Group Identity Helps Explain How We Hold Contradictory Beliefs
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Just how much of yourself do you need to change to belong to a community? What are you giving over when signing that dotted line? Whether it's an actual sheet of paper, a verbal declaration, or taking on the community's label, there’s an activity involved of placing yourself into the proverbial box and be defined by it. Tribalism and the seemingly inherent problem it creates of pitting one group against another in some form of quest for supremacy, is the go-to explanation of the American political climate, among other competing groups. For that matter, I’ve used it as an explanation.
However, tribalism does not demand such conflict, nor does it require a mentality of us versus them, as if a contrary perspective must be viewed through a militaristic lens. Tribalism, far from being a source itself of inter-group intransigence, is simply the cognitive spin placed on a perception, real and imagined, of resource scarcity. Tribalism is a form of community-building that emphasizes differences, for sure, but at its core it’s about belonging. Community…
"…offers the promise of belonging and calls for us to acknowledge our interdependence. To belong is to act as an investor, owner, and creator of this place. To be welcome, even if we are strangers. As if we came to the right place and are affirmed for that choice." (Block, 2008)
This interdependence that Block discusses points to the relational reality at the heart of human existence. We are driven to manage our resources, from the overtly physical of food, shelter, and mate-selection, to the cognitvely physical of status, group allegiance in the form of loyalty, and the contribution to social systems that provide structure for our actions. Engaging in this way provides the sense of making sense of our lives, the substance that informs our so-called ‘lived experience.’
Groups and Cognitive Dissonance
However, this community engagement is not just about finding out to whom we belong and connect with, but also determining just what is true. Actions are forever being interpreted and, as any relationship of varying intimacy can attest, actions, even the same ones, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Such interpretation is determined by the mental constructs or beliefs we carry, and they themselves are used to help delineate the various group identifies to which we have given over versions of ourselves.
Those ideas, funneled through group identities, help us navigate the competing desires, needs, and wants into a coherency that rests on interpersonal solidarity rather than objective rationality. It is when we build a community that we find the means of searching for truth and what is acceptable to believe. This starts with our families and is added to our peers as we grow up. Eventually, it gets spread out into broader categories of political parties, religious organizations, and other social identifications.
It is important to remember that just because we've moved on from old communities and/or expanded into others, in no way do the ideas we held previously fade away into nothing. As a consequence, we never reach a point of complete objectivity, where no influence exists on our minds beyond our individual thoughts/emotions. These social identities are intimately linked aspects of who we are. There is no "I" without the connections that have come before and exist now. If there's any doubt about this, remember the next time a parent knows just what button to push, an old romantic interest gets your heart racing, or thoughts of experiences past inspire new behavior.
Group identities serve, then, as a means of navigating the uncertainty of cognitive dissonance. Ever wonder how, particularly in this day of political silliness, people can hold to such seemingly ridiculous contradictions concerning personal freedoms, morality in leadership, and geopolitics without their heads exploding? Group identity. Groups carry the load of cognitive dissonance, much like our phones now carry the cognitive weight of navigation and remembering the contact information of others.
Do We Need Conformity in Community?
Recognizing the innate and inevitable role that building community plays in our sense of self and the selection of our beliefs leads to questions of our own autonomy and independence. This is where the problem of social conformity arises, when the group identity has become so powerful that to question the proscribed ideological box is to invite ridicule, ostracism, and a fragmentation of personal identity.
"James Robertson, author of American Myth, American Reality (1980), writes that myth is not only the story itself, but also unconscious attitudes extrapolated from stories and applied to real-world events. Myth is unconsciously drawn on and handed down from generation to generation as a model for understanding human nature and the world we live in (Robertson 1980: xv). Our thoughts and actions are based on sets of assumptions, often accepted without question and transmitted to friends, acquaintances, and offspring through our deeds and expressions without the slightest bit of conscious awareness. Since many of these messages are communicated non-verbally, the recipient is left with the impression that their conclusions are self-evident and require no further inspection. Opposition to these basic truths is seen as undesirable because it challenges and subordinates our sacred world-view; the illusion that ours is the only way." (Morris, 2016)
Block (2008) mentions that a community has the feeling of having "come to the right place and are affirmed for that choice." Morris, utilizing Jungian archetypes, explores this further with an understanding of myth. Rather than just a story, myth includes unconscious lessons that were handed down through families and assumptions taken from within the connections of our friends and family. The resulting structure is then taken as "self-evident." This is the power of community, the ability to form a worldview and instill it within people in such a way that it is not questioned.
Back to the question of conformity. It's not so much that we need conformity and therefore seek it out. No, it's that we're driven to it by the nature of our communal lives. This is not necessarily a bad situation. The cognitive load of our conscious lives needs to be carried, and we can’t do it individually. Our minds are constantly seeking explanations of changing environments through the miasma of competing desires, with the result being an increasing piling on of internal contradictions were we to be consciously aware of them all the time.
Attempts at structures for determining truth, the means of contemplating ethical behavior, customs, etc., are all part of what it is to live as human beings. Group conformity helps shoulder the burden of our surplus of neurons. Where this leads us astray is when such crosses the line of anxiety management to that of an attempt at controlling the uncontrollable through an increasing denial of the ever-changing world. Rather than the freedom to expand and seek out the near-infinite potential laden within humanity, we instead feel the constraints of identity politics screaming for ideological purity.
Effective Change
We have, then, a force focused on determining the right way to live that is double-edged: prodding us to join and be counted, while also encouraging participation in a reality that constantly challenges us.
"The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?" (Block, 2008)
We are not going to remove the pressure and need to build community any more than we are going to remove completely the notion that individual voices are meaningful. The changing dynamics within groups come from a recognition that there is coherency for a reason, to bring together disparate people in a homogenous search for a well-lived life, but that such a pressure should not quiet the voices raised in thoughtful skeptical inquiry. Those voices are in the same search as the rest of us and perhaps, just maybe, it will be one of their voice inspiring others, where together, will revitalize communities from stagnation, setting us on new paths of discovery.
References:
Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Morris, R. B. (2016). American cultural myth and the orphan archetype. European Journal of American Culture, 35(2), 127–145. doi:10.1386/ejac.35.2.127_1
Further Reading:
Pinkard, T. P. (1994). Hegel’s Phenomenology: The sociality of reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press