TWO

ANOTHER “OTHER”

A More Realistic Model of “Us and Them”

INTERNET CHAT group discussions are, of course, not an accurate tool for gauging us-and-them relationships, but they can give us a glimpse of some of the individuals who make up the statistics. In one such forum—a chat group with the disturbing name, “Why Turkish people hate Arabs”—I was struck by one participant’s position: “I don’t hate them. I simply don’t like them.”1 Perhaps inadvertently, this young man has made a very important distinction, not between levels of dislike, but—just as he says—between liking or not liking and hating or not hating. Researchers have, by and large, failed to make this distinction. This is exactly the scientific gap that is reflected in the leadership ...

Get Us Plus Them now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.