The Big Sort (10 page)

In an early homemade experiment, a German schoolteacher first determined who the popular and unpopular children in a school gym class were. The teacher secretly instructed the popular group to disobey clear instructions during class. When the entire class was asked to raise their right hands, the popular children disobeyed and raised their left. After the class, however, the children in the class reported that it had been the
unpopular
children who had not followed instructions.
¹⁷

Muzafer Sherif asked Harvard and Radcliffe students to rank a list of sixteen well-known authors, including Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Mark Twain. The psychologist then gave the students sixteen paragraphs with the name of one of the famous authors attached to each. Sherif told them that the various authors had written the paragraphs, but in reality Robert Louis Stevenson had written them all. He asked the students to rank the paragraphs according to literary worth. The students ranked them in nearly the same way they had earlier judged the sixteen authors. When Sherif conducted the same experiment in Turkey, the Turkish students did the same thing.

The experiments conducted by the German teacher and Sherif disclosed quite a bit about the fragility of human integrity. They also showed something important in understanding politics: what we think of what we hear or see or read depends largely on who said it, did it, or wrote it, and we are likely to find evidence that confirms our preconceptions.
¹⁸

In a 1951 study,
¹⁹
Stanley Schachter divided students enrolled in economics classes at the University of Michigan into four groups, or clubs. There was a radio club, a theater club, a movie club, and so on. Each group had three undercover members planted by the research team. One of the undercover researchers read the story of Johnny Rocco, a juvenile delinquent awaiting a court sentence on a minor crime. (Yes, Edward G. Robinson played Johnny Rocco in the 1948 movie
Key Largo.)
The reader in each group asked the members what should be done with young Johnny. The clubs were required to apply a seven-point scale of punishment, ranging from something akin to hugs to hanging. The group members talked about Johnny for forty-five minutes. One of the other two undercover researchers was the "slider." The slider began the discussion at one extreme and gradually moved to what she perceived to be the middle of the group. The slider appeared to be convinced by the group's thinking. The third undercover researcher played the "deviant." The deviant determined which way the group was leaning and then took the position at the other extreme, maintaining that opposing view throughout the discussion.

At the end of the debate, the club members were asked to make two other decisions in addition to punishment. First, they were to nominate members for an "executive committee" of clubs, clearly a position of honor. Second, they were told that the size of their club might need to be reduced. To help weed out members, they were asked to rank their preference for who should remain in the group. The deviant didn't fare well in these decisions. He wasn't picked for the executive committee and was consistently ranked low on the list of who should remain in the group. (Meanwhile, the slider was fully accepted by the group.) In all of the groups, however, rejection began long before any lists were made. As the deviant revealed himself in the discussion, group members gradually excluded him from the conversation. Eventually, they stopped talking to him altogether, effectively turning him into a nonperson. Schachter devised the test so that two of the four groups were made up of like-minded people. (Students who had a strong interest in movies or radio were placed in the same groups.) All of the groups excluded the deviant, but the more homogeneous groups were more intent on excluding the deviant than were the groups made up of a mix of students. The like-minded groups were quicker to stop talking to the person with the contrary opinion and rated him lower on the preference list for club membership.
^*

There was nothing sinister in the reactions these early experiments uncovered. People were responding to an innate need: to find safety in groups. "From our earliest moments on earth, we come to associate a wide array of positive outcomes with acceptance and love from others," psychologist Robert Baron, a professor at the University of Iowa, told me. "Right from day one, you form this very generalized belief that it is always bad to disagree with others." Beginning in the 1960s, however, social psychologists came to understand that like-minded groups not only enforced conformity but also tended to grow more extreme.

The discovery began with a misdirection. In 1961, a graduate student named James Stoner asked subjects in an experiment to consider the prospects of George, a competent chess player who has the misfortune of drawing a top-ranked player in a tournament's early round. The game begins, and George sees an opportunity to attempt a risky play that could bring quick victory. If it failed, however, it would result in certain defeat. The subjects were then asked if George should attempt the risky play if there was a 10 percent chance of success, a 20 percent chance, and so on. The subjects decided individually at what odds George should try the maneuver. They were then asked to discuss as a group what George should do and arrive at a joint decision. What Stoner found—and what other researchers around the world would also find in subsequent experiments—was that the group always made a riskier recommendation than the average of the individual decisions. If, for example, the average of the individual judgments was that George should try the play if there was a 30 percent chance of success, the group would agree that George should take the risk if it paid off only 20 percent of the time.

The consistent finding in this experiment became known as the "risky shift phenomenon," and as a piece of social psychological research, it was both provocative and deceptive. When the experiment was repeated in different ways and in different countries, researchers noticed a kink in the risky shift. In the chess game situation, most people thought the overmatched George should take a risk. But what if the hypothetical game was played from the point of view of the chess champion? In this scenario, individuals in the group leaned toward a restrained approach, and the group decision was more conservative than the average of the individual answers. Although the group decision still shifted from the average, in this case it became more risk averse.

Social psychologists concluded by the end of the 1960s that what Stoner had discovered in his chess tournament experiment was the phenomenon of group polarization—that groups over time become more extreme in the direction of the average opinion of individual group members. Stoner's chess tournament advisers were inclined as individuals toward a risky play, and so their group decision was even riskier. In a different setting, where individuals were cautious, the group arrived at an even more cautious decision. Either way, the effect of discussion was to push the group and the individuals toward the extreme.
²⁰

In another experiment, students in their last year at a Parisian lycée were asked their feelings about the United States and General Charles de Gaulle. After discussion, the students' positive feelings toward the general increased, as did their less than favorable inclinations toward the United States. The group didn't settle on the average of what the students thought as individuals. Instead, it adopted a more extreme position. Conventional wisdom is that group discussion balances out different points of view, but these researchers found that "society not only moderates ideas [but] it radicalizes them as well."
²¹

There have been hundreds of group polarization experiments, all finding that like-minded groups, over time, grow more extreme in the direction of the majority view. In one experiment, freshmen who joined fraternities were more conservative than freshmen who didn't. Senior fraternity members, however, were more conservative than freshmen. Freshmen who didn't join fraternities were more liberal, and the ideological gap between them and fraternity members widened during their years in college. In another experiment, people who were racially prejudiced became more prejudiced as they talked about race relations. In a third, intervention programs that clumped delinquents with other delinquents increased the group rate of law breaking.
²²

Even people who are impartial by training are subject to group polarization. University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein and University of California, San Diego, business professor David Schkade reviewed decisions of federal court of appeals panels. The panels consisted of three judges, all appointed by either Republican or Democratic presidents. Sunstein and Schkade used the difference in political sponsorship to test whether ideology mattered in the panels'decisions. It did. All-Republican panels were far more likely to side with companies in labor or environmental cases. All-Democratic panels were far more likely to find against companies in environmental, labor, and sex discrimination cases.
^*
Perhaps it's not surprising that Republican-appointed judges have views different from Democratic-appointed judges. But Sunstein and Schkade found that the same judges would shift their positions depending on the ideological makeup of the panel. A Republican-appointed judge sitting with two other Republican appointees voted more conservatively than when the same judge sat with a mix of Democrats and Republicans. A Democratic appointee would shift to the right when sitting with Republican appointees and would vote far more liberally when sitting with two Democratic appointees.
²³

The lesson for politics and culture is pretty clear: It doesn't seem to matter if you're a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal, or a federal appeals court judge. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.
^†

Social psychologists have proposed several theories to explain group polarization. Two have survived scientific scrutiny. The first holds that people in single-minded groups are privy to a large pool of ideas and arguments supporting the dominant position of the group. If there are good arguments in favor of the group's inclination, everyone hears them, and hears them often. Moreover, as the group talks about these ideas and arguments, individuals feel more strongly about them. People are more committed to a position once they voice it. The second theory holds that people are constantly comparing their beliefs and actions to those of the group. When a person learns that others in the group share his or her general beliefs, he or she finds it socially advantageous to adopt a position slightly more extreme than the group average. It's a safe way to stand out from the crowd. It brings notice and even approbation.
²⁴

"It's an image maintenance kind of thing," explained social psychologist Robert Baron. Everyone wants to be a member in good standing with the dominant group position. It's counterintuitive, but people grow more extreme within homogeneous groups as a way to conform. "One way to make sure you aren't mistaken for one of those 'other people' is to be slightly ahead of the pack in terms of your Republican-ness," Baron said. "It's hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other words, because you're afraid that other people will call you whatever. In racial terms, you'd be called an Oreo if you [were] black [but went along with whites]."
²⁵
Saint Paul knew this. Before his conversion, Paul said, "Beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it." The disciple knew that going overboard in his pursuit of Christians served him well in the homogeneous society of the Jews. Paul explained that he "profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers."
²⁶
Or, as Holly Golightly put it in the movie
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
"It's useful being top banana in the shock department."

Like-minded groups create a kind of self-propelled, self-reinforcing loop. Group members send signals bolstering existing beliefs as they all vie to stand out as the most Republican or most Democratic in the group. And that sets off a new round of unspoken competition. Any successful talk radio host has realized, like Paul, that acclaim (and ratings) accrue to the most zealous. It's not enough to disagree with Bill Clinton or George W. Bush and to work for his defeat. These days, you must call for him to be impeached.

"Cato," the pseudonym of an antifederalist writer, thought that people hailing from the far reaches of the thirteen former colonies could not possibly have enough in common to bind a nation together. The "strongest principle of union" was found within the four walls of a home, Cato reasoned. He wrote that as relationships extended beyond the family to the community and then the new nation, they weakened, until "we lose the ties of acquaintance, habits, and fortunes, and thus, by degrees, we lessen in our attachments, till, at length, we no more than acknowledge a sameness of species."
²⁷

Cato and his allies were opposed by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the federalists who sought to unite the new nation. The two sides debated qualities of human nature and the limits of democratic government. At the root of their discussions, however, was an attempt to tame the inevitable effects of group polarization and intergroup discord. In the parlance of the times, the problem was the rise of "factions," the division of people into political interest groups. Madison wrote that the "history of almost all the great councils and consultations held among mankind for reconciling their discordant opinions, assuaging their mutual jealousies and adjusting their respective interests, is a history of factions, contentions, and disappointments, and may be classed among the most dark and degrading pictures which display the infirmities and depravities of the human character."
²⁸
Cato and his antifederalist comrades believed that the differences between the new country's isolated communities would eventually tear the nation apart. They argued that only small, like-thinking territories could be self-governing. "Brutus," the pseudonym of another antifederalist writer, explained, "In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar. If this is not the case, there will be constant clashing of opinions; and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other."
²⁹