Class Assignment!
What motivates our tribal behavior?
Thanks to everyone who joined last week’s great talk with Barb McQuade, author of Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. One of the themes we spent some time talking about was political polarization, and how disinformation exploits our identification with our political “tribes.”
We spent some time in Class 27 looking at how too much bonding social capital — close-knit networks of people who are similar to ourselves — can result in tribal identities. In Class 29, we covered how social media encourages and exacerbates bonding social capital by keeping us in ideologically homogenous silos and discouraging us from creating connections across these tribal lines — which prevents us from creating the social trust necessary for a healthy democracy I described in Class 26.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at the implications of these political identities: Specifically, how does it impact our behavior, and how does it impact how we process information? To that end, I have a short and hopefully fun assignment in advance of next week’s lesson. Some of you might be old enough to remember a classroom experiment run by a teacher named Jane Elliott which was dubbed “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes.” Elliot was trying to use “us vs. them” framing around eye color as a way to illustrate the perniciousness of racism. I can’t remember how I learned about this experiment, though I vaguely remember watching this video when I was in elementary school. (I think the “anti-woke” lobby’s collective heads would explode if this were shown in classrooms today, which makes me laugh out loud.)
The video is fascinating in a number of ways, but especially as a window into the behavioral dynamics of group identity. Give it a watch, and then answer the questions that follow:
Discussion Questions:
How does being placed in a “tribe” affect the behavior of the “in” group? What about the “out” group?
On Day 2, why do you think the prior day’s out-group members are so willing to switch roles? Did that surprise you?
Why do you think no one resisted their tribal assignment? What would be the cost of not complying with the tribal norms? (i.e., what do you think would happen if an in-group student decided to cross over and try to be a part of the out-group, or vice versa?)
Please feel free to add any other thoughts or observations!
wow, It's been years since I've seen this! Literally as a person with green eyes, when I first saw this years ago, I thought it odd that there were only two choices for eye color, and felt left out altogether! But the larger issues still remain. I found Abbie McMillen's comment similarly descriptive of me in my early childhood, and also think that my sense of justice would have probably meant that I didn't participate, or only did so at the margins. The children in the video seemed quite eager to please the teacher, (and they must have been aware they were being filmed) and the social and cultural norms of the time probably demanded a certain amount of obedience. It seemed to me that these children all generally wanted to get along - as they were before this experiment- and the collars, the teachers instructions and the permission to make demeaning comments about the "others" encouraged them to be bold and emulate what the teacher was saying, even if it was different from their normal behavior. These kids felt they had permission from an authority figure to switch their normal behavior and friendships, even though it made them unhappy. And that unhappiness affected their academics as measured by the reading cards. Yet, they appeared to return to being happy when things were back to the status quo after the experiment ended. It is hard for me to try and speculate an answer to the specific questions so I will just make these observations. I wonder what the outcome of this would have been if there were children of color in the experiment - or children with green eyes - who weren't even included.
Thank you so much, Asha, for providing the video. I had heard about the experiment but didn’t know this record existed. A lot of psychology to unpack. I’m going to think a bit more about your questions before I answer and maybe even watch the video a second time.