maximized the
That’s right: as a trend, over dozens of individual reward decisions, subjects sought not to maximize their own group’s reward but the difference between the reward their group would receive and that which the other group would be awarded. Remember, this experiment has been replicated many times, with subject pools of all ages and many different nationalities, and all have reached the same conclusion: we are highly invested in feeling different from one another—and superior—no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being.
You may find it discouraging to hear that, even when group divisions are anonymous and meaningless, and even at their group’s own personal cost, people unambiguously choose to discriminate in favor of their in-group, rather than acting for the greatest good. But this does not doom us to a world of never-ending social discrimination. Like unconscious stereotyping, unconscious discrimination can be overcome. In fact, though it doesn’t take much to establish grounds for group discrimination, it takes less than we think to erase those grounds. In the Robbers Cave experiment, Sherif noted that mere contact between the Eagles and the Rattlers did not reduce the negative attitude each group had for the other. But another tactic did: he set up a series of difficulties that the groups had to work
In one of those scenarios, Sherif arranged for the camp water supply to be cut off. He announced the problem, said its cause was a mystery, and asked twenty-five volunteers to help check the water system. In reality, the researchers had turned off a key valve and shoved two boulders over it and had also clogged a faucet. The kids worked together for about an hour, found the problems, and fixed them. In another scenario, Sherif arranged for a truck that was supposed to get food for the boys not to start. The staff member who drove the truck “struggled and perspired” and got the truck to make all sorts of noises, as more and more of the boys gathered around to watch. Finally the boys figured out that the driver might be able to start the truck if they could just get it moving. But the truck was on an uphill slope. So twenty of the boys, from both groups, tied a tug-of-war rope to the truck and pulled it until it started.
These and several other scenarios that gave the groups common goals and required cooperative intergroup actions, the researchers noted, sharply reduced the intergroup conflict. Sherif wrote, “The change in behavior patterns of interaction between the groups was striking.”16 The more that people in different traditionally defined in-groups, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, or religion, find it advantageous to work together, the less they discriminate against one another.17
As one who lived near the World Trade Center in New York City, I experienced that personally on September 11, 2001, and in the months that followed. New York is called a melting pot, but the different elements tossed into the pot often don’t melt, or even blend very well with one another. The city is perhaps more like a stew made of diverse ingredients—bankers and bakers, young and old, black and white, rich and poor—that may not mingle and sometimes distinctly clash. As I stood beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. on that September 11, among the bustling crowd of immigrant street vendors, suited Wall Street types, and Orthodox Jews in their traditional garb, the city’s class and ethnic divisions were amply apparent. But at 8:46 a.m., as that first plane hit the north tower and chaos erupted, as the fiery debris fell toward us and a horrific sight of death unfolded above us, something subtle and magical also transpired. All those divisions seemed to evaporate, and people began to help other people, regardless of who they were. For a few months, at least, we were all first and foremost New Yorkers. With thousands dead, and tens of thousands of all professions, races, and economic status suddenly homeless, or jobless because their place of work had been shut down, and with millions of us in shock over what those in our midst had suffered, we New Yorkers of all kinds pulled together as I had never before experienced. As entire blocks continued to smolder, as the corrosive smell of the destruction filled the air we breathed, and as the photos of the missing looked down on us from buildings and lampposts, subway stations and cyclone fences, we showed a kindness to one another, in acts large and small, that was probably unprecedented. It was the best of our human social nature at work, a vivid exhibition of the positive healing power of our human group instinct.
CHAPTER 9
Feelings
Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us.
IN THE EARLY 1950s, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Chris Costner Sizemore walked into a young psychiatrist’s office complaining of severe and blinding headaches.1 These, she said, were sometimes followed by blackouts. Sizemore appeared to be a normal young mother, in a bad marriage but with no major psychological problems. Her doctor would later describe her as demure and constrained, circumspect, and meticulously truthful. He and she discussed various emotional issues, but nothing that occurred over the next few months of treatment indicated that Sizemore had actually lost consciousness or that she suffered from any serious mental condition. Nor was her family aware of any unusual episodes. Then one day during therapy she mentioned that she had apparently gone on a recent trip but had no memory of it. Her doctor hypnotized her, and the amnesia cleared. Several days later, the doctor received an unsigned letter. From the postmark and the familiar penmanship, he knew it had come from Sizemore. In the letter, Sizemore said she was disturbed by the recovered memory—how could she be sure she remembered everything, and how could she know the memory loss wouldn’t happen again? There was also another sentence scrawled at the bottom of the letter, in a different handwriting that was difficult to decipher.
On her next visit Sizemore denied having sent the letter, though she recalled having begun one that, she said, she had never completed. Then she began to exhibit signs of stress and agitation. Suddenly she asked—with obvious embarrassment—if hearing an imaginary voice meant she was insane. As the therapist thought about it, Sizemore altered her posture, crossed her legs, and took on a “childishly daredevil air” he had never before seen in her. As he later described it, “A thousand minute alterations of manner, gesture, expression, posture, of nuances in reflex or instinctive reaction, of glance, of eyebrow tilting and eye movement, all argued that this could only be another woman.” Then that “other woman” began to speak of Chris Sizemore and her problems in the third person, using “she” or “her” in every reference.
When asked her identity, Sizemore now replied with a different name. It was she, this person who suddenly had a new name, she said, who had found the unfinished letter, added a sentence, and mailed it. In the coming months Sizemore’s doctor administered psychological personality tests while Sizemore took on each of her two identities. He submitted the tests to independent researchers, who were not told that they’d come from the same woman.2 The analysts concluded that the two personalities had markedly different self-images. The woman who’d originally entered therapy saw herself as passive, weak, and bad. She knew nothing of her other half, a woman who saw herself as active, strong, and good. Sizemore was eventually cured. It took eighteen years.3
Chris Sizemore’s was an extreme case, but we all have many identities. Not only are we different people at fifty than we are at thirty, we also change throughout the day, depending on circumstances and our social environment, as well as on our hormonal levels. We behave differently when we are in a good mood than when we are in a bad one. We behave differently having lunch with our boss than when having lunch with our subordinates. Studies show that people make different moral decisions after seeing a happy film,4 and that women, when ovulating, wear more revealing clothing, become more sexually competitive, and increase their preference for sexually competitive men.5 Our character is not indelibly stamped on us but is dynamic and changing. And as the studies of implicit prejudice revealed, we can even be two different people at the same time, an unconscious “I” who holds negative feelings about blacks—or the elderly, or fat people, or gays, or Muslims—and a conscious “I” who abhors prejudice.
