Sports and politics: How strong is group identity? | Ezra Klein | Big Think

Sports and politics: How strong is group identity?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is often suggested that identity politics is something that marginalized groups do. American journalist and Vox co-founder Ezra Klein argues that it's something we all do.

"All politics all the time is influenced by identity." In social psychology, experiments in the minimum viable group paradigm methodology have shown that no matter how arbitrary the distinction, those who belong to one group tend to favor that group and discriminate against others.

Group identity trumps all else when it comes to politics and policy decisions.

Check out new episodes of Klein's podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, every week.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EZRA KLEIN

Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization. Launched in 2014, Vox reaches more than fifty million people across its platforms each month. Klein is also the host of the podcast the Ezra Klein Show, cohost of the Weeds podcast, and an executive producer on Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. Previously, Klein was a columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. He’s written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and appeared on many programs including Face the Nation, the Daily Show, and PBS NewsHour.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

I think it’s important that people’s theories of politics are built on a foundation of a theory about human nature or some rigorous empirics about human nature. And something that I think we do a bad job understanding is the way the psychology of identity and group affiliation function in politics. We tend to suggest that identity politics is something that only marginalized groups do and in fact it’s something we all do, all politics all the time is influenced by identity. In the 1930s and ‘40s a guy named Henri Tajfel, he was a Polish Jew, moved from Poland to France. He moved from Poland to France because in Poland he couldn’t go to university because he was Jewish, in France he enlists in World War II. He’s captured by the Germans, but he’s understood by the Germans as a French prisoner of war so he survives the war. When he’s released all of his family has been killed in the holocaust and he would have been killed as well if they had understood him to be a Polish Jew and not a French soldier. And he begins thinking and obsessing about these questions of identity what makes human beings sort each other into groups? Why when they sort each other into groups do they become so easily hostile to one another? And what does it take to sort into a group? What are the minimum levels of connection we need to have with each other to understand ourselves as part of a group and not individuals?

So, he begins doing a set of experience that are now known as the minimum viable group paradigm. And it’s a bit of an ironic term for reasons that I will get to you in a second, but he gets 64 kids from all the same school and he brings them in and he says you know we need you to do an experiment, could you look at this screen and tell many how many dots are on it just real quick do an estimation. And then researcher are busily scoring the work and deciding if the kids overestimated or underestimated. Then the researchers say hey while we’ve got you here would you mind doing another experiment with us not related to the first one in any way? We’re just going to sort you into two groups people who overestimated the number of dots and the people who underestimated them, but a different experiment. Don’t worry about it. In truth this sorting is completely random, it had nothing to do with dots, nobody cared how many dots anybody estimated. But immediately in this new experiment, which has to do with money allocation, the kids begin allocating more money, which they’re not allocating to themselves it’s only to other people. They begin allocating more money to their co-dot over or under estimators. And this was a surprise because the way this experiment was supposed to work was Tajfel and his co-authors we’re going to sort people into groups but not enough that they would begin to act like a groups and they were going to begin adding conditions to see at what point group identity took hold. But even Tajfel, who had gone through such a searing traumatic horrifying experience with how easily and how powerfully group identity takes hold, he underestimated it, he felt this would be underneath the line almost like a control group, but it was already over the line...

Read the full transcript here