via this post on The Proper Study of Mankind blog:
New research published in Nature shows how biases towards members of our social group, and against those outside it, shape how generous we are to people and how we punish others for transgressing social norms.
Humans are socially sticky: we bond into cohesive groups that commonly share a common identity and, often, similar values. This applies to social circles and local communities as much as to nationality and global religious and political affiliation. Such unity can encourage people within the group to pull together, to help one another when in need – in short, to get along.
But there’s a downside to human ‚Äògroupishness’: a mental division between members of the ingroup, to whom social and even moral obligations apply, and various outgroups, to whom they do not. People who live in different groups — geographical, social or ethnic — often treat outgroup members as ‚Äòothers’ (something viewers of Lost will be familiar with), frequently arousing enmity and stoking conflict. Note how groups really come into their own and pull together when pitted against other groups in the human speciality of war.
The ingroup-outgroup distinction has the power to distort and bias our attitudes towards outgroup members in pernicious ways. These prejudices are played out locally and globally on a daily basis. When supporters of our football team brawl with the other team’s, we can easily blame our opponents on starting the trouble ‘They always cause a ruckus, don’t they?’). When our country is at way with another, we’re justifiably retaliating against military aggression (‘We’re merely defending ourselves against those lunatics across the border’). Behaviour of ‚Äòour people’ that is deemed to be tolerable can be judged intolerable or immoral or worthy of punishment when people of other groups do the same thing.
The nature of human altruism (helping others), and the role of altruistic punishment (paying a cost to punish those that don’t help others) in establishing cooperation and a bases for sociality, are currently two of the most active areas of research in the behavioural sciences. Nearly every aspect of altruism and cooperation you can think of is being explored: how altruistic behaviour and willingness to punish non-altruists varies across societies with differing social systems (and also what universal trends underlie human altruism); how this variation relates to economic and demographic factors; how people respond to punishment for not cooperating, in both laboratory and real-world situations; the role of institutions that embody social norms of behaviour in maintaining cooperation; and what’s going on in the brain when we cooperate and defect in games of altruism with other human players.
Comments
@ 22:03
I have heard this numerous times, and people treat it as a truism. It’s either “groups are good,” (Collective Intelligence!) or “cliques are bad” (Group Think!)
I think we need to straighten our thinking, to see this more mechanically, and less judgementally.
It seems comparable to me to people’s thoughts about “Open Mindedness.” I believe I have identified a purpose, a story, that explains both Open Minded & Closed Minded behavior, detailing a functional role to both, and explaining how we should respond to whatever we find, as we find it.
You can see it at: CommunityWiki:SelectivelyOpenMinded
In brief, it goes like this: We become closed minded to make sense of things, and integrate ideas together, and build expertise. We become open minded to answer questions, find out new things. To exhault one or the other is to exhault one foot or the other foot, for enabling walking, while denigrating the other. Obviously, that can’t be right: Walking requires both feet one after the other.
I suspect it is similar with many of the grouping behaviors we see. I suspect it is impossible to not form cliques, and still be productive. The benefits of forming cliques are immense, and cannot be ignored. I suspect that cliques just have a bad rap, like being closed minded, that is actually undeserved, if we understand the situation in its entirety.
If we can refine a functional view of the system, then we should be able to refine what we find. Whatever genuinely negative aspects there are to cliques, we should be able to diminish. Whatever genuinely negative aspects there are to avoiding cliques, we should be able to diminish.
And so on.