Class 31. The Social Dynamics of Group Identity
A sense of solidarity with people in your "tribe" can feel good, but can also make you complicit in behavior you wouldn't engage in on your own.
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“If all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”
— Everyone’s mom, at some point
It’s fitting that I am kicking off our module on political tribalism right as Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial is getting underway. Every day, we see Trump talk to the cameras before he enters and leaves the courtroom, often making statements that undermine his legal case. Why would he sabotage his own defense (and potentially risk going to jail by violating his gag order)? Because he perceives that there is a reward that makes the risk worthwhile — namely, that his followers will rally to his defense in the voting booth, if not directly to the courthouse with potentially more violent designs. And as we know from January 6, the latter possibility is increasingly a realistic threat: Trump seems to have a cult-like sway over his supporters. We focus a lot on his tactics and intentions, but what makes them go along with it like zombies?
I’ve thought about this question a lot over the last eight years. Certainly, Trump’s efforts wouldn’t be so effective (or make him a viable candidate for President) if he didn’t have a system of complicity enabling them. I mean, remember this?
Not only did Trump’s own medical experts from the CDC not intervene to correct him when he suggested this completely bonkers “remedy,” but thousands of loyal followers who watched this went on to self-adminster bleach and other disinfectants to counter COVID, resulting in a spike of accidental poisonings and calls to poison control. If that’s not tribal behavior, I’m not sure what is.
Today’s lesson will be the first of many that is going to break down how and why group identity makes people — including people who otherwise should know better — willing to go along with things they otherwise wouldn’t.
In anticipation of the lessons for this module, I posted an assignment based on a video of the social experiment run by Jane Elliott in her third grade classroom. (It’s worth checking out before reading further, it’s not very long!) The purpose of her exercise was to illustrate the perniciousness of racism, though to me, it’s a fascinating example of how people’s behavior transforms when they become identified with a “tribe” based exclusively on some common attribute. As such, it provides an excellent illustration of the negative externalities of bonding social capital, which we discussed in Class 27. There, we noted that while bonding — that is, forming networks with people who are like ourselves in some fundamental way — can offer important benefits, too much of it can result in antisocial, and even antidemocratic, tendencies.
There are a lot more psychological processes underlying group identity that I will unpack in the coming weeks. Breaking down this dynamic is crucial for understanding not only why political polarization has intensified in the last decade, but also why disinformation works at a cognitive and emotional level and how social media exacerbates it.
But for now, let’s start with a chemistry lesson.
It Feels Good, Baby
Conceptually, whenever we are creating social bonds based on some affinity — race, religion, politics, eye color, whatever — we are defining ourselves in contraposition to something else. In other words, in identifying with a group, we are not only saying “I am this,” we are also saying “I am not that.” In her book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua sums up the dynamics of group identity succinctly: “[T]he tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is an instinct to exclude.”
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