Subliminal

Once we think of ourselves as belonging to an exclusive country club, executive rank, or class of computer users, the views of others in the group seep into our thinking, and color the way we perceive the world. Psychologists call those views “group norms.” Perhaps the purest illustration of their influence came from the man who engineered the Robbers Cave study. His name was Muzafer Sherif. A Turk who immigrated to America for graduate school, Sherif earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1935. His dissertation focused on the influence of group norms on vision. You’d think vision would arise through an objective process, but Sherif’s work showed that a group norm can affect something as basic as the way you perceive a point of light.

In his work, decades ahead of its time, Sherif brought subjects into a dark room and displayed a small illuminated dot on a wall. After a few moments, the dot would appear to move. But that was just an illusion. That appearance of motion was the result of tiny eye movements that caused the image on the retina to jiggle. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, under normal conditions the brain, detecting the simultaneous jiggling of all the objects in a scene, corrects for this jiggling, and you perceive the scene as motionless. But when a dot of light is viewed without context the brain is fooled and perceives the dot as moving in space. Moreover, since there are no other objects for reference, the magnitude of the motion is open to a wide degree of interpretation. Ask different people how far the dot has moved and you get widely different answers.

Sherif showed the dot to three people at a time and instructed them that whenever they saw the dot move, they should call out how far it had moved. An interesting phenomenon occurred: people in a given group would call out different numbers, some high and some low, but eventually their estimates would converge to within a narrow range, the “norm” for that group of three. Although the norm varied widely from group to group, within each group the members came to agree upon a norm, which they arrived at without discussion or prompting. Moreover, when individual group members were invited back a week later to repeat the experiment, this time on their own, they replicated the estimates arrived at by their group. The perception of the subjects’ in-group had become their perception.

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SEEING OURSELVES AS a member of a group automatically marks everyone as either an “us” or a “them.” Some of our in-groups, like our family, our work colleagues, or our bicycling buddies, include only people we know. Others, like females, Hispanics, or senior citizens, are broader groups that society defines and assigns traits to. But whatever in-groups we belong to, they consist by definition of people we perceive as having some kind of commonality with us. This shared experience or identity causes us to see our fate as being intertwined with the fate of the group, and thus the group’s successes and failures as our own. It is natural, then, that we have a special place in our hearts for our in-group members.

We may not like people in general, but however little or much we like our fellow human beings, our subliminal selves tend to like our fellow in-group members more. Consider the in-group that is your profession. In one study, researchers asked subjects to rate the likability of doctors, lawyers, waiters, and hairdressers, on a scale from 1 to 100.⁵ The twist was, every subject in this experiment was him- or herself either a doctor, a lawyer, a waiter, or a hairdresser. The results were very consistent: those in three of the four professions rated the members of the other professions as average, with a likability around 50. But they rated those in their own profession significantly higher, around 70. There was only one exception: the lawyers, who rated both those in the other professions and other lawyers at around 50. That probably brings to mind several lawyer jokes, so there is no need for me to make any. However, the fact that lawyers do not favor fellow lawyers is not necessarily due to the circumstance that the only difference between a lawyer and a catfish is that one is a bottom-feeding scavenger and the other is a fish. Of the four groups assessed by the researchers, lawyers, you see, form the only one whose members regularly oppose others in their own group. So while other lawyers may be in a given lawyer’s in-group, they are also potentially in his or her out-group. Despite that anomaly, research suggests that, whether with regard to religion, race, nationality, computer use, or our operating unit at work, we generally have a built-in tendency to prefer those in our in-group. Studies show that common group membership can even trump negative personal attributes.⁶ As one researcher put it, “One may like people as group members even as one dislikes them as individual persons.”

This finding—that we find people more likable merely because we are associated with them in some way— has a natural corollary: we also tend to favor in-group members in our social and business dealings, and we evaluate their work and products more favorably than we might otherwise, even if we think we are treating everyone equally.⁷ For example, in one study researchers divided people into groups of three. Each group was paired with another, and then each of the paired groups was asked to perform three varied tasks: to use a children’s toy set to make a work of art, to sketch a plan for a senior housing project, and to write a symbolic fable that imparts a moral to the reader. For each task, one member of each group in the pair (the “nonparticipant”) was separated from his or her cohorts, and did not take part in the tasks. After each pair of groups had completed a task, the two nonparticipants were asked to rate the results of the efforts of both groups.

The nonparticipants had no vested interest in the products their in-group had turned out; nor had the groups been formed with regard to any distinctive shared qualities. If the nonparticipants had been objective, therefore, you’d think that on average they would have preferred the products of their out-group just as often as they preferred those of their in-group. But they didn’t. In two cases out of three, when they had a preference, it was for what their in-group had produced.

Another way the in- and out-group distinction affects us is that we tend to think of our in-group members as more variegated and complex than those in the out-group. For example, the researcher conducting the study involving doctors, lawyers, waiters, and hairdressers asked all of his subjects to estimate how much those in each profession vary with regard to creativity, flexibility, and several other qualities. They all rated those in the other professions as significantly more homogeneous than those in their own group. Other studies have come to the same conclusion with regard to groups that differ by age, nationality, gender, race, and even the college people attended and the sorority women belonged to.⁸ That’s why, as one set of researchers pointed out, newspapers run by the predominantly white establishment print headlines such as “Blacks Seriously Split on Middle East,” as if it is news when all African Americans don’t think alike, but they don’t run headlines like “White People Seriously Split on Stock Market Reform.”⁹

It might seem natural to perceive more variability in our in-groups because we often know their members better, as individuals. For instance, I know a great many theoretical physicists personally, and to me they seem to be quite a varied bunch. Some like piano music; others prefer the violin. Some read Nabokov; others, Nietzsche. Okay, maybe they’re not that varied. But now suppose I think of investment bankers. I know very few of those, but in my mind I see them as even less varied than theoretical physicists: I imagine they all read only the Wall Street Journal, drive fancy cars, and don’t listen to music at all, preferring to watch the financial news on television (unless the news is bad, in which case they just skip it and pop open a $500 bottle of wine). The surprise is that the feeling that our in-group is more varied than our out-group does not depend on having more knowledge of our in-group. Instead, the categorization of people into in-groups and out-groups alone is enough to trigger that judgment. In fact, as we’ll see in just a bit, our special feelings toward our in-group persist even when researchers artificially sort strangers into random in-groups and out-groups. When Mark Antony addressed the throngs after Caesar’s assassination, saying, in Shakespeare’s version of the events, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” he was really saying, “In-group members, in-group members, in-group members …” A wise appeal.

A FEW YEARS ago, three Harvard researchers gave dozens of Asian American women at Harvard a difficult math test.¹⁰ But before getting them started, the researchers asked them to fill out a questionnaire about themselves. These Asian American women were members of two in-groups with conflicting norms: they were Asians, a group identified with being good at math, and they were women, a group identified as being poor at it. One set of participants received a questionnaire asking about what languages they, their parents, and grandparents spoke and how many generations of their family had lived in America. These questions were designed to trigger the women’s identity as Asian Americans. Other subjects answered queries about coed dormitory policy, designed to trigger their identity as women. A third group, the control group, was quizzed about their phone and cable TV service. After the test, the researchers gave the participants an exit survey. Measured by the subjects’ self-reports in that exit questionnaire, the initial questionnaire had had no impact on their conscious assessment of either their ability or the test. Yet something had clearly affected them subliminally, because the women who had been manipulated to think of themselves as Asian Americans had done better on the test than did the control group,