If these ingratiating strategies fail, then ostracized individuals switch tack and turn from being likeable to being angry and aggressive: ‘Look at me, I’m worthy of attention. I am not invisible, damn you.’ Individuals no longer care about being liked but rather want to exert their influence on others to take notice. People who have been ostracized are less helpful and more aggressive to others, whether or not the others are the perpetrators of the ostracism. For example, in one study ostracized individuals sought revenge by giving an innocent bystander five times the amount of hot chilli sauce as a punishment even when they knew the victim hated the sauce.23 Many of the tragic cases of school shootings and murderous rampages involve individuals who feel they have been socially rejected. An analysis of the diaries of school-shooters found that in thirteen of the fifteen cases examined, the perpetrators had been targets of ostracism.24 Clearly not everyone who has been ostracized goes on a shooting rampage, but if the ostracism persists, then excluded individuals eventually experience alienation and worthlessness. They often withdraw from society and become profoundly depressed and contemplate suicide. As humans, we all need to belong.
Do You Want to Be in My Gang?
In his resignation telegram to an elite Beverly Hills social club, Groucho Marx wrote, ‘Please accept my resignation, I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.’25
Whether we like it or not, we are all members of clubs. As a social animal, we cannot help but hang out with others. Even those of us not in a family can identify significant others in our lives – friends, Romans and even countrymen. Ultimately we are all members of one very big club: the human species. No man or woman is an island. Of course, there are some among us who reject being with others and seek out the isolated life of a hermit, but that is not the norm. They are the weirdoes amongst us. Most of us just want to belong. There is a drive, deep inside us, that compels us to be accepted by others.
Some group membership is relatively fixed and independent of what we want – age, sex, race, height and nationality, for example – though sometimes we try to change even these: lie about our age, cross-dress, have surgery, wear elevator shoes and become a nationalized citizen. Other groups we aspire to join throughout our lifetime – the in-crowd, the jet-set, the highfliers, the intelligentsia or the seriously wealthy. Some of us are assigned to groups we would rather not join – the poor, the uneducated, the criminal classes or the drug addicts. People do not normally choose to be any of these but we are all members of groups whether we like it or not. Furthermore, it is in our human nature to categorize each other into groups. Even those who don’t want to be characterized are a group unto themselves – they are the dropouts and the outsiders.
We categorize others because it makes it much easier to deal with strangers when we know where they are coming from. We do not have to do as much mental work trying to figure out how to respond and can react much quicker when we categorize. This is a general principle of our brains – we tend to summarize previous experiences to be prepared for future encounters. It’s likely to be an evolutionary adaptation to optimize processing loads and streamline responses. When we identify someone as belonging to a group, this triggers all the stereotypes we possess for that group, which, in turn, influences how we behave towards the person. The problem is, of course, that stereotypes can be very wide of the mark when it comes down to the characteristics of the individual.
Those stereotypes can also be manipulated by others as well as by prejudice, which means we can all be biased to be biased. In one study, participants had to inflict painful punishment on fellow students in a learning experiment, and they were allowed to choose the level of pain to administer.26 If they ‘accidentally’ overheard an experimenter describe the students as ‘animals’ before the start of the experiment, the participants chose more severe punishments. They were influenced by others’ opinions. Most of us say we hate to be pigeonholed but the truth is that it is in our nature to label others and be labelled our selves, and that process is highly dependent on what other people think. We are less self-assured than we believe in making our minds up. It is the group consensus, not the individual opinion, that determines how most of us evaluate others.
The groups we belong to define us, but we are constantly entering, leaving, expanding and swapping our groups. People obviously benefit from the collective power of groups as well as the resources and companionship that can be shared, but membership is also necessary for generating a sense of self-identity. Just belonging to a group shapes our self because we automatically identify with other members. We know this from the work of social psychologists like Henri Tajfel who used to be the head of my department. Before he came to Bristol in the 1960s, Tajfel witnessed the power of groups when he was a French prisoner-of-war, having been captured by the Germans during the Second World War. In fact, he was a Polish Jew but he kept this aspect of his identity secret from his German prison guards. After the war, Tajfel dedicated his life to understanding group psychology. In what is now regarded as a classic study, he showed that arbitrarily assigning Bristol schoolboys into two groups by the toss of a coin produced changes in the way that they treated each other.27 Those members in the same group or ‘in group’ were more positive to each other, and shared resources, but hostile to ‘out group’ members, even though they were all from the same class.
What’s In Your Eye, Brother?
In fact, Tajfel’s study had been pre-empted a couple of years earlier in the United States by Jane Elliot, an Iowa third-grade teacher from Middle America.28 The class had just been studying Dr Martin Luther King Jr as American of the Month, when news came over that the civil rights leader had been assassinated on 4 April 1968. The children had little experience of discrimination and could not understand why anyone would want to kill their man of the month. The following day, Elliot planned an audacious class project to teach them about discrimination. She told her class that there was very good evidence that children with blue eyes were superior to students with brown eyes.
Following this revelation, Elliot afforded the blue-eyed students privileges such as extra long breaks and being first in the lunch queue. However, the next day she said that she had been wrong, and that in fact the evidence proved that it was the brown-eyed children who were superior. This role-reversal produced the same pattern. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behaviour of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests, whereas the superior group became more hostile to the inferior group, thinking them less worthy. Simply by belonging to a group influences how you feel about your self and how you feel about others not in your group. In fact, it is the favourable comparisons that we draw against others not in our group that help to define who we are. This is how we formulate our identity – by focusing on what we are not. The trouble is that by focusing on others, we miss our own imperfections. As Matthew (7:3) in the Bible reminds us when talking about small grains (motes) of imperfection, ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’