Copycats and Contrarians

by Michelle Baddeley

  Consistent with some of Le Bon’s insights, we can understand identity as something more diffuse than the economic concept allows. As we saw in chapter 1, economists such as Akerlof and Kranton have developed an economic approach to identity, describing it in transactional terms – as a form of social exchange.23 A rational, self-interested individual signals to a group to demonstrate that they share an identity with that group, and they do this in order to benefit from the support the group can give them. So, in economics, identity is essentially determined by each person’s cost-benefit calculations about what they will gain from joining a group. In social psychology, identity is not obviously concentrated around the net benefits to self-interested individuals. The identities that bind groups together are not so much about advantages for each individual. Rather, they relate to how the group as a whole can build strength through its sense of identity. Identity determines how we interact with different groups around us. In the language of social psychology, we identify with our in-groups, and so we tend to favour them. We do not identify with our out-groups and so we are inclined to discriminate against them. We feel a strong social bond with our in-group, and we will copy and emulate its members, even with practices such as tattoos and other forms of painful body modification that seem perverse to outsiders. The decisions we make to build a sense of identity with specific groups may take other, more benign forms – perhaps wearing certain types of clothes or buying specific types of consumer goods. Our consumption choices are not just about increasing our own satisfaction, they are also about building a sense of shared identity, and encouraging members of a group to act in concert. With a strong sense of identity, the group is more likely to be strong and robust.

  What drives us to build our identities around one group rather than another? How do we decide who is in our in-group and who is in our out-groups? The Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel tackled these questions. Like Wilhelm Reich, Tajfel’s work was inspired by the destructive power of fascism. As a Jew, he was excluded from the Polish university system and so studied in France, and served in the French army during the Second World War. He was captured by the Germans and spent some time in prisoner-of-war camps, returning home after the war to discover that his entire family and most of his friends had been killed in the Holocaust. This inspired him to think deeply about how racism, prejudice and discrimination have their roots in questions of identity. He developed his social identity theory in an attempt to understand the persecution of Jews, not only by the Nazis, but also by non-Nazi mobs of ordinary Germans.24 How was the majority of the German population so easily persuaded to comply with the diktats of Hitler and the Nazi Party? Why did so many of these ordinary people identify so easily with such an extraordinarily vicious cause?

  Tajfel’s research focused on two aspects of identity. First, he found that we form bonds with others very quickly and easily: it does not take very much at all to encourage us to identify with some groups and not others, even when we have a minimal amount in common with them. This underlies Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm, and it helps to explain how mob psychology forms rapidly and unconsciously.25 Essentially minor choices can operate as a surprisingly powerful signal in building allegiances with our in-groups. With minimal encouragement, we join a group with which we identify, even if that group is formed around mendacious principles.

  Second, we tend to discriminate against our out-groups. Affinities with some groups and antipathies against others fuel tensions between in-groups and out-groups. We can be encouraged to copy those around us engaging in discriminatory, prejudiced behaviour against other groups.

  Tajfel and his research team developed a series of path-breaking experiments, exploring how easy it is to polarise people by building divides on fragile grounds.26 They brought together a group of sixty-four boys who knew each other well, from the same house and form at a comprehensive school in Bristol. The boys were split into groups of eight. In the first stage of the experiment each boy was shown forty clusters of dots, each containing a varying number of dots. The boys were asked to estimate the number of dots in each cluster. They were given some spurious information about the motivation behind this first experiment. Then the boys were told that they would be participating in another, unrelated experiment, which was really designed to capture how easily the boys identified with a specific group. They were told that, for convenience, they would be assigned to one of two groups according to the similarity of the answers they had given to the dots task – whether they had underestimated or overestimated the number of dots. In reality, the boys were randomly allocated to the two different groups. On this minimal and false basis – the random allocation of boys into one group of ‘underestimators’ and another group of ‘overestimators’ – the boys formed their in-groups and out-groups.

  Now that the boys’ bonds were formed, the next stage of the experiment tested their favouritism in discriminating against out-groups. The boys were asked to allocate financial rewards and penalties to other boys. They were not told the identities of those they were rewarding or penalising, only that they were giving or taking from either an underestimator or an overestimator. No boy had anything to gain for himself so the allocations could not be determined by each boy’s self-interest. It was found that the boys consistently favoured those in their in-group. They gave the other boys in their in-group a bigger share of the money than they gave the boys in the out-group.

  Tajfel and his team then tested the robustness of this finding by separating the boys according to their preferences for ‘foreign painters’ – either a painting by Paul Klee or one by Wassily Kandinsky (though the boys were not told the names of the painters). Their findings were broadly the same as those from the dots experiment. When the boys had a choice between maximum profit for all the boys together and maximum profit for their in-group, the boys tended to favour their in-group. Tajfel’s experiments showed how easy it is to engender a sense of loyalty to a group, even on the seemingly spurious basis of patterns of dots or artistic preference. There is no obvious reason, at least from the perspective of self-interest, to form affinities on such flimsy bases. This underscores the insights from Le Bon and Reich that mobs cannot be easily understood if we do not take the perspective of the group as a whole in itself. Collective herding cannot be understood just by looking at individual herd-members because individuals in herds are prepared to discriminate against out-groups even when it is not in their individualistic self-interest to do so. With collective herding, group goals are paramount.27

  Do Tajfel’s findings apply in more ordinary contexts – such as choosing to grow a beard or style our hair in a topknot? That these superficial choices work so well in building identity is consistent with Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm. Modern hipsters are a salient example.28 Outwardly unconventional, hipsters are rebelling against out-groups, but conforming and identifying strongly with a specific in-group. They are simply copying a small in-group by dressing the same way and conforming to (minority) conventions. With Tajfel’s evidence in hand, we can return to the economists’ conceptions of identity introduced in the previous chapter. We saw there that economists focus on costly signals – for example painful permanent face tattoos. From an economics perspective, why would an individual incur large costs (physical, economic and/or monetary) if there was nothing in it for them? In economic models of identity, in-groups will believe that an individual who has incurred significant psychic as well as economic costs in getting face tattoos is sincere about their membership of the group. Costly signals make economic sense because they are more credible. Tajfel’s findings undermine this explanation, however. Tajfel and his colleagues showed that group identity can be formed without people having to do very much at all to signal to the groups with which they identify. Whilst hipsters and other rebels want to be defined as different, they do not need to incur significant personal costs to persuade others that they belong. More broadly, identity does not need to be founded on demonstrably strong poli
tical and ethical convictions. People can disingenuously adopt the uniforms of rebels and outsiders with much the same impact as if they had got themselves a face tattoo. As journalist and blogger Ezra Klein argues, replying to economist Paul Krugman’s observations about some hipsters at a music festival,

  Krugman suggests that hipsters are signaling a rejection of the workaday bourgeois world by flouting conventional dress codes. I think the truth is closer to the opposite: They’re signalling a mastery of the workaday bourgeois world by flouting conventional dress codes . . . as venture capitalist Peter Thiel writes . . . ‘Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.’29

  In essentially superficial ways, hipsters can cheaply signal to their potential investors that they are creative nonconformists. Outside the business world, when we join groups of other copycats it is not necessarily difficult to signal to them that we belong. We can join a herd without incurring any immediate costs, whether tangible or intangible. The collective herd can build momentum without any individual member having to consider carefully what they’re joining and why.

  Mobs at night-time

  The impacts of identity on groups and mob psychology are themes of enduring interest, not only for academics but for social policymakers too. Our night-time lives are often associated with potentially violent and antisocial group behaviours. Exeter psychologist Mark Levine is interested in how people interact in the night-time economy, especially after the pubs close. In the past, policymakers have assumed that violence escalates when pubs all close at the same time. In the UK in 2003, for example, Tony Blair’s government relaxed some of the licensing laws to allow for staggered closing times, to reduce the size of unruly drunk crowds. If lots of drunken revellers simultaneously spill into city streets, they thought, then the chance of violent altercations is magnified.

  Levine and his colleagues focused on the idea that late-night mob violence is not usually about individuals fighting with other individuals. It is about conflicts between in-groups and out-groups. Aggressors are often motivated by a desire to either show off to their in-group or threaten their out-groups, and their impulsive violent actions are fuelled by alcohol.30 In other words, this is a demonstration of collective herds in conflict, with each possessing an identity that is not easily explicable in terms of its individual members but which plays an important role in the conflict itself. And this is collective rather than self-interested herding because late-night violence does not obviously relate to what any lone person can gain in terms of individual self-interest.31

  To test their hypotheses, Levine and his colleagues concentrated their study on three cities in the northwest of England. They convened twenty focus-group interviews with fifty-three people – a mixture of students, manual and retail workers, and a handful of people on prison probation. From these group interviews they collected seventy-seven stories in which the interviewees recounted their direct experiences of violence, either as participants or observers. Only direct witnesses were included because the researchers wanted to know about first-hand experiences. Their findings were both expected and surprising. Stranger-on-stranger violence was rare. Fights between members of the same in-group were common. One interviewee commented, ‘[Y]ou can know people too well . . . because he’s your mate and because you’re drunk, then you get aggressive with [him].’32 Intra-group conflicts were interpreted as friendly banter. They were often quickly resolved and forgotten.

  Violence was more serious when people fought with out-groups. Intergroup violence was usually driven by mob psychology and the group’s interests, and not by individuals’ independent actions. One interviewee observed that ‘Instead of single people, it’s gangs of lads.’33 Another interesting and perhaps unexpected finding was that many of the interviewees did not believe that police intervention was necessary most of the time. The collective herds were, to an extent, self-regulating, reflecting people’s strong social instincts to help others in distress. Often people observing a fight would play a positive and effective role in intervening and de-escalating the violence. Levine and his colleagues also noted that people watched out for their friends during nights out, and monitored whether they were drinking excessively. So, whilst mobs and crowds might play some role in escalating violence, they are also able to monitor and regulate themselves. Levine and his colleagues concluded that crowds may have positive as well as negative impacts. The presence of collective herds in the night-time economy is not unequivocally bad. In fact, perhaps police intervention during the fights simply magnifies the opportunities for conflict and violence, by introducing another out-group into the fracas.

  Peer pressures

  We have seen that mob psychology reflects interplays and feedbacks between individuals and groups. Identity plays a crucial role and the extent to which we identify with our in-groups against our out-groups helps to explain why tensions between different groups emerge. We can form bonds with our in-groups very easily, but are there other psychological explanations for our tendencies to conform so easily? What encourages an individual to do what others are doing, even when their choices do not align with their ethical principles or own self-interest? Groups need to develop ways of reinforcing group norms – behaviours that prioritise group interests over individual interests. Peer pressure plays a powerful role in this, helping to ensure the cohesiveness of groups, crowds and mobs.

  The social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a range of pioneering and influential experiments to demonstrate the power that peer pressure exerts in group settings. Like Tajfel, Asch was a Polish social psychologist of Jewish origin, but his family left Europe before the Holocaust, immigrating to New York in the 1920s. Asch completed his high school and college studies there and went on to have a distinguished career as an academic social psychologist in the US. In the 1930s, on hearing of Hitler’s hypnotic influence over the German population, he hypothesised that Nazi propaganda was effective because it tapped into an unconscious combination of fear and ignorance. He went on to develop an interest in our susceptibility to social influences, particularly when we are processing new information, including propaganda. To colleagues, Asch also recounted another event from his childhood that had fuelled his interest in conformity. One Passover night, he had been allowed to stay up late. He watched as his grandmother poured an extra glass of wine, and Asch’s uncle explained that this last glass was for the prophet Elijah. As an impressionable child, Asch thought he saw some wine disappear from this extra glass. At some unconscious level, he was responding to group pressure from his family, forming a superstitious belief in the prophet’s intervention. So he thought that Elijah really had taken a sip, his imagination fuelled by his instinct to conform to his family’s beliefs.34

  Asch and his team designed a line judgement task to test for peer pressure.35 They wanted to discover if people could be manipulated into giving obviously wrong answers to simple questions just because they felt a real or imagined peer pressure from a group around them. Asch’s experiment has since been replicated and adapted extensively, but the initial experiment was simple. Groups of between seven and nine male college students were assembled in a classroom and shown a series of two cards – we’ll call them Card A and Card B. Card A depicted a single line. Card B depicted three lines of different lengths. The students were asked to choose which of the three lines on Card B matched the line on Card A. They had to announce their answers to the rest of the group, one by one. The experiment was then repeated numbers of times.36

  In the early rounds, everyone got it right (it is a very simple task, after all). In the third round, however, the scenario changed. One of the students was surprised to find that he disagreed with the others in his group about which line from Card B matched the line from Card A. He did not know that the experimenters had briefed the other students to give the same wrong answer. In each group, the lone student confronted a conflict between his own beliefs and the unanimous judgement of everyone else.

  Asch and his team cond
ucted this initial experiment across three academic institutions, with 123 students placed in the minority scenario outlined above, and the experimenters talked to the students afterwards to find out more about how they had reacted to the confusion. The lone minority students changed their answer to match those of the lying majority 37 per cent of the time. Individual differences modulated the students’ responses, suggesting that personality and emotions play key roles in determining whether we decide confidently or otherwise to be copycats or contrarians. Asch and his team loosely separated their student participants into categories according to their emotional responses. Some students were admirably independent and did not seem to worry about being in a minority. They did not respond strongly to the majority opinion and seemed easily able to adapt quickly to the doubts raised by others, calmly retaining confidence and sticking to their own initial (and correct) answer. Other students expressed significant distress and confusion when they found that they were in a minority of one. One group of ‘dissenters’ did not sway from their correct answers, but being in the minority worried them. They became confused and unsure and stuck reluctantly to their correct answer. Finally, there was a broad category of students described by Asch as ‘extremely yielding persons’, who were persuaded by the group’s response to give the wrong answer. In their post-experiment interviews, these yielding students rationalised the disagreement in different ways. Some blamed their mistakes on the other students, arguing that the others’ sheep-like behaviour had been misleading. Some students thought that perhaps the experimenters were trying to trick them with an optical illusion. A further self-critical group thought that their initial answers had been the product of their own stupidity. Asch and his team also noticed that the students who yielded to the majority answer systematically underestimated how often they were conforming to the wrong majority answer, perhaps suggesting unconscious influences were at play.