Is life better when we’re together? It used to be a question that
only hermits bothered to ask. Now it’s a pressing, mainstream concern.
Many Americans did bounce through the year ecstatic to be in a community
again but only with certain people, people who hadn’t revealed
themselves to be morons, jerkwads or fascists. Something about passing
through the ordeal of the pandemic seemed to empower people to finally
write those other people off. If true cohesion is impossible, it seemed
permissible to scale back the project of togetherness by drawing a cozy
circle around Us and a bright, flaming line between Us and Them.
Notably,
Mr. Petrovic was newsworthy this summer only because he, too, was
momentarily venturing out of his isolation and back into society. And he
was doing it for an exquisitely noble purpose: A video captured
the cave man, sitting in an antiseptically modern health care facility,
rolling up the sleeve of his tunic to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.
Mr.
Petrovic was a solitary and antisocial creature. He had rebuked society
with his total being. Still, even he worried that, epidemiologically,
he could not sever his relationship to the rest of humanity as cleanly.
And if he were to get sick, he explained, no one would be around to take
care of him. “I want to get all three doses,” he told the camera. When
he was told about vaccine skeptics, his take was: What’s the big fuss?
“I urge every citizen to get vaccinated — every single one of them,” he
proclaimed. The hermit subsequently reported no significant side
effects. “Two or three days later, I was drinking beer normally,” he
said.
The beer comment probably sealed it: The hermit had a moment online. Commenters
celebrated him as a hero, bonding around the allure of his lifestyle: a
community of introverted, hermit romantics. Others, meanwhile, scoffed
at his hypocrisy, dismissing him for carrying on about freedom, then
choosing “to inject their bioweapon” into his arm like a dupe. (Mr.
Petrovic also receives welfare; no one seemed bothered by this in the
comments, though.) Other posts went further, assuming the entire story
was nefarious propaganda to promote vaccinations.
It was the
beginnings of something familiar, to the point of being boring:
different people mapping their group identities and collective
grievances onto the story of someone who wanted nothing to do with
groups of people at all. Little arguments about the hermit sprouted
between tribes of commenters under the video on YouTube, then branched
into unrelated arguments. (Like, does Islam represent the only
authoritative and universal truth?) “Open up your chakras and actually
connect to other dimensions,” one commenter told
another. “I think the best solution for you is to sit in your garage
and let the exhaust run until the fumes take you,” another sniped.
Two other people, liking the sound of that idea, expressed their solidarity by clicking the tiny thumbs-up.
*
Humans
have an almost unstoppable propensity to clump ourselves together into
groups. We tend to understand this rationally and in flattering terms:
It’s our capacity to form a community and feel invested in that
community that allows us to work cooperatively and succeed. We tell
ourselves that we choose to identify with a particular group because
that group is meaningful, productive and right. But fundamentally,
banding together may be more of a compulsion than a strategy. There’s
something intoxicating about solidarity itself.
In the early
1970s, the psychologist Henri Tajfel lead a series of studies at the
University of Bristol that would become known as “the minimal group
experiments.” Dr. Tajfel recruited 64 teenagers from a local school and
divided them into groups. In one version, he asked the subjects to
estimate how many dots were flashing on a screen, then classified them
as either overestimators or underestimators; in another, he showed them
two sets of paintings, asked which they preferred, then assigned them to
either the Paul Klee group or the Wassily Kandinsky group.
With
these groups established, Dr. Tajfel instructed each person, working in
isolation, to allocate money to members of their own group and to
members of the other. He was curious whether these “flimsy and
unimportant” collective identities, as he called them, would come into
play. It seemed unlikely they would.
Dr. Tajfel was born in 1919
as Hersz Mordche, a Polish Jew, and grew up as antisemitism crusted over
the country in the run-up to World War II. (He remembered walking home
from school one afternoon as a boy and watching two kids attack two
Jewish men on the street, ripping their beards from their faces, drawing
blood.) Studying at the Sorbonne when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,
Dr. Tajfel volunteered to fight for France. When the French surrendered,
he was captured and forced to march north alongside other prisoners of
war. While he walked, he destroyed his Polish passport and other
documents identifying him as a Jew the only way he could: He ate them
very slowly.
Ultimately, Dr. Tajfel learned that his immediate
family had perished; almost no one he knew before the war was alive by
the end. He was troubled by how readily divisions had sprung up in
society and compelled by survivors’ varied emotional responses to the
atrocities that followed. He saw some become writers and artists and try
to “express and reflect what had happened to them and to others,” he
explained at the end of his life. But he knew he didn’t have that
talent. He became a psychologist instead.
With the minimal group
experiments, Dr. Tajfel was setting out to investigate the mechanics of
intergroup conflict but strove, first, to create a kind of scientific
vacuum, untainted by history, stereotypes or prejudices of any kind, so
that he could slowly add in variables later and see what happened. That
is, these first experiments, with the dots and paintings, weren’t his
real experiment. He was just setting up a baseline to get started:
groups that were barely even groups, that had been assembled on the
spot, based on nothing.
In fact, Dr. Tajfel’s meaningless, minimal
groups were even more meaningless than they appeared. He and his
collaborators had actually ignored the kids’ responses to the dots and
paintings. Instead, as the social psychologists Dominic J. Packer and
Jay J. Van Bavel note, describing these experiments in their new book,
“The Power of Us,” “in each case, the researchers had essentially
flipped a coin and assigned people to groups based on chance.”
Still,
biases locked in right away. Overwhelmingly, people in Dr. Tajfel’s
experiment gave more of the money he put at their disposal to members of
their own group than the other. Moreover, they were bent on creating as
large a disparity as possible, even when offered the option of
maximizing the amount of money for everyone, at no cost. Their behavior
seemed vindictive, “a clear case of gratuitous discrimination,” Dr.
Tajfel wrote.
Since then, other researchers have run their own
minimal group experiments, pushing those findings further. Dr. Packer
and Dr. Van Bavel have split people into leopards and tigers, for
example. Others have gone maximally minimal and divided people into
group A and group B. Still, the pride — the readiness to connect — is
always there. When you tell people they’re in group A, Dr. Packer says,
those people are reliably psyched to be in group A. Stick leopard people
in a brain imaging machine and show them a picture of a stranger, and
their brain activity changes if they know that the stranger is a leopard
person, too. Their positivity toward other leopard people increases and
even supersedes racial biases that cut the other way.
Dr. Packer
and Dr. Van Bavel call the minimal group studies “among the most
important studies in the history of psychology.” They demonstrate that
“the human sense of self — your gravitational center — does not stay in
the same place. With a flip of a coin, people constructed entirely new
identities in a matter of minutes.”
The rewards of this kind of
connectedness wind up driving all kinds of wonderful human behavior,
sometimes less obviously than we’d assume. What initially piqued my
interest in this whole phenomenon was a conversation with Mark Snyder, a
University of Minnesota psychologist who has studied volunteerism in
America since the mid-1980s, when he started observing volunteers caring
for people with AIDS. I asked Dr. Snyder why people spend their time
helping others; every year Americans spend roughly eight billion hours
volunteering — an estimated more than $200 billion worth of labor, all
given for free. He started by pointing out that “we’re socialized to
believe that charity is selfless, that it shouldn’t feel good,” but that
this is a myth. Dr. Snyder’s research demonstrates that the volunteers
who stick with their volunteerism the longest are those who transcend
some narrowly altruistic motivation and enjoy the inevitable, more
self-interested rewards they’re reaping in the process as well.
And
one of the key ones is human connectedness: Volunteering creates
friendships, expands social networks and gives volunteers a greater
feeling of belonging to the other volunteers and their communities at
large. It’s a feedback loop, Dr. Snyder explained, an unwittingly
virtuous cycle. The stronger those bonds get, the more rewarding the
volunteer work becomes for the volunteers and the more committed they’ll
be.
Still, Dr. Snyder added, this phenomenon is morally neutral.
Togetherness is a fissile material; we can’t necessarily predict or
control what reaction it will set off. “The process that leads
individuals to take action — fulfilling their own motivations,
connecting with other people with a shared sense of community — these
processes work whether we approve or disapprove of the ends to which
they’re ultimately put,” Dr. Snyder said. The group of volunteers who
spend their Saturday working at a Covid vaccination clinic and the group
of volunteers who spend their Saturday protesting outside the clinic
are, psychologically speaking, riding the same wave. Each effort is
sustainable, he explained, “because the ends are usually seen as
valuable and moral in the eyes of the people working toward them.”
That
drive seems even more profound during a disaster. Sociologists have
long observed the formation of emergent groups — ad hoc, self-organizing
communities of volunteers that spontaneously arise to address specific
problems during natural disasters. These volunteers might search for
victims in the rubble of a collapsed building or get on social media to
systematize the dissemination of information about missing people.
Disasters are disruptions, cleaving ordinary life open into vacuums of
uncertainty. Falling into a community with others — particularly a
community acting with purpose — helps people regain certainty and
agency. In a catastrophe, taking action can feel restorative, euphoric
even, and seems to help sustain survivors’ mental health.
It’s
worth noting, since it may not feel that way every second of every day,
that if you’re reading this, you are surviving a disaster — a horrific
one but one that’s also curiously disorienting and abstract. More than
five million people have died, but there haven’t always been obvious
piles of rubble for the rest of us to run toward or completely
satisfying ways to reclaim our agency or offer help. I don’t know how an
mRNA vaccine works, for example, and, though I did sometimes wonder or
even worry about their safety, I ultimately just trusted the scientific
community that told me to stick one in my arm.
Imagine, under
these circumstances, a group of people who rush forward to help but are
given bad information by the people they trust — or even misinformation
that they can’t disprove or aren’t savvy enough to question or just
aren’t motivated to contradict. Maybe they’re told the rubble pile is to
the east instead of west or that it’s a tsunami that’s coming instead
of a fire. Imagine how unproductively they would wind up reacting. They
might set off running to help in exactly the wrong direction and just
keep running — for months or years, as long as the disaster lasted. Even
if, objectively, their running didn’t seem to accomplish very much,
they would be running as a group, which feels better than doing nothing
alone.
How would you ever stop these people from running? How would you call them back?
*
“I’ve
never seen antisocial behavior at scale in my lifetime in the United
States,” Scott Gabriel Knowles told me, “never seen it raised up to the
level of mainstream politics. It’s been really startling.”
Dr.
Knowles is a historian and professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology — an American who has studied disasters for 20
years. He explained that the academic literature of disasters talks
about emergent groups primarily as prosocial: people coming together to
help their neighbors. And overwhelmingly, that’s been the reality.
But
on Jan. 6, he turned on his television and saw an emergent group there,
too — a community of grossly misinformed, if not willfully misinformed,
insurrectionists who, although they had been unmistakably riled up by
an authority figure at the rally beforehand, were now storming the
Capitol as a self-organizing group of volunteers. “I can’t deconstruct
the psychology of each one of those people,” Dr. Knowles explained. But
it was clear to him from some of their own statements that many were
part of “a community that’s reacting to something they see as a bigger
disaster than Covid: the Black Lives Matter protests.” That is, they
were responding to a perceived emergency, persuaded that they were the
ones who had to get the job done. (“If you don’t fight like hell,” the
about-to-be-former president had told them, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”)
“These
are groups of people who’ve done exactly what the literature said they
should do,” Dr. Knowles conceded, “as much as I find it totally
distasteful. If people feel that their group is in danger or that a
disaster has occurred, they will take action in innovative ways.” It’s
hard to imagine more antisocial behavior than attempting to undo a
democratic election with mayhem and violence. But the insurrectionists
were doing it together, and pretty joyously, it seemed — snapping
selfies, posting them to Facebook with stupid jokes in real time. It
was, within their community, a prosocial activity, too. They were like
anti-hermits who, feeling the same hyperbolic disgruntlement and
repulsion about where society was heading, had all found one another
instead of each finding a cave.
Remember Podium Guy? Adam Johnson is the 36-year-old man who had traveled to Washington from Florida and was photographed
strolling through the chaos in the Capitol Rotunda cradling Nancy
Pelosi’s stolen lectern in one arm. There was nothing benign about him;
he was part of a rampage. But alone at the center of the photo, waving
at the camera and grinning widely, he had the bemused but cheerful
expression of a roadie loading out after a crazy gig.
Last month,
after Mr. Johnson pleaded guilty to “entering or remaining in any
restricted building,” a federal judge, Reggie B. Walton, explained that
he was considering sending Mr. Johnson to prison: “You seemed to have
thought it was a fun event to be involved in,” Judge Walton scolded
Podium Guy from the bench. But he did more than scold. He addressed Mr.
Johnson almost as a kind of empty vessel, a weak-willed receiver and
amplifier of other people’s energies — a completely impressionable
sucker for the feeling of being in a group. “You were gullible enough to
come all the way up here from Florida based upon a lie and then
associate yourself, because of that lie, with people and try to
undermine the will of the American public,” the judge insisted.
And those other people are still out there, still promulgating the same
lie. “So why shouldn’t I lock you up, sir? Why should I think that you
won’t do this again?”
I have no answer to the problem of Podium
Guys — how, on a societal level, to stop manufacturing them or to
neutralize the destructive potential of the ones who already exist. It’s
depressing to recognize that community, a powerful tool for solving our
most intractable problems, can be a powerful incubator and accelerant
of problems, too. And it’s extra-depressing because those problems keep
multiplying and inflating. Even aside from the pandemic, there’s enough
confusion and precariousness in our country, real and imagined and from
the scale of individual families to the planetary level, to make any
given day feel like a crisis, too. When a system appears to be
malfunctioning, indifferent, reckless or corrupt, that’s a kind of
disaster, and people are likely to come together and respond, for better
or worse.
Some will be volunteers, and some will be vigilantes.
But both may be reacting to a similar feeling of free fall, of tumbling.
This doesn’t make them morally equivalent; in the end, morality is what
keeps them from being equivalent. I know it’s important to
keep drawing that distinction, to keep calling it out. I also know it’s
not enough.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/21/opinion/2021-essays-opinion.html#mooallem
