On one hand, we see violence, selfishness, condescension, class hatred, racial profiling, beatings, gang hostility, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse; on the other hand, friendship, love, kindness, sharing, and most significantly, sincerity. Such is the grade school social scene. Children are extremely prone to bluntly exhibiting their primitively innate tendency to defend familiarity and shun the unknown. They also obey their bodily wants and needs with little to no inhibition, due to their underdeveloped frontal cortices. Sincerity arises, along with bluntness. Adding to this, traits learned from their individual domestic environments are exhibited as social separation mechanisms because of their need for familiarity.
Hostility thus arises when groups of kids familiar with one another go through the groupthink process, creating group pride, and thus the need to be better, or stronger than other familiarity groups. Perhaps this is the root of all our current problems with racism: the lack of early exposure to what becomes alien in a child's mind.
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