In February 2008, Sanjeev Himachali, a respected HR professional from the Isle of Mauritius, posted an interesting question on the Linkedin Q&A forum, inviting contributors to share thoughts on what is common in all of us. "We, human-beings", Sanjeev-ji explained, "have different colours, shapes, sizes, beliefs and cultures. We follow different religions. We are divided by geographical boundaries. We are driven by different motives. We are inspired by different people and stories. Yet, there is something common between us. Whether we are Indians (Asians), Americans, Europeans, Australians, Africans or of any other race, there is something common in us."

 Answering the question for himself, Sanjeev admitted thinking that it is our emotions which bind us all together. "The feeling of joy, happiness, and anxiety is common between all of us. When we feel hurt; when we fail; when we feel frustrated, we all feel the same."

No less than 68 LI-members jumped on the question to share their thoughts. After closing the question, Sanjeev-ji selected the following answer as "best answer":

Namaste Sanjeev-Ji,

Indeed an interesting question, even more so in the context of a much needed response to an apparently growing tendency in society to focus on what divides us rather than looking for what we have in common. Interestingly, the discovery of "human universals" permits us to identify human connections not "through identity" but "despite difference" (Appiah's terminology) and thus is a great answer to what I call "the Huntington Disease" (the clash of civilizations theory).

In the above answers, I have read many valuable approaches to this matter, taking points from a variety of disciplines ranging from cellular biology (the study of single nucleotide polymorphisms, named by Lakshminarayan), over (Vedic) philosophy (the panchbhuta, quoted by Krishnakumar) to psychology (cf. the little disagreement on Maslow's motivational theory). However much value lies in these answers, I am afraid this has made our discussion a rather haze one. Which (kind of) human universals are we after here? Do we include conditional (implicational) universals? And "near universals"? "Universal pools"?
And how about statistical universals? - Some universals clearly indicate a collective referent-being found in all (possible? imaginable? or both?) societies, languages or cultures - whereas they have a contingent relation individually. For instance, all societies know the concept of "music", whereas this feature is unevenly distributed among individual members of a each society.

Contrary to research in fields such as economy, political science, psychology and sociology, which so far (and to a certain extent) have been assuming universals without actually demonstrating them - from the mid-20th century, cognitive anthropology has proved to be a useful field in which to discover human universals, and in its applied version (and making use of post-Chomsky developments in linguistics) it has gone from mere hypotheses to persuasive demonstration of some. In this process, several kinds of universals have been identified.

Conditional universals, e.g., would typically be refering to cross-culturally invariant sets of the kind “if x is true, then y is true”. In linguistics, most in particular, we would find sets of this kind: “provided at least three words for colours exist, they will be ‘blak, ‘white’ and ‘red’.” Here, the real or general universal is not so much a manifold occurence of a specific phenomenon, but a pattern of co-occurences, with or without an inherent causational relationship.
Also, statistical universals (as explained above) imply a general explanation rather than a series of culturally specific explanations.
Universal pools, on the other hand, are ascertained sets of possibilities from which particular manifestations are drawn in any (cultural) environment.

Our task, therefore, is to search for underlying “general universals”. These will be found to be either “cultural universals” (inventions that have permeated all societies, e.g. our use of fire to achieve goals, our tendency to “classify” phenomena into categories, ...) or existential universals (e.g. the syndrome of cognitive and emotional traits comprising romantic love or the use of our imagination).

The most widely accepted view so far, is the list of "human universals" identified by Donald Brown in his 1991 book of the same name.
Recently, by the way, the fields of ethology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have added considerably to the discussion of this issue.

Remains the conclusion that, most fortunately, we are beginning to understand that humankind is indeed linked by a variety of general universals. In other words: it really means something when we say that we are all "global citizens". This fact has implications on the ethical level insofar as it enables us to construct a generally valid approach to ethical behaviour and conduct.

Kind regards,

Francis Laleman
Business Consultant/Trainer/Coach