The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  One explanation is that groups create deindividuation, a loss of the individual self. An analysis of 166 failed and successful suicide attempts across the US between 1966 and 1979 found that crowds were present in about twenty of them and, of those, half were found to bait or jeer the victim.9 The factors that seemed to link to baiting were larger crowds, the distance between the crowd and the victim, and the cover of night – arguably all factors that lead to greater anonymity.

  Anonymity to outsiders appears to be the crucial factor when individuals feel that they are not accountable, which leads to greater antisocial behaviour. Riots, lynching and hooliganism are all believed to be examples of mob mentality that are thought to thrive through the process of deindividuation.10 In contrast, the more that we lose anonymity, the more we conform and behave. In one simple study, researchers placed a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall above a collection tin in the coffee room where members of staff paid for their beverages.11 For the next ten weeks they alternated posting pictures of flowers or watchful eyes above the coffee pot. People were more honest paying for their beverages when the eyes were posted. Just like the self-conscious Halloween children, we are more honest when a mirror is present to reflect our behaviour. When we are made self-conscious we become more accountable. For example, students consider working on an exam paper after time is up as cheating, and yet 71 per cent of them continue to do so if left alone. However, only 7 per cent do so if they are made self-aware by a mirror hanging in the exam room.12 Anything that exposes the self to the scrutiny of others makes us more prosocial. Groups can bring out both the good and bad sides of our self.

  Does one really lose one’s individual identity in a crowd as deindividuation suggests? As the psychologist Vaughan Bell13 points out, anyone who has ever found themselves in a situation where they are suddenly under threat as a group does not necessarily lose identity – they just see themselves as part of a different, larger collective. For example, imagine you get on a crowded late-night bus home where there is a group of drunken students, an elderly couple and maybe a teenager playing his music too loudly through his personal stereo. You do not feel anything in common with them and might even resent your fellow travellers. However, if looters, aliens or zombies suddenly attack the bus, you spontaneously feel like a group and formulate plans to fend off the threat. You do not lose your identity but form a new one to address the group concern of which you are now a member. It’s the storyline of many film scripts where individuals discover themselves in threatening situations and, of course, this is where the heroes and villains emerge. So groups do not cause deindividuation but rather trump individualism depending on the context.14

  Piggy in the Middle

  Do you remember the childhood game, ‘piggy in the middle’? It’s a wicked teasing game. Usually, two players are supposed to pass a ball backwards and forwards to each other and the ‘piggy’ is the person in the middle who has to intercept it. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it. Except that whenever I was the piggy, I used to get very upset because it seemed as if I was being excluded.

  Caring about what others think may be one of the strongest preoccupations we have as an animal. Indeed, as Philippe Rochat15 has pointed out, ‘To be human is indeed to care about reputation.’ To be ostracized from the group is the worst fate, which he calls ‘psychological death’. Being ignored and rejected by our peers is painful. Most of us can remember being very upset when we were teased as children or not picked to play on teams. At the time, these events seemed like personal tragedies.

  This is why bullying is not simply physically abusive but psychologically traumatizing. According to a 2001 survey by the US National Institute of Child Health, one in three teenage children was involved in bullying.16 It is more prevalent in boys than girls and the patterns of abuse are different.17 For males, both physical and verbal bullying is common, whereas for females verbal bullying through taunting and rumour-mongering is typically more common. However, even though girls use less physical violence, neuroscience indicates they might as well punch their victims, as the pain of social rejection is just as real.

  This is something that psychologist Kip Williams from Purdue University knows from experience. He was out in the park walking his dog one day when he was hit in the back with a Frisbee. He threw it back to one of the two guys who were playing with it who then began tossing it back to Kip. This was fun but, after about a minute, they stopped throwing the Frisbee to Kip and returned their attention to each other. At first Kip thought it was amusing but then it became clear that they were not going to include Kip in their game again. The psychology professor was surprised at how upset he was by this exclusion given that he had only been included in their game for a minute and that these were complete strangers. He realized how sensitive we are to ostracism.

  Kip took his experiences from the park and developed a computer simulation known as ‘Cyberball’ where adult participants had their brains scanned as they played a game where they had to toss a ball back and forth between two other playmates.18 Just like the frisbee event, Cyberball was going along fine, until the two others started to only pass the ball back between themselves and ignore the adult in the brain scanner. When this exclusion became obvious, the ACC regions of the brain, which are activated by social cognition, started to light up with activity. This is because the pain of rejection also triggers the ACC – a result of its importance as a mechanism for conflict resolution. The social exclusion of the game had initially caused consternation and then distress, as it activated areas associated with emotional pain. Just like ego-depletion, those who were rejected by colleagues were more likely to eat fattening cookies, which is probably where comfort food gets its potency.19 When we say that our feelings are hurt, it may not simply be a metaphor we are using. We really feel as much pain as a punch in the stomach.

  What is remarkable is how sensitive we are to being rejected. Even when participants played Cyberball for only a couple of minutes and were told that it was only a computer simulation, they still felt the pain of rejection.20 And this pain had nothing to do with the personality of the players either. They were not overly sensitive. Rather, there is something very fundamental and automatic about ostracism.21 Williams argues that this reaction must be hard-wired and points out that, in many other social species, ostracism often leads to death. That’s why humans are so sensitive. As soon as it looks as though we are in danger of being ostracized, we become hyper-vigilant to those around us, looking for clues in the way people are interacting and opportunities to re-engage with the group.22 Excluded individuals engage in behaviours that increase their likelihood of being reconciled back into the group. We are more likely to mimic, comply with requests, obey orders and cooperate with others who don’t deserve it. We become obsequious to the extent that we will agree with others who are clearly in the wrong.

  If these ingratiating strategies fail, then ostracized individuals switch tack and turn from being likeable to being angry and aggressive: ‘Look at me, I’m worthy of attention. I am not invisible, damn you.’ Individuals no longer care about being liked but rather want to exert their influence on others to take notice. People who have been ostracized are less helpful and more aggressive to others, whether or not the others are the perpetrators of the ostracism. For example, in one study ostracized individuals sought revenge by giving an innocent bystander five times the amount of hot chilli sauce as a punishment even when they knew the victim hated the sauce.23 Many of the tragic cases of school shootings and murderous rampages involve individuals who feel they have been socially rejected. An analysis of the diaries of school-shooters found that in thirteen of the fifteen cases examined, the perpetrators had been targets of ostracism.24 Clearly not everyone who has been ostracized goes on a shooting rampage, but if the ostracism persists, then excluded individuals eventually experience alienation and worthlessness. They often withdraw from society and become profoundly depressed and contemplate suicide. As humans, we all need to belong.


  Do You Want to Be in My Gang?

  In his resignation telegram to an elite Beverly Hills social club, Groucho Marx wrote, ‘Please accept my resignation, I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.’25

  Whether we like it or not, we are all members of clubs. As a social animal, we cannot help but hang out with others. Even those of us not in a family can identify significant others in our lives – friends, Romans and even countrymen. Ultimately we are all members of one very big club: the human species. No man or woman is an island. Of course, there are some among us who reject being with others and seek out the isolated life of a hermit, but that is not the norm. They are the weirdoes amongst us. Most of us just want to belong. There is a drive, deep inside us, that compels us to be accepted by others.

  Some group membership is relatively fixed and independent of what we want – age, sex, race, height and nationality, for example – though sometimes we try to change even these: lie about our age, cross-dress, have surgery, wear elevator shoes and become a nationalized citizen. Other groups we aspire to join throughout our lifetime – the in-crowd, the jet-set, the highfliers, the intelligentsia or the seriously wealthy. Some of us are assigned to groups we would rather not join – the poor, the uneducated, the criminal classes or the drug addicts. People do not normally choose to be any of these but we are all members of groups whether we like it or not. Furthermore, it is in our human nature to categorize each other into groups. Even those who don’t want to be characterized are a group unto themselves – they are the dropouts and the outsiders.

  We categorize others because it makes it much easier to deal with strangers when we know where they are coming from. We do not have to do as much mental work trying to figure out how to respond and can react much quicker when we categorize. This is a general principle of our brains – we tend to summarize previous experiences to be prepared for future encounters. It’s likely to be an evolutionary adaptation to optimize processing loads and streamline responses. When we identify someone as belonging to a group, this triggers all the stereotypes we possess for that group, which, in turn, influences how we behave towards the person. The problem is, of course, that stereotypes can be very wide of the mark when it comes down to the characteristics of the individual.

  Those stereotypes can also be manipulated by others as well as by prejudice, which means we can all be biased to be biased. In one study, participants had to inflict painful punishment on fellow students in a learning experiment, and they were allowed to choose the level of pain to administer.26 If they ‘accidentally’ overheard an experimenter describe the students as ‘animals’ before the start of the experiment, the participants chose more severe punishments. They were influenced by others’ opinions. Most of us say we hate to be pigeonholed but the truth is that it is in our nature to label others and be labelled our selves, and that process is highly dependent on what other people think. We are less self-assured than we believe in making our minds up. It is the group consensus, not the individual opinion, that determines how most of us evaluate others.

  The groups we belong to define us, but we are constantly entering, leaving, expanding and swapping our groups. People obviously benefit from the collective power of groups as well as the resources and companionship that can be shared, but membership is also necessary for generating a sense of self-identity. Just belonging to a group shapes our self because we automatically identify with other members. We know this from the work of social psychologists like Henri Tajfel who used to be the head of my department. Before he came to Bristol in the 1960s, Tajfel witnessed the power of groups when he was a French prisoner-of-war, having been captured by the Germans during the Second World War. In fact, he was a Polish Jew but he kept this aspect of his identity secret from his German prison guards. After the war, Tajfel dedicated his life to understanding group psychology. In what is now regarded as a classic study, he showed that arbitrarily assigning Bristol schoolboys into two groups by the toss of a coin produced changes in the way that they treated each other.27 Those members in the same group or ‘in group’ were more positive to each other, and shared resources, but hostile to ‘out group’ members, even though they were all from the same class.

  What’s In Your Eye, Brother?

  In fact, Tajfel’s study had been pre-empted a couple of years earlier in the United States by Jane Elliot, an Iowa third-grade teacher from Middle America.28 The class had just been studying Dr Martin Luther King Jr as American of the Month, when news came over that the civil rights leader had been assassinated on 4 April 1968. The children had little experience of discrimination and could not understand why anyone would want to kill their man of the month. The following day, Elliot planned an audacious class project to teach them about discrimination. She told her class that there was very good evidence that children with blue eyes were superior to students with brown eyes.

  Following this revelation, Elliot afforded the blue-eyed students privileges such as extra long breaks and being first in the lunch queue. However, the next day she said that she had been wrong, and that in fact the evidence proved that it was the brown-eyed children who were superior. This role-reversal produced the same pattern. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behaviour of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests, whereas the superior group became more hostile to the inferior group, thinking them less worthy. Simply by belonging to a group influences how you feel about your self and how you feel about others not in your group. In fact, it is the favourable comparisons that we draw against others not in our group that help to define who we are. This is how we formulate our identity – by focusing on what we are not. The trouble is that by focusing on others, we miss our own imperfections. As Matthew (7:3) in the Bible reminds us when talking about small grains (motes) of imperfection, ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’

  Social identity theory has been refined and elaborated over the decades with research demonstrating that people see themselves within a hierarchy of different groups that can shift periodically over the lifespan. Clearly some changes in circumstances change our group affiliation. If we marry, have children or become crippled, the groups to which we belong change by default. Because we occupy so many different positions throughout our lifetime – child, adolescent, worker, parent, etc. – most of us see our selves occupying multiple groups. In most instances we perceive group membership as bolstering self-esteem; by being part of a larger affiliation, we gain a sense of who we think we are as individuals. This is a delicate balance we strive to achieve between our desire to be an individual and the need to belong alongside others,29 though not every culture sees the need to strike this balance. Most of us believe that we know our own minds and whether we decide to identify with a group, or not, is really up to us to decide. However, if anything has emerged in the field of social psychology, it is the revelation that such a belief is naive as we are all susceptible to the power of the group – whether we like it or not.

  Conformity

  How good is your vision? Take a good look at the lines in Figure 7 and decide which one matches the line on the left – A, B or C? This is pretty much a no-brainer and unless someone has serious visual problems, you would predict that everyone would answer B. However, it depends what others around you say.

  In what is considered one of the most important studies of the power of groups,30 Solomon Asch had eight participants take the line test. He held up cards with the lines on them and went round the room asking the participants which line matched the test line. In fact, there was only one real subject as the other seven participants were actually confederates of the experiment. At first, everything seemed above board. Everyone agreed on the length of the test line on the first two trials. However, on the third trial, the confederates gave the wrong answer saying that it was line C that matched. The real participant stared in disbel
ief at his fellow students. Were they blind? What would the participant say when it came to his turn? On average, three out of every four participants went along with his fellow participants and also gave the wrong answer. Each did not suddenly become blind, but rather conformed in accordance with the group so as not to be the outsider. Each participant was fully aware of the correct answer, but each did not want to appear different. They did not want to be ostracized so they conformed to the group consensus.

  What about situations that are not so clear-cut, as in the case of a jury evaluating evidence? In Sidney Lumet’s classic portrayal of the power of group psychology, Twelve Angry Men (1957), Henry Fonda stands alone as the one dissenting member of a jury. In the film, a Spanish–American youth is accused of murdering his father, but Fonda gradually convinces the other jury members that the eyewitness testimony is not only unreliable, but false. This film was made long before the experiments on false memories were conducted. As the film unfolds, we see the dynamics of allegiances shift as Fonda tries to win the jury over man by man. It is a dramatic portrayal of the power of compliance and group consensus.

  When we conform, it is not so much the power of the group or peer pressure that shapes our behaviour, but rather our desire to be accepted. Our need to conform is a powerful force that shapes us and literally changes the way we think. In other words, it is not just public compliance when we conform to the group but true private acceptance of group norms. For example, when asked to rate the attractiveness of music or faces,31 if there is a discrepancy between an individual’s liking and the group consensus, this triggers activation in brain regions associated with social cognition and reward evaluation. However, as soon as we have an ally, we become more self-opinionated. In Asch’s line test, it only required the presence of one other dissenter to give the right answer for the effect to reduce significantly. When we are accompanied by another dissenter, we are no longer an individual but part of a new group. The same thing unfolded in Twelve Angry Men. That’s why we seek out others who share our opinion, because there is strength in numbers. It’s also one of the reasons that oppressive regimes quash any resistance as soon as it starts to appear. If we feel isolated and powerless, then we submit more readily to authority and are less likely to resist. History teaches that authoritarian regimes have managed to control the people by terrorizing them into submission with acts of human cruelty and atrocity, but to suppress dissent you need others to do your bidding unquestioningly. This is where the power of the group can be manipulated to change the nature of the individual. This is where normal, good-natured people become monsters.