Bringing About World Peace May Be Easier Than You Think
In 1970, social psychologist Henri Tajfel conducted an experiment involving 48 school aged boys from Bristol. The boys were shown six pairs of unlabelled and unsigned paintings they were told were by abstract painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Each boy was asked which of the two paintings (from each pair) did he prefer.
The boys were then randomly divided into two groups titled “Klee group” or “Kandinsky group” — these groups were not based on their preferences.
They were then taken to a cubicle one by one and asked to allocate virtual money to two random boys. The only information they were given was a code number and the group name of the respective boy.
Tajfel and collegues were interested in learning about social identity and discrimination on the basis of this identity. They formed minimal groups for the purpose of seeing whether the participants favoured their own group or not based solely on this minimal information i.e. could discrimination between social groups be brought about on the basis of something as trivia as a group namel? The crazy thing is that the boys didn’t even know who was in their groups.
Multiple trials and versions of the experiment have been conducted since then, and some of the versions include even more minimal groups. The end result is always the same — the participants favour members from their own group.
Ingroups and outgroups are inevitable. Humans are social beings who gravitate towards people with shared interests or goals or in this case, the same group name.
But we must go a step back.
Groups are formed because humans need a sense of belonging — they need a sense of social identity. Tajfel had argued that people build their own identities from their group memberships. The interconnected world we live in today is a perfect case in point.
Everybody has an opinion on most everything, and everybody has a platform on which to present this opinion (however half-baked it might be).
We live in a world ideologically polarised at every stage. And it seems to be only getting worse.
I can think of three reasons for this:
- Platforms on the internet are run by for-profit companies which are in the business of capturing the user’s attention. So if you’re a pro-Bernie feminist who also supports the legalisation of mushrooms, you’re probably going to get content that goes in line with your beliefs. On YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram. (The email subscriptions are on you though.)
- Our friends are on our side. When I was in college, I hung out with people who also thought like me. Sure, we had our differences. But we agreed on the basics. That’s just how humans work — we spend time with people we connect with. Nothing wrong with that, right? No. But what’s happening today is an active vilification of the “other” side. We now have Whatsapp groups on which we can share content that goes in line with what we stand for. We spend more time listening to opinions of people who already agree with us. The myside bias states that we look at info. such that we, albeit subconsciously, interpret it in a manner that only solidifies our position. Now we have a bunch of people reassuring us of it. All the time.
- We debate. A lot. And we think that makes us badass. It does…not. Constructing well thought out arguments has always been deemed a virtue. It is. Only so much to the extent that it does not lead to our downfall, and as a result, detriment of society as a whole. Debating means choosing a side and finding all the data to support that side. It may work at school or University or the local Toastmasters chapter. But in the real world, it’s not going to work. Case in point: the world as it is. The previous two points add on to this.
Take the holy trifecta together, and you’ve left with people talking about what the colour purple is made of when they’ve only ever seen red or blue.
What we need is conversation, not debate. We need to do better as individual members of society. We can’t just point blank accuse everybody in favour of guns to also be supporting gun violence. We can’t call everyone who supports Trump a bigot. I have done this for a while and it’s not gotten me any closer to bridging the gap between “us” and “them”. It has also not helped me understand individual realities. Everybody gets mushed up into one giant blob of “I don’t like them”. That’s not fair to people.
We need to listen. We need to figure out where people are coming from. We need to stop categorizing positions as “good” or “bad” or people who support or are against something as “good” or “bad”.
Human beings are complex. It’s time to treat us as such. Our identities are not shaped by what we stand for or against — but instead why we choose to take that stand.
