Van Bavel, J. & Packer, D. (2021)

Van Bavel, J. & Packer, D. (2021). The power of us. Harnessing our shared identities for personal and collective success. Wildfire.

•	(17/18) Social identity – Henri Tajfel. “It seemed that the mere fact of being categorized as part / of one group rather than another was enough to link that group membership to a person’s sense of self.”

•	(18) “People typically like their own group more, but this does not necessarily mean they dislike or want to harm out-groups.”

•	(27/28) “What people think, feel, and do is influenced, often to a startling degree, by what they believe everyone else is thinking, feeling, and doing. And because they are bound to / groups and identities, the particular norms that guide people at any given moment can vary depending on which parts of themselves are most salient and active.”

•	(31/32)”... several key lessons about identity and the roles they play in people’s lives. First, the groups people belong to are often fundamental to their sense of self and understanding of who they are. Second, people have a remarkable readiness to find collective solidarity with others and generate, even if only temporarily, a sense of identity based on common experiences, shared characteristics, and even random assignment to a new group. Third, / when a particular social identity is salient and active, it can have a profound effect on people’s goals, emotions, and behaviors. Fourth, most people are quite likely to conform to the norms associated with an active identity and try to act in ways that they believe will advance its interests, making personal sacrifices if necessary.”

•	(32) “When relations between groups harden and we start to see “our” interest as fundamentally opposed to “their” interests, the natural positive emotions and empathy we feel towards our own group can shift in a dangerous direction. We start to think that we’re not only good but inherently good. And if that’s true, then they must be intrinsically bad and must be opposed at all costs. Issues become moralized in ways that favor our point of view. We become less tolerant of dissent and vigilant against any threat that threatens to dilute the all-important boundary between us and them. We see enemies without and within. We begin to believe that when it comes to pursuing our group’s interests, any means justify the ends.”

•	(33) “... we don’t assume that everyone in a category ... is equally identified with it.”

•	(39) “... we are often driven by our identities to interpret the world in a certain way.”

•	(57) “... identities provide us with ideas, philosophies, theories, and languages that draw our attention to what matters and help us to explain ourselves (and others) what is unfolding in the world around us. These identities shape our perception of the social and physical world, altering where we look and how we interpret the environment.”

•	(63) “Our world is far too complex and confusing for anyone to go it alone ...”

•	(66) “... in many cases, conforming to the behavior of others is a perfectly sensible thing for them to do.”

•	(67) express valued identities “The more we identify with a group, the more we tend to want to exemplify its norms in our own behavior.”

•	(68) “... although it has a dark side, conformity serves critical functions in human groups. The capacity of our species to share ideas and information and thereby coordinate behavior is what sets humans apart from other species ...”

•	(69) “Although relying on one’s communities is normally much better than going it alone, there are obviously some important exceptions. When people are overly influenced by charlatans, cult leaders, or propagandists, they can be led terribly astray. ... If these dynamics are left unchecked, the economic and human costs can be profound.”

•	(77) “Most of us have other identities and social connections we can turn to when an aspect of our lives hits a major snag.”

•	(79) “... individual intelligence is hardly a cure for social stupidity. Research has found that a person’s tendency to approach problems in ways that are likely to conform what he or she already believes is unrelated to cognitive ability.” [Stanovich, K.E. et al. “Myside bias, rational thinking, and intelligence” 2013]

•	(80/81) Antidote to groupthink is peer review. Not discuss something in a group but ask individuals to write “an anonymous critique”. The result: “a scattershot of perspectives rather than uniform agreement”.

•	(82) “... groups can have different types of goals and may develop patterns or norms for the sorts of goals that drive their decision-making. And as norms, these patterns tend to be reinforced and enforced.”

•	(86) “... there are norms and institutional practices that can be used to promote accuracy even in the face of strong political beliefs.”

•	(87) “Commitment to accuracy ... By valuing smart criticism, group and organizations can help foster dissent and improve decision-making.”

•	(87) “... humans’ understanding of the world is shaped by other humans ... our realities are fundamentally social. Yet, although this is true, people still tend to believe – most of the time, anyway – that they see the world objectively.” Naive realism

•	(90) “When people saw a post fact-checked, they tended to update their beliefs by very small amounts.”

•	(91) “When people want to be accurate, they are generally quite good at it.”

•	(95) Political polarization. “These trends have caused people to place greater emphasis on political identities than they used to ...”

•	(95) “... it is the nature of polarization to shit the psychology of social identity from in-group love ... to out-group hate.” (96) Consistent with US survey data.

•	(100) “... the internet is now a greater source of outrage for people than the lives they live offline.”

•	(105) Most effect online “words that combined moral connotations with emotional reactions – words like hate, shame, and ruin ...” (107) And “language of collective victimization. Words like blamed, brutal, hurt, abandon, victims, steal, abuse, and guilty ...” (108) And negative messages describing an out-group member. (109) And social media mechanisms favoring divisive language.

•	(111) “... social motives and beliefs can outweigh the desire for accuracy, causing people to be overly credulous when it comes to identity-affirming information.”

•	(118) “It is tempting to think that the solution to echo chambers and filter bubbles is simply to provide people with a more diverse diet of information, exposing them to views and perspectives from the other side. This type of approach assumes that the underlying problem is a knowledge deficit and that if people were only better informed or educated about issues, all would be well.” Not the case.

•	(119) “An antidote ... could be to remove partisan identity from the equation.”

•	(120) “... actual interactions between people with different points of view can help.”

•	(120) “Leaving the online sphere entirely, at least for a time, might also help.”

•	(121) “... it might be helpful to draw people’s attention more precisely to just how polarized societies really are.” A lot less than thought.

•	(122) “Simply being distracted can reduce your ability to reason carefully about the news.”

•	(127) “Your preferences are fundamentally shaped by your social identity, and the reason is quite simple: your social identity is you.”

•	(128) Optimal distinctiveness: “... the feeling hat you simultaneously belong and stand out from others.”

•	(132) “... people who care about the in-group are not only willing to send fellow members more money than they send rival out-group members but also appear to have an intrinsic feeling of reward when fellow group members have a stroke of good fortune.”

•	(133) “Joining groups is good for your health because ... it satisfies core human motivations.”

•	(144) “Attempts to claim and signal a high-status social identity are part of a psychological phenomenon known as symbolic self-completion.”

•	(146) “There are multiple ways to decide whether you can trust someone. Establishing long relations in which people learn about each other is one way.”

•	(146) Social identities lead to a shift in motivation. Not enough to care for in-group members and wanting them to thrive. “... knowledge of identity needs to be shared to unlock the full potential for cooperation.” (147) “Knowing that an in-group member is aware that the two of you belong to the same group is key to unlocking cooperation.”

•	(148) Social identities as “containers of generalized reciprocity”

•	(153) “... while our brains can and do judge people on the basis of their race, we have not evolved any special neural function just for this purpose.”

•	(154) Racism “... is built on mental tendencies to carve the world into groups and defend inequitable systems and power discrepancies.”

•	(160) “... a radical shift had occurred in our participants moments after they joined a mixed-race team.”

•	(160) “Far from being wired for racism, our brains are, if anything, wired for social identity.”

•	(161)”... we observed in-group bias in brain responses and behavior in children as young as eight years old. The effects grew larger with age. By middle adolescents, there was a very strong relationship between their amygdalae activity toward in-group members and the level of in-group favoritism they reported to our research team.”

•	(161) Calvin Lai et al tested 17 possible strategies for reducing implicit racial bias. “They found that shifting group boundaries to form new identities ... was one of the most effective.” [Lai, C.K et al. “Reducing implicit racial preferences: I. A comparative investigation of 17 interventions” 2014.]

•	(162) Short-term effects. “In case of the novel identities, the power of a new team to override implicit and automatic racist reactions seemed to dissipate within twenty-four hours.”

•	(164) “... success can form an especially strong sense of shared identity, and connections between teammates can last for years.”

•	(182) “How much we offer help to other people, like so much else, depends on whether we see them sharing a part of our identities.”

•	(184) “... it starts with whom we identify with enough to want to help, especially in dangerous or frightening situations.”

•	(190) “As it turns out, viewing videos and taking part in discussions were not only the most enjoyable elements of the class, they were also moments were students had the most similar patterns of brain activity.”

•	(209) “When people are exposed to popularly held ideas, their thinking tends to be lazy and narrow, focused on whether or not the majority view is correct. But when they hear a minority point of view, a rarer perspective, their thinking expands.”

•	(219) “Obedience and disobedience ... both seem a matter of identity. Whose side are you on?”

•	(221) “People possess numerous goals. They are almost always trying to accomplish more than one thing at the time, and the actions they choose to take often reflect an attempt to balance between them.”

•	(222) “We usually deviate because we want to be useful to our groups.”

•	(225) Dissent or not. “We can draw the route to your likely decision through a series of forking paths. First fork: Do you disagree with the norm? Second fork: Are you strongly identified with the group? Third fork: Do the potential benefits of dissent outweigh the potential costs? If the answer to all of these questions is yes, you are quite likely to dissent.”

•	(238) Leadership – Howard Gardner: “the capacity of a person (or group of persons) to influence other people”

•	(246) “... leaders embody, in the day-to-day moments of doing their jobs, the identities that they are striving to create. Another way leaders exemplify and reinforce those identities is in their response when the group’s sense of shared reality – perhaps its very definition – is threatened.”

•	(250) “Believing that our leaders are doing good things for us, like helping us win, is one key reason we trust them.”

•	(252) “... in addition to trusting leaders who do good things for us and who appear to be one of us, we trust leaders who play fair.”