The Power of Us: A Book Tribute
We hear a lot about “tribalism” in politics these days, especially in the US. It does seem like a useful idea for thinking about the miserable state of our discourse, invoking as it does warring factions that aren’t quite sure what they’re fighting over. But as it stands, “tribe” is mainly used as an epithet, a mob of those other people that renders them immune to reason, but is otherwise not very interesting. There must be more to it than that.
So it was with great relish that I heard Jay van Bavel on a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, You Are Not So Smart. It turns out that social psychology has a lot to say about tribes and tribalism, and he gave me that lovely scales-from-the-eyes feeling of “Oh my god, where has this information been all my life?” So I read his book (written with Dominic Packer), The Power of Us, and I must say: we’re overdue for a reckoning with group identity and group behavior.
What is a group?
First, let’s swap out the pejorative vocabulary: instead of “tribe” or “cult”, let’s talk about “groups” of people; that sounds bland enough. But now consider a question: why has humanity succeeded so spectacularly, dominating to the point of destruction all the other species in the world that are so much stronger and more numerous? Intelligence doesn’t hurt, of course, and language is also key. But even equipped thus, where would we be without the ability to cooperate? Acting in concert, we can gang up on any adversary. We can care for each other as the need arises. We can build larger and more sophisticated things than any set of individuals. In truth, the ability to aggregate into groups is one of the great enabling features of humankind.
As with other species, so with other humans. When humans contend for resources, who is in a position to win? Random, unfocused collections of individuals, or people who could gang up and perform as one, who help each other out? Those who could cooperate, who operated with superior group cohesion, simply must win the battle for future genes in very short order. So today we have a population whose inbuilt programming for group identity is so universally compelling, and cohesion so strong, that it runs our lives almost invisibly.
[Incidentally, the need for group coherence provides an excellent answer to an enduring question: Where does morality come from? Why is human interaction not just a matter of naked power and dominance, both within and between groups? The answer lies with the need for group cohesion. A group that’s not tightly bound is hardly a group at all; you can’t have members at each others’ throats. There have to be rules for how to treat one another, even if the group is run by a top-dog power structure. Interpersonal morals, as enforced by the group, are just as important for success as group-level logistics. Groups with strong interpersonal standards of behavior — who don’t waste energy battling each other — just will dominate those without. Guess whose genes we got?]
The grouping instinct
Fast forward a hundred thousand years or so. Civilization has commenced, government has become the norm, and people are still forming groups and tribes. We seem to have inherited something like a grouping instinct.
Do you doubt that? Do you think we’re innately driven to form and work in groups, or are our tribes just about what they’re about, e.g. race, political loyalty, class, etc, with their power derived solely from attachment to those concepts?
Enter Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol. His team set out to explore what factors make for stronger groups, starting with a meaningless grouping condition so that other factors could be added in to study their effect. But, to their great surprise, they could not find such a condition, an organizing abstraction so trivial that it didn’t trigger group behavior.
For example, they assigned subjects a meaningless task: estimating the number of dots on a page, then told the subjects that they were one of the “under-estimators” or the “over-estimators”. Group dynamics were kept pristine: members of the groups never interacted in any way. Even the labels were not just trivial but actually fictitious: the results of the tests were ignored and group assignments were random. And yet, when subjects were assigned to allocate resources between a member of their “group” and a member of the other “group”, they consistently gave more money (say) to their anonymous fellows than to anonymous others.
The principle social scientists use for this phenomenon is “social identity”.
With membership in a group, each member’s sense of who they are becomes entangled with the group identity (literally, individuals become identified with the group). The criteria for qualifying as “us” gets left behind and social identity takes on a life of its own. In other words, there may or may not be good reasons for forming or joining a group, but once formed, groupiness takes over.
Social death is worse than physical death
Tajfel, et al, showed how groups form for the most trivial of reasons, but does group behavior per se really have much effect out in the real world?
Consider the case of the flat-Earther. If you really want to explain how people can go so wrong, you can point to all kinds of cognitive biases, together with an uncharitable assessment of the flat-Earther’s intelligence, to cobble together a rather unconvincing explanation for such demented “reasoning”. Or, you can think about the role of group dynamics. If flat-Earthers are a group (as they most definitely are, complete with internet forums, conventions, books, meetings, T-shirts, bumperstickers and all the rest), and their individual identities are bound up with the group, can’t we easily understand the cognitive backflips and extraordinary mental gymnastics that they undertake to keep their identity secure? To change one’s mind about the shape of the planet would be to ostracize oneself from a group that supplies a great deal of the community and meaning in one’s life.
There are so many modern movements so far removed from reality — think QAnon, 9–11 Truthers, COVID skeptics, election-fraud zealots — that they’re easy to see as a sign of humanity off the rails. Instead, I look at the depth and power of the beliefs they command, and I see a group exercising its power, through entirely understandable means, right down into the neocortex.
It’s incredible but true: group identity can even trump the imperative for personal survival. That is, people will extinguish themselves in service to their group. Why else do young men by the millions march off to war, except in service to “the greater good” of the country with which they identify? I like the maxim “Social death is worse than physical death” because 1) it sounds like an exaggeration, and 2) it totally isn’t. Why suicide bombers? Because their group offers prospective (if post-mortem) glory. People will even die at the behest of their group when their death terminates the group itself. Need I say more than “Jonestown”? And today, we have COVID patients on their deathbeds refusing to acknowledge that they were wrong about the virus, or about the vaccines.
Social death is worse than physical death.
The Intertubes hum with astonishment whenever political identity blinds people to obvious facts and bland reason. But the fact that anyone is shocked only shows how poorly they understand the nature and power of groups at work. If people are willing to lay down their lives for a group, should we really be surprised that they’re willing to surrender their brains?
Invisible tribes
Another myth about groups is that groupiness is for other people. If you’re an American, the Lone Wolf archetype is strong within you. But where does that Rugged Individualist value come from? It’s part of our group identity as Americans!
If you’re reading this, my bet is that you are interested in ideas. You’d like to figure out how the world works, whether to be more effective personally or out of simple curiosity. Thus, you also hold values for truth, inquiry, rigor. You want to sort out true ideas from false ideas. You believe in evidence, and science, and overcoming cognitive bias, and deploying the skills of discernment in service to realism.
Welcome to the tribe of Rationalists.
Consider the hallmarks of group identity on display in that group. Rationalists have a glorious history of success since the Enlightenment; we have the rituals of higher education (“learning how to think”) and inquiry, from business memos up to peer-reviewed publications and books; shared values like Truth, Reason, Empiricism, Materialism, Skepticism; norms of what counts as rational (Out with the supernatural. If you must be spiritual, do it on your own time.); common experiences of education, reading, and even choices of entertainment; pride in the headlong success of science; and clear boundaries distinguishing the Ins from the Outs, starting with a language of discourse that spotlights members of the group like a badge of honor and leaves the less fluent out of the conversation.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a proud and practicing member of this tribe. I am convinced that the world is a better place, and gets better over time, when people value the truth over their own prejudices and do their best to rigorously investigate how reality functions. I firmly believe that people of our ilk should be in charge. But just because a tribe is formed for good reasons doesn’t mean it’s not a tribe, and that fact definitely has implications.
My point is not just to show how invisible groupiness is, or to tweak my fellows. I want to highlight two aspects of tribal behavior in the rationalist group. One is ironic; the other is rather critical to modern-day America.
Tribal behavior among the Rationalists
There is one aspect of groups that the authors don’t mention. If a tribe is defined by a certain quality in its members, there’s a natural tendency to overestimate the prevalence of that quality in that group. Part of the function of the tribe is to emphasize the qualities that distinguish the tribe from “the others”. Haven’t we all noticed church-goers who so identify and probably strive to be better Christians, but also overestimate the true extent of how their faith actually affects their attitudes and their conduct? Groups often include an element of wishful thinking.
To call such people hypocrites misses the point. To an outsider, they just are going to look like people who are falling short of their ideals, because their group identity makes up the difference — for them.
To be blunt, rationalists are borderline delusional about their actual dependence on collecting, verifying and analyzing primary data. Nobody can rigorously derive even a small fraction of what they believe. I personally have no qualifications or time to evaluate climate change or COVID vaccines, but I know whom I trust to do it for me: my fellow rationalists. Such a dependence on in-group trust seems and is reasonable, but it looks to people on the outside just like the behavior of any other clique, especially when it seems to flout such a core value.
Consider how the rationalist tribe looks from the outside:
- Preferentially trusting in-group members as above.
- Looking down on members of the out-group. Deserving or not, the devotion of Rationalists to Enlightenment values does inferiorize others.
- Limiting their access to resources. Is there any questioning the prosperity of the educated?
- Wielding power over them. Let’s face it: by and large, rationalists (aka wonks) are in charge around here.
I invite my fellow rationalists to take a sober look at group effects working on us, not just in the spirit of inquiry, but because it goes a long way to explaining how a certain ex-President got such astonishing power.
A masterclass in group manipulation
The story of Donald Trump on the national political stage is a masterclass in fomenting and exploiting group behavior. In a matter of weeks, it turned an indifferent businessman and blowhard into the avatar of a movement numbering something like a third of US adults, leaving pundits, politicians and historians alike dumfounded. No matter the narcissism, the lies, the impeachable behavior, the disinterest in actually governing; loyalty to Trump seemed immune to the news in a way utterly without precedent.
Donald Trump recognized the dominance in America of a group much like the Rationalist tribe I just described: the meritocrats, the media, the educated elites that had been running things for decades; the ones who had the qualifications and the inclination to take control; who benefitted from globalization and were unconcerned about immigration. This may not seem like a very pointed group, but the actual coherence of this “group” matters not at all, nor does it matter how sinister or exclusionary it really was. For Trump’s purposes, it only needed to have an outside.
The genius of Donald Trump (and yes, I can’t believe I just typed that) was to form a new group based on exclusion from “the elite”: an in-group defined by being an out-group. The invisible. The non-college-educated. The people in the middle of the country. Those for whom globalization (specifically, the export of working-class jobs) was a net loss. Anyone annoyed with the way things were going and felt isolated from the process.
From the day he rode that golden elevator down into the lobby of Trump Tower, Trump’s rhetoric was aimed like a laser at fomenting this group of “outs”, with him as its focus and leader. He drew in an inchoate population grumbling on right-wing talk radio and Fox News, and turned their simmering disquiet into a raging flame of grievance against those who had left them out. He defined a rallying, MAGA-hat-wearing, “I’d rather be Russian than Democrat”-T-shirt garbed team, defined by the idea of taking vengeance on those who had given them the backhand.
Ever wonder why “owning the libs” seems more important than anything else to the Trump supporter — every other concern or matter of policy or even decency? Now you know. It’s the core, defining value of Team Trump, the identity to which Trump’s legions have hitched their own.
Heads were scratched naked and raw trying to puzzle out why Trump’s supporters seemed to be acting in contravention of their own interests, supporting a massive tax cut largely targeting the wealthy, cheering for dismantling Obamacare, and opposing many issues that even Republicans support when polled on an issue-by-issue basis. But isn’t the very definition of group identification that it suppresses self-interest in favor of the group’s?
Once Team Trump had coalesced, Trump found that he could strengthen that group bond with tests of loyalty. When you’re strongly identified as one of the righteous crowd, and Trump asks you to swallow a piece of patent nonsense like the numbers at his inauguration, you have two options: you can abandon the group, surrender your identity and find another membership to sustain you — or you can swallow. And with every swallow, every surrender of your credulity and your own good sense, you’re bought in more, evermore committed to the group. This is what was most puzzling and enraging to those looking on appalled from outside of Trumpistan: why did the constant avalanche of bad news, that would have sunk any other presidency straightaway, not just bounce off of Trump but have the opposite effect, like some comic-book villain who absorbs the energy directed against him and turns it around to become stronger?
If your goal is to cement someone’s identification with your group, there’s no better way than such nonstop, meaningful tests of loyalty. This is why the fortunes of Donald Trump not only survived, but thrived under:
- the lies and delusions
- the hypocrisy of proclaimed vs. practiced values
- the malfeasance to the point of criminality
- the indifference to actually governing
- the flouting of institutions and norms
- the obviously fictitious healthcare and infrastructure plans
But here’s the beauty part: while all of this was making the loyalists more loyal, it was driving the opposition into a frenzy directed at Trump and his crowd, which only reinforced the group’s sense of embattlement and outsiderness bonding the group together!
To paraphrase a thought from evolutionary biology:
Without an appreciation and understanding of group dynamics, nothing about Trumpism makes sense. With it, everything makes sense.
A note of hope
There’s more to The Power of Us than I have space for here. Group dynamics and group identity make an illuminating and productive framework for thinking about race and racism, suggesting that racism might not be as inexorable as it is tragic, in that racist tendencies apparently can be overridden by other group identities. When it comes to teaming up in groups, race is not the only game in town.
Whether group identity can actually be marshaled as a weapon against prejudice in general is still an open question. But if racism, as expressed by implicit bias, can be manipulated out of mind in the lab, then maybe it isn’t quite the pox on the face of humanity that it seems. Someday we may look back and see that it was more like cholera: a plague that actually did have a solution.
Conclusion
This is entitled a “book tribute” rather than a “book review” because I wanted to communicate the substance of The Power of Us, and why what it tells us matters. If you’re not going to pick it up, I hope you can now see how:
- Group identity is an instinct that exists for good reasons.
- Social death is worse than physical death; renouncing the beliefs of your group is a social death sentence.
- My fellows in the rationalist/skeptic community should realize how tribal they really are.
Some of the biggest, hardest problems we face today (e.g., climate change) get stuck at the level of getting individuals to act in the collective interest. Others (e.g., racism) are deeply enmeshed with group dynamics. And American politics feels like it’s broken over the knee of group identity. The Power of Us supplies a most welcome toolbox for thinking about and deploying a hitherto obscure human reality. You’ll learn a great deal.
