March 30, 2023 • 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 episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the minimal group paradigm in social identity theory.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey,
fair warning, folks. If I if I sound like I
speak with the voice and mind of some kind of
(00:24):
decrepit bog monster today, it is. It is because I'm
on the mend from a from a bad cold. Sou
so apologies on whatever's happening in your ears right now.
But but but here I am on Mike. Well, sometimes
bog monsters are quite wise, so you know, it depends
on the story you're looking at. I hope to bring
a real meg muckle bones energy today's episode, so you'll
(00:48):
have to tell me how I do. But yeah, what
are we talking about today, Rob, Well, we're gonna be
talking about 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 duffy. Perhaps perhaps sounds a
little bit clinical, but I think it's it's a very
fascinating little topic. Shouldn't make for a nice one part
(01:09):
episode here because it attempts 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
(01:30):
to nothing even And I think for many of us,
the answer seems to be that we're, you know, who
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
(01:51):
if you're familiar with this. I don't know if we've
talked about this before, but in the nineteen fifty three
story from Doctor SEUs the Sneeches has this the butter
the bread one. 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 there those
(02:12):
butter side up, and they get into this big Cold
War stalemate. This is an arms race, an escalation of
their weaponry based on the butter ideology difference. Yeah, so
that's a good one to bring up to the sneeches
concerns this population of avian creatures that in their entire
(02:33):
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 bellies sneeches are the
ones that live at the top and the rest live
at the bottom. But then a con artist moves into
town with a star on machine and then later a
star off machine to capitalize on their divisiveness. Though at
(02:53):
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. 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. Yeah. Yeah, it's
it's a real clincher that one. But another example that
(03:15):
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 Judean People's Front and
the People's Front of Judea and various other fragments of
their independence group. One of the characters in the Judean
People's Front proudly proclaims that the only people they hate
(03:37):
more than the Romans is the People's Front of Judea.
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 if 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
(04:00):
world tend 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. 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
(04:20):
things we divide ourselves over, or you know, some of
the equally seemingly silly, at least from the outside, things
that we get that we're very divisive over, and to
your points, sometimes they're within like subgroups and fandoms. Even
all manner of brand and sports team loyalty can lead
to division that doesn't necessarily make much sense on closer inspection.
(04:43):
Perhaps you prefer Puma shoes and this other person prefers Adidas.
How could the two of you ever see eyed eye?
And this specific example ties into I think, what is
a great example of division in human beings and human groups?
One I originally saw pointed out by and it's it's
been well documented for a while by j Van Babel
(05:03):
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 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
(05:24):
familiar with this story, Joe, I'm not What all starts
in around nineteen nineteen. That's when these two brothers, Adolph
and Rudolph Dassler found a shoe company called Gabruda Dassler
Shoe Fabric or GAETA in their hometown of Herzogen. I
rock in Bavaria. It turns out they were very successful.
These shoes were really took off. You even had a
(05:47):
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 the An Army,
the factory is transformed into a weapons factory, and again
everything is just super disrupted until after the war the
(06:07):
brothers reunite, their work continues ad 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 the same.
Meaning anyway you cut it, the company is split into
that means material, workforce, and so forth. Rudolph founds Ruda,
(06:31):
which becomes Puma, and Adolph 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 Javan Babble and Dominique Packer and that ted
Ed video, is that the brothers feud and business division
ultimately divides the entire town quote residents became fiercely loyal
(06:53):
to one brand of shoe, local businesses chose sides, and
marriage across lines was discouraged. Herzegoganak eventually became known as
the town of bent necks because its residents looked down
to ensure they were interacting with members of their group. Oh,
look down at the shoes. That one took me a second. Yeah.
So I think it's a great example, not because not
(07:15):
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 how split people
can be about brands. I mean sometimes I think it's
(07:36):
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 underheaded toilet paper rolls.
I recall divisions of this type. We're big on like
early Facebook, like mid two thousands Facebook, where people would
(07:58):
make all these joke groups, and it would be like,
you know, for people who like red vines, because twizzlers
are for cowards. I mean, it's still I think, very
prominent in like name 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.
(08:21):
But then at what point does does does just sort
of trolling and mock fund At what point does that
then become like an actual entrenched belief or opinion? Oh?
I think rather quickly actually, So in this episode of
Stuff to Blow your mind, where you're going to look
at a at a social psychology concept that ties into
all of this, the minimal group paradigm, a method for
(08:42):
sussing out what might be the absolute minimal conditions for
discrimination to take place between two groups. Will their findings
be twiddlers versus red vines? Is that the minimal thing?
I don't know, you'll just have to find out, all right,
So where does this minimal group paradigm come from? All right? So,
one of the sources that I was looking at specifically
in order to understand the minimal group Paradigm and its
(09:04):
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 has of course
been a human concern for a long time, and certainly
was a long time concern of people in psychology. But
(09:25):
the MGP or the minimal group paradigm as we know
it generally is attributed to Polish social scientists on Retash
Fill who of nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty two, and
also a British social psychologist Michael Billigg, who worked with him,
was born nineteen forty seven. Typically, I see a lot
of references to work they did in the early seventies.
(09:48):
One of the main citations is on retash film Michael Billig,
Robert Bundy and Claude Flament, 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 source now, tash Fell it's worth noting
was a survivor of the Holocaust, and this is important
(10:11):
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 the early nineteen seventies, tash Fell at
all conducted a series of experiments on MGP studies that
(10:34):
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 tash Fell origin in the
work of Dutch social psychologist Yap Robbie in nineteen sixty four.
So Robbie suspected that common fate was the essential component
(10:55):
for a group to hold together and for intergroup discrimination
to occur. Common fate is a distalled psychology concept that
says that objects functioning or moving in the same direction
appear to belong together, kind of like we're off to
see the wizard, right, I mean, you're going to see
the wizard, while I'm going to the sea. We'll see
the wizard. Or I'm going down this road. Well, I
guess we're we're a group, Okay, so under this view,
(11:18):
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. Yeah, and
I think you can probably you know, cut it a
few different ways, but yeah, it's like there's something about
your your sort of common direction, common fate, if you
want to put it that way, that this sort of
(11:39):
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.
So um again Worth noting that he was looking at
some of the some of the same stuff that would
(12:00):
become important to the mental 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 of overlooked and some of the documentation surrounding
MGP and Brown breaks it down and attributes it to
(12:23):
three reasons. So, first, tash Fell'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 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
(12:47):
on as we'll get into, like just sort of random
grouping of people, 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. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing to keep
in mind is toash Fell's MGP work helped inspire and
(13:10):
like 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
tash Fell and John Turner, who lived nineteen forty seven
through twenty eleven in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties.
And then the third factor that Brown points out is
(13:30):
that personality differences between the two men. So tash Fell
has been characterized as more of a go getter, essentially
someone who really, you know, 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.
(13:51):
So some combination of these three factors, according to Brown,
So tash 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
(14:13):
certainly hitting 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. All right, Next, presumably based on these results,
(14:35):
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. 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,
(14:58):
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 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. Yeah. Yeah,
you can certainly break it down like that, But I
(15:19):
think on the other end, you could also just not
explain what the 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 informed this choice because it's actually random. But
you don't want people to think it's random, that you
want them to think that it's based on something. Yes,
(15:40):
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 in 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 for
you to say, well, they seem like decent people, even
if they count dots differently or estimate dots differently than
(16:02):
I do. In fact, a group membership was anonymous, right,
so you didn't know who was in the other You
couldn't like look around the room and be right, here
are the group a people. 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
(16:23):
use and also could therefore muddy and complicate the findings. 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. Right, So now it's time to get busy. Here,
a second task is assigned, in which subjects had to
assign reward tasks to anonymous individuals, either two from the
(16:47):
end group, two from the outgroup, or one from each
These individuals would be marked by a code number, and
your code number would never come up, so it wasn't
completely self serving, 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
(17:10):
subjects play some kind of game that involves distributing rewards
off in monetary rewards like a number of dollars or
tokens of some kind that can be exchanged for something
to these anonymous players belonging to the in group or
the outgroup or both. Yeah, and you might think that
this would all favor even handed distribution, since there's just
(17:31):
so little to go on aside from group affiliation in
divvying it up. 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 Oughton from twenty sixteen
said that basically quote fairness concerns strongly guided intergroup allocations,
(17:55):
but that didn't always hold true. There was a number
of exceptions. 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
(18:15):
in us, and it also created a them which you
then see borne out in the study results. So that's
the big take 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 do people
in the outside group look like or act like? When
(18:35):
you know, what do I have in common with the
people around me? It was even stripping all that away,
humans rather swiftly foreign factions and discriminate against others. 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.
(18:56):
This was published in Current Opinion and Psychology in twenty
sixteen by Sabinet. One thing Oughton mentions is that when
Tashfell and colleagues first came up 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
(19:18):
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 to that project to address
this other question. First, they wanted to just find out
what were the minimum criteria that could be leveraged to
cause people to show in group favoritism. So this was
(19:38):
originally supposed to be just like trying to establish what
they would need to do in this other test oughten
Wrights quote. They planned to start with 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
(20:01):
no power of social cohesion at all, like tendencies in
you know, the numerical estimation game, the dots game, or
preferences for the types of paintings. And again these were
only pretenses. The people were actually assigned to groups randomly
in most are all cases, And instead what they found
was that these fake, made up bases for social categorization
(20:23):
were good enough to kickstart in group favoritism. So they
were trying to find the minimum criteria, and it turns
out they just didn't really have to look very hard.
There's barely a minimum at all. Yeah, and that again
I think is the thing that that that floored everybody,
and I in still floors people when they hear about
it for the first time or reminded him. Oughton recognizes
(20:54):
three experimental features for recognizing what authors in this experimental
domain college 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 autenlists of them are.
(21:18):
Number one, categorization is novel and arbitrary, no history of
experiences within group and or out group, 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 served
(21:42):
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, right right, That would be the self
interest kicking in for sure. But a really interesting thing
emerges with the allocation tasks, that is, along the lines
(22:05):
of self interest. Instead of individual self interest, it is
in group interest. So Otton says, as we've discussed, there
were fairness concerns that did guide some inner group allocations,
but also there was evidence of in group favoritism even
when the group had just been formed. It meant essentially
nothing and the members were anonymous. And here's a really
(22:27):
interesting thing. In some cases quote, the tendency to positively
differentiate the in group from the outgroup was stronger than
the tendency to maximize the in group's profit. So the
example Latton gives here would be, instead of giving twelve
(22:47):
dollars to the in group and eleven dollars to the outgroup,
some subjects would select a strategy that gave eleven dollars
to the in group and nine dollars to the outgroup.
Everybody gets less, but the difference between the rewards of
the two groups is greater. And if you were on
(23:07):
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 think about a thing I read
in the context of a different paper exploring a different theory,
(23:29):
but it was won by the Harvard psychologist Jim Sidenius
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 that apparently comes from an Eastern European fable.
(23:52):
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 immediately answered, saying, okay, take out one of my eyes.
(24:15):
Oh that's grim, that's very gram. 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
(24:38):
rather have a higher degree of advantage over a known
neighbor or adversary than a greater objective advantage overall. It'd
be like if you sort of had it in for
your buddy and it was your turn to pick the
type of pizza you get, and you'd make sure you've
got a flavor that you weren't crazy about, but you
(25:00):
knew that your your friend hated. Yeah, like you're you're
willing to choke it down just because more refreshing to you,
more delicious to you 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
(25:20):
a scenario where someone's pettiness in spite would lead to
such an occurrence, and maybe this one, like that's a
version of it, and maybe is a little more real
world accurate as opposed to the blinding 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. Right, And for some reason,
(25:42):
this like, this whole scenario makes more sense concerning friends
than it does like enemies of any sort. I don't know,
I don't it. Perhaps the suggests a lot about about
the way relationships work. Now there's some caveats to this
that I want to get into in a second, because
to come back to that paper by Aughton, one thing
I was interested in was criticisms of the minimal group paradigm.
(26:05):
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 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
(26:27):
thing that comes up in Aten's paper here is is
the minimal group paradigm really revealing something about how people
would behave in the real world or does the experiment
quote merely create a situation in which social category information
receives unrealistic attention. I was like, Oh, I think that's interesting,
(26:48):
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 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
(27:10):
though it's arbitrary, because it's really like the only variable
they're being aware of in this situation. On the other hand,
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
(27:33):
in group preference for utterly arbitrary groups when group membership
is made salient when it is brought to your attention
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
(27:58):
is made salient people start paying attention to this difference
and talking about it. It seems to me that 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
(28:18):
no political valence suddenly becomes politicized for some reason. Yeah,
maybe 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,
(28:41):
and people will factionalize on the basis of it. Yeah,
And sometimes it takes the form of just sort of
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 a suddenly
there's you know, there's some sort of an outrage over
(29:03):
a particular piece of music that is interpreted by somebody
as 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 artists.
It ends up picking up steam all its own. And
then where do you fall on this divide totally? Now,
to be fair, things like that are not purely minimal
(29:25):
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 outgroup associations and so forth. But it's sort
of halfway there. I wonder if there might be a
comparison to draw here to the there were two things
(29:45):
that in recent years. There was the whole like what
color is this dress? Right? 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 people's became, like they were
quick to state what their interpretation of it was and
(30:05):
become a part of that group that sawd a certain way.
I do not remember what I thought of this dress
or even who wore it. Oh, I just remember being
amused that it was a thing at all. I think
I remember when I first saw it, it it looked blue
and black to me, So hate me if you want.
(30:32):
But anyway, coming back to this issue, so it may
be a good criticism that this has some 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
(30:54):
of attention to the presence and division differentiation of the groups.
Another interesting limitation that Otton 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
(31:15):
regarding positive traits. So when you're talking about things like
assigning actual punishments or negative personal assessments, it seems that
the mere categorization effect no longer reliably produces results, which
should be a good result, right Yeah, yeah, knowing that
(31:36):
eye gouging actually wouldn't play out all that well in
this scenario. Right, So, maybe experiments show the minimal group
stuff is enough to make you treat 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 pay out overall. But it doesn't extend
(31:57):
to actually wanting to hurt or punish the outgroup. Yes,
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 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
(32:22):
in the real world, 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 dynamic. 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 dule up
(32:45):
punishments or disparagements against a novel, arbitrary outgroup. Why might
this be? One interpretation given in this paper is it's
possible that the 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
(33:06):
I'm good in deserving 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 outgroup. 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
(33:27):
and disparagements for them. Yet this would raise interesting questions.
It would bring me 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 outgroup. Because again, remember, like you know, a
lot of these findings are If I'm in group A
(33:48):
but not personally receiving any rewards, 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 a leven. If this is not
to be interpreted as an attempt to punish group BE,
what does it mean. Maybe it means that some people
(34:10):
sometimes interpret it as a greater 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. Yeah, it's interesting to
(34:32):
sort of crunch that and I try and apply it
to some sort of you know, hunter gatherer scenario and
try and figure out how that makes sense even even
you know, like in a in those situations. But yeah,
I don't know, that is a weird little wrinkle in
human nature. Yeah, you know, sometimes I see this disgust
(34:53):
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 become a cathedral. And so you're not necessarily
(35:15):
going to get the full picture of the cathedral looking
at the basic shape that you've marked out in the dirt,
but you may be able to figure out some things,
some of the sweeping ideas that will be present in
the final design. But then again, you have no idea
like what all the different cultural structures on top of
it are ultimately going to produce. But it's still an
(35:36):
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 during the mid to late
(35:56):
sixties there is a so called crisis and social psychology
in which North American scholars in particular were 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
(36:16):
a lot of questions about quote 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 complexity, sucking all the
air out of the chamber of this experiment. But it
(36:37):
also could be seen, especially in the time period, is
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
(36:58):
why you had social prejudice is in the real world
we're 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 mental group paradigm
(37:22):
creates this against super stripped down simple experiment that does
seem to reveal a lot about someone, like the basic
mechanics of how we think about our group and outside groups,
coming back two memes and so forth. It also reminds
me of a common thing you I think still see
and that as people saying, well, there are two types
of people in the world. There are the people that
(37:44):
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, even though it's
(38:05):
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. Well, I think
one of the things that's interesting about those memes is
they tend to it's kinna. I feel like we should
(38:26):
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 a lot into
a behavior that, on its space we would assume does
not tell you much about a person. And exactly the
(38:49):
humor is in trying to like extrapolate everything you could
possibly want to know about a person from from that
one thing. Though that that is often kind of what
we do, like You can imagine sitting in these these
early experiments with Tesh Fell and saying like, you know, okay,
what are the people who counted the dots, you know,
the people who counted the dots differently? What does that
(39:10):
say about their personality? And trying to like work that
up into something meaningful about reality. Yeah. I mean, 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 jellybeans
in a jar, how we saw the dots and in
some sort of an array, we're going to think about
(39:31):
all the ways that that could potentially define who or
what we are. You would say that because you're a
dot undercounter probably, Yeah, I mean it does make you
think like, oh, does that mean I'm a I'm a pessimist?
Does that mean I'm just not that into sugar? What
does it mean? We can't we can't help but try
and figure that out and come up with all sorts
(39:51):
of ridiculous theories as to what it says. All right, well,
we're gonna go and close it out right there, but
hopefully we gave you just a good taste of the
minimal group paradigm, like where it came from, 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 fictional examples
(40:15):
or real world examples of some of some of what's
going on here right in we'd love to 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 Wednesdays we
do a short form artifact or monster fact. Tuesdays and
Thursdays are our core episodes, and on Fridays we set
aside most serious concerns to just watch a weird film.
(40:38):
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.
(41:00):
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
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey,
fair warning, folks. If I if I sound like I
speak with the voice and mind of some kind of
(00:24):
decrepit bog monster today, it is. It is because I'm
on the mend from a from a bad cold. Sou
so apologies on whatever's happening in your ears right now.
But but but here I am on Mike. Well, sometimes
bog monsters are quite wise, so you know, it depends
on the story you're looking at. I hope to bring
a real meg muckle bones energy today's episode, so you'll
(00:48):
have to tell me how I do. But yeah, what
are we talking about today, Rob, Well, we're gonna be
talking about 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 duffy. Perhaps perhaps sounds a
little bit clinical, but I think it's it's a very
fascinating little topic. Shouldn't make for a nice one part
(01:09):
episode here because it attempts 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
(01:30):
to nothing even And I think for many of us,
the answer seems to be that we're, you know, who
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
(01:51):
if you're familiar with this. I don't know if we've
talked about this before, but in the nineteen fifty three
story from Doctor SEUs the Sneeches has this the butter
the bread one. 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 there those
(02:12):
butter side up, and they get into this big Cold
War stalemate. This is an arms race, an escalation of
their weaponry based on the butter ideology difference. Yeah, so
that's a good one to bring up to the sneeches
concerns this population of avian creatures that in their entire
(02:33):
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 bellies sneeches are the
ones that live at the top and the rest live
at the bottom. But then a con artist moves into
town with a star on machine and then later a
star off machine to capitalize on their divisiveness. Though at
(02:53):
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. 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. Yeah. Yeah, it's
it's a real clincher that one. But another example that
(03:15):
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 Judean People's Front and
the People's Front of Judea and various other fragments of
their independence group. One of the characters in the Judean
People's Front proudly proclaims that the only people they hate
(03:37):
more than the Romans is the People's Front of Judea.
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 if 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
(04:00):
world tend 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. 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
(04:20):
things we divide ourselves over, or you know, some of
the equally seemingly silly, at least from the outside, things
that we get that we're very divisive over, and to
your points, sometimes they're within like subgroups and fandoms. Even
all manner of brand and sports team loyalty can lead
to division that doesn't necessarily make much sense on closer inspection.
(04:43):
Perhaps you prefer Puma shoes and this other person prefers Adidas.
How could the two of you ever see eyed eye?
And this specific example ties into I think, what is
a great example of division in human beings and human groups?
One I originally saw pointed out by and it's it's
been well documented for a while by j Van Babel
(05:03):
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 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
(05:24):
familiar with this story, Joe, I'm not What all starts
in around nineteen nineteen. That's when these two brothers, Adolph
and Rudolph Dassler found a shoe company called Gabruda Dassler
Shoe Fabric or GAETA in their hometown of Herzogen. I
rock in Bavaria. It turns out they were very successful.
These shoes were really took off. You even had a
(05:47):
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 the An Army,
the factory is transformed into a weapons factory, and again
everything is just super disrupted until after the war the
(06:07):
brothers reunite, their work continues ad 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 the same.
Meaning anyway you cut it, the company is split into
that means material, workforce, and so forth. Rudolph founds Ruda,
(06:31):
which becomes Puma, and Adolph 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 Javan Babble and Dominique Packer and that ted
Ed video, is that the brothers feud and business division
ultimately divides the entire town quote residents became fiercely loyal
(06:53):
to one brand of shoe, local businesses chose sides, and
marriage across lines was discouraged. Herzegoganak eventually became known as
the town of bent necks because its residents looked down
to ensure they were interacting with members of their group. Oh,
look down at the shoes. That one took me a second. Yeah.
So I think it's a great example, not because not
(07:15):
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 how split people
can be about brands. I mean sometimes I think it's
(07:36):
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 underheaded toilet paper rolls.
I recall divisions of this type. We're big on like
early Facebook, like mid two thousands Facebook, where people would
(07:58):
make all these joke groups, and it would be like,
you know, for people who like red vines, because twizzlers
are for cowards. I mean, it's still I think, very
prominent in like name 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.
(08:21):
But then at what point does does does just sort
of trolling and mock fund At what point does that
then become like an actual entrenched belief or opinion? Oh?
I think rather quickly actually, So in this episode of
Stuff to Blow your mind, where you're going to look
at a at a social psychology concept that ties into
all of this, the minimal group paradigm, a method for
(08:42):
sussing out what might be the absolute minimal conditions for
discrimination to take place between two groups. Will their findings
be twiddlers versus red vines? Is that the minimal thing?
I don't know, you'll just have to find out, all right,
So where does this minimal group paradigm come from? All right? So,
one of the sources that I was looking at specifically
in order to understand the minimal group Paradigm and its
(09:04):
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 has of course
been a human concern for a long time, and certainly
was a long time concern of people in psychology. But
(09:25):
the MGP or the minimal group paradigm as we know
it generally is attributed to Polish social scientists on Retash
Fill who of nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty two, and
also a British social psychologist Michael Billigg, who worked with him,
was born nineteen forty seven. Typically, I see a lot
of references to work they did in the early seventies.
(09:48):
One of the main citations is on retash film Michael Billig,
Robert Bundy and Claude Flament, 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 source now, tash Fell it's worth noting
was a survivor of the Holocaust, and this is important
(10:11):
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 the early nineteen seventies, tash Fell at
all conducted a series of experiments on MGP studies that
(10:34):
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 tash Fell origin in the
work of Dutch social psychologist Yap Robbie in nineteen sixty four.
So Robbie suspected that common fate was the essential component
(10:55):
for a group to hold together and for intergroup discrimination
to occur. Common fate is a distalled psychology concept that
says that objects functioning or moving in the same direction
appear to belong together, kind of like we're off to
see the wizard, right, I mean, you're going to see
the wizard, while I'm going to the sea. We'll see
the wizard. Or I'm going down this road. Well, I
guess we're we're a group, Okay, so under this view,
(11:18):
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. Yeah, and
I think you can probably you know, cut it a
few different ways, but yeah, it's like there's something about
your your sort of common direction, common fate, if you
want to put it that way, that this sort of
(11:39):
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.
So um again Worth noting that he was looking at
some of the some of the same stuff that would
(12:00):
become important to the mental 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 of overlooked and some of the documentation surrounding
MGP and Brown breaks it down and attributes it to
(12:23):
three reasons. So, first, tash Fell'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 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
(12:47):
on as we'll get into, like just sort of random
grouping of people, 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. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing to keep
in mind is toash Fell's MGP work helped inspire and
(13:10):
like 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
tash Fell and John Turner, who lived nineteen forty seven
through twenty eleven in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties.
And then the third factor that Brown points out is
(13:30):
that personality differences between the two men. So tash Fell
has been characterized as more of a go getter, essentially
someone who really, you know, 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.
(13:51):
So some combination of these three factors, according to Brown,
So tash 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
(14:13):
certainly hitting 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. All right, Next, presumably based on these results,
(14:35):
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. 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,
(14:58):
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 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. Yeah. Yeah,
you can certainly break it down like that, But I
(15:19):
think on the other end, you could also just not
explain what the 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 informed this choice because it's actually random. But
you don't want people to think it's random, that you
want them to think that it's based on something. Yes,
(15:40):
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 in 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 for
you to say, well, they seem like decent people, even
if they count dots differently or estimate dots differently than
(16:02):
I do. In fact, a group membership was anonymous, right,
so you didn't know who was in the other You
couldn't like look around the room and be right, here
are the group a people. 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
(16:23):
use and also could therefore muddy and complicate the findings. 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. Right, So now it's time to get busy. Here,
a second task is assigned, in which subjects had to
assign reward tasks to anonymous individuals, either two from the
(16:47):
end group, two from the outgroup, or one from each
These individuals would be marked by a code number, and
your code number would never come up, so it wasn't
completely self serving, 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
(17:10):
subjects play some kind of game that involves distributing rewards
off in monetary rewards like a number of dollars or
tokens of some kind that can be exchanged for something
to these anonymous players belonging to the in group or
the outgroup or both. Yeah, and you might think that
this would all favor even handed distribution, since there's just
(17:31):
so little to go on aside from group affiliation in
divvying it up. 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 Oughton from twenty sixteen
said that basically quote fairness concerns strongly guided intergroup allocations,
(17:55):
but that didn't always hold true. There was a number
of exceptions. 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
(18:15):
in us, and it also created a them which you
then see borne out in the study results. So that's
the big take 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 do people
in the outside group look like or act like? When
(18:35):
you know, what do I have in common with the
people around me? It was even stripping all that away,
humans rather swiftly foreign factions and discriminate against others. 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.
(18:56):
This was published in Current Opinion and Psychology in twenty
sixteen by Sabinet. One thing Oughton mentions is that when
Tashfell and colleagues first came up 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
(19:18):
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 to that project to address
this other question. First, they wanted to just find out
what were the minimum criteria that could be leveraged to
cause people to show in group favoritism. So this was
(19:38):
originally supposed to be just like trying to establish what
they would need to do in this other test oughten
Wrights quote. They planned to start with 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
(20:01):
no power of social cohesion at all, like tendencies in
you know, the numerical estimation game, the dots game, or
preferences for the types of paintings. And again these were
only pretenses. The people were actually assigned to groups randomly
in most are all cases, And instead what they found
was that these fake, made up bases for social categorization
(20:23):
were good enough to kickstart in group favoritism. So they
were trying to find the minimum criteria, and it turns
out they just didn't really have to look very hard.
There's barely a minimum at all. Yeah, and that again
I think is the thing that that that floored everybody,
and I in still floors people when they hear about
it for the first time or reminded him. Oughton recognizes
(20:54):
three experimental features for recognizing what authors in this experimental
domain college 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 autenlists of them are.
(21:18):
Number one, categorization is novel and arbitrary, no history of
experiences within group and or out group, 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 served
(21:42):
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, right right, That would be the self
interest kicking in for sure. But a really interesting thing
emerges with the allocation tasks, that is, along the lines
(22:05):
of self interest. Instead of individual self interest, it is
in group interest. So Otton says, as we've discussed, there
were fairness concerns that did guide some inner group allocations,
but also there was evidence of in group favoritism even
when the group had just been formed. It meant essentially
nothing and the members were anonymous. And here's a really
(22:27):
interesting thing. In some cases quote, the tendency to positively
differentiate the in group from the outgroup was stronger than
the tendency to maximize the in group's profit. So the
example Latton gives here would be, instead of giving twelve
(22:47):
dollars to the in group and eleven dollars to the outgroup,
some subjects would select a strategy that gave eleven dollars
to the in group and nine dollars to the outgroup.
Everybody gets less, but the difference between the rewards of
the two groups is greater. And if you were on
(23:07):
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 think about a thing I read
in the context of a different paper exploring a different theory,
(23:29):
but it was won by the Harvard psychologist Jim Sidenius
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 that apparently comes from an Eastern European fable.
(23:52):
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 immediately answered, saying, okay, take out one of my eyes.
(24:15):
Oh that's grim, that's very gram. 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
(24:38):
rather have a higher degree of advantage over a known
neighbor or adversary than a greater objective advantage overall. It'd
be like if you sort of had it in for
your buddy and it was your turn to pick the
type of pizza you get, and you'd make sure you've
got a flavor that you weren't crazy about, but you
(25:00):
knew that your your friend hated. Yeah, like you're you're
willing to choke it down just because more refreshing to you,
more delicious to you 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
(25:20):
a scenario where someone's pettiness in spite would lead to
such an occurrence, and maybe this one, like that's a
version of it, and maybe is a little more real
world accurate as opposed to the blinding 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. Right, And for some reason,
(25:42):
this like, this whole scenario makes more sense concerning friends
than it does like enemies of any sort. I don't know,
I don't it. Perhaps the suggests a lot about about
the way relationships work. Now there's some caveats to this
that I want to get into in a second, because
to come back to that paper by Aughton, one thing
I was interested in was criticisms of the minimal group paradigm.
(26:05):
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 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
(26:27):
thing that comes up in Aten's paper here is is
the minimal group paradigm really revealing something about how people
would behave in the real world or does the experiment
quote merely create a situation in which social category information
receives unrealistic attention. I was like, Oh, I think that's interesting,
(26:48):
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 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
(27:10):
though it's arbitrary, because it's really like the only variable
they're being aware of in this situation. On the other hand,
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
(27:33):
in group preference for utterly arbitrary groups when group membership
is made salient when it is brought to your attention
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
(27:58):
is made salient people start paying attention to this difference
and talking about it. It seems to me that 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
(28:18):
no political valence suddenly becomes politicized for some reason. Yeah,
maybe 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,
(28:41):
and people will factionalize on the basis of it. Yeah,
And sometimes it takes the form of just sort of
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 a suddenly
there's you know, there's some sort of an outrage over
(29:03):
a particular piece of music that is interpreted by somebody
as 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 artists.
It ends up picking up steam all its own. And
then where do you fall on this divide totally? Now,
to be fair, things like that are not purely minimal
(29:25):
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 outgroup associations and so forth. But it's sort
of halfway there. I wonder if there might be a
comparison to draw here to the there were two things
(29:45):
that in recent years. There was the whole like what
color is this dress? Right? 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 people's became, like they were
quick to state what their interpretation of it was and
(30:05):
become a part of that group that sawd a certain way.
I do not remember what I thought of this dress
or even who wore it. Oh, I just remember being
amused that it was a thing at all. I think
I remember when I first saw it, it it looked blue
and black to me, So hate me if you want.
(30:32):
But anyway, coming back to this issue, so it may
be a good criticism that this has some 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
(30:54):
of attention to the presence and division differentiation of the groups.
Another interesting limitation that Otton 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
(31:15):
regarding positive traits. So when you're talking about things like
assigning actual punishments or negative personal assessments, it seems that
the mere categorization effect no longer reliably produces results, which
should be a good result, right Yeah, yeah, knowing that
(31:36):
eye gouging actually wouldn't play out all that well in
this scenario. Right, So, maybe experiments show the minimal group
stuff is enough to make you treat 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 pay out overall. But it doesn't extend
(31:57):
to actually wanting to hurt or punish the outgroup. Yes,
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 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
(32:22):
in the real world, 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 dynamic. 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 dule up
(32:45):
punishments or disparagements against a novel, arbitrary outgroup. Why might
this be? One interpretation given in this paper is it's
possible that the 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
(33:06):
I'm good in deserving 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 outgroup. 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
(33:27):
and disparagements for them. Yet this would raise interesting questions.
It would bring me 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 outgroup. Because again, remember, like you know, a
lot of these findings are If I'm in group A
(33:48):
but not personally receiving any rewards, 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 a leven. If this is not
to be interpreted as an attempt to punish group BE,
what does it mean. Maybe it means that some people
(34:10):
sometimes interpret it as a greater 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. Yeah, it's interesting to
(34:32):
sort of crunch that and I try and apply it
to some sort of you know, hunter gatherer scenario and
try and figure out how that makes sense even even
you know, like in a in those situations. But yeah,
I don't know, that is a weird little wrinkle in
human nature. Yeah, you know, sometimes I see this disgust
(34:53):
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 become a cathedral. And so you're not necessarily
(35:15):
going to get the full picture of the cathedral looking
at the basic shape that you've marked out in the dirt,
but you may be able to figure out some things,
some of the sweeping ideas that will be present in
the final design. But then again, you have no idea
like what all the different cultural structures on top of
it are ultimately going to produce. But it's still an
(35:36):
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 during the mid to late
(35:56):
sixties there is a so called crisis and social psychology
in which North American scholars in particular were 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
(36:16):
a lot of questions about quote 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 complexity, sucking all the
air out of the chamber of this experiment. But it
(36:37):
also could be seen, especially in the time period, is
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
(36:58):
why you had social prejudice is in the real world
we're 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 mental group paradigm
(37:22):
creates this against super stripped down simple experiment that does
seem to reveal a lot about someone, like the basic
mechanics of how we think about our group and outside groups,
coming back two memes and so forth. It also reminds
me of a common thing you I think still see
and that as people saying, well, there are two types
of people in the world. There are the people that
(37:44):
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, even though it's
(38:05):
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. Well, I think
one of the things that's interesting about those memes is
they tend to it's kinna. I feel like we should
(38:26):
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 a lot into
a behavior that, on its space we would assume does
not tell you much about a person. And exactly the
(38:49):
humor is in trying to like extrapolate everything you could
possibly want to know about a person from from that
one thing. Though that that is often kind of what
we do, like You can imagine sitting in these these
early experiments with Tesh Fell and saying like, you know, okay,
what are the people who counted the dots, you know,
the people who counted the dots differently? What does that
(39:10):
say about their personality? And trying to like work that
up into something meaningful about reality. Yeah. I mean, 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 jellybeans
in a jar, how we saw the dots and in
some sort of an array, we're going to think about
(39:31):
all the ways that that could potentially define who or
what we are. You would say that because you're a
dot undercounter probably, Yeah, I mean it does make you
think like, oh, does that mean I'm a I'm a pessimist?
Does that mean I'm just not that into sugar? What
does it mean? We can't we can't help but try
and figure that out and come up with all sorts
(39:51):
of ridiculous theories as to what it says. All right, well,
we're gonna go and close it out right there, but
hopefully we gave you just a good taste of the
minimal group paradigm, like where it came from, 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 fictional examples
(40:15):
or real world examples of some of some of what's
going on here right in we'd love to 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 Wednesdays we
do a short form artifact or monster fact. Tuesdays and
Thursdays are our core episodes, and on Fridays we set
aside most serious concerns to just watch a weird film.
(40:38):
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.
(41:00):
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
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.