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!]

Tribal tactics

Given the right context, people tend to be cooperative.

That's the gist of a study out of the University of Texas - Austin this week, called, "Prosocial Modeling: A Meta-analytic Review and Synthesis," by Haesung Jung, Eunjin Seo, Eunjoo Han, Marlone Henderson, and Erika Patall.  If behavior is characterized as helpful to others -- such as wearing a mask during a pandemic -- it triggers similar prosocial behavior in those who witness it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wereskowa, Wearing FFP mask during the COVID-19 pandemic in Khmelnytskyi, April 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"Just like the deadly virus, cooperative behavior can also be transmitted across people,” said Haesung Jung, lead author of the study, in a press release.  "These findings remind the public that their behavior can impact what others around do; and the more individuals cooperate to stop the spread of the disease, the more likely others nearby will do the same...  We found that people can readily improvise new forms of prosocial actions.  They engaged in behaviors that were different from what they witnessed and extended help to different targets in need than those helped by the prosocial model."

It's unsurprising, given that we're social primates, that we're influenced by the behavior of those around us.  Not only do we learn by imitation, there's the tendency -- often nicknamed "peer pressure" -- to pick up behaviors, good or bad, from our friends and acquaintances, usually for reasons of group acceptance and fitting in.  I vividly remember being a graduate student at the University of Washington, where my classmates were some of the most foul-mouthed, snarky, hard-drinking folks I've ever been around.  They weren't bad people, mind you; but it definitely was the intellectual version of a "rough crowd."  It took very little time for me to adopt those behaviors myself.  We tend to conform to the norm for the group we belong to.

(Yes, I know, I still swear a lot.  I swore even more then, hard though that may be to imagine.  Like I said -- rough crowd.)

So the results of the Jung et al. study make sense.  Get the ball rolling, she suggests, and the influence we have over the people we associate with can cause an increase in the overall prosocial behavior of the group.

But.

The example the paper focuses on -- the wearing of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic -- isn't as simple as that.  This isn't simply a case of enlightened people who understand risks wearing masks and waking up the uninformed, or at least encouraging them to behave in a socially responsible manner.  Simultaneously we have a group of people who are consciously and deliberately using the same tribal tendencies to stop people from wearing masks.  From the very beginning of the pandemic, we have had Fox News bombarding their listeners with the following messages:

• COVID is a hoax.
• Even if it's not a hoax, it's China's fault.
• It's really just seasonal flu, so it's nothing to worry about.
• Okay, it's worse than the flu, but the numbers being reported, especially from blue states, are wild exaggerations made to disparage the Trump administration.
• Which, by the way, has been doing an absolutely stellar job of managing the pandemic.
• Wearing masks is giving in to the Democrats' alarmist propaganda.
• All this is just the "deep state" trying to get you to give up your liberties, so it's nobler and braver to defy them and not wear a mask.

Just this morning I saw a post on social media of the "Meh, why worry?" variety, to the effect that Woodstock happened right in the middle of the Hong Kong flu epidemic, and that didn't stop people from partying.

Which may well be true, but doesn't make it smart.

So we've got a "news" outlet deliberately downplaying the danger, and worse, making it look like a conspiracy to bring down Dear Leader.  The result is that wearing masks isn't seen as prosocial, at least amongst Fox viewers; it's seen as falling for the lies of the Democrats, and thus betraying Donald Trump and everything the GOP stands for.

This kind of thinking is remarkably hard to counteract, because the Fox mouthpieces -- people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham -- started out by training their listeners to disbelieve the facts.  The administration quickly picked up on this strategy, starting with Kellyanne Conway's infamous "alternative facts" comment, and it has proven wildly successful, if you can characterize getting a significant slice of the American public to trust nothing but the party line as "success."

As I've pointed out before, once you get people to mistrust the hard evidence itself, you can convince them of anything.

So the problem with mask-wearing in the United States is that it isn't universally being seen as a compassionate protective measure, it's seen as being a dupe.  Besides the "how others are seeing our actions" factor that Jung et al. focused on, there's "how we see ourselves" -- and if we've been trained that a behavior is going to make us look like a gullible sucker, that's going to counteract the positive forces of prosocial modeling.  (Especially if the training has included a message that the risk the behavior is supposed to protect us from doesn't exist in the first place.)

Yes, we're motivated to be compassionate and protect the people around us.  But the ugly side of tribalism is equally powerful, and we now have a group of people in charge who are callously choosing their tactics to exploit those tendencies, with the end of gaining power and money.

Until we can stop the disinformation and propaganda, the kind of prosocial modeling Jung et al. describe is unlikely to have much effect.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

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

Tribal mentality

There's a difference between respecting a culture and believing every damn thing it comes up with.

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists.  Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion.  No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery.  And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

A more benign manifestation of this same tendency is the glorification of indigenous cultures, as if they didn't have their own bad people and commit their own atrocities.  Current favorites are the Native Americans and the Celts, both of whom earned Historical Pathos Points for being overrun respectively by the European settlers, and by the Romans and (later) the English.  The destruction of their cultures gives them a veneer of tragic nobility.

Celtic knot from the Lindisfarne Gospels, 8th century [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, don't mistake me; the destruction of Native American tribes by the Europeans, and the crushing of Celtic society first by Rome and then by England, is an atrocity bordering on genocide.  But just because they had some cool aspects to their beliefs, and were ultimately destroyed, doesn't mean that they were somehow above reproach.  Indigenous people, just like us upstart Westerners, are people -- some good, some bad, some wise, some petty.  Some of their beliefs, just like some of ours, are worthy of emulation, and some are very much better off forgotten.

This blind admiration for All Things Indigenous reaches its pinnacle in the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, which claims that modern science has gone off the rails -- and what we need is a return to "indigenous science."  Which, according to the site, is defined thusly:

Indigenous science is a way of knowing and a way of life. The power of indigenous science lies in its ability to make connections and perceive patterns across vast cycles of space and time. This "Great Memory" belongs to the entire human species, but it is most fully active in cultural healers who develop heightened levels of consciousness. The Great Memory may also be realized more universally when the interspecies bond is honored.

Which sounds lovely, doesn't it?  You might at this point be asking, "but how do we know that any of this is real?"  You're asking the wrong question, they say:

Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the Sense [sic], including the spiritual and psychic...  The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place.  This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive.  In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science.

In other words, another call to abandon the modern scientific insistence on data, controls, and analysis.  Just get to the "point of balance" (whatever the hell that is) and you'll know the answer without all of the messy experimentation.

Now, lest you think that with all of their talk about peace and balance that they are working in harmony with actual scientists, all you have to do is look at their "Research Page" to put that to rest.  Some of it seems to be anthropological research, which is fine and dandy, but then they jump into serious woo-woo land with their project to help "Western man (to) remember who he is."  This, apparently, involves finding out about tribal Anglo-Saxon practices, under the guidance of an "Anglo-Saxon wizard," Brian Bates, and a "Siberian shaman," Dora Kobyakova.  The latter is going to lead tours to museums to "help identify artifacts which science has not been able to."

Worse still is their involvement in HIV/AIDS in Africa, where they are spearheading an effort to incorporate "traditional medicine and alternative therapies" into the "treatment and prevention of AIDS."  My charitable side wants to believe that this is about finding medically efficacious native plants -- research that has turned up useful chemicals for the treatment of many diseases -- but after the involvement of shamans and wizards in their anthropological studies, I'm pretty sure this isn't so.  And this crosses yet another line, which is taking woo-woo beliefs into a realm where they're suggesting that people abandon tested and effective medical treatment in favor of magical thinking.  Thus, for all of their flowery verbiage, they are jeopardizing human lives.

Look, it's not as if I don't think ancient beliefs are fascinating.  I'm an amateur student of anthropology myself, and love learning about other cultures, traditions, and languages.  I celebrate my own ancestry, for all that I keep in mind that some of them were probably not nice people.  I'm glad that I still speak French, given that three-quarters of my ancestors did as well; and I proudly wear a Celtic knot tattoo on my leg in honor of my Scottish forebears (which account for much of the remaining quarter).

But the ancients weren't right about everything.  They did bad things, held counterfactual beliefs, and participated in gruesome rituals.  I'm happy to live in the modern world, for all of its faults; and should I become ill, I still will seek out the assistance of modern medicine, not a shaman.

Simply put: there's a reason we are the healthiest, longest-lived society humanity has ever seen.

There's some truth in the claim that we could learn something from some of the indigenous cultures -- most clearly in their understanding that we are all part of nature.  (Nota bene: yes, I know that not even all of them believed that.  The Yanomami of Brazil, for example, consider themselves so separate that they don't even classify members of other tribes as human.  But many indigenous peoples understand that we are fundamentally connected to nature in a way we westerners have long ago lost.)

We won't learn from other cultures, however, by romanticizing them, by unquestioningly accepting everything they did as praiseworthy (and simultaneously condemning our own culture in toto).  Leaping into "other ways of knowing" just because our distant ancestors didn't have access to modern science and medicine is foolhardy at best.  Ethnocentrism, whether lauding a culture or denigrating it, is never going to be a valid way to understanding.