Jay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. From neurons to social networks, Jay’s research investigates the psychology and neuroscience of implicit bias, group identity, team performance, decision-making, and public health. He lives in New York City with his family and pet hamster, Sunny, and once taught a class while trapped in an elevator with his son and daughter.
Identity helps shape our perception and thinking about the world around us. What is identity? How does it influence our perspective? These are some of the questions we answer in this episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast. In this episode, we talk with Jay Van Bavel, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of New York, an affiliate at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations, and Director of the Social Identity and Morality Lab. He is also co-author of the book The Power of Us, which provides readers with cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how we can harness it for the better. His research focuses on how group identities, moral values, and political beliefs shape the mind, brain, and behaviour. He has published over 100 academic publications on the topic and has won various awards for his research achievements. In our conversation, we unpack the complexity of identity and its influence on our perspective and decision-making abilities. We cover aspects such as the differences between self-identity and group identity, how to be aware of your biases, the role that leaders play in influencing identity, and how identity plays out in social relationships. We also talk about how group identity interacts with democracy and the role of social media in shaping our identity, as well as learn some practical advice to help broaden your perspective.
Key Points From This Episode:
We start the show by learning the basics of group identity. [0:03:29]
How group identity differs from self-identity. [0:04:04]
He explains how impactful group identity is to individual identity. [0:05:06]
Whether there is good data on how many groups people typically identify with. [0:06:08]
How aware people are of the groups they identify with. [0:07:27]
Ways in which group identity affects decision-making. [0:08:12]
The effect group identity has on setting and achieving goals. [0:09:35]
General ways group identity affects social relationships. [0:15:21]
A deeper explanation about groups, memberships, and physical presence. [0:17:28]
Differences between introverts and extroverts. [0:19:18]
How group identity affects our thinking and perspective. [0:20:43]
Associate Professor Van Bavel explains how to foster social cohesion, using America as an example. [0:25:41]
Find out if people have a default identity that determines their perspective. [0:28:41]
What people can do to be aware of which identity is affecting their thinking. [0:30:10]
Find out if group identity affects how people learn new information. [0:31:58]
Whether people can change or broaden their identity to improve decision-making. [0:34:18]
Practical advice to help broaden someone’s perspective. [0:37:25]
The challenges of changing your group identity entirely. [0:39:34]
Steps that one can take to view the world more objectively. [0:42:04]
A rundown of how leaders influence the thinking and decision-making of individuals. [0:45:47]
An outline of what qualities to look out for in groups. [0:48:49]
The influence of social media on which groups people identify with. [0:52:21]
We learn if following people on social media with opposing views helps break down group barriers. [0:55:57]
An explanation of how group identities interact with democracy. [0:58:48]
The differences between current political divisions and past political divisions. [1:03:59]
How well studies on the topic can be replicated. [1:05:43]
We end the show by learning how Associate Professor Van Bavel defines success. [1:09:18]
Read the Transcript:
So right off the top, what is group identity?
Yeah, I mean, group identity is the sense that we all have a sense of identity who we are. And part of that identity is created by the groups we belong to. And so that can be, I'm a father, I walked my kids to school this morning. Right now, I'm talking to you as an author that comes with a different set of assumptions and behaviors. Once I get off the call, I'm back to my role as professor. That was my wife who came to my door, and so I also have the role of husband. And so, we all have different identities. And when they're activated by a situation we're in, they change how we think about the world.
How are group identities different from self identity?
Yeah, it's a good question. So we'll do this little exercise, and I'll invite the listeners to do it right now. You can get a pen and a piece of paper and answer this simple question. I am blank. So for me, I already said, I am a father, I am an author, I am a professor, I am a husband. I'm also a bunch of other things. In our book, I listed by my top 10, it includes social media addict, hockey goalie, a number of other things. It can also be, I'm extroverted, I like people and going out to social events.
And so, if you look at those, a bunch of them are about your personal identity. Like I said, I'm a social media addict, or I'm really a politics junkie. I love reading about politics. I love sports. And so, those are part of who I am as really my personal identity. And then the ones that are about a group that I belong to, like a group of fathers or a group of professors or a group of authors, those are my social identities, that my identity in those is defined by what it means to be a part of a community of people like me.
So how impactful is group identity to our individual identity?
It's hugely impactful. So first of all, well, people are pretty fluid that you can be thinking about yourself as an individual in one moment, and the next moment you could be thinking about yourself in terms of a group identity. But I want to argue, and we show evidence of this in our book, that even your identity as an individual is shaped by the group you're in. So I'll give you an example, American identity, when people think of what it means to be an American, a big part of it is rugged individualism and personal freedoms. And so, it turns out that part of that's determined by your identity as the group of Americans.
So when immigrants come here, the more they start to identify as American, the more they start to embrace individualism. And so, what you start to realize is, even individual identity is shaped by the groups that I'm in and the norms of the group. So we look to other people about our group, about what it means to be a good group member, and that shapes who we are and what we value. And so, even when we think of ourselves as individuals, a lot of time we don't realize that, that's shaped by the groups that we care about and communities that we're a part of.
Is there data on how many groups people typically identify with?
Actually, I have not seen good data on it. Normally the IM question is administered for 20 different identities or traits that you have. And so of those, when I've collected data on this, usually about half of those 20 are group identities, so about 10. Some of those are really central to you. So the ones I listed off are ones that are really important to me. Ones that are less important to me, is now I have an identity as a New Yorker. That doesn't really change my behavior that dramatically. My identity as a father is really central to me, and it's partly because I have kids, and they force you to think about yourself that way and what your role is. And so, then I subscribe to Instagram feeds about Daily Dad, newsletters and stuff, to try to embody and live up to what it means to be a good dad, but there's many other identities I have.
So I have a hockey goalie, I said. Well, there's no rings near me, and so my hockey equipment is sitting in my parents' basement in Red Deer, Alberta in Canada, and I only strap it on about once every year when I go back there for Christmas time. So that's not a really central identity to me anymore. And so, it doesn't really affect my life. So we have a lot of identities and a bunch of them are probably lying dormant, because they're from our past. Past roles that we played, places that we lived, communities that we were part of, and aren't really active. But if you go back and start doing that thing again, or interacting with those people, those things can come quickly to mind again.
How aware are people of the groups they identify with?
I think people are aware of the top three or four. A lot of people have a strong national identity. So I'm Canadian, it was Canada Day recently, but also yesterday was July 4th, Independence Day. And my kids are both American, and so last night we're sitting there watching the fireworks go off in New York, which is really incredible on Independence Day. And so, that's an identity that's central to a lot of people, your religious identities, sometimes your gender or racial identities are important, but those don't have to be. One of the key things of our book is that you get to choose which identities are important to you, and you can lean into those communities and embrace them more fully. And you don't have to passively accept all identities that other people want to slot you into.
Does the groups that people identify with, affect the decisions that they make?
Yeah. This is one of the big themes of our book, and we have an entire chapter called, The Lens of Identity. And the way identities seem to work for me, is very much like a pair of sunglasses. Actually, I have a pair here. When I put these on, I still see the world for what it is. I can still see both of you. I can see my computer screen, but the shade is a little bit different. So I'm filtering the information that I'm seeing through those glasses. And so, we think that, that's a lot of how identities work, that when you have an identity active, you're still seeing the world, but you're filtering out certain things and filtering in other things. And so, when you see something that's ambiguous, you interpret it through the lens of that identity. So I'll give you a very quick example.
We talk a lot about this great study that was done in 1950s at a college football game at Princeton, between Princeton and Dartmouth. And the fans who saw the game, if they were Princeton fans, they thought that Dartmouth committed more fouls. And if they were Dartmouth fans, they thought that Princeton committed more fouls. And so, they saw the exact same game, but they were interpreting ambiguous aggressive incidents through the lens of their own identity that would make them feel better. And this is why, whenever you go to a sporting event, everybody hates the refs or the umpires. They always think they're biased, but really what's happening most of the time, is that the fans are heavily biased in favor of their own team. And so, they're filtering it through that identity.
We talk a lot on the podcast about setting and achieving goals. What effect does group identity have on that process?
Yeah. So identity helps activate certain goals at the front of their mind. So I said, I'm an author, that's why you're interviewing me. The moment I adopted that identity, I actually got included in different communities and conversations with other authors. They helped me out. The conversations we had, were about those types of things. But also had a set of goals. I had to take responsibility for writing the book, editing it, making sure it wasn't going to be embarrassing. And then there's a whole year of promoting it, doing podcast, op-ed's, talks. And so, those are a lot of things that I've never done before, because I'd never had a book before that were focused on it. And so, I had to achieve those goals to make sure that people could hear about the book, because a book's very much like that old philosophical saying like, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really fall, or did it make a sound?
Books are very much like that. It's a lot of effort for someone to buy it and then pick it up and read it. It's a major commitment. So you have to convince them why that's interesting. And so, that activates the authorship of being an author, activates all those types of goals, and then you're hustling to try to achieve them. But as I said, I'm a father in the mornings. When I wake up, my kids need lunch, they need to be packed for camp. I need to help with their homework. I need to make sure that they don't spend too much time on screen. When I'm thinking about myself through that lens, it has a whole bunch of goals that come to mind that are very different, and that are immediately important. And so, that's one of the ways identity affects goal pursuit. It activates different goals.
So you want to think of adopting and leaning into the right identity, because it will come with a set of goals and responsibilities and norms that you want to uphold. The other way that identities help with goals, is that they can keep you on the right track. So this is one of the reasons why, if you want to get in shape, it's good to have a gym buddy, because you can easily avoid going to the gym if it's just you. You're not feeling it that day, you don't want to exercise, but if you have a buddy there, they're going to hold you accountable for that. You got to show up each day and they're going to push you to do that extra rep. And that's what groups do, identities do. They uphold you to the norms of the group.
And so, if you're a part of a group, I'm a professor, and so what set of responsibilities I have, is to publish scientific articles and do research. If I don't do that, I would not have gotten tenure. I would've lost my job or I would not get a pay raise. Or if I write an article and it's really bad, I'll have dozens of other professors and scientists who read it and scrutinize it and criticize it. They'll write a blog about it or drag me on Twitter. And so, there definitely is a certain set of norms that you have to uphold. And they're different when you're scientists, say than when you're an author.
An author is more expected to be able to tell stories. You get a little bit more flexibility about what the evidence is. But when I go back to my other job, I have to actually have very rigorous evidence. And if they find me talking on this podcast about stuff that's not backed up as science, my reputation will actually drop. My status will drop. I'll stop getting invited to scientific events. And so for me, I'm often actually trying to juggle those two identities a lot, make sure I'm telling good stories, but that they're backed up by the science. Otherwise, my other identity, the status in that community, will suffer.
Can someone also do the inverse order here? You talked about getting an identity, then setting out goals based on that identity. Can someone say, look, I have a goal of something and then go identity hunting?
Yeah. I think that, that's actually a really smart way to actually accomplish a lot of things. So the research on self-regulation, which is the study of how we achieve our goals, finds that people are actually pretty terrible at willpower. If you're on a diet, we just talked about getting in shape, I'll talk about it on a diet. You go out with your friends and there's dessert menu comes around. I'm actually really bad at this, where I'm pretty good at not ordering dessert, but if someone else orders it, like my wife, I'll just start eating it. And she hates that I do this, but I actually have no willpower. Most people who are successful, achieve their goals by what's called situation selection. They go to the right environments that help them achieve their goals. And so for me, the way to do that is order the right foods I have at home. So they're pretty healthy, there's not a lot of dessert food.
And that stops me from succumbing to my temptations and my lack of willpower. And so, the research shows that high achievers are people who are really good at situation selection. And so, well, what is situation, selection? It means going to work every day. And if you're working from home, that means going into your office, closing the door and plugging into your computer. It means, like I have this app on my computer that blocks my access to websites that are distracting to me. It's turning that thing on first thing in the morning. And so, the way I'm successful, is by doing those things. Well, another way to be successful, is by joining a community that's going to hold you to high standards. I already talked about the workout buddy, another one is a running group.
You can join a running group which will meet at certain days, they all jog at a certain pace that forces you to go along, but these can be an entrepreneurial community. It can be a certain group of people at work. For me, I actually created this authors community or joined one of other science and non-fiction authors, who all help in support each other, but it's also really inspiring to see them achieve goals, and then they give you advice on how to achieve yours. And so, I get a lot more social support and meaning, but also success by being part of that community. And we all try to lift each other up and help each other out. And so, that's why joining the right identity group is often really critical to your success. I'll give you an example where that goes downhill.
This is often something that people who have addictions, like let's say a smoker who's trying to quit. One of the things I'll tell you is, it's really hard to quit smoking. It's addictive. And if you end up going to the same groups that you used to go, like let's say to the bar and you drink with your friends and that's where you smoke, it'll be hard to stay off it, because you'll just instinctively go back to it and everybody else is doing it, and they offer it to you. And so you have to stop that group. You have to stop hanging out with those friends in those places, because it will trigger you and tempt you to engage in that activity. So if you ever want to set a goal for yourself, I would say one of the most powerful things you could do is think of the right group to hang out in, that you care about, that's going to support you and guide you and have healthy norms around pursuing that goal.
Hmm. What about more generally? How does group identity affect social relationships?
I mean, social identities are often the glue that holds relationships together. When you're part of a team, of any team, whether it's a work team or a sports team or your local trivia team at the bar, they give you a sense of social connection and meaning. And I will say even before the pandemic, we were in what was called by some people as an epidemic of loneliness, that even though we have all this technology, people are more and more lonely. They stopped going to bowling clubs and a local community clubs, and that's eroded over time. And then with the pandemic, it just accelerated. We were all at home alone, working. So this has been a real issue for social connection community and meaning for people.
And I'll just say this, I'll put it in context. It might sound fine to work from home. I have done it a lot in the last couple of years, and I actually like a lot of it. But what the research shows is, with the moment you start to feel lonely, like a real disconnection, loneliness has the same effect on your physical and mental health. Well, certainly your physical health is about the same as smoking. And so, it's really damaging. People have hypertension if they're lonely, they have trouble sleeping and they also have mental health problems. And so, there's research on what's called the social care, and we didn't write about this in our book, but at one point we thought about having a whole chapter on it, which is that people who have strong identities and are part of groups that they care about, actually have better physical and mental health. And I actually have a study on this, I found this at NYU with our undergrad students.
When they're freshmen, they come, they don't know anybody. If they're identified with the university, what we found is that they actually have lower anxiety and depression reports. And by the way, anxiety and depression are off the charts among young people in this country right now and on campuses. Something like 50% of Gen Z reports some degree of high anxiety or depression. Well, identification and feeling part of the community that you care about, actually is one way to buffer it. And what that means is in terms of real behavior, if you identify with the university, you go to rallies, you go to sports games, you show up for events, you volunteer on clubs and communities, and that's how you meet people. And so, that's why I say identity is like the glue that helps hold you together as part of your community.
There are two things going on there with what you were just talking about. There was, it sounded like membership in groups, but also physical presence. Are those the same thing, or how are they different?
You can have membership in groups that are meaningful, that are virtual. And I'll say, this is my authorship group. It's actually been fully virtual. It's been over Zoom once a month. And it's been really nice. And we do breakout groups and discussions, and then you might follow-up with people on a phone call or an email, but it hasn't mean in-person hasn't need to be, you can still have this virtually, but I will say it's harder. I think it's one of those things that unless you have a good group coordinator, that it can be harder. And I will say, this is something that I've been very trying to be good about locking down during COVID, but the first small conferences I went to, and the first social events I went to, one was my wife's 40th birthday at a bar, I was like a wash with dopamine. I felt so good just to be with people again in a social setting, and I had forgotten how much I missed it.
And so, I do think that there's something that you end up taking this for granted. And I'll give you an example of a study of this in person. This was done, I think by Nick Apley, of people commuting. And when I commute on the subway or the train, I often don't talk to anybody. I just plug it in my phone or pull out my laptop, it's what most of us do, we have pretty good options now with technology and wifi and stuff. But they had this study where they just asked people to talk to a stranger on your trip. And what they found is, most people didn't want to do that, but if they randomly assigned them to talk to a stranger, most people actually enjoyed it more and were in a better mood after.
And so, there's this weird thing where we mispredict what will make us happy. And a lot of it is actually the social connection, actual behaviors of real social connection, and left to our devices, we won't do it. But when we do it, we appreciate the benefits of it, where we become aware of it and it has an impact on our quality of life in ways we often aren't aware of.
Is that the same for introverts and extroverts, because in your small conference example, for me, that's anxiety inducing, but you're also saying that I may think that, but have a different experience if I do it.
Yeah. There is a lot of research on this that extroverts get energy from this, and introverts do, especially find big social outings exhausting. Introverts often like small social interactions with one or two good friends, and they actually get energized from that. And so, the social connection, I think for the most part helps most people. But introverts also, as I said before, the loneliness is the key for the physical, mental health problems. If you're an introvert, you might not feel lonely being at home and reading a book. Whereas I, as an extrovert, might feel lonely. And being alone is not bad. Feeling lonely is bad. And so, people have different thresholds for what tips them into that feeling lonely. And for you, you might be more at peace with it than I would. And that's why I often say loneliness is a little bit different from just being alone. It's a psychological state of feeling lonely.
You can be in a crowded room though, and feel lonely. And this actually sometimes happens at conferences where you walk into the conference hall and it looks like everybody's visiting and knows each other. The room's full of chatter and you don't know anybody. And so, you can be surrounded by a 100 people in your field or in your universe or whatever it is, and feel really lonely. And so, that's why the loneliness is a little bit different from being alone, and it's really actually the bad part. And so, I think introverts can manage that a bit more effectively.
How does our group identity affect our thinking? Does it affect our thinking? And if it does, how aware are we that it affects us?
I don't think people are aware of the impacts of identity on their behavior and their thinking. We often think about Dominic and I in our book, we talk about a little bit like a gravitational force pulling us down. So think about gravity. Gravity was pulling humans down for thousands of years before Isaac Newton realized it. And so, it was affecting all of us holding us down, it was making things fall to the ground, and it wasn't until he saw that apple fall, that he had that moment where, "Okay, something's pulling stuff down." But you would think that should've been something that was obvious to us. It's only obvious after you realize it, then it becomes incredibly obvious to everybody. And that's how identity works a little bit, that it shapes our thinking. And once you see it, and especially in the studies, I mean, I've run hundreds of studies and it affects our thinking on so many things.
In our book, we talk about how it can affect your mathematical thinking, that you give people a math problem to solve, and as long as it's not about their identity, the example, I think, was about the effects of skin cream on cancer. People are pretty good at solving it. If they're better at math skills, they're even better at solving it. But the moment they connected their identity to it, and changed it, made it about something like gun control, they give people the exact same math problem, the effects of gun control on deaths. And they find that it really depends on how much you identify as a pro or anti-gun person, that changes your ability to solve the math problem.
Wow.
And so, that's why I think that our identity really affects our thinking, because if it is affecting something as basic as math, it's problematic, but I have found that it affects all kinds of economic decisions, like your ability to cooperate with people, trust them, how much money you're going to share.
If you're in a group, we have this game called, the public goods game, where everybody gets money, let's say $10 each, all three of us. And we all make a private decision about how much to put into the middle. And whatever we all put into the middle, gets tripled. And so, the ideal thing is, all of us slide in our $10 to the middle, that'd be $30. It would get tripled to $90 and then we'd all split it, we'd all walk home with $30. But if you both put in and I hold onto mine, I keep my $10, but now I get a third of the pool share, and the pool share would be, the $20 you put in, gets put to $60 and $20... I would still walk away with the same, or more money. And so, what happens is, when people are really identified with the group, we found in our lab, that they put in more money and everybody there walks away with more benefits economically.
But if you're all competing with each other as individuals, and not thinking about yourself as a group, people put in less, it doesn't get expanded. And then everybody walks away with less money. And so, that's the type of economic decision making, we've done it, of course, with real money, with real stakes, that people end up making decisions that end up harming them. Because if they don't have a strong commitment and identity with the group, that they make decisions that are self interested, but in the short term, might think like, "This is good for me", but in the long term, if everybody does it, it harms all of us and we all end up with less.
That's crazy. How significant do those groups have to be? A political affiliation seems like a strong one, but what about the same color of socks or something, does that still have the same effect?
Yeah. Obviously, if it's a really strong identity, in the US it's Democrats and Republicans, that's the one that would determine a lot of these decisions right now for people. I mean, I'm reading stories of people who refuse to go to a dentist, because they found out that their dentist doesn't have the same politics as them. Well, your politics probably have no bearing on your ability to put a filling or a root canal in someone's mouth. And so, that could be harmful to you if you don't go to your dentist and you're stuck with a toothache, but these can happen even with what we call minimal groups.
Even when we bring people into lab and we flip a coin and put them on two teams, they don't even have to see the other people or interact with them. And they automatically start allocating more money to members of their in-group over the out-group. And so, this has been studies that have been done since the 50s, been replicated many times. So what this means is that the moment you create an identity, it starts to shape who people think they can trust, who they're going to allocate resources to. We find in our lab, that it even shapes their brain responses. It shapes how they allocate attention. They allocate attention more to their in-groups. They look more at those people's eyes and pay more attention, and that's often where you read people's emotions. Whereas the other group, they're not even looking at them or paying much attention to them. And so, it shapes all of these aspects of our thinking and our cognition. And it happens within minutes of this coin flip.
The cool thing about it, it sounds really terrible, you're all shaking your head, this is like really irrational. But the cool thing about it is that you can use this to overcome previous divides. By creating a sense of team, we found in our studies that it can overcome racial divides. As long as your team is mixed in race, you start to allocate more to them and like them more, no matter what their race is, you start to feel positive towards them. And so this is part of, I think, human psychology. It's part of human nature. This is part of, I think our evolutionary history. But once you understand what that evolutionary history is, it can be used for bad things to divide people and create conflict, but it can also be leveraged to not just in a direction of cooperation and coordination and social support.
How does an idea like that scale? That sounds great, but in a lab it makes sense. How do you fix the American population, for example?
Yeah. I mean, the American population is a pretty bad place, because I think there's so many things, so many factors, economics, social, political, money, and politics, gerrymandering, that are pulling people apart. Social media is something else I study, I think it's actually making this like putting gasoline on a fire that already started. So I think that's all pulling us in different directions, pulling us apart and creating conflict. So it's hard to imagine that, but I do think that, and there's lots of evidence that it could be nudged in another direction, but it would take changes. It would be more than just the psychology at this point that you need. But I will say that, here's a study from a lab that uses psychology. It was, they brought a bunch of Democrats and Republicans in, and they gave them a data point from NASA with climate change, temperature change over time.
And they asked them to try to draw a conclusion about what's the weather pattern happening here based on. Everybody trusts NASA, by the way. It's one of those institutions, Amazon is the other one, and the military that everybody trusts. And if you give the NASA data and you let people discuss it as a group, and you do not tell them people's political identities, they actually get smarter and converge as a consensus on the accurate reading of the data from NASA. But if you put a little R or a D in front of their name, suddenly they don't trust each other. They're in conflict, and the average in consensus drops. And so, they become less accurate at reading the exact same graph. And so sometimes, in my view, the best thing to do is take identity out of the equation, is try to anchor your discussion on other pieces of evidence, remove them from politics as much as you can, and allow those people to have a deliberative consensus. And that seems to be the better solution.
The other way to do it, of course, and this was on TV yesterday, reminded me, is you could have an alien invasion like Independence Day, where the aliens come down and suddenly everybody has to work together. That is a case throughout history and lots of studies I found, that can bring people together. And I'll give you an example of this. To some extent, it wasn't perfect, but it was after 9/11. If you look at George Bush's approval ratings, it was about 50% the week before 9/11. It was what, 90% the week after.
Right.
Because Americans felt a sense of shared identity when they were under real significant threat. And so, that is a case where it was pretty polarized. It wasn't that long ago, and you saw this difference. I want to say, of course, that wasn't beneficial for everybody. It created a lot of prejudice towards Arab Americans, and it led to some disastrous policy and positions in my opinion. But at least there was a possibility of leveraging that, I think, for some shared purpose that could have been good. And so, I think that, that's the potential that we have in us as humans. Of course, it takes like good leadership to figure out how to harness that in ways that are effective at dealing with the threat and maintaining a sense of cohesion.
So, if we have multiple group identities, each of us have that, is there a default identity that drives the lens that we view reality from? Like, if I'm a fly fisherman and a pilot and a Republican, is there one dominant identity typically?
No. What's dominant depends on the circumstances. And so, I'll give you a data point on this. If you look at people's Twitter profiles, they might list like, I'm a dad, I'm a fly fisherman, I'm a Republican, I'm a proud Montanan. Is that what you say if you live in Montana? I just associate Montana with good fly fishing, that's why they say that. And so, you can have all those identities, but what's been happening over time, researchers found that people are putting their political identity in their Twitter profile more and more over time. And so, as we get more and more polarized, as social media becomes a place where we have these political debates, that becomes the filter through which we analyze a lot of the news. And so, we're in a place now where every major news story immediately gets politicized and polarized.
And that's partly because we're in this matrix where that's the dominant way that Americans are filtering it. You drop that same news story in America 30 years ago, and people would've been filtering it through these other identities. The fly fishermen or fisher woman would've been thinking, "Okay, how does this affect the rivers and Montana where I go fly fishing? I don't really care about what Republicans or Democrats are implicated by it. I care about my fly fishing and my friends, and we go on this trip each year." Now, I think that same person might filter it through the lens of politics and what the national, political elites and leaders are saying. And so that's actually, I think, a pretty bad thing when everything gets filtered through that prism, and people just trust what they're handful of political leaders say about a situation, and they're not able to evaluate it through these other prisms.
What can people do to be aware of which identity is affecting their thinking?
That's a great question. I mean, there's this exercise called, the turnaround test. And you try to imagine something if it was coming from an out-group, and would you agree with it if they were saying it. And there was actually a really good example of this, where I think it was a valedictorian, I believe he was giving his valedictorian speech at high school graduation. I think it was in Kentucky. And he said all these quotes, and there was a big applause. And because he said these, I'm quoting Donald Trump, he said all these things that everybody was applauding. And he says, "Actually, those are quotes from Barack Obama." And it was silent. And he did the turnaround test, which is to this audience, which was that you should actually judge the statements on their own merit, not who's saying them. And that should determine whether you think they're good or bad.
And so, I think that, that is a really good exercise, if you don't like something or if you do like it, imagine if another party or a political leader you dislike was saying it, and see if you would still like it. And so, that's a good way of holding yourself accountable to actually some set of principles that are over and above a specific identity. And I won't just say this is if we're talking about politics, this doesn't have to be about politics. This could be about sports teams.
Imagine a player on the other team did the thing that your favorite player just did, they smack somebody on the back of the lake with a hockey stick. Would you think that, that's okay? And so, we need to actually have a way of, I think it's a good mental exercise each time you're seeing a group conflict or you're in an argument with somebody, imagine the perspective from their side, and see if you would still agree with it then. And if you didn't, then that suggests that there's a problem. And that suggests that there's some bias going on and you probably need to question yourself and try to transcend that and have a higher set of principles, other than just your identity in that moment.
So interesting. So does group identity affect how people update or not, I guess, their beliefs with new information?
Yeah. Okay, so first of all, this is a study I just saw at this conference. A lot of our beliefs about the information right now, are based on our identities, especially like the studies in politics are based what we want to believe based on what our political leaders have told us and news we watch. Okay. But updating our beliefs, we have this new set of studies we run, and we wanted to see, when people were fact checked by someone from the other party, when they saw someone on their party fact checked by a member of the other party, did they update their beliefs? And we found almost not at all. From the fact of fact checks on your belief, updating was tiny. What was 10 times the size was just simply, were they part of your political party? And if they were, you believed whatever they said, whether they said it originally or whether it was fact checked, and you just clung to it.
And so, what this means is that the dominant way of discourse on social media, is really probably not that helpful for us updating our beliefs, because we're just buying into whatever members of our party are saying, and we're not actually very attuned to fact checks. I don't want to say fact checks don't work, because they do work. And especially when they're removed from political party identity, they're actually reasonably effective. And when you move them from politics completely, they're super effective. If you're getting a fact check about your laundry detergent, people will be like, "Oh, okay, I need to get a different laundry detergent." The moment it moves to politics, fact checks work a little bit weaker. And then the moment that it's really in the domain of identity, where it's someone from the other party is fact checking your party, then the effect on you updating, is really tiny.
And we found, I think in about 20 to 30% of cases, it even backfire. Doesn't backfire all the time, but it backfires a significant non-trivial margin of the time. And so, people can become very defensive and entrenched in their beliefs, and that's what's happening, I think, in that 20 to 30% of cases. And so, that's why I think, again, in that case, if you're going to do fact checking, I would try to move it out of the domain identity, not lead with your identity, or maybe have some trusted third party do it. And that allows people to update their beliefs more. Of course, I'm just talking about partisans here. People who don't really care about politics can update their beliefs on this a little bit easier, because they're not super committed to ra ra cheering like a fan in the stands of the stadium for their team.
Can people change, or at least broaden their identities to improve their decision making?
Yeah. And that's one of the core themes of our book. The goal of our book is to get people to understand how identities work, but then to step back from it, because there's, you can go to the bookstore and there's reams and reams of self-help and personal improvement books. And I actually have read many of those. I like them. But what we want to understand is, that only part of your identity is the self and self-regulation. We want you to understand how you work in groups and how groups influence you, to give you the tools to think about what groups you want to be part of, but also to think about how to change your identity, to broaden it, to make it more inclusive or open minded or grounded in facts and reality. And you can do that. There's lots of evidence that groups can be... Groups can go wrong and look cultish and be engage in groups think and things like that.
But there's also lots of evidence that groups that implement the right norms, can do the opposite. And so, we talk about the role of psychological safety, that Google did this huge study of all their teams. And they found that the teams that flourished weren't the ones that necessarily had the smartest people or the best leaders, that had vertical or horizontal leadership structures, or went out for drinks after work. They were the ones that had psychological safety. And it doesn't mean what most people think that means. What that means is that people are free to dissent. They can throw out new ideas, they can challenge the status quo. And that really unlocks the potential of the whole team. And there's also research showing that the moment you have a dissenter in a group, the group reaches better decisions, even if the dissenter is wrong. So let me say that again.
If someone dissents in a group, the group reaches better decisions, even if the dissenter is wrong. The reason is, because if I dissent against you two, it might free up the other one of you to also dissent, because you were biting your tongue about something or weren't sure about something and you're like, "Okay, well I'll throw this out there now." And so, descending is a service you do to a group to make it safer for other people who have other ideas, which might actually be more precise or accurate or innovative than your own to speak up. And so, really thinking about groups that you run, and I run a big research team, is I'm constantly thinking about these principles to make it a better space for dissent and innovation and accuracy. And so, when I present an idea to the group or a proposal or a paper, I shut up actually, because I'm in power and I don't want them to all just go around and agree with me.
I actually want to hear what they all think before they know what I think. And so, that is often where I get the best ideas and innovative ideas and criticism, and then I update my thinking based on it, and go with whatever the best ideas are. And so, there's lots of ways to do that in groups. And so, the vision that I have is that people use these lessons to create processes and practices and norms and groups that allow them to get smarter, because there's also a lot of research showing that collective decision making, collective intelligence, can outcompete the best individual. I found that in studies in my own lab. And so, I want to be part of a revolution to make groups smarter and more accurate and less hostile to people, and actually find a space that's comfortable for dissent, and harness it and channel it in healthy ways.
So Jay, I'd like some practical advice. Let's say that I happen to notice that Ben's being affected by his group identity in his thinking, what can I do?
Yeah. So I would actually first try to say, well, get him to explain why he thinks that, make sure that you are not wrong first, because you might be seeing it through your lens of your identity. And so, always walk through his thinking, find out what his evidence is, and then I would try to remove it from identity. Ask him if the same would hold if it applied to a different type of identity or group that he didn't like, and that might help him see that he's being hypocritical or irrational. And then I would say, try to give people an off-ramp. I think a lot of the discourse, and I would also probably do it actually offline, not on the podcast, because when people are in public discourse, and this is what happens on social media, but also a platform like this, is people might cling to their identity because they don't want to be criticized by people, their group, their team, their network.
And so, we have to understand, a lot of what people are saying is actually expressive signaling of identity, rather than necessarily their true beliefs. And so, he might actually be more open minded if you confront him in a private way. And that gives him away an off-ramp to save face without publicly humiliating or shaming him. I think a lot of the discourse that we do in organizations at a team meeting or online around these types of conversations, is that a lot of people are defending something for the sake of signaling they're a good group member, even if they don't necessarily genuinely believe it. And so, I would try to get that conversation going offline. And once you can get them, then it's a safe space for him maybe to come back publicly and say something more careful and nuanced about it, or acknowledge he's wrong.
I'd also try to create a norm, and you can do this on your podcast. And this is actually what good publications do is, they issue the corrections. And our podcasts, I listen to when they come on and if they made a mistake, they correct it at the top. And I actually really love that. That's a norm that's in journalism, also a norm in science where you should be comfortable correcting yourself. And it signals to people, you're listeners, that you have intellectual humility that you're updating your beliefs, you're accepting information when you're corrected, and that you will let people know when you're corrected. Hard to do. That's why it's called intellectual humility. There's a part of humility, which is hard for many of us.
So that makes sense for being wrong about something and correcting it. What about changing a group entirely? Is it hard for people to change the groups that they're a part of?
Yeah. I think that is something that's hard. I think the first thing, and this is the research on conformity, is people will go along and conform or be obedient to things. The moment they see another dissenter, it makes them free to dissent. And then once you have two or three or four people, you can actually create solidarity around something and try to make change. But I think you need your first mover, your first dissenter or your first person to identify a problem's wrong. You need your second mover who is going to be an ally for that person. And then I would say, you probably want to build some coalition. And it depends on what type of group you're trying to change, but it really does help if you go into a meeting, I have faculty meetings with 30 people, but if the seven or eight of us behind the scenes think that something's going wrong, it can build a sense of what we think is going wrong, and we can have social support in that meeting and back each other up when other people are challenging us.
And once you have that, it becomes really way easier to resist pressure from authorities and group conformity pressure, if you know those other people will have your back. It's really hard to do it alone. This is why I throw out history. We have these awful names for dissenters, like Devil's advocate. Think of that. That means you're comfortable descending in a group, what a terrible name to call somebody. Heretic. Think of how we treated heretics throughout history. They were burned at stakes, traitor. I don't know what the American punishment is for traitor, but I think it's actually one of the worst, but I think it's actually really bad. I forget what it is, might be imprisonment for life or something.
And so, these are the types of words and terms we have, and punishments we have for these type of people in all kinds of societies throughout history for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so, it's psychologically really hard to descend. I will say the other thing about identity and descent is that, that's super surprising. This is a research from my co-author Dominic Packer. He finds that people who are willing to dissent are often the people who care most about the group. So I'm going to say that again, because it's very counterintuitive. We think of dissenters as often people who are rabble rousers or dissidents, his research finds people who care the most about the group, are often the ones that are willing to say that it's going wrong-
Absolutely.
... because they care enough about it, they're worried, and they're willing to incur the reputational cost. And so, we have to be very careful on how we treat dissenters and whistle blowers, because they're often the people who see something so wrong that they're willing to say something. And we know how badly they get treated throughout history. And so, even if you don't agree with the dissenter, understand that their voice might be coming from a point of care of the group, not of a willful intent to malign or harm the group.
I have another advice question for you. What can we do to view the world more objectively?
That's a tough one. This is a realization that I had that was challenging, is that a lot of how we view the world, is socially determined. I'll say this as a scientist, this is a moment for me. I was in a debate with a former chemistry teacher about climate change. And then I realized, I actually didn't know that much about climate change. I'm a scientist. I have a PhD, but I have never read the research on climate change. So he wrote a climate skeptic article in the news. I tried to find the original article, and then I tried to read it to understand what it said. And I actually couldn't. I couldn't understand it. And so, that's where I realized that a lot of my beliefs about big things in the world, like climate change is arguably the biggest one right now that we're going to be worried about going forward, are determined by our social community.
And so, I place trust in other scientists, because I know how the scientific process works. And when there's massive consensus, that's exceedingly rare in science, so I actually buy something when I see that amount of consensus, because I know that, that consensus do not exist about almost anything in psychology. So I know how rare it is, but I actually can evaluate it myself. And so, a lot of my beliefs about the world, whether people landed on the moon, is based on an assumption that I trust NASA and astronauts, all the astronauts have gone up there and come back and reported it, but I've never been there myself. So a lot of our beliefs that are ostensibly rational about the science of climate change, about moon landing, are based on actually trust in the social institutions and community. And so, I think that's the first thing, is understanding how that works.
And then I think you want to lean into looking at the process by which those communities develop their beliefs. Because if that's where beliefs are coming from, a lot of them, in addition to obviously we have personal experience, I can drink this water now, and I know what it tastes like. I can believe that. But a lot of things are coming from institutions and communities. So be sure that you're part of institutions and communities that have a track record of being accurate, and then be sure that you're part of institutions and communities who have processes for rooting out bad ideas and for affirming and replicating and confirming good ideas, and that are trying to improve over time, because no one knows everything right now. So you want to be parts of communities that are honest about what they know and what they don't know, and are trying to get better.
And so those are maybe the three things that I would look for to be more rational. It's not even a south thing, it's about thinking about these other things. And so, then I would frame it as a metaphor, like your diet. I study a lot on misinformation and conspiracy theories. Some people have really good information diets. They're listening to a podcast like this that brings on experts and asks some tough questions, and only brings in people who have actually some credentials and some writing or expertise on it, versus other podcasts that are bringing on people that are just spouting off and aren't backing up their claims with evidence or science or real hardcore empirical observation. And there's a lot of those. And that's a lot of social media, I'd say probably 95% of it is just people's opinions. And so, if that's your diet, to me, that's like eating at McDonald's.
It's like, you're going to get less healthy, and you might not see it at first, because a lot of it is internal. It's in your organs or gathering plaque and cholesterol, but if you consume that over a long period of time, you're going to have a lot of misdirected and false beliefs. And those places are not updating and issuing corrections and trying to ask the right questions and do rigorous analysis. And so, that's a decision we all make. We live in a free country. If you want to eat in McDonald's every day, it's your choice. There's a whole great documentary on it called, Supersize Me, but you can see if you watch the documentary what happen to this guy's health over time. And so, I think of information as the same thing. I actually care a lot about having a high quality information diet, because I want to actually be as accurate as possible as I can be, given what's known about the world at any given time. And so, that's how I would encourage people to be rationals. Think of it in terms of your diet.
How important are the leaders of groups in the thinking and decision making of the individual group members?
Yeah, I think quite a bit. To the extent that people identify with the group, they often look to leaders of the group. Leaders often rise to power, because they're seen as the prototypic group member. In other words, they're seen as somebody who's essential and an essential element of the group. But once they rise to leader, they have a huge role in shaping what the group believes. And this is why you see, we have a whole chapter in our book on cults, we talk about cult leaders and why people will even cling to false beliefs in a cult. And one of them is, and we talk about this great cult called, The Seekers in Chicago, who thought a flood was going to come and wipe out this huge segment of humanity, but all the true believers are going to be saved by an alien spaceship at midnight on, I think it was December 21st.
And so, all these cult members are in this room waiting for the spaceship to come. And social psychologists had infiltrated the group, Leon Festinger was the most famous one, because he wanted to test what happens when people's beliefs are falsified, because he predicted they'd have a main feeling of cognitive dissonance, which was his theory. He had developed that theory. And the clock strikes midnight. At that moment, all these people are confronted with the facts, because it was a very specific prediction, their belief system was wrong. And he found that they still clung to it. Even through the night, they were all sitting there quietly, no aliens were coming. And then at about three or four in the morning, the main cult leader woman, Dorothy Martin, went into another room and came back and said, the aliens have sent a special message that we saved humanity from our beliefs.
And so, at that point you got to be thinking, "Well, I'm going to pack my bags, I'm out of this cult. They were just falsified, and now they're making up a bunch of baloney to keep me hooked." But most people actually stayed in the cult. And the two biggest predictors of why you stayed, was how strong your beliefs were. So true, the hardcore believers were more likely to stick around for weeks and months after. And not only did they stick around, but they started to proselytize it, which they hadn't even done before. They called the media, they went in the public, they told everybody about the cult and the power of their beliefs.
The second thing, and this is the one that's critical to our book, was social support, is that it's easy to give up on a belief if it's just you, but if everybody else around you in your group is telling you, "Oh, this is really true. Our beliefs related save humanity", it's easier and easier to cling to a false belief. And I think a little bit, this is what the internet and social media do now, is that if you have your little community, and we've seen this with QAnon on and other basically cultish conspiracy theory beliefs, is they're constantly make these predictions that are false, but they have all these other people who are part of this community who help bolster and sustain this false belief system.
And so, it takes them down this pathway of increasing irrationality while the rest of the world looks on in complete puzzlement. Well, this is the psychology of what's going on. And so, that's why that is a really dangerous thing. If you're around people who rationalize bad beliefs, you're one step into a cult, my friend. If that's your friend group, start looking for the exit.
You've mentioned a bunch of characteristics there in groups that I think you would say are, what we should be looking for in groups. Things like being rational, updating your beliefs, respect, descent, are those the main ones or are the other things that people should look for in groups?
Yeah. I mean, one of the things would be leaders and the honesty of leaders and whether they're beliefs and predictions actually match reality. If you find out that your leaders lying to you, again, that's a moment where you should pack your bags and get out of that group. I would look also for processes. I'm a big fan of psychology. We can harness it a little bit. In our book, we talk about a lot of the interventions in psychology move human behavior by about 5%. So we talk about interventions, we're talking about all this stuff. You can do these things, and each thing will probably improve your group performance by about 5%. Maybe you can stack three or four of those, but you're moving the needle in a way that you probably should care about, and will matter over the long run.
But the more powerful way to do it, is change the processes, create processes that help you arrive at accurate beliefs. And so in science, we have anonymous peer review. And science works best when you send your paper out to three people who are all from different backgrounds, and you don't know who they are, and you'll never find out, and they all get to critique the crap out of it. And some scientists don't like this, because peer reviewers can be nasty or whatever, they don't agree with the critiques. And they also don't like it, because sometimes the peer reviewers don't even agree with themselves, but that's by design. When I am an editor, I send it up to three different reviewers from three different communities with three different expertise, so that they can find different holes in it and poke them in it. And so, that's the process.
When I'm reading scientific papers, we share pre-prints now, but the most stuff I really read and trust is peer reviewed, because I know it went through a process. And peer review is not perfect. Again, it's three humans. Three humans is not all of humanity reviewing this and scrutinizing all the problems. Peer reviewers are busy and they have their own flaws and biases. I trust it much more than I would trust the authors submitting it on their own. And so, I look for trustworthy things that have good systems. Another example, I keep using journalism, some journalistic outlets are good, some are bad. Over time, I really just trust opinion based pieces. And I trust more and more database pieces, which actually have evidence embedded in them, and evidence in particular that I can check. So I love pieces journalism where they can show me the data or they click to the source and I can see the source and check over for myself, and ensure that they're being accurate.
So they should have almost, it's like Hansel and Gretel, where they leave the trail of crumbs. And I want to see that in leaders or groups or journalists, that they have a trail of crumbs that I can check in debt. And that's them creating accountability with me, or they issue correction when they get it wrong. And I'm increasingly skeptical of people who are just driving opinion-based journalism. And I read those, and more and more I'm disenchanted that it's just someone's opinion. It's anecdote driven, which is actually unfortunately how the human brain learns, is through stories and anecdotes.
When we wrote our book, we knew that. So we wrote a lot of stories and anecdotes. I've told you a couple here, but we always tried to align them to what the science was. We knew what the science was first, and then we found the stories to be vehicles for transmitting the data. But what happens a lot, unfortunately in communities with leaders, with organizations is, they tell stories, but the stories aren't necessarily connected to representative data. And so, they actually are actively misleading. They create false intuitions. What they're called is intuition punks. They pump up your intuition, but they don't actually deliver any real deep insight that's anchored on anything in reality. And that's, I think where people get misled by leaders and organizations get misled, and journalists.
Super interesting. I loved your book. I skim the stories. I always skim the stories. I always, when I read books, I'm like, "Why all the stories? Just give me the data." Anyways, it's funny. You mentioned the effect of social media a few times. Does social media affect the groups that we identify with, as opposed to amplifying the effect. Does it affect who we identify with?
Yeah, I think so. There's a couple things happening on social media. One of them is that you get reinforced by certain things. So you post something, a meme or a hot take, or for me, it's like posting studies. It's boring. And you see what gets liked, because you get feedback. Normally, if we're all at a dinner party and I make a bad joke, you both roll your eyes at me and I realize, okay, that joke didn't land. I won't hit it again. This is what comedians do when they're building, they go to small standup comedy clubs, work on their bits, and then eventually they have a Netflix special after they've did a trial run at 40 tiny comedy clubs. I go to enough comedy clubs, they see this. They're working their material to see what lands and what doesn't. That's normally how humans have worked through this.
But now with social media, you get to do this, but you get real hard data real time, and you can see your likes, your shares going up, your followers growing. And so, you can get sucked into a community, based on the feedback you get. And so, that is one of the things. And guess what, it gets rewarded on things like Twitter and Facebook. It's often that we find it's morally extreme content. And so, when people put moral emotions in a message, it's 15 to 20% more likely to get retweeted. So you put three or four of those, you say, "Well, these people make me so angry and I'm utterly disgusted and full of contempt." Well, that's three of them right there, so there's a 60% chance that it's going to be shared more than if you had just talked, said the exact same thing without those words. And so, you can get sucked into a community, based on the words you use. You find out what resonates, you use it more.
And I see this happening to people, and who knows if they're truly identifying these groups or believing this, but it looks at least like they are. And there's this great theory in psychology called self-perception theory, that we're looking to see what we do to infer who we are. And so, if I find myself going to the gym a lot, I start to think, well, I'm a gym person. If I start to post a lot about politics, I start to think, maybe I'm a politics person, I never really thought about myself before, or I start getting invited to events where people are talking about politics. That's what happens in my world. I start posting on stuff, I get invited to places to talk to more people who talk about those things. And then slowly over time, it becomes my community and my identity.
So you have to be thoughtful about what you post. The second thing about social media is, and this actually is even a bigger effect, is the social norms, is we look what people like us are doing there and what's getting rewarded. So when you're seeing stuff go viral, you're seeing, oh, that's what people like on here. And so, that's actually something that concerns me more, because what goes viral is determined a lot by the algorithms and the profit incentive of the social media structure. But the norms and research finds, this is by a former student of mine, Billy Brady. He finds that people look to the norms even more to determine what to share. And so, that's why actually you can see different norms. If you go to LinkedIn, it's just people sharing stuff about work. It's a lot about personal overcoming and perseverance in the work world.
You go on Twitter and it's just a moral competition around politics, and it's super polarizing. You go to Instagram and there's people showing all their cool vacations and how fit they are. And so, each platform has its own normative environment. And I know people who are on all platforms and I look at what they posted. It's a different thing on each platform, because they're trying to win the social status competition on each platform. And so, they're super fit at this amazing vacation on Instagram, but they're really against the income inequality on Twitter. And on LinkedIn, they're talking about their new promotion. And so, you can see the wheels turning in their little mind almost in real time. And I don't want to say I'm above it, I mean, we're all in this matrix together, let's not deny it, but that's how it's working, I think, on our psychology and behavior and identities.
Does following people online with opposing views to our own, does that help us break down our group barriers that we might have?
Unfortunately the data on this is really bad. There's one really good study on this that I like, by Chris Bale, who's a sociologist. He paid people to follow, a bunch of Democrats had to follow a bunch of hardcore Republican leaders and news outlets, or Republicans had to follow Democratic leaders and news outlets. He followed them up a few weeks later and found, if anything, they were more entrenched in their views. And so, I think just simply following a partisan who disagrees with you, is probably not going to help you. I would say that what you might want to do though, is follow people who disagree with you, but are not posting hyperpartisan, hypermoralized interpretations of things. So I think, if you follow the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, that might be a good way to get rounded out view of what's going on in the news.
But if you're going to follow the Palmer Report, which is a very far left online news site, and maybe Breitbart, which is very, very far right, if you're already somebody who's a hardcore Democrat, you're not going to be convinced by Breitbart. It's probably just going to actually trigger you every day, and vice versa. I think we have to think carefully about what that means to follow someone who disagrees with us. I would say follow high quality sources of information who disagree with you, is probably useful. And that can be for anything. Before we went on the show, we were talking about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and things like that. Follow some people who are experts in that space, who have different perspectives than your own, but be mindful of not following the most extreme, over-the-top people, because it's probably just going to make you psychologically reactive to them.
Hmm. Those are tough to find.
Yeah. There is, they're actually a really, I would say to me, I have a list of science people I follow, and actually finding people who can curate high quality information on social media, actually is hard to find, and can be impartial about it. Actually, it's a talent and it's in short supply.
You said that the data on following people with opposing views is really bad. Did you mean inconclusive bad, or bad that the effect isn't good.
Oh, well just bad in that people get more entrenched in their views.
Okay.
Maybe getting entrenched in your views is to some people, a good thing.
Got it. But the studies are conclusive on that though.
Yeah. The findings were this, it's actually, one of the findings was conclusive, the other finding was inconclusive.
Okay.
I think the finding was that Republicans got more entrenched and became even more conservative, and Democrats backfired a little bit, but not all the way that it was statistically significant.
Interesting.
If I remember those results correctly. So on average, it didn't really move them in the direction you'd predict, which is more broad minded about political issues. We know that for certain, from that data, but the backfire effect was only true among one of the groups.
Super interesting. Okay. Politics has come up a lot throughout this conversation. I don't know how much we've actually asked about it explicitly, but it comes up a lot, which makes sense. How do group identities interact with democracy?
The last chapter of the book is about, I think, three big identity issues. One of them was inequality we talked about, another one was climate change, and the last one is democracy. And I think democracies are under threat. Here's a recent review of 500 studies on the effect of internet. It turns out it helps democracy potentially, in places that do not have good democracies. And so, if you are talking about the Arab Spring or you're talking about descent in Russia right now, or China, having a healthy social media ecosystem's actually probably really good, because there's a lot of voices that are suppressed in those environments, and you need those voices to be able to speak. And a lot of those voices ideally would push for democracy or encourage at least more democratic decisions by the government. Now, the data suggests the exact opposite seems to be happening in established democracies.
In established democracies, the effect of social media seems to be harming trust in democratic institutions. And this is obviously where we are in the United States, and from Canada, this is Europe. And so what is happening is, people are exposed to a lot more misinformation than they normally would be, and conspiracy theories, which erode their capacity to make good voting decisions if they don't have accurate information. If social media can do this good thing and identities can do this thing about challenging institutions, but if you erode people's trust in institutions completely, it becomes incredibly hard to solve problems. And I'll just, I mean, you can take a glance through human history. Our life expectancy as humans are inter-group conflict and warfare and death. The number of babies who died in childbirth, poverty, all of those are way lower than they were across the entirety of humanity, especially in healthy democracies, than they were throughout the entirety of human history.
And so, when we throw away our trust in democratic institutions, it's hard to regain. And it often, a lot of people are like, "Let's tear it all down." Well, if we tear it all down, let's just take a glance at what it looks like to have it torn down, so you can look at countries that have failed democracies. There's lots of those around the world. Or you can look throughout human history, how we manage to perform how humans flourish in those environments, and it was way worse on almost every major metric that we would care about. So I have a lot of concern. Of course, you can have a pro-democratic identity, so that if you embrace norms of democracy, there are groups and people, and I'm actually getting in conversations with more and more of these, who are very concerned about the state of the democracy in the US and other countries.
They want to reinforce and rebuild institutions, so they're more trustworthy. They want to have a healthier information ecosystem. And so, there's groups and people who are absolutely committed to doing this and rebuilding these and making them better. Look through the last couple 100 years of history, this is what people have been doing. They've been building institutions, from the United Nations to the World Health Organization, the World Trade. A lot of these are institutions that are trying, have been building and trying to get better at dealing with things like global poverty, reducing warfare. And they don't always do it. Right now we see the effect of NATO in supporting Ukraine against Russia. If NATO was not there, Ukraine would've fallen, I think, in a week. So there are people who are committed to building institutions in ways that foster democracy. That's one of them.
And I think that those are the types of institutions we should rally behind. And if we see flaws in them, we should dissent and call them out and try to fix them. I would be very concerned about throwing these institutions in the trash. I'm somebody who care. And here's another thing, if you want to identify with a political party, identify with a party that fosters democracy. And I will say this, we're talking about politics again and global politics, local politics, I'll zoom into work. Okay, so I also care about organizations. In my own organization, I run a lab. I regularly have votes on things, what book we're going to read for this semester? And I have my students in my lab all vote on it. I give them voice by creating a democracy.
I do this when now I'm moving into this role, I'm running the whole social psychology program, which is 50 people. I'm implementing a lot of democratic procedures, anonymous votes. What anonymous votes do is, means the people with the most power don't get to throw their weight around and bully people into silence. It means that new faculty who have no power, who are scared about their tenure prospects, get just as much power and say about who we hire next. It means that students get just as much voice, no matter if they're first year students or fifth year students on certain decisions, because they, in fact, some of them will have a bigger stake in it, because they're going to be around longer. So you should actually harness their voice. And so, as I keep going back to this procedures and processes and norms in our identity group at NYU, social psychology, that supported foster democracy, not only does everybody like them, it also produces better decisions.
Because now you're doing crowdsourcing of decision making, and then people feel actually a bigger part of the community, because they suddenly have a voice in it and they feel more committed to it, and they're more excited about the decisions you make, because they had a voice, and you ended up going with popular decisions. And so, those are the types of institutions and practices that's pretty part of any group. And we all run small groups. I'm never going to be the president of the United States. I'm not American. So that's off the table, for first starters. But I know I don't aspire to that, but I still have a leadership role in small groups, and that's the type of identity that I want to embrace for us.
How are political divisions today different than they might have been in the past?
Okay, here's the data on this. We have a paper on this. Affective polarization is higher in the United States than it's been in the last 40 years. We don't know before that, because we don't have data before that, but it's way worse than it was 40 years ago. So I assume it was better for a long time. Okay, what is affective polarization? People identify with their party, what's called in-group love. They love their party's about as much as they have over that 40 years. What's changed is that they hate the other party more, and that is at a 40 year high. And so, what you're seeing is really disdain for the other party, and especially political leaders and elites. It turns out that people are smart enough to know that the political leaders who are running a party or if they really hate them, they don't necessarily hate their neighbors as much.
Although, it is causing them to dislike their neighbors more if their neighbors have a party sign in front of their yard that's different from theirs. And so, then that's now trickling down into our daily life. It affects, as I said before, who you go to for your dental appointment. Another big way it affects us is who we date and fall in love with. I ran a study after Trump was inaugurated with WYNC, which is a news station here, and I gave them some questions. And one of the biggest effects we found is that people just simply do not want to date anybody who voted differently than them. And it's huge. People do not want to go into business with people who voted for somebody different than them. That's big. Well, that can be fine. In some cases it makes sense, don't get me wrong. Who you sleep with is, I don't care, that's your own business, but it has consequences that ripple through all kinds of parts of our community. And that's the consequences of polarization.
You've given us a ton of evidence based insights so far. I want to ask a little bit about the evidence, how well the studies on this topic replicate.
Great question. I would say in social psychology, we've last 10 years been going through a big debate about replication and making sure a lot of things do not replicate. Small studies in particular, or small effect sizes, are the least likely to replicate. What we've been doing more and more in our field and in my lab, is moving to more huge studies. So what I tell you about the studies I do on the internet, one of them was with half a million people. Another one was with 2.7 million. I did the effect on partisanship and real movement during the pandemic, that was with 15 million people. Once you start to get big samples over a few hundred people, they tend to be very reliable. The other thing you want to look for, and this is something that ensures robustness, is that they're following open science practices, that researchers are making their materials and their data public.
That means they're not hiding anything. It means other people can go and reproduce their results, reanalyze their data. And if they're holding up, even after that, then that's a sense of a greater strength. And we didn't do that historically. Over the previous 50 years of the field, that happened almost never. And now, at least in my lab, we've done 99% of our last five years of papers have done that. The only time we didn't, is when we didn't have the ethics to do it. And so there's a real sea change in the quality of evidence. I will say this for our book. We understand that some of the studies we cite are classics, because you want to pay homage to the people who first came up with idea and some of them are great stories, but we only tried to give those if we thought there was modern evidence that backed it up, that replicated it.
Sometimes it's hard to replicate the cult study. Who's going to find another cult and get embedded with them for months and then publish that. So we tried to find things that at least the experimental studies were backed up. We found another study like that with another cult, end-of-world belief that was with economists that was really strong, that we thought, okay, now we can show-tell the cult study. So there is a nuance. I don't want to say that our book is the final word. There's some studies that are in there that will be updated. And my goal is to update my thinking as I hear of them, but we thought it was at a snapshot as of a few months ago. We thought that was the state-of-the-art in this literature.
And I will say this, because we wrote this, and you skip through the stories to find the science, but so do my peers, my colleagues who are scientists. And if you write a shady book, you can be prepared for people trolling you on Twitter, or a couple blog posts that disparage you and pull quotes from it or show studies that don't replicate it. And we never had that. In fact, our best review is by one of the leading experts in the field who wrote a review in science. And that was probably the best we felt after it was, we got really good reviews by people outside of science. But to us, making sure that actually the leading experts in the scientific field who study this thought it was solid, was like, I can't tell you how much sigh of relief that we had when we read that review.
So for us, that's actually been something that's really resonated. But I also want to say that we talk about the replication crisis in our book, because I think that any good book in the social sciences, and also, by the way, the replication crisis is happening in biology and medicine and cancer research, almost to the same extent it is in psychology. So psychology is nothing special about this. It's just, it hit us first, and people are more aware of what's happening in all these other fields. In fact, fields where the stakes are way higher when you're talking about cancer treatment.
But I think the key thing to come out of it is that the practices, that's why I keep coming back to processes. The process of doing science due to this criticism, has improved considerably in the last 10 years, especially the last five years. And I think, if you are going to be podcasters or people who are reading books like this, I would want to look for people who are open about that and embrace it, because that's probably where you're going to, a good heuristic for finding higher quality evidence.
That was an amazing answer. Jay, our final question for you, how do you define success in your life?
Oh, good question. I will say that when you're younger, and I feel like I'm getting old, I'm 44 now. And there are a lot of metrics you look for. In my world, as I keep alluding to, it's pure recognition of quality, because I live in a world where you're pretty harshly criticized if you don't do that. But the older I get, I think it's more internal. It's more, I'll say it in the context of this book, that it's going to make an impact, that people that I don't normally talk to, are going to read it and it's going to resonate with them and they want to have a conversation about it, or they're going to use it in some way. And then the second, having a real impact in the world and being part of the conversations with people outside the ivory tower, I think, is more and more important to me.
I care less and less about the treadmill that I'm on in academia. And I'm certainly on one. I do a lot of research and stuff, but I'm more skeptical and critical of that as a metric for meaning in my life. And then the second thing, I think is relationships. I keep thinking back more and more, and I am focusing more and more on the relationships that matter to me, time with my kids, my wife, my friends, and really, the pandemic has helped put that in contrast that how fragile life is, and how we might not see people. And so, I've really leaned into over this last few months, as things have opened up and everybody's more vaccinated and stuff, is reconnecting with people and doing real in-person interactions. And sometimes, it's just going for drinks or dinner with a friend I haven't seen in a while.
Those types of things matter to me so much more now. And then the third piece I'll say is just, I'm trying to make decisions in my life about things that give me joy. So I actually like podcasts, because I love conversations about ideas, and actually it's pleasurable for me. And I'm moving more and more away from going to huge conferences or something like that, that don't give me joy. I mean, if you pay me money, I'll go. But if you don't, I'm not going there. And I come back burned out, and I didn't get to learn anything, and I go and it's just a bunch of, it feels like a churn and a hamster in a wheel. And so, I've been thinking more and more about things that are intrinsically pleasurable that I learn something from, and I get to connect with people.
Wow, you sure connected with us. This was amazing. Jay, thanks, been a blast. So happy you could join us.
Yeah, thanks for having me. As you can tell, I enjoy these conversations. I love these topics.
That was great. Thanks Jay.
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