'Harmful' group biases describe all group dynamics

There’s this cluster of classic social psychology experiments from the 50’s through the 70’s that you’ll be presented with in documentaries and historical novels whenever groups of people are behaving crazily. You’ve probably heard of some of them. Milgram’s ‘shock’ experiments, or Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or Asch’s conformity tests, and so on.

I talk about them in detail in part one of this series, but the basic idea is that humans will cheerfully engage in the most obscene behaviour if either:

1. Everyone else is; and/or
2. Someone charismatic/in authority tells them to.

This, I should be honest, can be true. But as I pointed out in part one (and I’ll do a little recap here, for the time poor or lazy), this narrative usually overplays its hand. And in concentrating on this, a more important point is often missed. Not only are the things that contribute to this bad behaviour are necessary features of any group, they’re also things that bring the best out of groups too.

So, in this second part of my series, I’ll talk about how the same dynamics people like to worry about actually make good groups. Or rather, how these dynamics actually characterise all groups. All that before we move on the last parts of the series. First, where we talk about how the best groups have the strongest biases, and why that might be so.

¶A quick recap of how hard it is to develop bad group dynamics

You could skip this section if you already read part one.

Two experiments really stand out from mid-last-century, in terms of demonstrating how easily people can be made to participate in terrible behaviour when they’re in a group. Milgram’s shock experiments, and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Milgram showed us that, so long as there was a man in a lab coat standing behind them, ~65% of people would shock another person to death. Zimbardo showed us that, if you make a fake prison, and assign half your participants to be guards, and half to be prisoners, within six days you’ll have naked prisoners sleeping on bare concrete and cleaning toilets with their bare hands.

That’s the usual narrative. And then people will refer to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”. In exploring Adolf Eichmann, logistician for the Jewish Holocaust, she was struck by how ‘terrifyingly ordinary’ the man was. Not a ‘monster’, but a bureaucrat concerned with professional advancement, simply following orders. Arendt was, like we should be, shocked that evil is not the product of deep-seated malice, but thoughtlessness, conformity, and a failure to reflect.

The general idea is that:

When we’re in groups, those in authority are balanced precariously atop a collection of biases that threaten to suck them into a maelstrom of abuse. And those poor fools obedient to the group find themselves weaving delicately between a collection of biases that threaten to plunge them into an abyss of complicity and moral decay.

But, as I detail in part one, these things don’t just happen out of nowhere. Milgram’s shock experiments certainly show that some people might be unusually obedient to authority, but you have to push them mighty hard. And Zimbardo’s prison experiments didn’t show how ordinary people end up doing terrible things. It showed that, if you train your guards to brutalise your prisoners, actively stop your prisoners from being able to leave, and regularly intervene in order to stop people’s better nature rebalancing the situation, then people will be brutalised, be unable to leave, and be unable to rebalance the situation.

¶They’re real biases, but it’s just normal social behaviour

There’s this big social psychology fruit salad that might be thrown at you to make the point people usually like to make. Again, I run through these in more detail elsewhere, but since I’ve complained before about endless lists of biases, I’ll do you a favour and summarise them nice and concisely for you:

• You have a cluster of behaviours that are about creating an in-group (us) and an out-group (them). So you think of Levi-Strauss’ othering or the idea of dehumanisation, for example.
• You have a cluster of behaviours around the pressure of social norms: making you more likely to conform or change your behaviour to match the groups. You might be introduced to conformity theory, or social comparison theory.
• You have a cluster that makes you outsource your thinking to the group: ignoring information that might contradict the group in some way or valuing group consensus and cohesion over other things. You’ll hear of cognitive dissonance, de-individuation, and the status quo bias.
• And you have a cluster that makes you behave less like you might alone: acting more riskily in a group setting perhaps, or failing to intervene in a situation because no one else is. You might come across risky shift, for example, or the bystander effect.

Obviously, injecting malice into this little mix here can make things rather untidy. But all of this also just describes natural processes of creating and maintaining a social identity.

I probably don’t have to convince you that humans are social animals. Any catalogue of human behaviour will illustrate how fundamental our relationships with others are to our wellbeing—any textbook, or lecture series, almost all of the psychology studies, and the entire disciplines of sociology and anthropology will make mention of the fact. And you could justify this on evolutionary terms, or developmental terms, or just by looking around to see how structurally important cultural norms and societal institutions are to smooth human interactions. Or, if you’re more hardcore, you could turn to the evidence from the brain or studies of DNA or studies of disease. While you’re at it, conceivably, you could argue that it’s not possible to be a living organism, and not have some form of social instinct—we’re even publishing about the genetic determinants of self identity and social recognition in bacteria

¶Social identity theory: a neater way to think about things

Now, there’s a bit of a fight going on in social identity literature. You can imagine how sexy all this in-group/out-group stuff is in the current political and media climate, and some people are really in it to win it. I am not in it to win it, so I’m just going to gloss over all this fairly irrelevant (to us) theoretical precision.¹ Instead, I’ll talk generally about what people do when they come together in groups,² why, and how our social psych fruit salad fits in.

We all have a personal identity. A sense of who we perceive ourselves to be. But this is coloured by the social categories we’re a part of. I’m not just Dorian, I’m Dorian the Australian. The Sydney-sider. The ex-pat in the UK. The ex-University student. The academic. The millenial. The plant daddy.³ And so on. Each of these self-identifications are also social identifications. When I meet other academics, or other Australians in the UK, or other plant daddies, we’ll do a little ‘oh we are the same in some way’ thing.

So we each have all these social categories orbiting around us. But of course, at times, some become more important than others. Sometimes we want to identify more with this category than that category, but at other times, perhaps not. Or maybe we always want to identify as not something. The question is why? What makes us like some categories, dislike others, and slide between the rest?

Social identity theorists would tell us that the thing that makes us category-jump are the distinctions between them. Like, in the UK, I am Dorian the Australian. I place myself in that category to distingish myself from the British and other ex-pats roaming this soggy landscape. But in Australia, I place myself in the Sydney-sider category to distinguish myself from those pesky Melbournites. And no matter where I am, I’m never a Holocaust-denier, to, you know, distinguish myself from lunatics.

You see, our hypothetical theorists would say, the distinctions help you understand yourself. They help clarify your personal identity. To situate yourself in a sea of groups of people doing things.

It might also help to consider the more practical aspects of social categories. I’ve written before about how generating social stereotypes⁴ helps us figure out how to be around new people without having to work them out from scratch. Social categories also help us figure out how to be around a group. What is the group about? What does it do? What should we do as a result?

And that’s exactly the point, on the other side of these calculations about others is a calculation about ourselves. We define much of ourselves in relation to how other people are. And we do it by determining the distinctions between categories of them.

¶Positive distinctions between groups draw us to them

Alright, so the distinctions are important. And what drives our social-identification are the positive distinctions. What about that category, or group is appealing to us? Is that category of people something I would like to be, or do they reflect something I like about myself? Then perhaps I’d like to identify with that group. Sometimes I might prefer this more than other times. Sometimes I might want this all the time.

And when I want to be identified with a group, I’m going to accentuate those distinctions. I’m going to make very clear all the ways the group I’m identifying with is different from other groups, and how similar the people in the group are to each other, including lil old me.

To do this, I need to dip into my social psych fruit salad:

• I obviously need to make clear who is us, and who is them, so I’ll do the ‘othering’ cluster of behaviours.
• I need to make sure I’m behaving like my group, so I’ll do a lot of conforming, and I’ll be evaluating how close my behaviour is to the behaviour of the group.
• Thinking like myself is actually not super productive, because my personal identity doesn’t always match my social identity. So I’ll do a lot of outsourcing my thinking to the group, leaving my personal identity behind.
• And because I’m outsourcing all this thinking, I’m probably going to do stuff I wouldn’t otherwise do. Not just because there’s safety in numbers, but because my thinking is those numbers. I don’t have responsibility for my actions anymore, because taking responsibility might make me act differently to the group and I want to be part of the group.

And now you can inject more things into this mix to help explain group dynamics. Maybe we might think about how we tie our self-esteem into the reputation and status of our social categories, and how that might enhance these things. Or we might think about how ordinary emotional processes get heightened when our thinking has all coalesced like this. Or we could think about how our preferences for familiarity drive us to create ever tighter norms. And we could extend that to consider how tightening the norms is likely to attract similar people, try to keep those similar people, and scare off less similar people, all of which makes the group even more homogenous. And so on.

¶Outro

It’s not just that bad group dynamics fall out of these biases. All group dynamics fall out of these biases. And groups do good things too. Often, the best groups are the groups that capitalise on their social identity to motivate their followers to be better. And that would describe all the same ‘harmful’ group biases trotted out to explain Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or whatever atrocity.

In the next part we’ll talk about exactly how the best groups capitalis on these biases, in a way we wouldn’t want to interfere with. Then, we’ll wrap up by talking about how and why these things go wrong, because they do go wrong.

But not often. More often, mob mentality isn’t really such a bad thing.