Siding with the tribe

Springboarding off yesterday's post, about our unfortunate tendency to believe false claims if we hear them repeated often enough, today we have another kind of discouraging bit of psychological research; our behavior is strongly influenced by group membership -- even if we know from the start that the group we're in is arbitrary, randomly chosen, and entirely meaningless.

Psychologists Marcel Montrey and Thomas Shultz of McGill University set up a fascinating experiment in which volunteers were assigned at random to one of two groups, then instructed to play a simple computer game called "Where's the Rabbit?" in which a simulated rabbit is choosing between two different nest sites.  The participant gets five points if (s)he correctly guesses where the rabbit is going.  In each subsequent round, the rabbit has a 90% chance of picking the same nest again, and a 10% chance of switching to the other.

The twist comes when in mid-game, the participants are offered the option of seeing the guesses of three members from either group (or a mix of the two).  They can also pay two points to use a "rabbit-finding machine" which is set up to be unreliable -- it has a two-thirds chance of getting it right, and a one-third chance of getting it wrong (and the participants know this).  Given that this is (1) expensive, points-wise, and (2) already a lower likelihood of success than simply working on your own and basing your guess on what the rabbit did in the previous round, you'd think no one would choose this option, right?

Wrong.  It turns out that when you looked at how people chose, they were way more likely to do the same thing as the people who belonged to their own group.  Next in likelihood is the wonky, inaccurate rabbit-finding machine.  Dead last was copying what was done by members of the other group.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sara 506, Group people icon, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Remember what I started with -- these groups were entirely arbitrary.  Group affiliation was assigned at the beginning of the experiment by the researchers, and had nothing to do with the participants' intelligence, or even with their previous success at the game.  But the volunteers were still more likely to side with the members of their own tribe.  In fact, when choosing whose decisions to observe, the test subjects decided by a two-to-one margin to consult in-group members and not even consider the decisions made by the out-group.

How much more powerful would this effect be if the group membership wasn't arbitrary, but involved an identity that we're deeply invested in?

"Researchers have known for some time that people prefer to copy members of their own social group (e.g., political affiliation, race, religion, etc.), but have often assumed that this is because group members are more familiar with or similar to each other," said study co-author Marcel Montrey, in an interview in PsyPost.  "However, our research suggests that people are more likely to copy members of their own group even when they have nothing in common.  Simply belonging to the same random group seems to be enough.  Surprisingly, we found that even people who rated their own group as less competent still preferred to copy its members."

It's easy to see how this tendency can be exploited by advertisers and politicians.  "Human social learning is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, where many factors other than group membership play a role," Montrey said.  "For example, we know that people also prefer to copy successful, popular, or prestigious individuals, which is why companies advertise through endorsements.  How do people’s various learning biases interact, and which ones are most important?  Because these questions have only recently begun to be explored, the real-world relevance of our findings is still up in the air."

This also undoubtedly plays a role in the echo-chamber effect, about which I've written here more than once -- and which is routinely amplified by social media platforms.  "By offering such fine-grained control over whom users observe," Montrey said, "these platforms may spur the creation of homogeneous social networks, in which individuals are more inclined to copy others because they belong to the same social group."

We like to think of ourselves as modern and knowledgeable and savvy, but the truth is that we still retain a core of tribalism that it's awfully hard to overcome.  Consider how often you hear people say things like, "I'll only vote for a person if they belong to the _____ Party."  I've sometimes asked, in some bewilderment, "Even if the person in question is known to be dishonest and corrupt, and their opponent isn't?"  Appallingly, the response is often, "Yes.  I just don't trust people of the other party."

And of course, a great many of the politicians themselves encourage this kind of thinking.  If you can get a voter to eliminate out of hand half of the candidates for no other reason than party affiliation, it raises the likelihood you'll be the one who gets elected.  So the benefits are obvious.

Unfortunately, once you look at the Montrey and Shultz study, the downsides of this sort of thinking should also be frighteningly obvious.

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Morality and tribalism

I had a bit of an epiphany this morning.

It was when I was reading an article in the news about the fact that Joe Biden has lost support among law enforcement unions because of his call to increase oversight and investigate claims of unwarranted or excessive violence by the police.  "For Joe Biden, police are shaking their heads because he used to be a stand-up guy who backed law enforcement," said Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations. "But it seems in his old age, for whatever reason, he’s writing a sad final chapter when it comes to supporting law enforcement."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jamelle Bouie, Police in riot gear at Ferguson protests, CC BY 2.0]

I suddenly realized that this was the common thread running through a lot of the problems we've faced as a society, and that it boils down to people believing that tribal identity is more important than ethical behavior.  The police are hardly the only ones to fall prey to this.  It's at the heart of the multiple pedophilia scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church, for example.  This one resonates for me because I saw it happen -- as I've written about before, I knew personally the first priest prosecuted for sexual abuse of children, Father Gilbert Gauthé.  Father Gauthé was the assistant pastor for a time at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Broussard, Louisiana; the priest, Father John Kemps, employed my grandmother as live-in housekeeper and cook.  The point here is that when the scandal became public, and it was revealed that Gauthé had abused hundreds of boys, the most shocking fact of all was that the bishop of the Diocese of Lafayette, Maurice Schexnayder, knew about it all along -- and instead of putting a stop to it, he transferred Gauthé from one church to another in the hopes that no one would ever find out that a priest could do such a thing.

For Schexnayder, membership in the tribe was more important than protecting the safety of children.

It happens all the time.  Inculcated very young, and reinforced by slogans like "everyone hates a rat" and "snitches get stitches," kids learn that refusing to identify rule-breakers is not only safer, it's considered a virtue.  Things like cheating rings survive in schools not only from the fact that participation is rewarded by higher grades (provided you don't get caught), but from the complicity of non-participants who know very well what's going on and refuse to say anything.

Tribe trumps morality.

The teachers themselves are not immune.  In 2011, a scandal rocked Atlanta schools when it was revealed that teachers were changing scores on standardized exams -- 178 teachers and administrators eventually confessed to the practice, and lost their licenses -- and it had been going on for over a decade.  I'm not going to go into the ridiculous reliance of state education departments on high-stakes standardized test scores that probably acted as the impetus for this practice; regular readers of Skeptophilia know all too well my opinion about standardized exams.  What interests me more is that there is no way that 178 teachers and administrators were doing this for a decade, and no one else knew.

The great likelihood is that almost everyone knew, but for ten years, no one said anything.

Tribe trumps morality.

The truth is that any time people's affiliation becomes more important than their ethics, things are set up for this kind of systemic rot.  How many times have you heard the charge leveled against both of the major political parties in the United States that "you only care about someone breaking the law if (s)he's a member of the other party?"  When the voters -- when anyone, really -- puts more importance on whether a person has an (R) or a (D) after their name than whether they're ethical, honest, moral, or fair, it's only a matter of time before the worst people either side has to offer end up in charge.

We have to be willing to rise above our tribe.  Sure, it's risky.  Yes, it can be painful to realize that someone who belongs to your profession, religion, or political party isn't the pillar of society you thought they were.  But this is the only way to keep a check on some of the worst impulses humans have.  Because when people feel invulnerable -- when they know that no matter what they do, their brothers and sisters in the tribe will remain silent out of loyalty -- there are no brakes on behavior.

So to return to what began this: of course there are good cops.  I have several friends in law enforcement who are some of the kindest, most upstanding people I know.  But it's imperative that the good ones speak up against the ones who are committing some of the atrocities we've all seen on video in the last few days -- peaceful protestors exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed right to assembly being gassed, reporters being beaten and shot in the head with rubber bullets, police destroying a city-approved medics' table in Asheville, North Carolina, and in one particularly horrifying example, cops shooting a tear gas canister into the open window of a car stopped at a stoplight, and when the driver got out yelling that his pregnant wife was in the car, the cops opened fire on him.

If people know they can act with impunity, they will.  It's only when the members of the tribe are willing to call its members out on their transgressions -- when we are as loud in condemning illegal or immoral behavior in members of our own political party, religion, or profession as we are in condemning those of the others -- that this sort of behavior will stop.

And that applies to the police spokespersons who are questioning their support of Joe Biden because he called for more oversight.  No one likes outside agencies monitoring their behavior.  I get that.  But until the police are more consistent about calling out their fellow officers who are guilty of unwarranted or excessive violence, there really is no other choice.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]