March 30, 2024 • 41 mins
Humans obviously don’t have any difficulties finding division and tribalism, but just how little is required for factions to form? In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the minimal group paradigm in social identity theory. (originally published 03/30/2023)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to
go into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This one was on the minimal group Paradigm, and it
originally published March thirtieth, twenty twenty three. Is this from
exactly one year ago today? I think so?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, Hey the Jackpot, hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, fair warning, folks.
If I sound like I speak with the voice and
mind of some kind of decrepit bog monster today, it
is because I'm on the mend from a bad cold.
So apologies on what's happening in your ears right now.
But but but here I am on Mike.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well, sometimes bog monsters are quite wise, so you know,
it depends on the story you're looking at.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I hope to bring a real meg muckle bones energy
today's episode, so you'll have to tell me how I do.
But yeah, what are we talking about today? Rob?
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Well? We're gonna be talking about a little something called
the minimal group paradigm, which sounds, I know, if you're
not familiar with it, sounds a bit a bit stuffy,
perhaps perhaps sounds a little bit clinical, but I think
it's it's a very fascinating little topic. I shouldn't make
for a nice one part episode here, because it attempts
(01:39):
to come down to some of the major concerns regarding
human civilization and human interactions, basically coming out of the
question of like, just how divisive are human beings and
how little does it take for us to split into
factions over something or next to nothing even And I
think for many of us, the answer seems to be
(02:01):
that we're, you know, are very divisive and that it
doesn't take much at all for us to split off
into factions. And I think this has been played to
great effect in literature and cinema, especially comedically, and two
examples always come to my mind, so one of them, Joe,
I'm not sure if you're familiar with this. I don't
know if we've talked about this before, but in the
(02:22):
nineteen fifty three story from Doctor Seuss The Sneeches, is this.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
The butter on the bread one.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
No, no, you're thinking of the Butter battle Book, which
does get into a similar situation. That's a where you
have two different groups and one side thinks you should
do the butter side down those buttered side up, and
they get into this big Cold war stalemate.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
This is an arms race and escalation of their weaponry
based on the butter ideology difference.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, so that's a good one to bring up too.
The Sneeches concerns this population of avian creatures that in
their entire social hierarchy is based on which ones have
a star on their bellies and which ones don't have
a star on their bellies, and the star bellied Sneaches
are the ones that live at the top and the
rest live at the bottom. But then a con artist
(03:13):
moves into town with a star on machine and then
later a star off machine to capitalize on their divisiveness.
Though at the end of that, the Sneeches move beyond
all of this and they unite as a single people.
So it's kind of a nice message.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Oh, that's that's very nice. That's a much happier ending
than the Butter battle Book, which, as I recall, it
ends with basically both sides on a hair trigger with
their ultimate weaponry.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a real clincher that one. But
another example that comes to mind, and I know you're
familiar with this one is, of course Monty Python's Life
of Brian. There's a memorable scene in which the anti
Roman resistance is split more than split between the Judee
and People's Front and the People's Front of Judea and
various other fragments of their independence group. One of the
(03:59):
characters in the Judea and People's Front proudly proclaims that
the only people they hate more than the Romans is
the People's Front of Judea.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I think this is meant to play on a concept
that was called the narcissism of small differences by Sigmund Freud.
I don't know Freud was the first person ever to
observe this, but I think that's where the phrase comes from,
is his writings about the idea that it's actually like
the most bitter, hateful, divisive struggles in the world tend
(04:28):
to be between people who actually share a lot of
things in common but have some difference that really appears
minor to people looking in from the outside.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Now, I think a lot of you out there you
may be able to think of examples from other works
of fiction, or certainly from real life, many of the
various serious things we divide ourselves over, or you know,
some of the equally seemingly silly, at least from the outside,
things that get that we were very divisive over. And
to your point, sometimes they're within like subgroups and and fandoms.
(05:00):
Even all manner of brand and sports team loyalty can
lead to division that doesn't necessarily make much sense on
closer inspection. Perhaps you prefer Puma shoes and this other
person prefers Adidas. How could the two of you ever
see eye to eye? And this specific example ties into
I think, what is a great example of division in
(05:22):
human beings and human groups? One I originally saw pointed
out by and though it's been well documented for a
while by Jay van Bavel and Dominique Packer in a
ted Ed video. This is like an animated educational short
that ted Ed puts on Wonderful Shorts. It's regular viewing
in my household with my family. But the title of
(05:42):
this one is the sibling rivalry that divided a town.
So I thought i'd cover the basics of this sibling rivalry.
All right, So are you familiar with this story, Joe,
I'm not. Well. It all starts in around nineteen nineteen.
That's when these two brothers, Adolph and Rudolph Dossler, found
a shoe company called Gebruda Dossler Shoe Fabric or GAETA
(06:05):
in their hometown of herzogen Rock in Bavaria. Turns out
they were very successful. These shoes really took off. You
even had the situation where in the nineteen thirty six
Olympics American runner Jesse Owens apparently was wearing some of
these shoes. But then World War Two breaks out. This
disrupts everything, to say the least, Rudolph is drafted into
(06:26):
the German Army, the factory is transformed into a weapons factory,
and again everything's just super disrupted until after the war
the brothers reunite. Their work continues, that is until nineteen
forty eight when they split over some personal issues. And
I think there are a few different analyzes of what
those personal issues might have been, but the results are
(06:49):
the same. Meaning anyway you cut it, the company is
split into that means material, workforce, and so forth. Rudolph
founds Ruda, which becomes Puma, and add All starts Adidas.
Now that's not that crazy, right, It's just one shoe
company splitting into two shoe companies. Now. The interesting thing
about this, though, according to j Van Babel and Dominice
(07:11):
Pucker and that ted Ed video, is that the brothers
feud and business division ultimately divides the entire town. Quote,
residents became fiercely loyal to one brand of shoe, local
businesses chose sides, and marriage across lines was discouraged. Herzegognoch
eventually became known as the town of bent Necks because
its residents looked down to ensure they were interacting with
(07:34):
members of their group.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Oh look down at the shoe. Is that one took
me in second?
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah? So I think it's a great example, not because
not only because it's kind of has some sort of
comical elements to it, kind of like belly Stars, but
also we do see these various elements to the division,
the personal, the business, the social, and the schism is
is quite real and it is funny to think how
(07:59):
how split people can be about brands. I mean, sometimes
I think it's meant jokingly you see a lot of
joking comments today, even about things like coke versus pepsi,
or Twizzlers versus red vines or something, and then also
things that are not even brand oriented, like overhanded versus
underhanded toilet paper rolls.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
I recall divisions of this type were big on like
early Facebook, like mid two thousands Facebook, where people would
make all these joke groups and it would be like,
you know, for people who like red vines because twizzlers
are for cowards.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
I mean, it's still I think, very prominent in like
meme making. You know, people like to get in on
this sort of thing. I don't know, maybe especially when
it's meant jokingly. It's kind of like low stakes things
to sort of mock disagree about. I'm not sure. But
then at what point does just sort of trolling and
mock fun. At what point does that then become like
(08:54):
an actual entrenched belief or opinion.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Oh, I think rather quickly actually, So.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're
going to look at a social psychology concept that ties
into to all of this, the minimal group paradigm, a
method for sessing out what might be the absolute minimal
conditions for discrimination to take place between two groups, will
their findings be twizzlers versus redfines? Is that the minimal thing,
I don't know, You'll just have to find out.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
All right. So where does this minimal group paradigm come from?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
All right? So one of the sources that I was
looking at specifically in order to understand the minimal group
paradigm and its history was The Origins of the Minimal
Group Paradigm by Rupert Brown of the University of Sussex,
twenty twenty, published by the American Psychological Association. Brown points
out that the basis of prejudice and inner group discrimination
(09:45):
has of course been a human concern for a long time,
and certainly was a long time concern of people in psychology.
But the MGP or the minimal group paradigm as we
know it generally is attributed to Polish social scientists Henri Tashfell,
who live nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty two, and also
British social psychologist Michael Billig, who worked with him was
(10:09):
born nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Typically, I see a lot of references to work they
did in the early seventies. One of the main citations
is Henri Tashfell, Michael Billig, Robert Bundy, and Claude Flement,
and the title is Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior, published
in the European Journal of Social Psychology, nineteen seventy one.
If you want to go back to the.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Source now, tash Fell, it's worth noting was a survivor
of the Holocaust, and this is important to keep in
mind because much of his work does ponder the question
of what drives groups of people to take up extreme
prejudice views and does the transference rely on extreme personality
types or is it something more mundane. So yeah, in
(10:53):
the early nineteen seventies, Toashfel at all conducted a series
of experiments on MGP studies that would end up having
an enormous impact on the field of social psychology. More
on this in a second, but I also want to
point out that Brown stresses that there is also a
pre tached Fell origin in the work of Dutch social
(11:14):
psychologist Yap Robbie in nineteen sixty four. So Robbie suspected
that common fate was the essential component for a group
to hold together and for intergroup discrimination to occur. Common
fate is a distallt psychology concept that says that objects
functioning or moving in the same direction appear to belong together,
(11:35):
kind of like we're off to see the wizard, right,
I mean you're going to see the wizard. Well I'm
going to see the wizard, or I'm going down this road. Well,
I guess we're a group.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Okay, So under this view, the thing that would make
you prefer and show favoritism to members of your in
group is a basic belief that the same kind of
thing is going to happen to all the members of
this group. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yeah, And I think you can probably cut it a
few different ways, but yeah, it's like there's something about
your sort of common direction, common fate, if you want
to put it that way, that this sort of binds
you together. Now, Robbie's experiments involved classifying subjects into groups
to explore inner group discrimination, but he ultimately concluded that
mere classification was not enough to elicit in group favoritism.
(12:21):
So again worth noting that he was looking at some
of the some of the same stuff that would become
important to the minimal group paradigm and what kind of
lays some of the groundwork for it. Even but his
findings were different. Now, this raises a question that Brown explores,
why was Robbie overlooked and why is he still sort
(12:43):
of overlooked in some of the documentation surrounding MGP, and
Brown breaks it down and attributes it to three reasons. So, first,
Toshfell's findings were counterintuitive and therefore more newsworthy. That's one
of the big things about MGP is that you know
a lot of people going into it, you don't expect
to see the results you see. You don't expect to
(13:04):
see this thing that seems to explain a lot of
the division that goes on in groups and the discrimination
that occurs between groups. Just based on as we'll get into,
like just sort of random grouping of people.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
It makes more sense to assume that if people are
showing in group favoritism, it would be because I don't know,
they assume that all of the members of the group
are sharing a common fate or something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
The other thing to keep in mind is Toshfel's MGP
work helped inspire and the groundwork for social identity theory,
which became huge, so that that in turn elevated his
work with MGP, and in fact the social identity theory
was formulated by Tosh Bell and John Turner, who lived
nineteen forty seven through twenty eleven in the nineteen seventies,
(13:54):
in the nineteen eighties. And then the third factor that
Brown points out is that personality differences between the two men.
So Toshvel has been characterized as more of a go getter, essentially,
someone who really took full advantage of any opportunity to
you know, sort of explore his ideas and get his
ideas out there, whereas Robbie was more unassuming. So some
(14:20):
combination of these three factors, according to Brown. So toash
Fell was quite aware of these studies, but suspected that
the opposite was true and was already experimenting with the
social comparison theory. So fast forward to the nineteen seventies
and the first MGP experiments. I'm not going to bust
these experiments out blow by blow necessarily, but certainly hitting
(14:40):
the really important parts the basics of the MGP experiments.
So the first part is you have subjects carry out
a task, and the task is often described as something
like estimating the number of dots on an image or
answering an opinion question about a work of abstract art.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
All right.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Next, presumably based on these results, subjects are placed into groups.
But known only to the researchers, not to the subjects,
is the fact that the group assignment is actually random.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Okay. So, for example, if the question you were given
had to do with like estimating the number of dots,
you might break people into groups, say and tell them that, okay,
Group A is the people who overestimated the number of
dots in the image, and group B is the number
of people who underestimated the number of dots in the image.
Or with the question about art, you might separate people
(15:33):
into different taste categories. You say, like, oh, you were
the people who preferred the art by this artist, and
group B is the people who preferred the art by
this other artist.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah. Yeah, you can certainly break it down like that,
But I think on the other end, you could also
just not explain what the methodology is at all, Like
you could just put people into groups and it's just
the idea that there's something about data that originates in
you that inform this choice because it's actually random. But
you don't want people to think it's random. That you
(16:04):
want them to think that it's based on something. Yes,
Now there's no interaction between the resulting groups, no room
for interpersonal bonds, you know, not enough to be like, hey,
those the people who apparently guess differently from me about
jelly beans and a jar. They seem a little stuck
up or they seem a little sting, you know, there's
no room for that at all, or likewise, no room
(16:24):
for you to say, well, they seem like decent people,
even if they count dots differently or estimate dots differently
than I do.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
In fact, a group membership was anonymous, right, so you
didn't know who was in the You couldn't like look
around the room and hear the group a people.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, and that's important to stress too, because yeah, it's
just really the beauty of this experiment and the attractiveness
of it is that it does just strip everything else away,
everything that you could use and also could therefore muddy
and complicate the findings.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Okay, so people are assigned into these random groups. They
think there is a reason for the assignment. They don't
know who's in the groups. They just know they're in
one of them.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Right, So now it's time to get busy. Here a
second task is a sign in which subjects had to
assign reward tasks to anonymous individuals, either two from the
in group, two from the out group, or one from
each These individuals will be marked by a code number,
and your code number would never come up, so it
wasn't completely self serving.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Right, And these would be what are known as allocation tasks,
tasks that are used in a number of different experiments
to try to see what people value or reward. And
generally these are just experiments where subjects play some kind
of game that involves distributing rewards, often monetary rewards like
a number of dollars or or tokens of some kind
(17:46):
that can be exchanged for something to these anonymous players
belonging to the in group or the outgroup or both.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, and you might think that this would all favor
even handed distribution, since there's just so little to go
on aid from group affiliation in digvating it up.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And I've read that in some cases many subjects did
try to distribute things kind of fairly. Like one of
the later reviews of minimal group paradigm I was looking
at by Sabine Aughten from twenty sixteen said that basically
quote fairness concerns strongly guided intergroup allocations, but that didn't
always hold true. There were a number of exceptions.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, Ultimately, subjects consistently engage in constant in group bias.
So the groups were again entirely made up by chance.
There was no contact here, but it was enough to
generate a sense of group belonging. It created an us
and it also created them, which you then see born
out in the study results. So that's the big take
(18:50):
home from the minimal group paradigm, even without factors such
as religion, race, nationality, socioeconomic class, even without things like
what do other people what people in the outside group
look like or act like? When you know what do
I have in common with the people around me? It
is even stripping all of that away, humans rather swiftly
formed factions and discriminate against others.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
So to offer a little bit more detail from that
later piece I mentioned, this was a paper called the
Minimal group Paradigm and its Maximal Impact in Research on
social categorization. This was published in Current Opinion in Psychology
in twenty sixteen by Sabine Aughten. One thing Aughton mentions
is that when Tash fell and colleagues first came up
(19:32):
with the minimal group paradigm. Their original intention was apparently
to investigate whether people would display in group favoritism even
in situations where there was no actual conflict for resources
between the two groups. So their original question was a
little bit different, but as a preliminary avenue of research
(19:53):
to that project to address this other question. First, they
wanted to just find out what the minimum criteria that
could be leveraged to cause people to show in group favoritism.
So this was originally supposed to be just like trying
to establish what they would need to do in this
other test. Oughten writes quote, they planned to start with
(20:14):
a most minimal setup and to successively add elements to
the design until intergroup discrimination would emerge. So they started
with these novel social categorizations based on things that they
expected to have no power of social cohesion at all,
like tendencies in you know, the numerical estimation game, the
(20:34):
dots game, or preferences for the types of paintings. And again,
these were only pretenses that people were actually assigned to
groups randomly in most of all cases, and instead what
they found was that these fake made up bases for
social categorization were good enough to kick start in group favoritism.
So they were trying to find the minimum criteria, and
(20:57):
it turns out they just didn't really have to look
very hard. There's barely a minimum at all.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, and that, again, I think, is the thing that
that floored everybody and I and still floors people when
they hear about it for the first time or are
reminded of it.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Aughtan recognizes three experimental features for recognizing what authors in
this experimental domain call a mere categorization effect. That's what's
going on in the minimal group paradigm. It's like people
are behaving in ways that indicate group favoritism, but only
based on merely being categorized in a group, and like
nothing happening in the real world. The three features, as
(21:43):
outanlists them, are, Number one, categorization is novel and arbitrary.
No history of experiences within group and or outgroup, so
it's got to be all new in the experiment. Number two,
categorization is anonymous, no face to face interaction between group
members because you can obviously see how that would introduce
complications and see no utilitarian self interests can be directly
(22:08):
served by intergroup evaluations or allocations. So you don't want
to complicate your study by having people have the ability
to pay money out to themselves, because that would obviously
add in new variables.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Right right, That would be the self interest kicking in
for sure.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
But a really interesting thing emerges with the allocation tasks.
That is along the lines of self interest. Instead of
individual self interest, it is in group interest. So Oughten says,
as we've discussed, there were fairness concerns that did guide
some intergroup allocations, but also there was evidence of in
(22:46):
group favoritism even when the group had just been formed.
It meant essentially nothing and the members were anonymous. And
here's a really interesting thing. In some cases quote the
tendency to positively differ diferentiate the in group from the
out group was stronger than the tendency to maximize the
(23:07):
in group's profit. So the example Lotten gives here would
be instead of giving twelve dollars to the in group
and eleven dollars to the out group, some subjects would
select a strategy that gave eleven dollars to the in
group and nine dollars to the outgroup. So everybody gets less,
(23:29):
but the difference between the rewards of the two groups
is greater, and if you were on the top of
that difference, even if you got less, some people preferred that.
Oh wow, and this thing about sacrificing the overall objective
gains of the in group for a greater distinction in
gains between the in group and out group made me
(23:52):
think about a thing I read in the context of
a different paper exploring a different theory, but it was
won by the Harvard psychologist Jim's Side and co authors
called Vladimir's choice and the distribution of social resources a
group dominance perspective. This was exploring a different theory called
social dominance theory, but it starts off with this anecdote
(24:14):
that apparently comes from an Eastern European fable. The authors
related as following, one day, God came down to Vladimir,
a poor peasant, and said, Vladimir, I will grant you
one wish. Anything you want will be yours. However, God added,
there is one condition. Anything I give to you will
be granted to your neighbor if on twice over. Vladimir
(24:38):
immediately answered, saying, okay, take out one of my eyes.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oh, that's grim, that's very grim.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Now, the stakes in these minimal group paradigm experiments are
certainly not that high, but I think we can all
think of examples where, you know, sometimes you just see
a case where what appears to be spite or maybe
something else like that overrides a person's own objective self interest,
like they would rather have a higher degree of advantage
(25:09):
over a known neighbor or adversary than a greater objective
advantage overall.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
It'd be like if you if you sort of had
it in for your for your buddy, and it was
your turn to pick the the the type of pizza
you get, and you make sure you've got a flavor
that you weren't crazy about, but you knew that your
your friend hated. You're willing to choke it down just
because more more refreshing to you, more delicious to you
(25:37):
is is the fact that they are going to dislike
it more than you do, which again is illogical. It
shouldn't be a thing that someone would do. But I
think we can all easily imagine a scenario where someone's
pettiness and spite would lead to such an occurrence. And
maybe this one like that's a version of it that
maybe is a little more real world accurate as opposed
to the blinding.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
The gulf between your okayness and your friend's misery is
more valuable to you than the extra pleasure you would
get from getting a topping you really liked.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right, And for some reason, this, like this whole scenario
makes more sense concerning friends than it does like enemies
of any sort. I don't know. It perhaps suggests a
lot about the way relationships were.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Now there's some caveats to this that I want to
get into in a second, because to come back to
that paper by Aughten, one thing I was interested in
was criticisms of the minimal group paradigm. It does seem
that the MGP findings have been widely replicated with a
lot of superficial variations. So it does look to me
like the finding is robust. But while the finding itself
(26:44):
is sound, you could argue that people might be drawing
the wrong conclusions from it, and so there are a
number of criticisms along those lines. One thing that comes
up in Aughton's paper here is is the minimal group
paradigm really revealing some thing about how people would behave
in the real world, or does the experiment quote merely
(27:06):
create a situation in which social category information receives unrealistic attention.
I was like, Oh, I think that's interesting because, Okay,
you're in a contrived laboratory scenario. Your membership in one
group or the other is highlighted to you, people are
telling you about it, and the situation is stripped of
(27:26):
a lot of other contextual information that would exist in
the real world that would normally inform your behavior. Maybe
people are placing undue weight on group membership even though
it's arbitrary, because it's really like the only variable they're
being aware of in this situation. On the other hand,
(27:46):
while that criticism makes a lot of sense to me,
I think these experiments are just as valuable if you
think about them with that caveat in mind, Like they
show a certain irrational way that some people behave, showing
in group preference for utterly arbitrary groups when group membership
is made salient when it is brought to your attention
(28:09):
and people are talking about it, which is something that
does happen in the real world all the time. Actually,
like there is some category distinction between people that was
maybe not previously much noted, and for some reason, suddenly
it is made salient. People start paying attention to this
difference and talking about it. It seems to me that
(28:32):
in reality, this is enough to trigger minimal group paradigm effects.
This is only partially related, but it reminds me of
that thing when an arbitrary factual question that previously had
no political valance suddenly becomes politicized for some reason, maybe
(28:52):
by like a prominent politician taking a stance one way
or another on this question, and now suddenly, like, what
you think about this, this question that previously involved no
political values, now is a major part of your identity,
and people will factionalize on the basis of it.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, and sometimes it takes the form of just sort
of a you know, fear mongering about something that normally
had no real kind of like fear weight to it.
Like I instantly think of various things going on doing
say the Satanic panic, where you know, it's suddenly there's
you know, there's some sort of an outrage over a
particular piece of music that is interpreted by somebody as
(29:34):
having some sort of subliminal, demonic message inside it, even
if there's little or no proof that that is even
possibly the case or certainly the intent of the artist.
It ends up picking up steam all its own, and
then where do you fall on this divide totally?
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Now, to be fair, things like that are not purely
minimal group paradigm, because once you're talking about like cultural
artifacts and preferences, you do start bringing in like, well,
maybe that already touches certain things about, you know, cultural identity,
which people would have opinions about and would have some
in group out group associations and so forth. But it's
sort of halfway there.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
I wonder if there might be a comparison to draw
here to the there were two things that in recent years.
There was the whole like what color is this dress?
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:16):
And people were split over that. I don't know, I
mean not to the point where I guess you really
saw outgroup discrimination. But it was interesting to see how
quickly peoples became like they were quick to state what
their interpretation of it was and become a part of
that group that sawd a certain way. I do not
remember what I thought of this dress or even who
(30:38):
wore it, so I just remember being amused that it
was a thing at all.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I think I remember when I first saw it, it
looked blue and black to me, So hate me if
you want. But anyway, coming back to this issue, so
it may be a good criticism that this has some
(31:04):
limitation in how it applies to the real world once
you bring in all the context of culture and all that.
But I do think it still probably highlights something very interesting,
which is that group sort of in group favoritism can
emerge with minimal stimulation just by like drawing a lot
of attention to the presence and division differentiation of the groups.
(31:27):
Another interesting limitation that Otten mentions. Subsequent research has shown
that in group favoritism with the minimal group paradigm is
quote mostly restricted to allocations of positive resources into valuations
regarding positive traits. So when you're talking about things like
(31:48):
assigning actual punishments or negative personal assessments, it seems that
the mere categorization effect no longer reliably produced results, which
should be a good result.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Right yeah, yeah, knowing that that eye gouging actually wouldn't
play out all that well in this scenario.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Right, So maybe experiments show the minimal group stuff is
enough to make you treat your your in group better,
and maybe even in some cases prefer them to get
a better leg up over the other group as opposed
to more payout overall. But it doesn't extend to actually
wanting to hurt or punish the outgroup.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, though not to imply though, that just not wanting
or not thinking about actively hurting the group doesn't mean
that in the like the real world implications of the
minimal group paradigm, that plenty of hurt might be inflicted,
you know, especially if you're dealing like you know, any
kind of outgroup discrimination could of course have terrible effects
(32:50):
in the real world.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
But in those situations you'd be going beyond the conditions
of the minimal group paradigm and sort of bringing in
the real world. Yeah. But anyway, I thought this was
an interesting dynamics. So people might be more willing to
allocate monetary payments to their own group, even if that
group is novel or arbitrary. But studies don't reliably show
people to be willing to dull at punishments or disparagements
(33:14):
against a novel, arbitrary outgroup. Why might this be? One
interpretation given in this paper is it's possible that the
in group favoritism in minimal group paradigm experiments shows up
because people have positive associations with themselves, and hey, I'm
part of the in group, so I'm good in deserving
(33:35):
and I'm part of group A, and therefore group A
is good in deserving, and there might not really be
an equivalent mechanism of comparison with the out group. So
the same logic doesn't lead someone to conclude that group
B is bad and undeserving, so you might not actually
go so far as to select punishments and disparagements for them.
(33:56):
Yet this would raise interesting questions. It would bring back
to that thing about why people so often in these
experiments will sacrifice overall rewards of the in group to
get a bigger leg up on the out group. Because again, remember,
like you know, a lot of these findings are If
I'm in group A but not personally receiving any rewards,
(34:19):
I might choose a plan where group A gets ten
and group B gets seven instead of a plan where
group A gets twelve and group B gets eleven. If
this is not to be interpreted as an attempt to
punish group B, what does it mean? Uh? Maybe it
means that some people sometimes interpret it as a greater
(34:41):
personal reward to get significantly more than your neighbor, then
it would be to get a greater objective reward overall.
Like some people would just rather come in second place
and have Jeff come in sixth place, rather than come
in first place myself and have Jeff come in second.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Yeah, it's I seem to sort of crunch that and
try and apply it to some sort of you know,
a hunter gatherer scenario and try and figure out how
that makes sense even like in a in those situations.
But yeah, I don't know, that is.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
A weird little wrinkle in human nature.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Yeah, you know, sometimes I see this discuss and I
think of it in terms of it's kind of like
the idea here is that MGP is kind of like
a bedrock scenario, you know, and that again, when you
bring into the real world, everything else is going to
be built on top of that bedrock. Or you could
think of it in terms of like just sort of
the initial like laying out with stakes of what will
(35:39):
become a cathedral, and and so you're not necessarily going
to get the full picture of the cathedral looking at
at the basic shape that you've marked out in the dirt,
but you may be able to figure out some things,
some of like the sweeping ideas that'll be that will
be present in the final design, but then again you
have no idea like what all the different cultural structures
(36:01):
on top of it are ultimately going to produce. But
it's still an interesting exercise to sort of strip things
down to this level. Now, I want to come back
to Brown for just one last thing here, because in
that paper, Brown stresses the historical context of MGP and
says it is also to consider, especially as it regards
two major points. So first of all, he says that
(36:23):
during the mid to late sixties, there is a so
called crisis in social psychology in which North American scholars,
in particular, we're questioning whether European studies, involving a great
deal of laboratory experimentation could actually apply to real world
social issues of the time. So this led to a
lot of soul searching and changes in Western psychology in general.
And ironically, there were a lot of questions about quote
(36:46):
unquote experiments in a vacuum. Now it's ironic because I mean,
as we've been discussing, the minimal group paradigm is very
much an experiment in a vacuum like that, a lot
of effort goes into sucking all of the real world
complex sucking all the air out of the chamber of
this experiment. But it also could be seen, especially in
(37:07):
the time period, it's kind of like a stripping down
to a new bedrock, to a new level upon which
to try and understand, like sort of like sweeping out,
removing all those other experiments that were potentially complicating things.
And Brown also stresses that prior to minimal group paradigm,
the main ideas for why you had social prejudices in
(37:28):
the real world were tied to personality dynamics often connected
to things in your upbringing, built up frustration, and negative
interdependence among groups, and all of these ideas as sort
of sweeping definitions were challenged by experimental data. Instead, the
(37:49):
mineral group paradigm creates this again super stripped down, simple
experiment that does seem to reveal a lot about some
of the basic mechanics of how we think about our
group and outside groups, coming back to memes and so forth.
It also reminds me of a common thing I think
still see, and that is people saying, well, there are
(38:09):
two types of people in the world. There are the
people that do or believe X and those who do
or believe why. And I guess the thing that often
makes them funny is that it will or potentially makes
them funny is that they'll hit on a division you
did not realize was a thing, but then suddenly you're
just presented with this spark of an idea that this
is truly a defining choice to make. And you know,
(38:33):
even though it's generally played for laughs, you know, you
can kind of feel it, sort of you can feel
the divide sort of moving and you've sort of forced
to step to one side or the other, even if
you don't actually engage with said meme or said conversation.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about
those memes is they tend to it's kinda I feel
like we should give an example. What do they say?
There are two types of people, those who peel back
the slim gym rapper as they eat it, or those
who take the slim gym out in one go and
then eat it with their hold it with their fingers.
You know, do you get your fingers greasy or not?
Those memes are funny because they ask people to read
(39:10):
a lot into a behavior that, on its face we
would assume does not tell you much about a person.
And exactly the humor is in trying to like extrapolate
everything you could possibly want to know about a person
from that one thing, though, that is often kind of
what we do. Like you can imagine sitting in these
early experiments with Tesh Fell and saying like, you know, okay,
(39:33):
what are the people who counted the dots, you know,
the people who counted the dots differently? What does that
say about their personality? And trying to like work that
up into something meaningful about reality.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, I mean, we as humans, we tend to look
for the patterns and things. So even when there's a
random splitting, like if there's a if it's supposedly based
on how we counted the jelly beans in a jar,
how we saw the dots and in some sort of
an array, We're going to think about all the ways
that that could potentially define who or what we are.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
You would say that because you're a dot undercounter.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
I probably yeah, I mean it does make you think, like, oh,
it does that mean I'm a I'm a pessimist? Does
that mean I'm just not that into sugar. What does
it mean? Uh, we can't. We can't help but try
and figure that out and come up with all sorts
of ridiculous theories as to what it says. All Right,
we're gonna go and close it out right there, but
hopefully we gave you just a good taste of the
(40:28):
minimal group paradigm, like where it came from, what it
what it seems to mean, what it seems to tell
us about human nature. Obviously, we'd love to hear from
everyone out there if you have some more great, you know,
fictional examples, the real world examples of some of some
of what's going on here right in, we'd love to
(40:49):
hear from you. We read listener mail every Monday and
the Stuff and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
feeding our Stuff to Blow your Mind listener Mail episodes.
On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact.
Tuesdays and third Thursdays are our core episodes, and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just watch
a weird film.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hello. You can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to
go into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This one was on the minimal group Paradigm, and it
originally published March thirtieth, twenty twenty three. Is this from
exactly one year ago today? I think so?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, Hey the Jackpot, hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, fair warning, folks.
If I sound like I speak with the voice and
mind of some kind of decrepit bog monster today, it
is because I'm on the mend from a bad cold.
So apologies on what's happening in your ears right now.
But but but here I am on Mike.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well, sometimes bog monsters are quite wise, so you know,
it depends on the story you're looking at.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I hope to bring a real meg muckle bones energy
today's episode, so you'll have to tell me how I do.
But yeah, what are we talking about today? Rob?
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Well? We're gonna be talking about a little something called
the minimal group paradigm, which sounds, I know, if you're
not familiar with it, sounds a bit a bit stuffy,
perhaps perhaps sounds a little bit clinical, but I think
it's it's a very fascinating little topic. I shouldn't make
for a nice one part episode here, because it attempts
(01:39):
to come down to some of the major concerns regarding
human civilization and human interactions, basically coming out of the
question of like, just how divisive are human beings and
how little does it take for us to split into
factions over something or next to nothing even And I
think for many of us, the answer seems to be
(02:01):
that we're, you know, are very divisive and that it
doesn't take much at all for us to split off
into factions. And I think this has been played to
great effect in literature and cinema, especially comedically, and two
examples always come to my mind, so one of them, Joe,
I'm not sure if you're familiar with this. I don't
know if we've talked about this before, but in the
(02:22):
nineteen fifty three story from Doctor Seuss The Sneeches, is this.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
The butter on the bread one.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
No, no, you're thinking of the Butter battle Book, which
does get into a similar situation. That's a where you
have two different groups and one side thinks you should
do the butter side down those buttered side up, and
they get into this big Cold war stalemate.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
This is an arms race and escalation of their weaponry
based on the butter ideology difference.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, so that's a good one to bring up too.
The Sneeches concerns this population of avian creatures that in
their entire social hierarchy is based on which ones have
a star on their bellies and which ones don't have
a star on their bellies, and the star bellied Sneaches
are the ones that live at the top and the
rest live at the bottom. But then a con artist
(03:13):
moves into town with a star on machine and then
later a star off machine to capitalize on their divisiveness.
Though at the end of that, the Sneeches move beyond
all of this and they unite as a single people.
So it's kind of a nice message.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Oh, that's that's very nice. That's a much happier ending
than the Butter battle Book, which, as I recall, it
ends with basically both sides on a hair trigger with
their ultimate weaponry.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a real clincher that one. But
another example that comes to mind, and I know you're
familiar with this one is, of course Monty Python's Life
of Brian. There's a memorable scene in which the anti
Roman resistance is split more than split between the Judee
and People's Front and the People's Front of Judea and
various other fragments of their independence group. One of the
(03:59):
characters in the Judea and People's Front proudly proclaims that
the only people they hate more than the Romans is
the People's Front of Judea.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I think this is meant to play on a concept
that was called the narcissism of small differences by Sigmund Freud.
I don't know Freud was the first person ever to
observe this, but I think that's where the phrase comes from,
is his writings about the idea that it's actually like
the most bitter, hateful, divisive struggles in the world tend
(04:28):
to be between people who actually share a lot of
things in common but have some difference that really appears
minor to people looking in from the outside.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Now, I think a lot of you out there you
may be able to think of examples from other works
of fiction, or certainly from real life, many of the
various serious things we divide ourselves over, or you know,
some of the equally seemingly silly, at least from the outside,
things that get that we were very divisive over. And
to your point, sometimes they're within like subgroups and and fandoms.
(05:00):
Even all manner of brand and sports team loyalty can
lead to division that doesn't necessarily make much sense on
closer inspection. Perhaps you prefer Puma shoes and this other
person prefers Adidas. How could the two of you ever
see eye to eye? And this specific example ties into
I think, what is a great example of division in
(05:22):
human beings and human groups? One I originally saw pointed
out by and though it's been well documented for a
while by Jay van Bavel and Dominique Packer in a
ted Ed video. This is like an animated educational short
that ted Ed puts on Wonderful Shorts. It's regular viewing
in my household with my family. But the title of
(05:42):
this one is the sibling rivalry that divided a town.
So I thought i'd cover the basics of this sibling rivalry.
All right, So are you familiar with this story, Joe,
I'm not. Well. It all starts in around nineteen nineteen.
That's when these two brothers, Adolph and Rudolph Dossler, found
a shoe company called Gebruda Dossler Shoe Fabric or GAETA
(06:05):
in their hometown of herzogen Rock in Bavaria. Turns out
they were very successful. These shoes really took off. You
even had the situation where in the nineteen thirty six
Olympics American runner Jesse Owens apparently was wearing some of
these shoes. But then World War Two breaks out. This
disrupts everything, to say the least, Rudolph is drafted into
(06:26):
the German Army, the factory is transformed into a weapons factory,
and again everything's just super disrupted until after the war
the brothers reunite. Their work continues, that is until nineteen
forty eight when they split over some personal issues. And
I think there are a few different analyzes of what
those personal issues might have been, but the results are
(06:49):
the same. Meaning anyway you cut it, the company is
split into that means material, workforce, and so forth. Rudolph
founds Ruda, which becomes Puma, and add All starts Adidas.
Now that's not that crazy, right, It's just one shoe
company splitting into two shoe companies. Now. The interesting thing
about this, though, according to j Van Babel and Dominice
(07:11):
Pucker and that ted Ed video, is that the brothers
feud and business division ultimately divides the entire town. Quote,
residents became fiercely loyal to one brand of shoe, local
businesses chose sides, and marriage across lines was discouraged. Herzegognoch
eventually became known as the town of bent Necks because
its residents looked down to ensure they were interacting with
(07:34):
members of their group.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Oh look down at the shoe. Is that one took
me in second?
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah? So I think it's a great example, not because
not only because it's kind of has some sort of
comical elements to it, kind of like belly Stars, but
also we do see these various elements to the division,
the personal, the business, the social, and the schism is
is quite real and it is funny to think how
(07:59):
how split people can be about brands. I mean, sometimes
I think it's meant jokingly you see a lot of
joking comments today, even about things like coke versus pepsi,
or Twizzlers versus red vines or something, and then also
things that are not even brand oriented, like overhanded versus
underhanded toilet paper rolls.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
I recall divisions of this type were big on like
early Facebook, like mid two thousands Facebook, where people would
make all these joke groups and it would be like,
you know, for people who like red vines because twizzlers
are for cowards.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
I mean, it's still I think, very prominent in like
meme making. You know, people like to get in on
this sort of thing. I don't know, maybe especially when
it's meant jokingly. It's kind of like low stakes things
to sort of mock disagree about. I'm not sure. But
then at what point does just sort of trolling and
mock fun. At what point does that then become like
(08:54):
an actual entrenched belief or opinion.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Oh, I think rather quickly actually, So.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're
going to look at a social psychology concept that ties
into to all of this, the minimal group paradigm, a
method for sessing out what might be the absolute minimal
conditions for discrimination to take place between two groups, will
their findings be twizzlers versus redfines? Is that the minimal thing,
I don't know, You'll just have to find out.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
All right. So where does this minimal group paradigm come from?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
All right? So one of the sources that I was
looking at specifically in order to understand the minimal group
paradigm and its history was The Origins of the Minimal
Group Paradigm by Rupert Brown of the University of Sussex,
twenty twenty, published by the American Psychological Association. Brown points
out that the basis of prejudice and inner group discrimination
(09:45):
has of course been a human concern for a long time,
and certainly was a long time concern of people in psychology.
But the MGP or the minimal group paradigm as we
know it generally is attributed to Polish social scientists Henri Tashfell,
who live nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty two, and also
British social psychologist Michael Billig, who worked with him was
(10:09):
born nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Typically, I see a lot of references to work they
did in the early seventies. One of the main citations
is Henri Tashfell, Michael Billig, Robert Bundy, and Claude Flement,
and the title is Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior, published
in the European Journal of Social Psychology, nineteen seventy one.
If you want to go back to the.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Source now, tash Fell, it's worth noting was a survivor
of the Holocaust, and this is important to keep in
mind because much of his work does ponder the question
of what drives groups of people to take up extreme
prejudice views and does the transference rely on extreme personality
types or is it something more mundane. So yeah, in
(10:53):
the early nineteen seventies, Toashfel at all conducted a series
of experiments on MGP studies that would end up having
an enormous impact on the field of social psychology. More
on this in a second, but I also want to
point out that Brown stresses that there is also a
pre tached Fell origin in the work of Dutch social
(11:14):
psychologist Yap Robbie in nineteen sixty four. So Robbie suspected
that common fate was the essential component for a group
to hold together and for intergroup discrimination to occur. Common
fate is a distallt psychology concept that says that objects
functioning or moving in the same direction appear to belong together,
(11:35):
kind of like we're off to see the wizard, right,
I mean you're going to see the wizard. Well I'm
going to see the wizard, or I'm going down this road. Well,
I guess we're a group.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Okay, So under this view, the thing that would make
you prefer and show favoritism to members of your in
group is a basic belief that the same kind of
thing is going to happen to all the members of
this group. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yeah, And I think you can probably cut it a
few different ways, but yeah, it's like there's something about
your sort of common direction, common fate, if you want
to put it that way, that this sort of binds
you together. Now, Robbie's experiments involved classifying subjects into groups
to explore inner group discrimination, but he ultimately concluded that
mere classification was not enough to elicit in group favoritism.
(12:21):
So again worth noting that he was looking at some
of the some of the same stuff that would become
important to the minimal group paradigm and what kind of
lays some of the groundwork for it. Even but his
findings were different. Now, this raises a question that Brown explores,
why was Robbie overlooked and why is he still sort
(12:43):
of overlooked in some of the documentation surrounding MGP, and
Brown breaks it down and attributes it to three reasons. So, first,
Toshfell's findings were counterintuitive and therefore more newsworthy. That's one
of the big things about MGP is that you know
a lot of people going into it, you don't expect
to see the results you see. You don't expect to
(13:04):
see this thing that seems to explain a lot of
the division that goes on in groups and the discrimination
that occurs between groups. Just based on as we'll get into,
like just sort of random grouping of people.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
It makes more sense to assume that if people are
showing in group favoritism, it would be because I don't know,
they assume that all of the members of the group
are sharing a common fate or something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
The other thing to keep in mind is Toshfel's MGP
work helped inspire and the groundwork for social identity theory,
which became huge, so that that in turn elevated his
work with MGP, and in fact the social identity theory
was formulated by Tosh Bell and John Turner, who lived
nineteen forty seven through twenty eleven in the nineteen seventies,
(13:54):
in the nineteen eighties. And then the third factor that
Brown points out is that personality differences between the two men.
So Toshvel has been characterized as more of a go getter, essentially,
someone who really took full advantage of any opportunity to
you know, sort of explore his ideas and get his
ideas out there, whereas Robbie was more unassuming. So some
(14:20):
combination of these three factors, according to Brown. So toash
Fell was quite aware of these studies, but suspected that
the opposite was true and was already experimenting with the
social comparison theory. So fast forward to the nineteen seventies
and the first MGP experiments. I'm not going to bust
these experiments out blow by blow necessarily, but certainly hitting
(14:40):
the really important parts the basics of the MGP experiments.
So the first part is you have subjects carry out
a task, and the task is often described as something
like estimating the number of dots on an image or
answering an opinion question about a work of abstract art.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
All right.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Next, presumably based on these results, subjects are placed into groups.
But known only to the researchers, not to the subjects,
is the fact that the group assignment is actually random.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Okay. So, for example, if the question you were given
had to do with like estimating the number of dots,
you might break people into groups, say and tell them that, okay,
Group A is the people who overestimated the number of
dots in the image, and group B is the number
of people who underestimated the number of dots in the image.
Or with the question about art, you might separate people
(15:33):
into different taste categories. You say, like, oh, you were
the people who preferred the art by this artist, and
group B is the people who preferred the art by
this other artist.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah. Yeah, you can certainly break it down like that,
But I think on the other end, you could also
just not explain what the methodology is at all, Like
you could just put people into groups and it's just
the idea that there's something about data that originates in
you that inform this choice because it's actually random. But
you don't want people to think it's random. That you
(16:04):
want them to think that it's based on something. Yes,
Now there's no interaction between the resulting groups, no room
for interpersonal bonds, you know, not enough to be like, hey,
those the people who apparently guess differently from me about
jelly beans and a jar. They seem a little stuck
up or they seem a little sting, you know, there's
no room for that at all, or likewise, no room
(16:24):
for you to say, well, they seem like decent people,
even if they count dots differently or estimate dots differently
than I do.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
In fact, a group membership was anonymous, right, so you
didn't know who was in the You couldn't like look
around the room and hear the group a people.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, and that's important to stress too, because yeah, it's
just really the beauty of this experiment and the attractiveness
of it is that it does just strip everything else away,
everything that you could use and also could therefore muddy
and complicate the findings.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Okay, so people are assigned into these random groups. They
think there is a reason for the assignment. They don't
know who's in the groups. They just know they're in
one of them.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Right, So now it's time to get busy. Here a
second task is a sign in which subjects had to
assign reward tasks to anonymous individuals, either two from the
in group, two from the out group, or one from
each These individuals will be marked by a code number,
and your code number would never come up, so it
wasn't completely self serving.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Right, And these would be what are known as allocation tasks,
tasks that are used in a number of different experiments
to try to see what people value or reward. And
generally these are just experiments where subjects play some kind
of game that involves distributing rewards, often monetary rewards like
a number of dollars or or tokens of some kind
(17:46):
that can be exchanged for something to these anonymous players
belonging to the in group or the outgroup or both.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, and you might think that this would all favor
even handed distribution, since there's just so little to go
on aid from group affiliation in digvating it up.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And I've read that in some cases many subjects did
try to distribute things kind of fairly. Like one of
the later reviews of minimal group paradigm I was looking
at by Sabine Aughten from twenty sixteen said that basically
quote fairness concerns strongly guided intergroup allocations, but that didn't
always hold true. There were a number of exceptions.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, Ultimately, subjects consistently engage in constant in group bias.
So the groups were again entirely made up by chance.
There was no contact here, but it was enough to
generate a sense of group belonging. It created an us
and it also created them, which you then see born
out in the study results. So that's the big take
(18:50):
home from the minimal group paradigm, even without factors such
as religion, race, nationality, socioeconomic class, even without things like
what do other people what people in the outside group
look like or act like? When you know what do
I have in common with the people around me? It
is even stripping all of that away, humans rather swiftly
formed factions and discriminate against others.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
So to offer a little bit more detail from that
later piece I mentioned, this was a paper called the
Minimal group Paradigm and its Maximal Impact in Research on
social categorization. This was published in Current Opinion in Psychology
in twenty sixteen by Sabine Aughten. One thing Aughton mentions
is that when Tash fell and colleagues first came up
(19:32):
with the minimal group paradigm. Their original intention was apparently
to investigate whether people would display in group favoritism even
in situations where there was no actual conflict for resources
between the two groups. So their original question was a
little bit different, but as a preliminary avenue of research
(19:53):
to that project to address this other question. First, they
wanted to just find out what the minimum criteria that
could be leveraged to cause people to show in group favoritism.
So this was originally supposed to be just like trying
to establish what they would need to do in this
other test. Oughten writes quote, they planned to start with
(20:14):
a most minimal setup and to successively add elements to
the design until intergroup discrimination would emerge. So they started
with these novel social categorizations based on things that they
expected to have no power of social cohesion at all,
like tendencies in you know, the numerical estimation game, the
(20:34):
dots game, or preferences for the types of paintings. And again,
these were only pretenses that people were actually assigned to
groups randomly in most of all cases, and instead what
they found was that these fake made up bases for
social categorization were good enough to kick start in group favoritism.
So they were trying to find the minimum criteria, and
(20:57):
it turns out they just didn't really have to look
very hard. There's barely a minimum at all.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, and that, again, I think, is the thing that
that floored everybody and I and still floors people when
they hear about it for the first time or are
reminded of it.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Aughtan recognizes three experimental features for recognizing what authors in
this experimental domain call a mere categorization effect. That's what's
going on in the minimal group paradigm. It's like people
are behaving in ways that indicate group favoritism, but only
based on merely being categorized in a group, and like
nothing happening in the real world. The three features, as
(21:43):
outanlists them, are, Number one, categorization is novel and arbitrary.
No history of experiences within group and or outgroup, so
it's got to be all new in the experiment. Number two,
categorization is anonymous, no face to face interaction between group
members because you can obviously see how that would introduce
complications and see no utilitarian self interests can be directly
(22:08):
served by intergroup evaluations or allocations. So you don't want
to complicate your study by having people have the ability
to pay money out to themselves, because that would obviously
add in new variables.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Right right, That would be the self interest kicking in
for sure.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
But a really interesting thing emerges with the allocation tasks.
That is along the lines of self interest. Instead of
individual self interest, it is in group interest. So Oughten says,
as we've discussed, there were fairness concerns that did guide
some intergroup allocations, but also there was evidence of in
(22:46):
group favoritism even when the group had just been formed.
It meant essentially nothing and the members were anonymous. And
here's a really interesting thing. In some cases quote the
tendency to positively differ diferentiate the in group from the
out group was stronger than the tendency to maximize the
(23:07):
in group's profit. So the example Lotten gives here would
be instead of giving twelve dollars to the in group
and eleven dollars to the out group, some subjects would
select a strategy that gave eleven dollars to the in
group and nine dollars to the outgroup. So everybody gets less,
(23:29):
but the difference between the rewards of the two groups
is greater, and if you were on the top of
that difference, even if you got less, some people preferred that.
Oh wow, and this thing about sacrificing the overall objective
gains of the in group for a greater distinction in
gains between the in group and out group made me
(23:52):
think about a thing I read in the context of
a different paper exploring a different theory, but it was
won by the Harvard psychologist Jim's Side and co authors
called Vladimir's choice and the distribution of social resources a
group dominance perspective. This was exploring a different theory called
social dominance theory, but it starts off with this anecdote
(24:14):
that apparently comes from an Eastern European fable. The authors
related as following, one day, God came down to Vladimir,
a poor peasant, and said, Vladimir, I will grant you
one wish. Anything you want will be yours. However, God added,
there is one condition. Anything I give to you will
be granted to your neighbor if on twice over. Vladimir
(24:38):
immediately answered, saying, okay, take out one of my eyes.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oh, that's grim, that's very grim.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Now, the stakes in these minimal group paradigm experiments are
certainly not that high, but I think we can all
think of examples where, you know, sometimes you just see
a case where what appears to be spite or maybe
something else like that overrides a person's own objective self interest,
like they would rather have a higher degree of advantage
(25:09):
over a known neighbor or adversary than a greater objective
advantage overall.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
It'd be like if you if you sort of had
it in for your for your buddy, and it was
your turn to pick the the the type of pizza
you get, and you make sure you've got a flavor
that you weren't crazy about, but you knew that your
your friend hated. You're willing to choke it down just
because more more refreshing to you, more delicious to you
(25:37):
is is the fact that they are going to dislike
it more than you do, which again is illogical. It
shouldn't be a thing that someone would do. But I
think we can all easily imagine a scenario where someone's
pettiness and spite would lead to such an occurrence. And
maybe this one like that's a version of it that
maybe is a little more real world accurate as opposed
to the blinding.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
The gulf between your okayness and your friend's misery is
more valuable to you than the extra pleasure you would
get from getting a topping you really liked.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right, And for some reason, this, like this whole scenario
makes more sense concerning friends than it does like enemies
of any sort. I don't know. It perhaps suggests a
lot about the way relationships were.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Now there's some caveats to this that I want to
get into in a second, because to come back to
that paper by Aughten, one thing I was interested in
was criticisms of the minimal group paradigm. It does seem
that the MGP findings have been widely replicated with a
lot of superficial variations. So it does look to me
like the finding is robust. But while the finding itself
(26:44):
is sound, you could argue that people might be drawing
the wrong conclusions from it, and so there are a
number of criticisms along those lines. One thing that comes
up in Aughton's paper here is is the minimal group
paradigm really revealing some thing about how people would behave
in the real world, or does the experiment quote merely
(27:06):
create a situation in which social category information receives unrealistic attention.
I was like, Oh, I think that's interesting because, Okay,
you're in a contrived laboratory scenario. Your membership in one
group or the other is highlighted to you, people are
telling you about it, and the situation is stripped of
(27:26):
a lot of other contextual information that would exist in
the real world that would normally inform your behavior. Maybe
people are placing undue weight on group membership even though
it's arbitrary, because it's really like the only variable they're
being aware of in this situation. On the other hand,
(27:46):
while that criticism makes a lot of sense to me,
I think these experiments are just as valuable if you
think about them with that caveat in mind, Like they
show a certain irrational way that some people behave, showing
in group preference for utterly arbitrary groups when group membership
is made salient when it is brought to your attention
(28:09):
and people are talking about it, which is something that
does happen in the real world all the time. Actually,
like there is some category distinction between people that was
maybe not previously much noted, and for some reason, suddenly
it is made salient. People start paying attention to this
difference and talking about it. It seems to me that
(28:32):
in reality, this is enough to trigger minimal group paradigm effects.
This is only partially related, but it reminds me of
that thing when an arbitrary factual question that previously had
no political valance suddenly becomes politicized for some reason, maybe
(28:52):
by like a prominent politician taking a stance one way
or another on this question, and now suddenly, like, what
you think about this, this question that previously involved no
political values, now is a major part of your identity,
and people will factionalize on the basis of it.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, and sometimes it takes the form of just sort
of a you know, fear mongering about something that normally
had no real kind of like fear weight to it.
Like I instantly think of various things going on doing
say the Satanic panic, where you know, it's suddenly there's
you know, there's some sort of an outrage over a
particular piece of music that is interpreted by somebody as
(29:34):
having some sort of subliminal, demonic message inside it, even
if there's little or no proof that that is even
possibly the case or certainly the intent of the artist.
It ends up picking up steam all its own, and
then where do you fall on this divide totally?
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Now, to be fair, things like that are not purely
minimal group paradigm, because once you're talking about like cultural
artifacts and preferences, you do start bringing in like, well,
maybe that already touches certain things about, you know, cultural identity,
which people would have opinions about and would have some
in group out group associations and so forth. But it's
sort of halfway there.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
I wonder if there might be a comparison to draw
here to the there were two things that in recent years.
There was the whole like what color is this dress?
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:16):
And people were split over that. I don't know, I
mean not to the point where I guess you really
saw outgroup discrimination. But it was interesting to see how
quickly peoples became like they were quick to state what
their interpretation of it was and become a part of
that group that sawd a certain way. I do not
remember what I thought of this dress or even who
(30:38):
wore it, so I just remember being amused that it
was a thing at all.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I think I remember when I first saw it, it
looked blue and black to me, So hate me if
you want. But anyway, coming back to this issue, so
it may be a good criticism that this has some
(31:04):
limitation in how it applies to the real world once
you bring in all the context of culture and all that.
But I do think it still probably highlights something very interesting,
which is that group sort of in group favoritism can
emerge with minimal stimulation just by like drawing a lot
of attention to the presence and division differentiation of the groups.
(31:27):
Another interesting limitation that Otten mentions. Subsequent research has shown
that in group favoritism with the minimal group paradigm is
quote mostly restricted to allocations of positive resources into valuations
regarding positive traits. So when you're talking about things like
(31:48):
assigning actual punishments or negative personal assessments, it seems that
the mere categorization effect no longer reliably produced results, which
should be a good result.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Right yeah, yeah, knowing that that eye gouging actually wouldn't
play out all that well in this scenario.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Right, So maybe experiments show the minimal group stuff is
enough to make you treat your your in group better,
and maybe even in some cases prefer them to get
a better leg up over the other group as opposed
to more payout overall. But it doesn't extend to actually
wanting to hurt or punish the outgroup.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, though not to imply though, that just not wanting
or not thinking about actively hurting the group doesn't mean
that in the like the real world implications of the
minimal group paradigm, that plenty of hurt might be inflicted,
you know, especially if you're dealing like you know, any
kind of outgroup discrimination could of course have terrible effects
(32:50):
in the real world.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
But in those situations you'd be going beyond the conditions
of the minimal group paradigm and sort of bringing in
the real world. Yeah. But anyway, I thought this was
an interesting dynamics. So people might be more willing to
allocate monetary payments to their own group, even if that
group is novel or arbitrary. But studies don't reliably show
people to be willing to dull at punishments or disparagements
(33:14):
against a novel, arbitrary outgroup. Why might this be? One
interpretation given in this paper is it's possible that the
in group favoritism in minimal group paradigm experiments shows up
because people have positive associations with themselves, and hey, I'm
part of the in group, so I'm good in deserving
(33:35):
and I'm part of group A, and therefore group A
is good in deserving, and there might not really be
an equivalent mechanism of comparison with the out group. So
the same logic doesn't lead someone to conclude that group
B is bad and undeserving, so you might not actually
go so far as to select punishments and disparagements for them.
(33:56):
Yet this would raise interesting questions. It would bring back
to that thing about why people so often in these
experiments will sacrifice overall rewards of the in group to
get a bigger leg up on the out group. Because again, remember,
like you know, a lot of these findings are If
I'm in group A but not personally receiving any rewards,
(34:19):
I might choose a plan where group A gets ten
and group B gets seven instead of a plan where
group A gets twelve and group B gets eleven. If
this is not to be interpreted as an attempt to
punish group B, what does it mean? Uh? Maybe it
means that some people sometimes interpret it as a greater
(34:41):
personal reward to get significantly more than your neighbor, then
it would be to get a greater objective reward overall.
Like some people would just rather come in second place
and have Jeff come in sixth place, rather than come
in first place myself and have Jeff come in second.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Yeah, it's I seem to sort of crunch that and
try and apply it to some sort of you know,
a hunter gatherer scenario and try and figure out how
that makes sense even like in a in those situations.
But yeah, I don't know, that is.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
A weird little wrinkle in human nature.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Yeah, you know, sometimes I see this discuss and I
think of it in terms of it's kind of like
the idea here is that MGP is kind of like
a bedrock scenario, you know, and that again, when you
bring into the real world, everything else is going to
be built on top of that bedrock. Or you could
think of it in terms of like just sort of
the initial like laying out with stakes of what will
(35:39):
become a cathedral, and and so you're not necessarily going
to get the full picture of the cathedral looking at
at the basic shape that you've marked out in the dirt,
but you may be able to figure out some things,
some of like the sweeping ideas that'll be that will
be present in the final design, but then again you
have no idea like what all the different cultural structures
(36:01):
on top of it are ultimately going to produce. But
it's still an interesting exercise to sort of strip things
down to this level. Now, I want to come back
to Brown for just one last thing here, because in
that paper, Brown stresses the historical context of MGP and
says it is also to consider, especially as it regards
two major points. So first of all, he says that
(36:23):
during the mid to late sixties, there is a so
called crisis in social psychology in which North American scholars,
in particular, we're questioning whether European studies, involving a great
deal of laboratory experimentation could actually apply to real world
social issues of the time. So this led to a
lot of soul searching and changes in Western psychology in general.
And ironically, there were a lot of questions about quote
(36:46):
unquote experiments in a vacuum. Now it's ironic because I mean,
as we've been discussing, the minimal group paradigm is very
much an experiment in a vacuum like that, a lot
of effort goes into sucking all of the real world
complex sucking all the air out of the chamber of
this experiment. But it also could be seen, especially in
(37:07):
the time period, it's kind of like a stripping down
to a new bedrock, to a new level upon which
to try and understand, like sort of like sweeping out,
removing all those other experiments that were potentially complicating things.
And Brown also stresses that prior to minimal group paradigm,
the main ideas for why you had social prejudices in
(37:28):
the real world were tied to personality dynamics often connected
to things in your upbringing, built up frustration, and negative
interdependence among groups, and all of these ideas as sort
of sweeping definitions were challenged by experimental data. Instead, the
(37:49):
mineral group paradigm creates this again super stripped down, simple
experiment that does seem to reveal a lot about some
of the basic mechanics of how we think about our
group and outside groups, coming back to memes and so forth.
It also reminds me of a common thing I think
still see, and that is people saying, well, there are
(38:09):
two types of people in the world. There are the
people that do or believe X and those who do
or believe why. And I guess the thing that often
makes them funny is that it will or potentially makes
them funny is that they'll hit on a division you
did not realize was a thing, but then suddenly you're
just presented with this spark of an idea that this
is truly a defining choice to make. And you know,
(38:33):
even though it's generally played for laughs, you know, you
can kind of feel it, sort of you can feel
the divide sort of moving and you've sort of forced
to step to one side or the other, even if
you don't actually engage with said meme or said conversation.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about
those memes is they tend to it's kinda I feel
like we should give an example. What do they say?
There are two types of people, those who peel back
the slim gym rapper as they eat it, or those
who take the slim gym out in one go and
then eat it with their hold it with their fingers.
You know, do you get your fingers greasy or not?
Those memes are funny because they ask people to read
(39:10):
a lot into a behavior that, on its face we
would assume does not tell you much about a person.
And exactly the humor is in trying to like extrapolate
everything you could possibly want to know about a person
from that one thing, though, that is often kind of
what we do. Like you can imagine sitting in these
early experiments with Tesh Fell and saying like, you know, okay,
(39:33):
what are the people who counted the dots, you know,
the people who counted the dots differently? What does that
say about their personality? And trying to like work that
up into something meaningful about reality.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, I mean, we as humans, we tend to look
for the patterns and things. So even when there's a
random splitting, like if there's a if it's supposedly based
on how we counted the jelly beans in a jar,
how we saw the dots and in some sort of
an array, We're going to think about all the ways
that that could potentially define who or what we are.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
You would say that because you're a dot undercounter.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
I probably yeah, I mean it does make you think, like, oh,
it does that mean I'm a I'm a pessimist? Does
that mean I'm just not that into sugar. What does
it mean? Uh, we can't. We can't help but try
and figure that out and come up with all sorts
of ridiculous theories as to what it says. All Right,
we're gonna go and close it out right there, but
hopefully we gave you just a good taste of the
(40:28):
minimal group paradigm, like where it came from, what it
what it seems to mean, what it seems to tell
us about human nature. Obviously, we'd love to hear from
everyone out there if you have some more great, you know,
fictional examples, the real world examples of some of some
of what's going on here right in, we'd love to
(40:49):
hear from you. We read listener mail every Monday and
the Stuff and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
feeding our Stuff to Blow your Mind listener Mail episodes.
On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact.
Tuesdays and third Thursdays are our core episodes, and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just watch
a weird film.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hello. You can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
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