Recognizing your own group is important, but why does it feel good to belong? Humans have evolved rationality and logic to calculate the benefits of living in groups as opposed to being alone. Why do we need to feel emotions towards others as well? Feelings and emotions are two sides of the same coin. Emotions are short-lived, outward responses to an event that everyone around can read, like a sudden burst of anger or fit of laughing, but feelings are the internal lingering experiences that are not always for public consumption. We can have feelings without expressing them as emotions. They are part of our internal mental life. Without feelings, we would not be motivated to do the things we do. Feelings we get from others are some of the strongest motivations that we can have. Without feelings, there would be no point getting out of bed in the morning. Even pure logic needs feelings. When we solve a puzzle, it is not enough to know the answer – you have to feel good about it too. Why else would we bother?
It is through our social interactions that most of us find meaning in life – through the emotional experiences they generate. Pleasure, pride, excitement and love are feelings largely triggered and regulated by those around us. When we create or strive, we are not just doing it for ourselves – we seek the validation and praise of others. But others also hurt us when they cheat, lie, scold, mock, belittle or criticize. Living in groups has its ups and downs.
Social norms
Since we are social animals, it is in our collective interest not to lie, cheat or take advantage of each other in our group. This is something that good persuaders and con artists manipulate. They know that most people are kindhearted and willing to give others the benefit of the doubt when there is conflict of interest. These expectations form the basis of social norms of behaviour – what is expected by members of a group. Social norms can be so powerful that we will even apologize for something that is clearly not our fault. Anthropologist Kate Fox deliberately bumped into commuters and jumped queues at Paddington Station in London to provoke characteristic responses that she calls the ‘grammar’ of social etiquette.39 As you might have already guessed, Fox found that there is almost an automatic reflex to say ‘Sorry’ when we bump into strangers in the street. Failing to apologize in such a situation would be considered rude – the violation of a social norm.
We are remarkably susceptible to the power of others when it comes to conformity. A classic set of studies by American psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated that individuals were also prepared to deny seeing something with their own eyes if there were enough people in the room to say otherwise.40 He set up a situation where a real participant was part of a group with seven other confederates who were in on the true purpose of the experiment. They were told that it was a study of perception and that they had to match the length of a test line to one of three other lines. The experimenter held up a card and then went around the room, asking each person to answer aloud in turn. The real participant was among the last to be called on. The task was trivially easy. Everything was normal on the first two trials, but on the third trial, something odd happened. The confederates all began giving the same wrong answer. What did the real participant do? Results showed that three out of four of them conformed and gave the wrong answer on at least one trial.
For many decades, this research was interpreted as evidence that we comply with the group consensus. People merely said something they did not believe in order to gain social approval. It only took the presence of one other person who disagreed with the answer for the real participant to stick to their guns and give the correct answer. However, this finding has been undermined by many studies that show that even when responses are anonymous, people still go with the flow.41
One remarkable possibility is that people’s perceptions are indeed changed by the group consensus. To get at the difference between public compliance and private acceptance, you can look at brain activation. In a recent brain-imaging study,42 men were asked to rate photographs of 180 women for attractiveness. They were then placed in an fMRI scanner and asked to rate all the faces again, but this time they were provided with information about how each one had been rated by a group of peers. In fact, the group ratings were random. If the group said ‘hot’ but the participant had originally rated ‘not’, the participant shifted his rating higher and there was an increase in activation in two areas associated with evaluating rewards, the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex. Both areas light up when viewing sexually attractive faces.43 When the group rated a face that the participant had originally thought beautiful as less attractive, there was a corresponding downward shift in his rating and brain activity.
We are so keen to fit in with the group that our behaviour can be easily manipulated. You may have noticed this with the signs and messages left for guests appearing in some of the hotels you stay at. When a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona, left a variety of different message cards in their guests’ bathrooms in the hopes of convincing those guests to re-use their towels rather than having them laundered every day, they discovered that the single most effective message was the one that simply read: ‘Seventy-five percent of our guests use their towels more than once.’44 This technique has recently become used to nudge people into making economic decisions that previously were imposed by the state, often raising a degree of resentment. Authorities can more easily persuade people by nudging them rather than threatening them, as a better way of influencing their behaviour.45 When a pension fund sends out a letter saying, ‘Most people are willing to invest a proportion of their earnings towards their pension …’, the fund’s managers are relying on our herd mentality to conform with the group rather than threatening us, which is less effective.
Hypocrites in the brain
How does conformity work? One answer is that when we are conforming we are avoiding the experience of discordance in our brains. It has long been known that humans need to justify their thoughts and actions; especially when they behave hypocritically. For example, if we expend a lot of effort to attain a goal to no avail, rather than accept that we have failed, we are more inclined to reframe the episode in a positive light such as ‘I didn’t really want that job’ or ‘That relationship was never going to work out’. We would rather re-evaluate the goals as negative so that we avoid discord. Aesop wrote about such ‘sour grapes’ in his fables as when the fox abandoned the grapes that were out of reach, dismissing them as probably inedible anyway. The reason we justify our actions is because of cognitive dissonance – the unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes inconsistency in his or her own actions, attitudes, or beliefs. In the same way that we generally prefer truth over lies, we like to believe that we are true to ourselves.46
This belief means that we will frequently be disappointed in ourselves. All too often in life, we let ourselves down, which presents us with a state of dissonance – when things do not match up to our expectations. None of us is a saint – we are all flawed to a lesser or greater extent. We may cheat, lie, deceive, be economical with the truth, slack on the job, contribute less, fail to help, be hurtful, cruel or misbehave in other ways. We are often hypocritical – congratulating others through gritted teeth when we would have preferred to win the competition.