Human irrationality in distinguishing kin from nonkin takes us to the heart of our best and worst behaviors. This is because of something crucial—we can be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we actually are. When it is the former, wonderful things happen—we adopt, donate, advocate for, empathize with. We look at someone very different from us and see similarities. It is called pseudokinship. And the converse? One of the tools of the propagandist and ideologue drumming up hatred of the out-group—blacks, Jews, Muslims, Tutsis, Armenians, Roma—is to characterize them as
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