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