#groupishness

  Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham & Craig Joseph argue, based on “Dan McAdams’s (1995; McAdams & Pals, 2006) three-level account of personality (dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life stories)” that:  

“the single dimension of left-right is indeed a useful construct that describes a network of Level 2 adaptations (such as right-wing authoritarianism) closely linked to Level 1 traits (such as openness to experience), but the study of ideology requires us to look at the Level 3 narratives of self and society that people construct and internalize as they develop, join groups, and share ideologies.”(Above and Below Left-Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations, Psychological Inquiry, 20:110-119, 2009).

So, that is a mouthful. Earlier in their paper, they helpfully offered:

“Why do people vary in their views of human nature and their visions of the good society? Why do many people categorize themselves as ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘libertarian,’ ‘socialist,’ and so on? Some researchers try to answer those questions by starting with people’s self-identifications and then moving ‘down,’ examining traits (such as openness to experience) that underlie and predict endorsement of an ideological label (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003, and Sibley & Duckitt, 2008, for reviews). In contrast, others find it more informative to move ‘up’ from such labels, examining the network of meanings, strivings, and personal narratives that unite the individuals who endorse a label (e.g., Conover & Feldman, 1981; Geertz, 1964; Smith, 2003; Sowell, 1995, 2007).”

Which is all very interesting, but really concentrating on particular sorts of ideological commitments [a San Francisco Democrat can be quite culturally different from a South Carolina Democrat (or not)]  rather than groupishness specifically. And that is a problem I will run into repeatedly: studies that brush up against my concerns around groupishness that are actually conceived around oppositional political sorts of “affinity groups” and what I would term coalitions, such as Liberal/Conservative and Democrat/Republican, rather than groups that are much more likely to be bound up with a person's identity, such as Cubs fan or White Sox fan. 

Right from the beginning, I find myself annoyed with the (entirely accurate within academia) assertions Haidt, Graham and Joseph make about the “trait approach” being “extraordinarily successful” to the point where “the Big Five taxonomy is widely accepted as a valuable high-order model of personality.” Sigh. I have looked at questions in the Big Five and they are so problematic that I am rendered the opposite of speechless whenever the topic comes up. (Conversely, Dan Kahan at his Cultural Cognition of Risk blog, argues that "These sorts of self-report measures predict vulnerability to one or another reasoning bias less powerfully than CRT and numeracy, and my sense is that they are falling out of favor in cognitive psychology.")

First, the “Big Five” taxonomy is generated by a self-report questionnaire that asks a person to assess in a Likert scale (1 to 5) their agreement with statements like “I have a rich vocabulary.” It seems obvious to me that the correct way to assess these questions is to understand they are capturing cultural commitments, not innate personality traits. We don’t know if the person has a rich vocabulary, only whether or not they believe they have one, and whether or not a rich vocabulary is something worth claiming is entirely cultural. How that meaningfully assesses “openness to experience” is not clear, unless one means that people with interests in intellectual pursuits are inherently more open to experience, which is a tautology, not a finding. Second, the theory currently uses the descriptive “openness to experience,” which has a particular usage in Standard English that equates to “open-mindedness” but the theory delimits the phrase as psychological category that does not (necessarily) equal the standard usage.  The questions asked in the Big Five questionnaire do not assess a person’s functional open-mindedness, though that is how the results are commonly described. (I have gone on and on about this before [http://isabel.penraeth.com/post/30209151045/the-moral-emotions-openness-liberals-conservatives & http://isabel.penraeth.com/post/32275404553/us-and-them-openness-groupishness-care-harm-and ]). Haidt, Graham & Joseph’s assertion around the “trait approach” being “successful” and perceived as “valuable” gets back to the definition of a theory in psychology: a framework that has proven generative of studies, not that it has proven fundamentally true [a definition offered in this textbook]. I sometimes fear the social sciences really are semantics all the way down. Well, that and statistics.

So, even when psychologists think they are dealing with a personal trait (as measured by the Big Five), at an individual-level construct, I would argue they are capturing cultural commitments, a groupish-level construct. That is what I mean about confusion around what is a trait of an individual and what is a cultural commitment on the part of the individual to a groupish standard. Haidt, Graham and Joseph suggest that some theorists work “up” and other theorists work “down,” but it seems to me nearly all of modern American psychology fundamentally atomizes everything to the individual not only because of a strongly individualistic American bias, but because of the functional limits of the preferred experimental method: the self-report questionnaire. [For much more interesting critiques of the Big Five, ones that are critical in quite different ways, see: The Five-Factor Framing of Personality and Beyond: Some Ruminations by Jack Block; The Five-Factor Model Describes the Structure of Social Perceptions, by Sanjay Srivastava; Two Cheers for the Big Five! [paywall] Donald W. Fiske.]

In their favor, Haidt, Graham & Joseph go on in their paper to ask of the trait approach, “Rather than arguing with success, an alternative response is to ask, Is that all there is?” They believe they can show there is more. But, yeah, me, I am absolutely going to argue with that sort of “success.”

Group Groupishness versus Individual Groupishness

Additionally, there are useful distinctions to be made between a “group groupishness” and an “individual groupishness,” where a group has traits that render it more “groupish” and an individual has preferences/habits that render groupish behavior more congenial to them. Triandis and Suh helpfully describe allocentrism and idiocentrism at the individual level, as well as work on collectivism and individualism at the cultural level:

The terms individualism and collectivism are used at the cultural level of analysis, where the number of observations is the number of cultures (e.g., Hofstede 1980). In such data individualism is the polar opposite of collectivism. As mentioned above, results at the cultural level may differ from results at the individual level of analysis. Thus, different terms are used to indicate the level of analysis. Individualism and collectivism are used at the cultural level, whereas at the individual level of analysis (i.e., within-culture analyses), the corresponding terms are idiocentrism and allocentrism (Triandis et al. 1985). Idiocentrism and allocentrism are personality attributes that are often orthogonal to each other. Idiocentrics emphasize self-reliance, competition, uniqueness, hedonism, and emotional distance from in-groups. Allocentrics emphasize interdependence, sociability, and family integrity; they take into account the needs and wishes of in-group members, feel close in their relationships to their in-group, and appear to others as  responsive to their needs and concerns (Cross SE, Bacon P, Morris M. 2000. The relational-interdependent self-construal and relationships. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78:791–98).” (P. 140, Cultural Influences on Personality, Triandis & Suh, 2002.)

This becomes particularly useful when one wants to compare individuals who are personally allocentric yet are living in a collectivist society and individuals who are allocentric living in an individualistic society. 

In all cultures there are both idiocentrics and allocentrics, in different proportions (Triandis et al. 2001). Generally speaking, in collectivist cultures there are about 60% allocentrics and in individualist cultures about 60% idiocentrics. The allocentrics in individualist cultures are more likely than the idiocentrics to join groups—gangs, communes, unions, etc. The idiocentrics in collectivist cultures are more likely than the allocentrics to feel oppressed by their culture and to seek to leave it. (P. 141)

[Susan Cain, in her recent popular non-fiction book Quiet, very busily conflates introversion with allocentrism. But I digress.]

There are other measures or attempts at measurement in the wild world of the social sciences. Is groupishness most accurately measured by the communitarianism side of the Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk group grid, leaving out worldviews that land on the individualistic side of the scale? Triandis gives us The Psychological Measurement of Cultural Syndromes (a measurement that maps quite nicely to the Cultural Theory Grid-Group schema). Is groupishness confined to Triandis’ vertical collectiveness? And if it is, how is that measured? Rayner & Gross, for instance, tried to measure communitarianism on the Cultural Theory of Risk grid-group scale with a mathematical computation based on observing how much time members of a group spent together (Measuring Culture). Or when we talk about groupishness, is it most properly referring to Triandis’ collectivism. Where does the individual fit? Can one individual be more groupish than another? Is one culture more groupish than another? Is groupishness confined to the Gemeinschaftliche “high group, high grid” world of hierarchical-communitarians? Sometimes those using the term groupishness seem to be attempting to describe a measurement of how controlling the members of the group are of other people (in the group or not): how much they want to force their viewpoint onto others, or how totalitarian they are. It is a theorized variation on this theme that results in the calculation that totalitarian regimes that espoused Leftist views were really Conservative.

So, it seems entirely reasonable to me to suspect that one can be functionally groupish yet, if one has a cultural commitment to individualism, to adopt an identity-protective denial around that trait. Similarly, it also seems entirely reasonable to me that a cultural commitment/acceptance of groupishness need not be as pathological as individualist groups ["I would never join a group that would have me as a member."] might be inclined to believe.

I think the key to understanding groupishness and the current muddle around its use is the concept of authority. As Adam Seligman puts it in his book Modernity’s Wager:

Modernity, whether in the form of liberal politics, capitalist exchange, or the epistemologies of the social sciences, is inherently hostile to the idea and experience of authority and as a result has a hard time understanding its persistence. (P. 15 Seligman, Modernity’s Wager, Nook version)

So, of course, before we talk any further about groupishness, let’s talk about authority.

At the end of this series of pieces, which is a great many words from here, I conclude that it is not “groupishness” per se nor the forms it takes in religiosity, nationalism, culturalism &etc that is the sin that breeds socio-political evils (Nazism, 9/11), but mono-moralism, and that mono-moralism, unfortunately, is a universally habitual sin that no groups are immune from committing. I will argue that the conviction that there is one moral truth is necessary for the individual, but the conclusion that this one moral truth applies to all people, in all situations, in all places, and all times is always false. I will argue that the conviction that anyone who does not come to the same, obvious, simple, fair and right moral conclusions is evil is the sin that leads to the sort of “othering” that allows for justifying considerable human harm. [Us and Them, by David Berreby] And that mono-moralism does not require “groupishness,” as it is generally (oh-so vaguely) conceived, to work its damage.

Observations on Perspective-taking

I free the moth flinging itself against the window because observing its struggle begins to make me feel trapped, despite a certain squeamishness about flying insects and a concern that I might do more harm than good by accidentally injuring it. 

Some would think that I am showing empathy and being effective at perspective-taking. That would not be true. The moth does not feel trapped. Its eyes are on the distant view beyond the window. It does not perceive its dilemma, but continues to attempt to move forward, uncomprehending of the impediment it faces. When I gently encase it in my carefully cupped hands and it *is* trapped, it behaves quite differently: docile, quiet, still.

I have not taken its perspective. I have placed upon it mine.

Similarly, when I observe the woman in hijab or burqa or niqab and conclude that I know what that experience is like for her, I am wrong unless and until I listen to her describe her own experience. Because, unlike the moth, I can ask her and she is capable of telling me. Just because observing a woman wearing a burqa makes me feel trapped and claustrophobic does not necessarily mean that is how she experiences it.

But, you observe, Dear Reader, that I did free the moth from its confinement, a confinement it was not aware of until I freed it! And, I must respond, a human being is not a moth, and it is some time since we have generally recognized the right of individual human beings to a certain personal dignity and respect [Durkheim/Bellah, On Morality and Society,p. 46 ]. The matter takes on a much more fundamental moral weight in a circumstance where a human being does not consider herself trapped than that a moth does not consider itself trapped.

Cultures and Morals

Human beings develop their cultures, and are developed by their cultures in return, to adapt to particular social/political/economic environments. The moth is not meant to live inside a home, and so freeing it is no sin. But when I try to insist that a Muslim woman cannot be living a free life until she sets aside wearing the hijab, I am describing how it is not helpful or necessary in my cultural/moral environment to wear the hijab. There is no guarantee that I am freeing her to live a more full life in the culture in which she is embedded and which is embedded within her. Humans adapt, personally and culturally, and regularly set aside habits and beliefs that are not helpful to them, sometimes quite quickly. When they are not doing that, when they are not setting them aside, it is perhaps more helpful to consider what purpose it serves than to conclude that they are doing it because they are (pick one) stupid, backward, immoral, authoritarian, kowtowed, unevolved.

I will attempt to convince you that moral standards, theories, systems, and codes all derive from communal lived experience organized around something that we both inherit and impact: culture. I will also try to convince you that differing lived experiences that produce moral standards that do not align with yours do not produce inherently immoral systems, only moral systems designed for a different environment. What is the same is that different cultures/moral systems are inhabited by people who are biologically exactly like you who have simply had different experiences/different resources/different environments. (think rural vs. urban, north vs. south, wealthy vs. poor) The battle is not properly defined as right vs. wrong. The battle is more properly defined around whose experiences will be validated and whose will not, and in a country with a vast range of lived experiences possible, whose preferences with be nurtured with communal resources and whose preferences will be starved. [See Chapter 11: Moral Particularism, p. 305 − 330, Moral Theory: An Introduction, by Mark Timmons; Chapter One: Sociocultural Psychology, Hazel Rose Markus &  MarYam Hamedani, in The Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama & Dov Cohen]

Cultures are constantly changing, responding to the environment. But they tend to keep what works and rapidly abandon what does not. Cultural shifts can be rapid. Cultures pick things up from each other. Cultures measure themselves against other cultures. Cultures are a communal response, a communal inheritance. Cultural systems are moral systems [Chapter 19: Cultural Psychology of Moral Development, p. 477, by Joan G. Miller, in The Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen]. Moral systems are embedded in a cultural response to the environment. Resource restriction brings “conservatism” and resource abundance brings democracy. Resource restriction brings cram schools and resource abundance brings a concern that children have a care-free childhood [also see, p. 87, Chapter Four: The Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Psychology, by Melvin Konner, in The Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen]. Relative stasis in the environment brings cultural stasis and reverence for the wisdom of the elderly. Constant change and upheaval in the environment brings cultural reverence for the highly-adaptive young and disregard for the relative worth of the older generations.

Our “reasoning” is fundamentally malleable. The person who argues that sexual expression should not be controlled because it is natural is easily able to simultaneously feel that children’s natural desire to eat large amounts of sugar should be controlled. We accumulate moral reasoning for the moral system that works for us and fits our experience. But most people make no attempt to be remotely consistent. For good reason.

One person says that it is immoral to experience the pleasure of homosexual relations. Another says that it is immoral to experience the pleasure of gun ownership. Measuring these statements is powerfully personal: where one believes there to be harm and where one believes there to be harmlessness is often based on experience and not particularly malleable or susceptible to persuasion [Parsing "Care" as a Moral Verb, this blog]. 

When it comes to implementing true values, there are always trade-offs, which is why there are different traditions of values (cultures) and why no one cultural tradition has ever been able to honor everything that is good.(p. 38, Culture Theory: Some Classic Problems, Why Do Men Barbecue? by Richard Shweder)

We insist on making group-level determinations about what sort of life is worth living and what sort of life is worth nurturing, because as a community, we bear the burdens of whatever these conclusions entail in allocation of shared resources and environmental effects.

Ultimately, moral systems are artefacts of cultures, and moral philosophers are inevitably apologists for the moral systems of their own culture.

My Method

My method, born of necessity not idealism, has been to simply observe, and upon observing I begin to notice patterns emerging, and then I locate discussions around those patterns in the academic literature, groping around until I find the terms that the specialists use to describe what concerns me. And then I become dissatisfied with the terms; it begins to feel that all the specialists have are semantics, and statistics based on the semantics. For linguists, the word “semantics” has depth and richness, but out in the world, “semantics” implies shallowness and word-play. The more I delve into these works, mostly in the social sciences, the more I am with the late, great sociologist George Homans when he observed:

We shall begin with semantics, the science of tracing words back to their references in observed fact. In sociology we are devoted to the ‘big’ words: status, culture, function, heuristic, particularistic, methodology, integration, solidarity, authority. Too often we work with these words and not with observations. Or rather, we do not wed the two. No one will make progress with this book who does not train himself to extensionalize [See S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 58-60], who does not habitually catch himself as he mouths one of the big abstractions and ask: What does this mouthful mean in terms of actual human behavior that someone has seen and reported? Just what, in human behavior, do we see? The question is devastating, and we do not ask it half often enough.” (emphasis in original: The Human Group, 1950, p. 10)

Observation is the start of everything, and while statistical analysis is helpful, it is not the end. After statistical analysis, we must take it all back to observation and confirm the analysis (and its usefulness) there.

 Sophistication includes knowing when not to be sophisticated. No one is more a creature of fashion than the average intellectual. He is quite ready to believe, at any moment, that certain kinds of work are the only respectable ones to go into. We are told, for instance, that our data in sociology should be quantitative, that is, should be cast in numerical form, and of course they should. But good observation ought not to be discarded just because it is not numerical. Sociology may miss a great deal if it tries to be too quantitative too soon. Data are not nobler because they are quantitative, nor thinking more logical because mathematical. . . . Let us make the important quantitative, not the quantitative important. The final emphasis must always be on the group before us. (Homans, The Human Group, 1950, p. 22)

A problematic word that seems to be at the crux of the things that concern me about what I have been observing is “groupishness.”

 There is a great deal of fuzziness around the use of the word “groupishness” (and to some extent also in the use of terms like “group cohesion,” “tribalism” and talk of certain “human kinds” [a la Berreby] being “team players”). In one odd corner of the Internet someone described it as a “nonce word”—designed to be used once and not to become part of regular vocabulary—and someone else felt compelled to put quotes around it whenever they used it. In the latter case, the author offered that “It's not very helpful to think of groupishness as a category unless you specify what sort of group is going to be produced.” Perhaps having something to do with the problematic lack of a lexical history, it is a word some people seem to use but few seem to trouble themselves to precisely define. 

 I have come across a wide range of terms, thinking and theories around concepts of “groupishness” in sociology, group psychology, social psychology, political science, evolutionary theory and anthropology that I have been exploring. Much of the work around groups and groupishness that I have delved into has centered on political groupings that have used some version of the right-left scale, though that is not groupishness per se, rather a form of groupishness. And it has been my observations of statistical conservatives and statistical liberals that have worrisomely not matched the conclusions reported in the social sciences that have mostly informed my own contemplations. Nonetheless, I find myself most concerned with groupishness more broadly, and so my reading has ranged quite widely.

 This list, frighteningly enough, is by no means comprehensive of all the reading I have done, but it includes some of the more helpful thoughts and thinkers.

Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Sherif) Self-categorization Theory (Turner) Cultural Theory of Risk (Douglas & Wildavsky, Rayner & Gross-- further elaborated as the  Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk (Kahan et al) Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Toennies and Durkheim) In-group bias (Sumner) Social actions, Herrschaft, Verstehen (Weber) Work groups and Basic Assumption groups (Bion) Allocentrism and Idiocentrism/Collectivism and Individualism (Triandis) Collective identity (Mead, Melucci) Muscular bonding (McNeill) Constrained and Unconstrained Visions (Sowell) Optimal distinctiveness (Brewer) Cultural memory/Tradition (Pascal Boyer) Coalitions, mutuality and cooperation (Cosmides & Tooby, Kurzban, Sperber) Syndrome of Ethnocentrism (LeVine and Campbell) Authoritarianism (Adorno, Jost) Motivated cognition (Jost) Reverse Dominance Hierarchies (Boehm) Relationship regulation, Relational Management Theory (Fiske) Group cohesiveness (David Sloan Wilson, particularly around religiosity) Groupthink (Janis) The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality (Alan Page Fiske) Infrahumanization (Leyens & Demoulin) In-group boundary keeping (Lovaglia and Houser) Dual Inheritance Theory (Richerson & Boyd, Henrich) Cultural Psychological approaches (Shweder, Markus, Kitayama, Heine, Norenzayan, Buchtel) Moral Foundation Theory (Haidt, Joseph, Graham, et al., building on Shweder) Civil Religion (Rousseau, Bellah) Social Exchange Theory (Homans) Moral coherence (Ditto and Liu) Moral coordination (DeScioli and Kurzban) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) The Blank Slate (Pinker) Us and Them: The Science of Identity (Berreby) Obedience to Authority (Milgram) Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo)  

It is impossible to fairly represent the depth, complexity and intellectual fullness of any of the thinkers I will be discussing here. But if one was intent on being perfectly comprehensive, one would never be finished, and so all one can do is be humble and make a start. I try to avoid setting up straw men, but I’m afraid in some instances I may come dismayingly close to doing that. Not only have some of these thinkers been incredibly generative, many write on challenging topics in ways that are not entirely accessible. Sometimes it is a writer whose work I must read in translation and a quick comparison between two translations shows meaningful differences that proves the importance of being able to read the material in the original language. In other cases, even when written in a language I am competent in, what the writer really meant by what they wrote is a matter of considerable disagreement and debate. But it is also a fact that having, necessarily, read only a limited amount of each thinker’s writing, even when written in clear and comprehensible language, I can easily and quite accidentally misunderstand and misrepresent what they said and what they meant by what they said by my cherry picking. (Dear Reader, if you believe you find such an error, please point it out to me.)

  I should also mention, Dear Reader, that when I place citations in this series on Groupishness, it is because the citation is a source for my thinking: via either agreement or disagreement. Sometimes I read a source and come to the opposite conclusion. Rather like the convention that one can re-tweet something as much as a mark of disapproval as approval. [Enjoy!]

But, out of all the similar topics that have been concretely written of and discussed widely, I perversely want to find a meaningful definition for a nebulous word like “groupishness.”

Because included in any discussion of the term “groupishness” must be the acknowledgement that much confusion and disagreement abounds as to what is properly considered a characteristic of the individual and what is a characteristic of the group.