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