Sports and politics: How strong is group identity? | Ezra Klein | Big Think

I think it’s important that people’s theories of politics are built on a foundation of a theory about human nature or some rigorous empirics about human nature. And something that I think we do a bad job understanding is the way the psychology of identity and group affiliation function in politics.

We tend to suggest that identity politics is something that only marginalized groups do, and in fact, it’s something we all do. All politics, all the time, is influenced by identity. In the 1930s and ‘40s, a guy named Henri Tajfel, he was a Polish Jew, moved from Poland to France. He moved from Poland to France because in Poland he couldn’t go to university because he was Jewish; in France, he enlists in World War II.

He’s captured by the Germans, but he’s understood by the Germans as a French prisoner of war, so he survives the war. When he’s released, all of his family has been killed in the Holocaust, and he would have been killed as well if they had understood him to be a Polish Jew and not a French soldier. And he begins thinking and obsessing about these questions of identity: What makes human beings sort each other into groups? Why, when they sort each other into groups, do they become so easily hostile to one another? And what does it take to sort into a group? What are the minimum levels of connection we need to have with each other to understand ourselves as part of a group and not individuals?

So, he begins doing a set of experiences that are now known as the minimum viable group paradigm. And it’s a bit of an ironic term for reasons that I will get to you in a second, but he gets 64 kids from all the same school and he brings them in and he says, you know, we need you to do an experiment. Could you look at this screen and tell me how many dots are on it? Just real quick, do an estimation.

And then researchers are busily scoring the work and deciding if the kids overestimated or underestimated. Then the researchers say, "Hey, while we’ve got you here, would you mind doing another experiment with us, not related to the first one in any way? We’re just going to sort you into two groups: people who overestimated the number of dots and the people who underestimated them, but a different experiment. Don’t worry about it."

In truth, this sorting is completely random; it had nothing to do with dots; nobody cared how many dots anybody estimated. But immediately in this new experiment, which has to do with money allocation, the kids begin allocating more money, which they’re not allocating to themselves, it’s only to other people. They begin allocating more money to their co-dot over- or under-estimators. And this was a surprise because the way this experiment was supposed to work was Tajfel and his co-authors were going to sort people into groups but not enough that they would begin to act like groups, and they were going to begin adding conditions to see at what point group identity took hold.

But even Tajfel, who had gone through such a searing traumatic, horrifying experience with how easily and how powerfully group identity takes hold, he underestimated it. He felt this would be underneath the line, almost like a control group, but it was already over the line. This experiment was replicated by him in other ways and in other ways that actually showed not only would people favor members of their group, but they would actually discriminate against the outgroup. They would prefer that everybody gets less so long as the difference between what their group and the other group got was larger.

And again, these groups are meaningless and random; even atop their meaninglessness. But look around, think about sports, think about how angry people get, how invested they get in their identity connection to a team that oftentimes has no loyalty back to them. That will move if it doesn’t get a stadium tax break or players will leave if they get a better deal. But we get so invested in our local team and what it says about our identity and the group we’re part of as fans of that team that in the aftermath of losses and wins, we wil...