By John Clarvis, Data and Insights Director as originally featured in The Media Leader
I used to quite proudly state that I was from Yorkshire. In London, it wasn’t uncommon, but I never felt entirely like a Londoner and didn’t want to deny my roots in a poor rural village.
This changed in 2016 post-Brexit, when my wife and her family received and continue to receive racist abuse whenever I visit home. Since then, I’ve disowned by home and transferred my citizenship to London.
While many of my friends and family are shocked by the revelation that large parts of the UK are openly racist and hostile to minorities, I was not. The far-right riots that ravaged the UK in the summer did not surprise me either. Nor should they have done to anyone who has cast even a cursory glance at the headlines, Twitter or Facebook over the last 12 years.
Social identity maintains individual self-esteem
While the overall causes are complex, a significant proportion are caused by the propagation of identity-threatening content.
In psychology, identity is a core concept of understanding social dynamics and behaviour. Identity exists on a spectrum, from individual identity to social identity. The former being formed and maintained by upbringing, family and friends; the latter being groups of any size, from as small as a football club to the size of an entire ethnicity.
Social identity theory proposes that a social identity is a crucial part of maintaining individual self-esteem. That is, membership of an identity makes people feel good. As creatures whose adaptive success has been based on co-operation and groups, it is an important impulse driven by survival.
A single humanoid in wild prehistory stood little chance against the environment, fauna or other humanoids, whereas a group of co-operating humanoids were able to not only survive but thrive and dominate their environment.
When a social identity is active, psychologists refer to the members’ group as the in-group and members of any other group as the out-group. When an individual identifies strongly with their in-group, they exhibit a proportional preference for members of their in-group and denigrate members of out-groups.
For the majority of the time, this causes few problems. Football rivalries, for example, are a relatively safe social identity that enable individuals to reap the self-esteem benefits of a social identity without external conflict.
Indeed, while members of different groups may not like each other, their presence is not necessarily threatening and does not cause conflict. Using football as an example again, direct conflict between rival teams is very rare and football fans are capable of co-existing.
Identities can be formed around any common interest or background, from fans of anime to hair colour to ethnicity.
Social identity is a crucial part of the human psyche, as are its effects on our opinions and beliefs about other groups. As a media type, I may hold the belief that bankers are conservative, greedy and boring. Or as a fan of jazz, I may believe that fans of chart music have unsophisticated taste. In short, social identity leads us to make stereotypes about ourselves and others as a shortcut to navigate the world.
Stereotypes are an unpleasant and often hurtful mode of thinking, but are only part of violent inter-group conflict.
Threat to distinctiveness
Salacious and provocative headlines are not new. Content that directly threatens a social identity, however, is. This differs from inter-group conflict in that when groups are in conflict, the in-group identity becomes more cohesive and stronger, and only under pressure escalates into violent confrontation.
What threatens a social identity most is a threat to its distinctiveness. That is, what makes the group different to other groups? As one of the foundations of positive self-esteem, a distinct social identity is crucial. One that is too vague or poorly identifiable cannot sufficiently serve as a “badge” for its members.
When distinctiveness is threatened, in-group members tighten the definitions of their identity and increase the strength of their beliefs — both positive and negative — about themselves.
When Hungary proposed to enter the EU, individuals who identified strongly with the Hungarian identity increased the degree to which they agreed with both positive and negative stereotypes about the Hungarian identity. In isolation, this can result in members leaving their group and joining another or tightening the restrictions of group membership.
Conserving energy
The final mediator of social identity is mood. As self-esteem and general mood become more negative, the more activated and defensive a social identity becomes. Crucially, this encourages a phenomenon known as the cognitive miser.
As an organ, the brain consumes a phenomenal number of resources — at times, up to 30% of available glycogen is consumed by the brain. In short, it is an expensive luxury to run at full capacity. It is hypothesised that, in order to save energy, we are predisposed to not waste that energy. In everyday life, this results in heuristics, habits and rules of thumb. We don’t need to think about many everyday tasks and thus save energy.
The downside of the efficiency is that we can also apply that model to our relations with other groups and people. It consumes much less energy to categorise a group of people as friendly, unfriendly, greedy, kind or unlikable than it does to individually assess a person on their own merits.
This effect is multiplied in times of threat and our survival system — the limbic system — is activated. This provides further adaptive value as it is better to act in a potentially dangerous situation than it is to think.
Unfortunately, our trigger-happy limbic system activates very easily since it is better to be safe than sorry, especially in prehistory. Being in a state of fear reduces blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the area required for complex thought. For group identity, fear and anger strongly reduce the positivity of attitudes towards out-groups as the cognitive miser encourages the use of stereotypes and in-group preference.
For violent inter-group conflict, each of the three threats — group conflict, group distinctiveness threat and the cognitive miser — are not sufficient in isolation. Rather, it would require a combination of them all.
In part two of this series, I will describe how significant parts of the media ecosystem profits from and encourage the activation of these three group flashpoints.