GROUP CONFLICT & ETHNOCENTRICISM – PART 2
Conformity; football hooliganism; ethnocentricism; social identity; self-esteem; rehabilitation; personal responsibility; the nature of evil; genocide
In last week’s newsletter, we looked at conformity, and how the demands of the social group can lead to violent or aggressive behaviour among gangs of football hooligans. We also looked at Social Identity Theory (SIT), a powerful idea in Social Psychology which implies that people are constantly trying to raise their self-esteem, either through personal triumphs, or raising the status of whichever group they happen to be identifying with at the time. This week, we’ll deal with something called Criminal Social Identity. After that, we’ll take on ] a giant subject indeed - the nature of evil.
After last week’s discussion of SIT, one question may have occurred to you. What if a person’s in-group – the group they identify with, which they count on to burnish their self-esteem – what if, rather than being the goal-scoring, green-hat wearing, coin-toss winning group they’d like to imagine, turns out not to be very appealing? What, indeed, if it turns out to be a little grim?
Imagine this: A man finds himself in prison for, say, child molesting – a crime despised even by his fellow inmates. Prison slang marks him out as a nonce – which is to say, a member of the group of nonces. Now, membership in that group is the last thing the prisoner wants. He’ll look for a way out – not from prison itself, but from the prison-within-a-prison to which he seems condemned.
The jargon this time is social mobility: when someone tries to take on membership of a different group (such as, say, the ‘wrongly-accused’, or ‘hardmen around the prison yard’) instead of the one in which they find themselves (‘nonces’). In any given case, his application to join a newer, better group is in the lap of the gods. The group may reject the man’s application for membership. The mere presence of a nonce may be enough to devalue the group, after all, and lower the self-esteem of everyone in it.
It’s the same on the outside: How often do we hear a story about an offender trying to reform, only to be short-changed by a ‘society that rejects him’? It’s a staple of crime novels. We can clearly see SIT in action again. Our luckless prisoner is likely to adopt something psychologists call a Criminal Social Identity (CSI).[i]
Let’s consider the case of the average prisoner (not necessarily a nonce). He (or, less likely, she) doesn’t have a large variety of groups to choose from. Their immediate social circle is more or less restricted to criminals (and not necessarily very successful ones at that: after all, by definition, they’ve been caught). If this average prisoner wants to raise their self-esteem, the optimum strategy is clear: raise the status of the in-group; convince everyone who cares that a Criminal Social Identity is a good identity.
Think of it like this: in a society where everyone wears a mask, the prettier the better, our prisoner has been handed down a particularly ugly one. The prisoner might swap it for one that’s marginally less unappealing – but in truth their options range only from the horrid to the monstrous. What can they do but shrug and try to prettify the mask as best they can? Out come the finger-paints, the sequins, the badges.
The more strongly the prisoner identifies with the criminal in-group, the more likely they are to adopt its thinking patterns and behaviours. No surprise there. Both help demonstrate conformity to group norms. It’s going to be a mighty challenge to rehabilitate such a prisoner. Perhaps it will be impossible.
Let’s turn again to that matter of self-esteem, which I mentioned in the previous newsletter. With regard to self-esteem, psychologists and the general public aren’t just on different wavelengths: they’re on whole different systems. Chalk and cheese are not more different than professional and public concepts of self-esteem.
According to SIT, we are all trying to raise our self-esteem in one way or another. That sounds positive. The psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden wrote this (and infinite psychologists wish he hadn’t): ‘I cannot think of a single psychological problem - from anxiety and depression, to underachievement at school or at work, to fear of intimacy, happiness or success, to alcohol or drug abuse, to spouse battering or child molestation […] that is not traceable, at least in part, to the problem of deficient self-esteem’.[ii]
On the back of such claims, the state of California unveiled its mighty Task Force for Self Esteem and Personal Responsibility. The idea was to prevent crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, (and just about every other social ill you could think of,) simply by raising everyone’s self-esteem. They thought it would take nothing more than that. (You honestly have to wonder whether the members of this Task Force had even been to California.)
We all know what to think about things that sound too good to be true. Here’s the psychologist, Roy Baumeister, taking a realer, saner, and far less uplifting view:
The quote comes from Baumeister’s book. Want to know what it’s called? Evil, no less. Baumeister – a world expert - takes just about the dimmest of all possible views.
He refines his thought: ‘[V]iolence ensues when people feel that their favourable views of themselves are threatened or disputed by others. As a result, people whose self-esteem is high but lacks a firm basis in genuine accomplishment are especially prone to be violent’.[iii]
And that sounds right, doesn’t it? Who ever calls out the self-absorbed narcissist? Not me, at any rate, not if I want to go peaceably about my day. Not you, either, I’m sure. That goes double if the narcissist in question happens to be some hulking menace with a gun. Can you think of any politicians on the world stage who might illustrate Baumeister’s principle? Really, can you?
Two further effects result from categorising people into groups. Both are malevolent and disturbing (not to mention topical). First of all, ‘deindividuation’. By that, psychologists mean disguise; they mean hiding ourselves from the gaze of others.
The word has quite a resonance in Psychology. The famous researcher, Philip Zimbardo, has devoted a large part of his career to studying and writing about deindividuation. ‘Anything, or any situation, that makes people feel anonymous,’ he writes, ‘as though no one knows who they are or cares to know, reduces their sense of personal accountability, thereby creating the potential for evil actions’.[iv] There’s that word ‘evil’ again.
Here’s a brief summary of some important findings:
· Compared to individuated peers, deindividuated female college students deliver electric shocks of twice the duration to other, perfectly innocent, women. It makes no difference whether the victims were believed to be ‘nice’ or ‘bitchy’.
· Children spend more than twice as much time playing aggressive games when they are anonymised by Halloween disguises, compared to when they are individuated and recognisable.
· Warriors who change their appearance before going into battle are far less inhibited than those who do not: ‘90 percent of the time when victims of battle were killed, tortured, or mutilated, it was by warriors who had first changed their appearance and deindividuated themselves’.[v]
· Zimbardo himself (and his colleagues) abandoned cars in two distinctly different areas of the United States: the Bronx, in New York City; and Palo Alto, in California. The dense urban environment was considered to be much more anonymous than the bucolic spot near campus. Within 48 hours, several dozen passers-by had stopped to vandalise the first car. In the course of one whole week in Palo Alto, no one vandalised a thing.
The second process, after deindividuation, is called ‘dehumanisation’.
Here is the novelist, Aldous Huxley: ‘The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human’.[vi] There is a reason for that. The propagandist, to put it crudely, wants you to hurt other people. That’s much easier to do if you don’t think of them as people at all.
The milder side of this is when we forget that other people are individuals, and treat them instead as representatives of particular social groups. That’s a common consequence of social categorisation. It plays out constantly, endlessly, on social media, where half the posts one sees in a day could be boiled down to something like ‘I’m an expert; you’re an amateur’, or ‘I’m a liberal; you’re a conservative,’ or ‘I’m a Democrat; you’re a Republican’. If we insert the word just, we get the full flavour: ‘I’m an expert; you’re just an amateur’; ‘I’m a conservative; you’re just a liberal; ‘I’m a Democrat; you’re just a Republican’. No wonder the discussions never get anywhere, when insults are buried in the very language.
It gets worse. Sometimes, we deny humanity altogether to those we believe are members of different, or inferior, social groups. The author James Waller writes about the psychological processes at work when history’s greatest crimes – genocides - occur. By now, the name of the first process will hardly surprise you: Us-Them Thinking.
As we saw, the simple division of people into groups makes us regard our own as more valuable than others. There is a process called ‘ethical dualism’. Those who are unfit to join Our group deserve whatever They get. Take cannibals in Indonesian New Guinea. They call themselves Asmar, which means ‘the people’. Outsiders are called Manowe, or ‘the edible ones’.[vii] This is ethical dualism at its purest. It is visible in all the worst events:
· Cunning politicians glorify one single group and its distinctiveness from all others. The extremely middle-class Vladimir Lenin, for instance, was busy advocating the proletarian cause long before he’d ever laid eyes on an actual proletarian.[viii] He learnt to dress and speak like a worker, and pointed out Others who were ‘spiders’ or ‘leeches’. They deserved to die.
· A Japanese soldier at the Rape of Nanking said of his victims, ‘I regard them as swine. We can do anything to such creatures’.
· At My Lai, where American soldiers massacred innocents by the hundred, the enemy were known as ‘gooks’. Who can have any sympathy for so inhuman a thing as a ‘gook’? We could never massacre people, for sure, but perhaps we could bring ourselves to massacre ‘gooks’.
· During the invasion of the Falkland Islands in the 1980s, the British press referred to the enemy as ‘Argies’. Who can have any sympathy for an ‘Argy’? Like ‘gooks’, ‘Argies’ just don’t sound human.
· Allied commanders during the Second World War explained to their troops that the Japanese had ‘renounced the right to be regarded as human’ – instead, they were ‘formidable fighting insects’.
· Rwandan radio told the Hutus that the Tutsis were ‘cockroaches’ and ‘cannibals’. Genocide was financed by Rwanda’s richest man, Félicien Kabuga. ‘Finance’, in this case, simply meant buying lots of machetes.
· The murderers who were responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers had learnt that all Americans were alike: simply capitalist infidels, responsible for every trouble in the world. They should be exterminated.
· Even the Nazi genocide started with propaganda that showed Jews as less than human, less even than rodents. (Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, illustrates this point in a way no reader will ever forget.)
· The Los Angeles Police Department had its own notorious expression for the murder of African-Americans: ‘NHI – No Human Involved’.[ix]
· On 11th November 2023, former President Donald Trump referred to his political opponents as ‘vermin’. And you know what we do to vermin, don’t you?
Let’s say we actively want to create prejudice, inter-group hostility, even violence. Our path is clear. Split people into groups on whatever spurious, pointless grounds we can invent (hat colour will do nicely). Convince the Green Hats that other Green Hats approve of, or actively encourage, aggression towards Yellow Hats. Tell them that Yellow Hats are less human than themselves. They may not believe it at first, but we know that a lie, repeated over and over and over, becomes indistinguishable from the truth. Now put the Green Hats into competition with the Yellow Hats: not necessarily for anything important - the mere fact of competition ought to do it. Let’s say we make them compete for simple attention, approval, or social-media Likes. That’s how you create enemies. Worse, that’s how you create Enemies (with a capital ‘E’). That’s how you create violence.
Can you think of a technology that does all of these things? Any handy, pocket-sized piece of kit, (containing, incidentally, the toxic, murderous ‘conflict material’ coltan, which has its miners enslaved and dying)?
The psychologist, Steven Pinker, writes about a ‘moral circle’. It loops warmly everyone whom we must treat as fellow human beings.[x] The march of civilisation means widening the circle, from the family, to the tribe, the nation, and, finally, to everyone everywhere – all of humankind. The tragedy of our postmodern world is the shrinking of the circle as we silo ourselves off into self-contained, morally self-righteous, echo-chambers wherein all of our allies are right, good, and forward-looking, and all of our enemies are wrong, bad, and primitive.
Do I have any suggestions? Yes, I do. Get rid of the technology that makes all of this not just possible, but, apparently, inevitable. Get rid of the technology that is explicitly designed to addict you to strife and intergroup conflict. Throw away your smartphone. It won’t actually fix anything, but it’ll be a start. But please subscribe to the Crime & Psychology newsletter before you do.
All pictures courtesy of Wiki Commons.
References supplied partly out of academic habit; partly so that you can read more about anything you find particularly interesting.
[i] Boduszek, D, Debowska, A, Sharratt, K, McDermott, D, Sherretts, N, Willmott, D, Popiolek, K and Hyland, P.: Pathways between types of crime and criminal social identity: A network approach Journal of Criminal Justice, 72, 2021, p.101750.
[ii] Branden, N: The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Nash Publishing, New York, 1969, p5
[iii] Baumeister, Roy: Evil – Inside human violence & cruelty, Henry Holt & Co, New York, 2001, p25
[iv] Zimbardo, Philip: The Lucifer Effect, Rider Books, UK, 2007, p301
[v] Zimbardo, Philip, op cit, p304
[vi] Aldous Huxley - The propagandist's purpose is to make one... (brainyquote.com)
[vii] Waller, James: Becoming Evil – How ordinary people commit genocide & mass killing, Second edition, OUP. Oxford, 2007 p197
[viii] Conquest, Robert, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, John Murray, London, 1999, p90
[ix] Leovy, Jill: Ghettoside – Investigating a homicide epidemic, Bodley Head, London,2015, p6
[x] Pinker, Steven: ‘The moral instinct’, New York Times, January 13, 2008
Thank you for your excellent comments and questions! I'm very glad you found the newsletter to be, at least, not the worst possible account.
It's always a bit unwise to speculate in politics - recent elections in the Netherlands and Argentina have shown us why - but you are quite right: One has to hope the situation never arises when one has to choose between a mask-wearing unaccomplished, anonymous narcissist and any other candidate at all. Maybe they would turn out to be great, but it might be advisable to find out from a very long distance. Fingers crossed we never have to collect the empirical evidence.
Low self-esteem plus an unmasked state isn't going to be safe, necessarily. The Psychology literature just gives us reason to assume that, on the average, it might be less dangerous than the reverse. To be honest, if you happen to be the one wired to the electrodes, you're probably not likely to find any personality characteristics in your tormentor particularly reassuring! Best avoided altogether, probably. High self-esteem - especially when it is not objectively justified - is definitely not a reassuring quality to have, though. I know some psychologists who shudder rather at magazine articles and the like that promise to help you 'Raise Your Self-Esteem!'
Powerful stuff thank you for summarising so clearly and for the bullerpoints on experimental evidence. I almost wrote experimental bullet points but that has a slightly different spin and is not the meaning intended. So the most threatening circumstances would be put place a high self esteem thug wearing a mask in a position of remarkable power and influence? Imagine for example someone born into huge privilege ditching his first name and running for high office under a pen name and under the cloak of a circus personality? Are we quite sure that low self esteem in the unmasked state is safe though? May people commit atrocities to change their circumstances and in doing so hope to heighten their self esteem? It would not seem an impossible idea. Of course I appreciate you didn't say that low self-esteem wasn't a potential way to violent crime, only that it was by no means the common one.