Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

We categorize others because it makes it much easier to deal with strangers when we know where they are coming from. We do not have to do as much mental work trying to figure out how to respond and can react much quicker when we categorize. This is a general principle of our brains – we tend to summarize previous experiences to be prepared for future encounters. It’s likely to be an evolutionary adaptation to optimize processing loads and streamline responses. When we identify someone as belonging to a group, this triggers all the stereotypes we possess for that group, which, in turn, influences how we behave towards the person. The problem is, of course, that stereotypes can be very wide of the mark when it comes down to the characteristics of the individual.

Those stereotypes can also be manipulated by others as well as by prejudice, which means we can all be biased to be biased. In one study, participants had to inflict painful punishment on fellow students in a learning experiment, and they were allowed to choose the level of pain to administer. 26If they ‘accidentally’ overheard an experimenter describe the students as ‘animals’ before the start of the experiment, the participants chose more severe punishments. They were influenced by others’ opinions. Most of us say we hate to be pigeonholed but the truth is that it is in our nature to label others and be labelled our selves, and that process is highly dependent on what other people think. We are less self-assured than we believe in making our minds up. It is the group consensus, not the individual opinion, that determines how most of us evaluate others.

The groups we belong to define us, but we are constantly entering, leaving, expanding and swapping our groups. People obviously benefit from the collective power of groups as well as the resources and companionship that can be shared, but membership is also necessary for generating a sense of self-identity. Just belonging to a group shapes our self because we automatically identify with other members. We know this from the work of social psychologists like Henri Tajfel who used to be the head of my department. Before he came to Bristol in the 1960s, Tajfel witnessed the power of groups when he was a French prisoner-of-war, having been captured by the Germans during the Second World War. In fact, he was a Polish Jew but he kept this aspect of his identity secret from his German prison guards. After the war, Tajfel dedicated his life to understanding group psychology. In what is now regarded as a classic study, he showed that arbitrarily assigning Bristol schoolboys into two groups by the toss of a coin produced changes in the way that they treated each other. 27Those members in the same group or ‘in group’ were more positive to each other, and shared resources, but hostile to ‘out group’ members, even though they were all from the same class.

What’s In Your Eye, Brother?

In fact, Tajfel’s study had been pre-empted a couple of years earlier in the United States by Jane Elliot, an Iowa third-grade teacher from Middle America. 28The class had just been studying Dr Martin Luther King Jr as American of the Month, when news came over that the civil rights leader had been assassinated on 4 April 1968. The children had little experience of discrimination and could not understand why anyone would want to kill their man of the month. The following day, Elliot planned an audacious class project to teach them about discrimination. She told her class that there was very good evidence that children with blue eyes were superior to students with brown eyes.

Following this revelation, Elliot afforded the blue-eyed students privileges such as extra long breaks and being first in the lunch queue. However, the next day she said that she had been wrong, and that in fact the evidence proved that it was the brown-eyed children who were superior. This role-reversal produced the same pattern. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behaviour of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests, whereas the superior group became more hostile to the inferior group, thinking them less worthy. Simply by belonging to a group influences how you feel about your self and how you feel about others not in your group. In fact, it is the favourable comparisons that we draw against others not in our group that help to define who we are. This is how we formulate our identity – by focusing on what we are not. The trouble is that by focusing on others, we miss our own imperfections. As Matthew (7:3) in the Bible reminds us when talking about small grains (motes) of imperfection, ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’

Social identity theory has been refined and elaborated over the decades with research demonstrating that people see themselves within a hierarchy of different groups that can shift periodically over the lifespan. Clearly some changes in circumstances change our group affiliation. If we marry, have children or become crippled, the groups to which we belong change by default. Because we occupy so many different positions throughout our lifetime – child, adolescent, worker, parent, etc. – most of us see our selves occupying multiple groups. In most instances we perceive group membership as bolstering self-esteem; by being part of a larger affiliation, we gain a sense of who we think we are as individuals. This is a delicate balance we strive to achieve between our desire to be an individual and the need to belong alongside others, 29though not every culture sees the need to strike this balance. Most of us believe that we know our own minds and whether we decide to identify with a group, or not, is really up to us to decide. However, if anything has emerged in the field of social psychology, it is the revelation that such a belief is naive as we are all susceptible to the power of the group – whether we like it or not.

Conformity

How good is your vision? Take a good look at the lines in Figure 7 and decide which one matches the line on the left – A, B or C? This is pretty much a no-brainer and unless someone has serious visual problems, you would predict that everyone would answer B. However, it depends what others around you say.

In what is considered one of the most important studies of the power of groups, 30Solomon Asch had eight participants take the line test. He held up cards with the lines on them and went round the room asking the participants which line matched the test line. In fact, there was only one real subject as the other seven participants were actually confederates of the experiment. At first, everything seemed above board. Everyone agreed on the length of the test line on the first two trials. However, on the third trial, the confederates gave the wrong answer saying that it was line C that matched. The real participant stared in disbelief at his fellow students. Were they blind? What would the participant say when it came to his turn? On average, three out of every four participants went along with his fellow participants and also gave the wrong answer. Each did not suddenly become blind, but rather conformed in accordance with the group so as not to be the outsider. Each participant was fully aware of the correct answer, but each did not want to appear different. They did not want to be ostracized so they conformed to the group consensus.

What about situations that are not so clear-cut, as in the case of a jury evaluating evidence? In Sidney Lumet’s classic portrayal of the power of group psychology, Twelve Angry Men (1957), Henry Fonda stands alone as the one dissenting member of a jury. In the film, a Spanish–American youth is accused of murdering his father, but Fonda gradually convinces the other jury members that the eyewitness testimony is not only unreliable, but false. This film was made long before the experiments on false memories were conducted. As the film unfolds, we see the dynamics of allegiances shift as Fonda tries to win the jury over man by man. It is a dramatic portrayal of the power of compliance and group consensus.