Aronson, had he not wanted tight control over the
experiment, he writes in his widely used textbook, ”The Social Animal,”
he and Professor Mills could simply have studied an initiation outside the
lab — at a campus fraternity or sorority.
THAT kind of lumping together — studying one group to explain another
— drives scholars in other fields to distraction. To them, a pep rally is
different from a political rally. Historians, trained to see big
generalizations as meaningless, are often aghast at the way psychologists’
theories about groups ignore the difference between, say, today’s twogendered,
multiethnic and meritocratic Harvard College and the one that
gave Lippmann his degree in 1909. And anthropologists for generations
have disdained psychology for ignoring cultural differences.
But one fact is clear, and college groups exemplify it well: While many
creatures live in groups, humanity’s are unlike anything else found in
nature. Peter Richerson, a biologist at Sacramento State’s rival, the
University of California at Davis, likes to point out that his students,
sitting quietly together on the first day of class, are an amazing exception
to the general rules of animal behavior. Put chimpanzees or monkeys that
don’t know one another in a room, and they would be in hysterics. People
team up with strangers easily.
Professor Richerson and his longtime collaborator, Robert Boyd, an
anthropologist at U.S.C.’s hated enemy, U.C.L.A., argue that we will sign
up for membership in tribelike groups for the same reason birds sing: It
feels right because we evolved to do it. ”We want to live in tribes,”
Professor Richerson says. Humans are ”looking to be told what group
they belong to, and then once they do that, they want to know, ‘What are
the rules?”’
The tricky part, says Professor Sapolsky of Stanford, Cal-Berkeley’s
bitter rival, is that humans alone among animals can think about what a
tribe is and who belongs. ”Humans actually think about who is an ‘us’ and
who is a ‘them’ rather than just knowing it,” he says. ”The second it
becomes a cognitive process, it is immensely subject to manipulation.”
And, of course, studying the phenomenon won’t make you immune. ”I’m
true blue,” says Professor Banaji, who taught at Yale from 1986 until
2002, when she joined the Harvard faculty. ”I was physically unable to sit
through a women’s basketball game between Harvard and Yale on the
Harvard side.”

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