Dissonance and Out-Groups

A class assignment for a forum post:

Story telling is an invaluable laboratory for learning about ourselves and others. Which of the stories and experiments cited by the authors did you find particularly meaningful? Can you share stories from your personal histories that we would also find informative?

I wrote my essay on this point, which begins around page 55. The concept of prejudice and of reinforcing my own ego through contrast with an outside group is one I've considered important for years.

In my mind, the process is something like this: the creation of a Them creates an Us by default. And an Us necessitates the existence of an I, thereby validating and reinforcing my ego. I enjoyed reading the perspective in Mistakes Were Made because it suggested some further detail about this. In my observation, much of our thinking either reinforces our sense of self, or threatens it. The concept of cognitive dissonance places a label on this thought for me and the explanations help me explore it further.

Travis & Aronson state that "stereotypes flatten out differences within the categories we are looking at and exaggerate the differences between categories" (p. 57). This is an awesome clue to the manipulations of mental functioning. I think it should be pretty obvious that I am not dealing with reality when I begin to group any set of individuals based not on the totality of each, but rather on only those characteristics I consider significant.

On pages 63-64, we read of an experiment where electric shocks were administered to students fitting the parameters of one group by those fitting the parameters of another. I liked this story because it illustrated to me just how superficial the distinctions are. The authors go on to expand upon the list of groups that have responded in similar ways, including those divided by gender, language, sexual preference and ethnicity. From personal experience, I might add sports team affiliation, religion, income level, political affiliation and computer manufacturer. My personal conclusion regarding this phenomenon is that it isn't about the actual topics involved, which are all arbitrary, but rather about the degree to which I internalize a given stance as part of my identity.

I have run into the behavior at work and amongst friends and family, too. Issues like abortion, dress codes, appropriate use of intoxication and even preferred weather seem to work just as well as any to establish in- and out-groups. Intelligent discussion or debate often takes a back seat to egotistical assertion.

The War on Terrorism is an interesting global display of Us vs. Them. In this, a terrorist is a label placed on a human being who commits a certain type of aggression. Although the terrorist may be a person responding to social or religious pressures and may be a family member and otherwise similar in many ways to me, he is labeled by his behaviors and thus fair game for out-grouping. In fact, he can now be subjected to behaviors on my part that mimic his own original transgressions, such as the killing of uninvolved parties as part of an effort to kill him!

Even more shocking is the fact that I can create new groups around him which don't even directly involve him. For instance, I can join a group that says it is not OK to accept collateral damage in pursuit of holding the terrorist accountable for past behaviors, while my friend joins a group that opposes this perspective. Although we both have far more in common than either of us do with the terrorist, we can become very heated in our defense of the two viewpoints, even to the point of doing irreparable harm to our friendship over them. And yet, rationality suggests that the issues are open to reasonable discussion and that such would require each of us opening his mind to the other's perspective. What is it that so commonly blocks such sensible behavior?

Why do I become angry over this issue but accept opponents of another without care? Is it really because one is so much more important than the other by some objective measurement? Or is it perhaps that I have made this issue over here more personal, more attached to me like some growth of my Self? Do I rage at the other group because of fundamental differences? Or because doing so reinforces my own identity? And if the latter, is my anger, my perspective, valid?

I think it is important to think about this concept because of the daily harm committed in the name of allegiance to ideas, membership and causes. And not only the interpersonal damage, but also the intrapersonal as well: whenever I limit my own identity to a concept, I've reduced the breathing reality to fit into a far smaller box than it really can. I am warping and contorting it and I have to live with the result.

D

Tavris, Carol; Aronson, Elliot. (2007). Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc.

A post from my Religious Thought in World Perspective class:

I used the word syndrome advisedly with regard to Us vs Them - the human tendency to divisiveness and depersonalization - because it refers to a cluster of behaviors and effects and that is how I see this phenomenon. In some cases, it is a simple and seemingly innocent teaching, as when a child is taught which humans belong to her family. In others, such as with religious fundamentalist activism, it can have more violent consequences. This is not a judgment on either of these scenarios, but a statement that it seems to me they represent the same drive.

Regarding your "local Hasidic Jewish community and their endless mission to separate and extricate themselves from the rest of us", I suspect it is indeed the same thing. When I identify with a given structure, physical or conceptual, I invest a bit of myself in it - it becomes a reinforcement for my existence. Thus, protecting it becomes self-defense. In my mind, again, this is the only way I can account for the desperate, sometimes homicidal fervor with which people will defend so many things from personal morality to religious systems to football teams.

It is a sad thought for me that I participate in these behaviors as well. To exclude someone, to create a Them for that excluded person to belong to, requires that I reduce him to a symbol, a nonhuman idea that I can push away. A person discovered in my living room at two in the morning becomes a "home invader", a man targeted in my rifle sights on the battlefield becomes "an enemy", a person who gossips about me is "a troublemaker", a person as seen from my jury box becomes "the accused." The people who yell at my dog are "those sons of biskets" and the people in front of me on my way to work are "Sunday drivers." The world's air is polluted by "careless self-serving corporate rapists" and the people responsible for the abused pets in that horrifying television commercial are simply "monsters."

It's easy to dehumanize someone in order to support judging, excluding and hurting her. It is more difficult to consider that there is a history of influences stretching back in time that led up to the current behavior, which is itself performed by a living human being just like me who is attempting to make sense of life. While this view doesn't invalidate the concept of personal responsibility as applied her, it does cause me to consider it more deeply in relation to my own actions. If I shoot the guy in the living room, for instance, I am not shooting some conceptual target labeled "home invader", but rather I am killing a human being because I have chosen my own safety over his.

I wonder how such a perspective affects the human ability to wage war?

D