Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group(newsoffice.mit.edu) |
Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group(newsoffice.mit.edu) |
Now every time I see people who organize an "us", I start looking for the "them" to appear. And then I write off the leader as someone up to no good.
We can also look at the digital world and the "together, alone" concept. With globalization and pop culture, the internet and fewer and fewer entities in charge of our food/entertainment/etc, we become a "me similar to an us".
Edit: I took out an aside/anecdote.
[1] http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/html/Mindwise...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_conflict
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ingroup_identity
And a couple of interesting experiments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083316/
I saw this in school as a 17 year old and it has never left me, I keep recommending this movie to people. Especially with the re-surgence of the nationalist movement in Europe (and elsewhere) this is as relevant as it ever was.
Also in many ways it's a big chunk of regular military training (though not as extreme) - from boot camp onwards it's "We hate platoon two, we hate battalion three, we hate non-infantry units etc and we are gonna beat them at XYZ."
I have often thought that when people give theories (many I agree with) on the reasons behind the long term drop in crime (better policing, abortion, removing lead paint from houses, change in availability of goods etc) one that they miss out is the change in social nature. My sense is that social connections are now weaker, with more individualism and less scope for in/out group love/hate thus less reason for group related violence - stabbing outside a bar, murder in retribution for attack on your ingroup etc.
Perhaps we are more starting to see ourselves as humans?
This is also interesting from a defense perspective as it means that area-weapons get less effective when the people you are trying to attack are no longer conveniently located in one spot. Things like nukes, for instance, are completely ineffective if your target is scattered throughout another population. I suspect that one of the main outrages of war in the 21st century will be from saturating an area with close-quarter drones with instructions to target a section of a population, rather than the bombing of whole cities.
This reads as a non-sequitur to me. How is dehumanizing the enemy, which is an explicit aspect of military training, not a form of institutionalized outgroup hate?
We're on the same team.
It's funny how many things around you stop making sense with this mindset. Racism and patriotism obviously come to mind, but there are many, many more, including most of the political discourse on the local scale.
How you choose to act given that understanding of your biology is of course up to you.
Can you recall any instances of out-group violence committed by your tribe?
I have found the whole concept of "in-group vs out-group" to be very useful in explaining a great deal of human behavior. Humans evolved as hunter-gather tribes and all of our social instincts are from that. We have empathy for our friends and family, but it has an off switch labelled "enemy" or even "stranger". More than that, we are actually compelled to hate the out-group, or follow the in-group, far more than we would otherwise do.
The reason politics sucks is that everyone is trying to identify with a tribe more than they are rationally debating policies. The reason racism, ethnic conflicts, and even wars happen is we consider the other side a rival tribe that is a threat to us.
The phenomena is obvious. The motivations, at a rational, cognitive level are also obvious though.
Within a group, there is comfort, love, protection, identity, etc.
Others, outside the group, are a threat to all that endorphin-releasing meeting of needs and/or desires. Of course there are physical (psycho-chemical) reinforcements to the behavior. I would have been surprised to NOT find brain activity of the sort.
We are social creatures through natural selection and, despite modernity's recontextualizing of what our clans look like, we should very well expect a very plastic ability of individuals to storm+norm+form groups which then are "protected" by degrading the power of those not in the group.
Would it be a terrible analogy to say this echo's the brain's feedback loop for sugary foods? We are wired to gorge on sugar when we find it. Food marketers apply psychological levers based around how that feedback loop is molded by our modern, human existence.
I want waffles...
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/4/1262.full
# Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism
## Abstract
Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence.
Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members.
In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation.
Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation.
Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group.
Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group.
Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation.
These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.
Without mentioning that, we very easily end up in a place where we have an article espousing a world view ("Belonging to a group is bad") that is very appealing to a demographic (Hacker News readers) who are very susceptible to those views since their natural state is to mimic the implicit outcome of the article. Specifically, HN readers are generally engineers and programmers, who are more likely to be introverts, and so less likely to easily fit in with groups, so this article validates their existing status (proven by the comments -- "I'm enlightened! I don't belong to a group!")
There are very good benefits to being part of a group, not limited to things like containing the excesses and rampant desires of the individual, so it's a shame articles like this don't try to present a balanced viewpoint.
"The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight"
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymm...
I would say that the holier than thou, more righteous than thou, more PC than thou attitudes here on HN all fall foul of how the main core 'regulars' treat anyone else with a different point of view.
Want to know why they call it a hell-ban? Because HN is curating it's own view of hell and banning others help reinforce their own self made wallowing.
...that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the "tribeless, lawless, hearthless one," whom Homer denounces—the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.
Or, of course, the Stanford Prison Experiment: http://www.prisonexp.org/
More subtly: the notion of American "rugged individualism," and the group with which many (right-leaning) "indiviudalists" unironically self-identify.
On HN, I suspect there's high participation the group of rational, logical thinkers who consider themselves superior to the fears and insecurities that compel the typical "joiner."
If this was irony, it was splendidly done.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274
> Four experiments confirmed that women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's and investigated explanations for this sex difference, derived from potential sources of implicit attitudes (L. A. Rudman, 2004).
PDF: http://rutgerssocialcognitionlab.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/9/7/...
’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’
Nobody heard him.