Psychology and Politics: A Social Identity Perspective [1 ed.] 041567770X, 9780415677707

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Psychology and Politics A social identity perspective

Alexa Ispas

Psychology and Politics

What makes us divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’? How can we exert social influence over others? When does a peaceful protest turn into a riot? Why are some politicians heroes one day and villains the next? Where do we find the resources to resist authoritarian regimes? Taking these questions as a starting point, the book examines political conduct from a social identity perspective. Supported by over two decades of empirical research, this perspective distinguishes between our personal identity, which is prevalent when we think of ourselves as individuals, and our social identity, which comes to the fore when we think of ourselves as members of groups. The social identity perspective argues that our political behaviour is largely governed by our social identity, and discusses the implications this has for politics, particularly for social influence, crowd events, leadership, and authoritarian regimes. Accessible and engaging, the content covers a wide range of political topics, such as the way in which categorizing ourselves into groups influences how we perceive the social world, the implications of categorization for social influence, the development of crowd events, the dynamics of leadership, and the mechanisms underlying obedience under authoritarian regimes. The book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students across a range of disciplines, as well as to political activists and leaders. Alexa Ispas completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. She has worked on research projects at the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, Cardiff University, and the University of St Andrews. Alexa has also worked as a social researcher for the Scottish Government.

Psychology and Politics A social identity perspective

Alexa Ispas

First published 2013 by Psychology Press 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Psychology Press 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Psychology Press The right of Alexa Ispas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ispas, Alexa. Psychology and politics : a social identity perspective / Alexa Ispas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Group identity. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept) 3. Social psychology. I. Title. HM753.I87 2013 302—dc23 2012021726 ISBN: 978–0–415–67770–7 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–57159–0 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements 1

Psychology and the social identity perspective

vii xi 1

Learning objectives 1 Henri Tajfel: Personal motivation and categorization research 1 Sherif’s Robber’s Cave study 4 Tajfel’s minimal group studies 10 The social identity perspective 17 Implications for politics 23 Chapter 1 summary 24 Focus questions 25 Further reading 25 2

The psychology of social influence Learning objectives 26 Sherif’s studies on norm formation 28 Asch’s conformity studies 30 Group polarization 35 Minority influence 38 Rethinking groupthink 42 Implications for politics 50 Chapter 2 summary 50 Focus questions 51 Further reading 52

26

vi Contents 3

The psychology of crowd events

53

Learning objectives 53 Crowds as irrational: A social identity critique 54 The importance of group norms 61 Crowds as agents for positive change 65 Implications for politics 68 Chapter 3 summary 68 Focus questions 69 Further reading 69 4

The psychology of political leadership

70

Learning objectives 70 Leaders as extraordinary individuals: The importance of leader attributes 70 Leaders as doers: The importance of leader behaviour 73 Leadership as perception: The importance of followers 76 Leaders as givers: Personal versus group interests 81 Leaders as visionaries: Transforming social reality 86 Implications for politics 89 Chapter 4 summary 91 Focus questions 92 Further reading 92 5

The psychology of authoritarian regimes

94

Learning objectives 94 Deference to authority: Milgram’s obedience studies 95 Evil in uniform: Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment 101 Implications for politics 110 Chapter 5 summary 112 Focus questions 113 Further reading 113 Glossary Bibliography Index

114 119 128

Preface

I fell in love with psychology the day I was introduced to the social identity perspective, during my second year of undergraduate studies. The first year of psychology was very different from what I had expected. Instead of learning about Freud and Jung and archetypes and dreams, about making sense of our own and others’ behaviours and thought processes – all things I had previously associated with psychology – the lectures seemed incredibly abstract. They were about cognitive models, perception, biology – very little of what I could relate to or observe in my everyday life. There was also something else that seemed to be missing, but I could not articulate what it was. One day, the social psychology lecturer said we were about to embark on a series of lectures on the social identity perspective. He told us about Henri Tajfel, its originator – about his experiences as a Polish Jew, fighting for survival in a German prison camp during World War II, and his shock upon returning home and finding that his entire family had been killed during the Holocaust. Shaken to the core, Henri Tajfel set off on a life-long quest to understand what happens psychologically when people categorize themselves and others into groups. He soon found students and colleagues eager to join him, and the theoretical approach he developed quickly became the preeminent contemporary social psychological approach to the study of relations between and within groups – a rich, hugely insightful perspective that explains so much about the world we live in. All I could think about when I left the lecture theatre that day was that I had found my way not only into psychology, but also into everything else that interested me – groups, politics, people. I also knew what had been missing from those other psychology lectures: the social group. The psychology in the lecture hall did not correspond to my own experience of the world; it was focused exclusively on the individual. By contrast, having recently left my home country – Romania – to study in the UK, what fascinated me most was the way in which my group membership as a Romanian influenced so many

viii Preface of my early interactions with fellow students. Many years later, I still strongly believe that the social identity perspective has something unique to teach us about the social world. Over the next few chapters, I will endeavour to show how useful this perspective can be when applied to politics.

Applying the social identity perspective to politics The social identity perspective presents a number of advantages in analyzing political phenomena. First, its development was motivated by the need to understand how something as monstrous as the Holocaust could take place. As a result, one of the key questions of the social identity perspective is to examine the circumstances under which repressed groups are likely to engage in collective action to improve their circumstances – a highly political question. From its early development to the present day, social identity research has maintained that it is largely through the work of groups that social change is possible. As Turner (2006) argues, ‘it is the group through which people are able to change things collectively and politically, and hence ultimately change personalities and individual attitudes’ (p. 44). Second, the social identity perspective is highly attuned to the political messages that are put forward by psychological research. In particular, social identity research challenges many of the established theories and work in social psychology, such as work on social influence, crowd events, leadership, and obedience to authority (Turner, 2006). This has made the social identity perspective controversial to those intent on maintaining the status quo within psychology, but popular with researchers eager to spread out a positive message of empowerment. There is now active social identity research all over the world, which leads to interesting international perspectives. By contrast to individualistic approaches to social influence, crowds, or leadership, the social identity perspective offers a progressive view, one that provides hugely stimulating insights into politics.

How this book is structured Several excellent books have been published in recent years on political psychology. These books can give you a very broad idea of how psychology is relevant to politics. In this book, I am taking a different approach. Rather than introducing you to a multitude of different theories and models, aiming for a broad overview, I am focusing in-depth on what the social identity perspective can contribute to our understanding of politics. I have focused on four broad areas of politics, to which I believe a social identity perspective has the most to offer: social influence; crowd events; leadership; and authoritarian regimes.

Preface ix If you are a student, a political activist, or someone interested in current affairs, I believe this book can provide a useful, engaging starting point for understanding the processes behind political phenomena, for ‘reading between the lines’ when listening to political speeches or reading newspaper articles, and being able to make more informed choices and decisions about the world you live in. Whether you are reading this book to study for your exams or purely because it looks interesting, I would like it to be useful to you – not just to your academic or professional life, but to your life as a citizen of the world. As the social identity perspective has developed over many years, it has generated a large amount of jargon. This book aims to translate findings into accessible language and provide an engaging reading experience. The glossary at the back also aims to help understanding. The chapters can be read independently or in sequence. The bulk of each chapter discusses social psychology findings in a way that builds up an argument in line with the social identity perspective. At the end of each chapter, I then discuss the specific implications for politics. It is best to read Chapter 1 before any of the others, as it provides an overview of the social identity approach, but I reintroduce the relevant concepts in each chapter. In Chapter 1 I discuss the way in which the social identity perspective was developed. Starting with Henri Tajfel’s personal motivation and empirical work on categorization, I then discuss a range of studies that are at the basis of the social identity perspective. In the final part of the chapter I provide a brief overview of the main tenets of the social identity perspective. In Chapter 2, I focus on the insights provided by the social identity perspective to the process of social influence, a central concept for politics. By focusing on social identity concerns, the social identity perspective challenges individualistic interpretations of social influence. I discuss this in relation to a range of experimental paradigms and concepts prevalent in social psychology: Sherif’s norm formation studies, Asch’s conformity studies, group polarization, minority influence, and groupthink. In Chapter 3, I apply some of the insights relating to social influence from Chapter 2 to the study of crowds, the initiators of social and political change throughout history. I begin by examining the way in which previous theorists such as Le Bon have conceptualized the crowd as irrational and deprived of any sense of responsibility. I also discuss later empirical work on deindividuation. Both these strands emphasize the negative effects of crowds and groups on individual behaviour. By contrast, research from the social identity perspective argues that crowd members’ actions are guided by social rather than individual concerns. The negative behaviour that arises is therefore not caused by being in a group per se, but rather depends on the norms of that particular group.

x Preface In Chapter 4, I examine the concept of leadership. A wide range of perspectives has been put forward over the past decades to explain what makes an effective political leader. In particular, I discuss the ‘great person’ approach to leadership and its emphasis on the leader’s personality; the contingency approach, with its notion that the effectiveness of a particular leader depends on whether the leader’s behavioural style matches the relevant context; the perceptual approach and its focus on followers’ perceptions; the emphasis placed by the transactional approach on the exchange that takes place between leaders and followers; and the transformational approach, with its focus on the way in which leaders inspire followers to greatness. Each of these approaches emphasizes, in different ways, the gap between leader and followers. By contrast, the social identity perspective emphasizes the shared social identity that makes leadership possible, and that allows leaders not only to respond to the social context but also to shape it to their advantage. In Chapter 5, I examine the psychological processes through which authoritarian regimes take hold. Famous social psychological experiments such as Milgram’s obedience studies and Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment have traditionally been interpreted as testimony to our inability, as human beings, to resist evil. However, a closer examination of the findings from a social identity perspective turns these famous interpretations on their head. Empirical research designed by social identity researchers further suggests that it is when groups are ineffective that group members become susceptible to authoritarian regimes.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Andy McKinlay for introducing me to the social identity perspective and Rachael Eggins for feeding the flame. Your enthusiasm was infectious, and I simply could not resist. Thank you. The foundations for the contents of this book were laid during my time as a summer research scholar in the psychology department at the Australian National University, an opportunity for which I will be forever grateful. I would also like to thank Rupert Brown, Nick Hopkins, Jolanda Jetten, Craig McGarty, Michael Platow, Russell Spears, Cliff Stott, and Sue Widdicombe for enabling me to develop my understanding of the social identity perspective over the years. Steve Reicher’s influence can be found on nearly every page of this book. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of John Turner, a tremendous mentor and leader within the social identity research community. I have always been in awe at the clarity with which he was able to express highly complex concepts, and his extraordinarily bold and empowering political vision. I hope he would have approved of this book. The book could not have been written without the loving support and encouragement offered by my partner, Stuart. His advice and guidance have helped me to write a book I can be proud of. Thank you also for taking care of the practical matters of life, allowing me the freedom to take on this monumental task. I will never forget it.

1

Psychology and the social identity perspective

Learning objectives • • •

discover the roots of the social identity perspective; understand the distinction between personal and social identity; recognize key concepts of the social identity perspective: social identity, depersonalization, prototype, positive distinctiveness.

In this chapter we introduce the social identity perspective. We begin with Henri Tajfel, its originator – his personal motivation behind his theoretical and empirical work, and the initial research on categorization that influenced his later thinking. We then discuss Sherif’s Robber’s Cave study, which provided rich empirical data that inspired Tajfel’s experimental paradigm, and discuss the findings of Tajfel’s minimal group studies. In the final part of the chapter we introduce the theoretical underpinnings on which the social identity perspective is based.

Henri Tajfel: Personal motivation and categorization research Henri Tajfel was born in 1919 in Poland to a Jewish family. His experiences as a young man led to a life-long quest to understand how categorizing ourselves and others into groups influences our perception of the social world. Tajfel was studying at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when World War II began. He volunteered to serve in the French army, but a year later was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war. Upon release he returned to Poland, to find that none of his family and only a few of his friends had survived the Holocaust. This tragic news left Tajfel with a strong desire to understand the process through which something as monstrous as the Holocaust had been

2 Psychology and the social identity perspective possible (Billig, 2002; Tajfel, 1981). In this quest, Tajfel was also influenced by his experiences as a prisoner of war. During that time, he had found that being perceived as a member of one group (‘French Jew’) as opposed to another group (‘Polish Jew’) could literally mean the difference between life and death. This experience opened Tajfel’s eyes to the importance of categorization – a lesson he would carry with him for the rest of his life (Turner, 1996). Unsurprisingly, given this background, the first strand of research that firmly established Tajfel’s name in social psychology was on categorization, with a focus on understanding stereotyping and prejudice. His point of departure was a study by Campbell (1956). In this study, participants were presented with a series of trials where nonsense syllables were placed along a horizontal line. The participants were asked to remember the physical location of these syllables. There were two kinds of nonsense syllables: in one of them, the central letter was always ‘E’; in another, it was always ‘X’. The ‘E’ and ‘X’ syllables overlapped in their placement along the horizontal line, but ‘E’ syllables were presented towards the left, while ‘X’ syllables were presented towards the right. The study found that participants consistently overestimated the extent to which the overlapping syllables containing ‘E’ were towards the left and the ‘X’ syllables were towards the right. Why would they perceive the two sets of syllables as further apart than they were in reality? Campbell suggested that this was because the participants perceived the two types of nonsense syllables as two distinct categories. Because of this implicit category distinction, the participants were led to overestimate the distance between the two types of syllables. Campbell used these findings to make a broader point. He suggested that an important consequence of categorization is that it leads to an overestimation of any pre-existing differences between individual elements belonging to a category. Campbell’s (1956) interpretation was speculative, given that the two categories had been generated implicitly, through the placement of the different syllables and letters. Tajfel designed a study in which this categorization was explicit, so any findings could be attributed to the effect of categorization with greater certainty than was the case in Campbell’s study. Tajfel (1959) hypothesized that if a category distinction is imposed on two sets of stimuli in an explicit way, for example through the use of the letters ‘A’ for one set and ‘B’ for the other, any pre-existing differences between the two sets of stimuli will be enhanced. In a study conducted with one of his colleagues (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963), he provided empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. The study asked participants to estimate the length of a series of lines which were presented one at a time (see Figure 1.1). There were eight different

Psychology and the social identity perspective 3

Condition 1

A

B

A

B

A

B

A

B

A

A

A

A

B

B

B

B

Condition 2

Condition 3 (control condition)

Figure 1.1 The three conditions in the study by Tajfel and Wilkes (1963).

lines, each varying in length from the one next to it by the same amount, less than 1 cm. There were three conditions. In the first condition, the letter ‘A’ appeared under the four shorter lines, and the letter ‘B’ under the four longer ones. In the second condition, the letter ‘A’ or ‘B’ appeared under each line, but there was no relationship between the length of the line and the letter

4 Psychology and the social identity perspective appearing underneath it. In the third condition (the control condition), the lines were presented on their own. The study found that in the second and the third condition, participants’ estimates were accurate. By contrast, in the first condition, participants consistently overestimated the difference between the longest ‘A’ line and the shortest ‘B’ line, judging this difference to be nearly double than its actual size. All their other estimates were as accurate as in the other two conditions. The introduction of the ‘A’ and ‘B’ labels in a way that bore a relationship to the length of the lines had therefore led participants in the first condition to overestimate the difference between the ‘A’ and the ‘B’ line that were closest to each other in length. In the laboratory, the category distinction ‘A’ and ‘B’ had simply led to an overestimation of the difference between the lines that were most similar. Tajfel knew, however, that in the outside world, the same kind of category distinction had far more important consequences. During his time as a prisoner of war, Tajfel had consistently told the German guards that he was a French rather than a Polish Jew; had the guards found out he was in fact Polish, he would have been killed. Tajfel realized that this was because in the eyes of the guards, he was not an individual; he was a member of a particular group. In this real-life context, a category distinction of the kind he had found to influence participants’ judgements in the laboratory had been meaningful enough to signify the difference between life and death (Turner, 1996). Both Tajfel’s personal experiences and his empirical work pointed to the idea that once we impose a category distinction on a group of people, the individual members are seen as interchangeable. Their idiosyncratic characteristics become irrelevant; what matters is the group to which they belong, and the value judgements associated with that group. Tajfel was keen to show that the findings of this and other studies on categorization had direct relevance for the behaviour of group members in ways that had more in common with the world outside the laboratory than judging a series of lines. How could he capture the effects of categorization on the behaviour of group members in the laboratory – a setting so sterile, so removed from the strong group allegiances brought on by the outside world? In search of an experimental paradigm, Tajfel’s attention turned to an intriguing field study carried out in the USA – Sherif’s Robber’s Cave study (Sherif et al., 1961).

Sherif’s Robber’s Cave study In the summer of 1954, 22 boys were brought by bus to Robber’s Cave State Park in Oklahoma to spend three weeks at a summer camp. However, this was a summer camp with a difference. The person in charge was Muzafer Sherif,

Psychology and the social identity perspective 5 a social psychologist aiming to study the way groups develop, enter into conflict with one another, and reconcile. Over the next three weeks, this summer camp was going to be his laboratory; the boys, his unwitting participants. The boys were 11 years old, from similar middle-class backgrounds, and not previously acquainted with one another. They had been assigned to two equal groups. These groups had been carefully matched on relevant criteria such as height, weight, athletic skill, and previous camping experience. The interactions among and between these two groups were monitored and documented by two teams of participant observers playing the role of summer camp staff. In addition, hidden recording devices were placed at strategic points to record conversations between the boys. During the first week of summer camp – the first phase of the study – the two groups were kept unaware of each other’s presence. They were brought to the camp site on two separate buses, at different times, and housed at different locations. Even though they used the same canteen, the meal times were different and any traces left by one group were removed before the other group was brought in. The researchers used this elaborate procedure in order to ensure that the boys in each group had the chance to become acquainted with one another and develop a sense of ‘ingroup’ – a sense of ‘us’ – without this being in any way influenced by an awareness of ‘them’. As such, staff members kept the boys away from competitive games during the first week. Instead, they encouraged activities that required the boys to work together as a team. For example, they organized a treasure hunt for the boys – a challenge that required the boys to work together in tracing the path and finding the hidden objects. Other such team-building activities included making a fire, singing, swimming, canoeing, and hiking. By the end of the first week, the two groups had a strongly developed sense of ‘us’. Each group had their own songs, favourite places, and code of conduct. They also had come up with names for their group: ‘the Rattlers’ and ‘the Eagles’. The stage was set for the second phase of the study. The second phase began with each of the groups being made aware that another group of boys was using the same camp site. This was done casually, through staff bringing the groups within hearing distance of each other, to keep the boys unaware that the encounter had been planned all along. The Rattlers’ immediate reaction was to ‘run them off’ and ‘challenge them’. They laid particular emphasis on being the first to propose the challenge, and asked their staff to organize a competition with the other group. The Eagles, slightly depleted in numbers (two boys had been sent home during the first week due to homesickness), initially did not react to finding out about the other group. The next day, however, they referred to the Rattlers in derogative terms, asked their staff to challenge them to a baseball tournament, and started

6 Psychology and the social identity perspective to prepare by selecting their team’s captain. The boys were ahead of Sherif’s planned development of the second phase. Even before having come into contact, the two groups had already started to perceive each other as rivals, and both were keen to prove that they were in some way ‘better’ than the other group. The insistence of the two groups to compete against one another anticipated Sherif’s plans to introduce a tournament, in which the two groups were brought into what Sherif called a ‘relationship of negative interdependence’ – one group’s win was predicated on the other group’s loss. The tournament consisted of competitive activities such as tug-of-war, baseball, and football games. In addition, the boys could also gain points for their group through their performance in a second category of activities: cabin inspections, their performances of skits and songs, and a competitive treasure hunt. This second set of activities enabled staff to juggle points in such a way that both teams’ scores remained extremely close throughout the tournament, thus fuelling the rivalry between the two groups and keeping up the tension as to which group was going to win. Competitiveness was also exacerbated by staff in other ways. The two groups were now made to share the canteen at meal times, where the changing scores were shown through rising thermometers and announced by staff at every meal. In addition, the prizes for the winning group (a pen knife for each group member and a trophy cup for the group) were exhibited in full sight. With every meal, therefore, the two groups were reminded about the importance of winning. The conflict between the two groups, already present before they had come into contact with one another, developed from bad to worse over the course of the tournament. Derogatory remarks between the two groups became a regular occurrence at meal times. The situation escalated further as the Eagles, after losing a game, burnt their opponents’ flag, and the other team retaliated in kind the next day. Staff had to intervene to stop fights erupting between members of the two groups. A raid of the Eagles’ cabin by the Rattlers, following a tug-of-war game in which the Eagles won through what their rivals saw as an unfair strategy, led a day later to a raid of the Rattlers cabin by the Eagles. The Rattlers also started storing rocks, which they planned to throw against their opponents in case of reprisals, and were only dissuaded from doing so by another staff intervention. The Eagles were declared the winners of the tournament based on the last, deciding event – the treasure hunt (in reality, the final scores were tweaked by staff in favour of the team least likely to win). The winners jumped up and down, hugged each other, took turns in kissing the trophy, and made a great amount of noise. The losers, on the other hand, remained seated, looking glum and dejected.

Psychology and the social identity perspective 7 By the end of the second week of summer camp, conflict between the two groups was at its peak and the second phase of the study was at an end. The aim of the third phase was to find the most effective way of resolving this conflict. Initially, Sherif thought now that the conflict of interest (the tournament) between the two groups had been removed, bringing the two groups into noncompetitive contact with one another would be sufficient. He therefore introduced a range of non-competitive activities that required the groups to spend time together within the same space, such as watching movies in the canteen. This strategy failed, as members of both groups refused to mingle, only engaged with the other group through food fights and derogatory remarks, and reserved their positive behaviours for members of their own group. Sherif therefore decided to adopt a different strategy. He reasoned that as the conflict had been created by bringing the two groups in a relationship of negative interdependence with each other, the conflict could only be resolved through reversing the nature of this relationship to one of ‘positive interdependence’ – where the success of one group depended on the success of the other. To this end, Sherif introduced a series of ‘coincidences’ that required all the boys to work together towards a common goal. This meant that each group could only reach their goal if the other group succeeded too. For example, the staff rigged the water supply to the camp so it stopped running, and announced a possible leak in the supply pipe. The boys had to work together to inspect the mile-long supply pipe, identify the problem (a clogged valve in the tank), and find a solution as quickly as possible. They all rejoiced when the water started running again, and temporarily put aside their differences. Another time, they had to work together to start a truck that had ‘broken down’ and that was needed to deliver food to everyone in the camp. The truck was too heavy for one group alone; it was only by working together that the two groups were able to get the truck moving again. Ironically, the same rope that had been used a few days before in a conflictfuelled tug-of-war game was used in this instance to solve a common problem. After a series of such ‘common goal’ situations, the two groups reduced their negative attitudes and aggressive behaviour towards each other. They started mingling with members of the other group without prompting from staff, and began to organize activities that involved both groups. By the end of the summer camp, they were able to coexist alongside each other, and the boys even requested to go back to their homes on the same bus. Sherif (1966) interpreted these findings in light of ‘realistic conflict theory’, originally developed by Campbell (1965). This theory argues that groups come into conflict when one group’s win is predicated on the other group’s loss. Sherif suggested that under conditions where people see

8 Psychology and the social identity perspective themselves as belonging to a particular group (as was achieved during the first phase of the study), and this group’s interests – winning the tournament – are in direct conflict with those of another group, the outcome is likely to be that members of the two groups will express negative attitudes and engage in discriminatory behaviour towards each other, as we saw during the second phase. If, on the other hand, the two groups can be brought into a relationship whereby they have to work together to achieve a common goal, as was the case during the third phase, they are likely to develop a harmonious relationship. Sherif’s (1966) explanation makes intuitive sense. The two groups were indeed locked into conflict during the second phase of the study, but succeeded in putting aside their differences by the end of the third phase. However, examining the data more closely, it becomes evident that an explicit conflict of interest may not in fact have been necessary to spark the rivalry between the two groups; simply assigning the boys to two different groups may have been enough. Indeed, two instances in Sherif’s own careful documentation of the study indicate that the mere awareness of ‘us’ and ‘them’ led to rivalry. We have already discussed one of them – as soon as the Rattlers were made aware of the existence of the other group, even before coming into contact with them, they started hatching plans for a competition to prove their group’s supremacy. They began asserting themselves from the very start, by making sure they were the first to propose the challenge. This, of course, was before the staff had suggested a tournament with the aim of introducing a conflict of interest. Indeed, it was the boys themselves who proposed the tournament to the staff, not the other way around. The boys therefore saw the tournament as a way of asserting their supremacy, not as a conflict of interest. This interpretation is also supported by the Eagles’ reaction to being made aware that another group was using the camp site. By contrast to the Rattlers, they did not react immediately to the news. This, as Sherif et al. (1961) suggest, is most likely due to being depleted in numbers compared to the Rattlers group. Their delayed response is a typical response by subordinate groups, as outlined by the social identity perspective. Given that comparing themselves to a more powerful group is psychologically risky, such groups initially consider alternative ways of asserting their supremacy. However, presumably having decided that they stood a good chance of winning despite lower numbers, the Eagles also anticipated plans by staff to suggest a tournament. Once again, instead of the conflict of interest having been suggested by the researchers as a way of inciting rivalry, the rivalry was already there once the two groups became aware of each other. The tournament simply provided the two groups with a means to prove that their group was better than the other.

Psychology and the social identity perspective 9 Another instance which suggests that a conflict of interest may not have been necessary for the sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ to emerge happened at the very beginning, when the two groups of boys travelled on separate buses to the camp. The boys were picked up by their respective bus in Oklahoma City. Each bus stopped twice, with several boys being picked up at each stop. In the Eagles group, all the boys were on time at both stops. In the Rattlers group, on the other hand, Sherif et al. (1961) report that one of the boys was half an hour late at the first bus stop. The four boys waiting at the second bus stop therefore had to wait half an hour for their bus to arrive. During this time, they formed what Sherif calls a ‘friendship cluster’ that immediately began calling themselves ‘us south-siders’. Once on the bus, together with the other boys, the ‘south-siders’ regarded the other boys on the bus as ‘them’. This was evident in the seating arrangements on the bus, in the sides taken during a game, and the enquiry whether ‘us south-siders’ could stay together at camp. Once the boys had arrived at camp, this initial ‘us’ versus ‘them’ distinction also manifested itself through the ‘south-side’ boys choosing neighbouring bunks, and at breakfast on the second day when the south-side boys opposed the suggestion that one of the other boys lead them all in singing. This division between the boys, the ‘south-siders’ and the others, was recorded as lasting until the fifth day, when upon arrival back at their cabin after a long camping trip the boys found all the beds and their personal gear outside the cabin. This had been done by the staff, under the pretext that the cabin needed to be fumigated, to see how the boys would reorganize themselves. The rearrangements provided evidence that the ‘south-siders’ had by now integrated into the larger group, with one of the other boys choosing a bed between two of the south-siders, and the other two south-siders moving to other parts of the cabin. This example shows that even waiting half an hour together at a bus stop had been enough to introduce a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The category distinction took several days to disappear, and was probably only dissolved due to a range of team-building activities that aimed to generate a sense of ‘us’ within the larger group. If the biases between the two groups had been due to a conflict of interest, as argued by Sherif (1966), we would also expect such biases to have disappeared completely in the Robber’s Cave study once the groups were no longer in competition with one another. However, as we have discussed, Sherif’s attempts at bringing the two groups into non-competitive contact with one another failed to reduce the rivalry between the two groups. It was only when Sherif introduced a series of outside factors that the boys could classify as ‘them’ (e.g. the faulty supply pipe, the heavy truck) that the two groups gradually laid their previous conflicts to rest and began to coexist in harmony with one another, perhaps with an emerging sense of an ‘us’ which included both groups.

10 Psychology and the social identity perspective

Tajfel’s minimal group studies The findings reported by Sherif et al. (1961) indicate that a conflict of interests, while important, may not be the most basic factor to generate a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ between groups. Based on both his research on categorization and his personal experiences of prejudice, Tajfel started thinking: could it be that it took less than the complicated set-up of Sherif’s study to generate the same ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset in participants, and in a way that could be examined systematically in the laboratory? The initial evidence looked promising. Rabbie and Horwitz (1969) divided Dutch school children who were strangers to one another before the study into groups of four, labelled ‘green’ and ‘blue’. In the experimental condition, after being asked to work together on an unrelated task, the children were told that transistors would be handed out to help with the task. They were also told that due to shortage in the number of transistors, only one group (decided through a coin toss) would receive these. In the control condition, participants were not told about the transistors. The study examined how the children rated each other on a series of socio-metric scales. Initial findings indicated that in the experimental condition, the children rated members of their own group more favourably than members of the other group, whereas this did not happen in the control condition. Upon increasing the size of the control group, however, Horwitz and Rabbie (1982) noted that in fact, participants rated members of their own group more favourably in both conditions; the experimental group only presented a bigger discrepancy. These findings provided an initial indication that it takes much less than the complicated set-up of the first phase in Sherif’s study to generate the same kind of discrimination between ‘us’ (ingroup) and ‘them’ (outgroup). Tajfel (1970) decided to investigate just how little it took for this type of discrimination to happen. He developed an experimental paradigm that, unlike Sherif’s study, was stripped of any social interaction between participants, yet aimed to achieve the same ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset. The studies came to be known as the ‘minimal group studies’, because they involved groups that had been generated through an artificial distinction in the laboratory and therefore had no prior history. For his first minimal group study, Tajfel (1970) recruited 64 boys from a comprehensive school in Bristol, whom he tested in groups of eight. The boys were 14 and 15 years old, and knew each other well. They were told they were going to take part in an experiment examining visual judgements, and were asked to estimate the number of dots flashed onto a screen. There were 40 trials, and the dots were arranged in clusters of varying sizes, so the boys were not able to count the dots. In one condition, after completing the task, the boys were told that people are either overestimators or underestimators. In another

Psychology and the social identity perspective 11 condition, the boys were told that people are either accurate or inaccurate in their visual judgements. The boys were then taken to another room one by one, and told which group they belong to on the basis of their estimations. In the first condition, the boys were told they were either an ‘overestimator’ or an ‘underestimator’, while in the second condition they were told their visual judgements had either been ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’. In reality, the boys were allocated to these groups on a random basis, with half the participants in each condition allocated to one of the two groups. The aim of this first part of the study was to make the boys think of themselves as members of the artificially created groups rather than as individuals. This represented the equivalent of Sherif’s first phase and the beginning of the second in the Robber’s Cave study, when the two groups became aware of each other’s existence. The second part of Tajfel’s (1970) study was conducted under the pretext of a second experiment. The boys were told that for the purpose of efficiency, the same groups as before would be used. Each of the boys was provided with an 18-page booklet. On each page, there was a matrix consisting of 28 boxes. The boxes were arranged in two rows, with 14 columns for each row (see Figure 1.2). Each box in the matrix contained a number which was either positive or negative. The numbers were never the same in the upper and lower row – one number was always bigger than the other. The boys were told that the numbers in the boxes represented monetary rewards and penalties, which they were asked to allocate to some of the other boys taking part in the study. The numbers in the top row of the matrix were the rewards and penalties to be awarded to one person, those in the bottom row to another person. In making the allocations, the boys did not know who the first or the second person were, as they were only identified by code numbers. The only information they had was whether the person was part of their own group or part of the other group. The boys were told that their own rewards and penalties were generated in a similar way, through allocations made by other participants in the study; they could not make any allocations to themselves. In this way, Tajfel ensured that the boys’ choices were not motivated by personal interest but were the result of thinking of themselves as a member of one of the artificially created groups. The boys completed the task on their own, in separate cubicles. The matrices required the boys to make three types of choices: ingroup choices (the top and the bottom row represented rewards and penalties for two members of the participant’s own group), outgroup choices (the top and the bottom rows represented rewards and penalties for two members of the other group), and intergroup choices (one row indicated the rewards and penalties to be awarded to an ingroup member, the other the rewards and penalties to be awarded to an outgroup member). There were six matrices in total, and each appeared three times, once for each of the three types of choice.

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Figure 1.2 The matrices used in Tajfel’s first minimal group study. Adapted from Tajfel (1970).

According to Turner (1996), who was one of Tajfel’s PhD students at the time and later became one of his closest collaborators, Tajfel did not expect any interesting results to come out of this initial experiment. His intention was merely to use this situation as a baseline to which he could gradually add further variables in order to examine at what point participants would start to use money allocations to discriminate between ingroup and outgroup members. To Tajfel’s surprise, however, the study found that despite no social interactions, no knowledge of who the other ingroup members were, and within a setting devoid of the complexities of the outside world, participants – regardless of condition or the category they had been placed in – consistently

Psychology and the social identity perspective 13 allocated more money to ingroup than to outgroup members on the ‘intergroup choice’ matrices. By contrast, participants’ choices on the matrices that asked them to make allocations between two ingroup members or two outgroup members were clustered around the mid-points of the matrices (see Figure 1.3). This was the point at which the distribution was fairest, as both participants were allocated similar amounts. On the basis of these findings, Tajfel (1970; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) argued that two principles were at play in participants’ choices. First, the boys adhered to what could be called a ‘fairness principle’ – when making monetary allocations to two unknown individuals, this principle dictates that similar amounts should be allocated, to make the distribution as fair as possible. This was demonstrated by the fact that on both the ingroup and the outgroup choices, the boys tried to allocate similar amounts to both participants. Examining the boys’ choices on the matrices where they had to allocate money between an ingroup and an outgroup member, on the other hand, a different principle seemed to be at play. This principle was termed by Tajfel the ‘ingroup favouritism principle’: when making allocations between an ingroup and an outgroup member, the ingroup member should always be favoured over the outgroup member. This is demonstrated by the fact that on the ‘intergroup choice’ matrices, unlike on the other two types of matrices, INGROUP-OUTGROUP CHOICES

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Figure 1.3 The findings from Tajfel’s first minimal group study. Adapted from Tajfel (1970).

14 Psychology and the social identity perspective participants consistently allocated more money to the ingroup than to the outgroup member. Taken together, the findings suggest that in general, fairness was important to participants. However, the mere act of introducing a category distinction that made the boys think of themselves as group members rather than as individuals was enough for them to discriminate against outgroup members in those instances that provided an intergroup context. Intrigued by these findings, Tajfel wanted to find out what motivated the boys’ consistent favouring of the ingroup over the outgroup. Three distinct possibilities presented themselves. The first possibility was that what was important to the boys was that ‘we’ make more money from taking part in the experiment than ‘them’. The money in this case would represent a conflict of interest between the two groups, similar to the way Sherif interpreted winning the tournament in the Robber’s Cave study. On the other hand, as Tajfel suspected, the boys’ choices might have been motivated by the need to assert their supremacy over the other group, the amount of money made only being a secondary matter. In Sherif’s study, as we have already mentioned, the fact that the boys had proposed the tournament before any prompting from staff suggests that they saw it as a way to assert their supremacy rather than as a conflict of interests. A third possibility was that given that the boys knew each other well before taking part in the study, they may see themselves, if given the chance, as one group (‘us boys’) versus the experimenters as the outgroup. If this were the case, they might want to maximize the amount of money both ingroup and outgroup members made from taking part in the study. Tajfel (1970) designed a second minimal group study to examine which of these possible motivations had influenced the boys’ choices in the first study. The participants in this study were 48 teenage boys who knew each other well and were tested in groups of 16. This time, the boys were asked to look at a series of 12 slides, half of which showed paintings by Paul Klee, the other half by Wassily Kandinsky. The boys were told that based on their preference, they were either in the ‘Kandinsky’ or the ‘Klee’ group. In reality, the paintings were shown without a signature, so the boys could be allocated to the two categories on a random basis. As in the first study, the boys were subsequently asked to make monetary allocations between some of the other participants using booklets of matrices with numbers set out in two rows over 13 columns (see Figure 1.4). The other participants were only identified through code numbers and membership labels – ‘Klee’ or ‘Kandinsky’. Like the matrices in the first study, these matrices asked the boys to make allocations between a member of the ingroup and a member of the outgroup; between two ingroup members; and between two outgroup members.

Psychology and the social identity perspective 15 A 19

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Figure 1.4 The matrices used in Tajfel’s second minimal group study. Adapted from Tajfel (1970).

However, towards each end of the matrices, the numbers were designed to make the boys choose between three variables, each of which related to one of the three possible motivating factors already mentioned: maximum ingroup profit (largest possible reward to ingroup member); maximum difference (largest difference in gain between a member of the ingroup and a member of the outgroup, in favour of the ingroup member); and maximum joint profit (largest possible reward to both participants). As these matrices focused on the boys’ strategies for allocating rewards, they only contained positive numbers. There were only four matrices this time – two type A and two type B matrices – repeated three times. In the type A matrices, in the outgroup-overingroup version, the three variables were all at the same end of the matrix, while in the ingroup-over-outgroup version, the ingroup profit and difference in favour of ingroup were together in one direction and were in direct conflict with choices approaching maximum joint profit. In the type B matrices, the outgroup-over-ingroup versions had all three gains at one end, while the ingroup-over-outgroup versions had the difference in favour of the ingroup placed in the direction opposite to joint profit and ingroup profit combined. The matrices therefore pitted one variable against the other two, to see which of the three best explained the boys’ choices.

16 Psychology and the social identity perspective The study found that the boys’ tendency to favour the ingroup over the outgroup was motivated by their quest for supremacy over the other group. This was demonstrated both by the findings on the intergroup matrices (the matrices where the participants had to make allocations between an ingroup and an outgroup member) as well as by the findings on the two other types of matrices, where the boys had to allocate between two ingroup members or between two outgroup members. On the intergroup matrices, when the boys had to choose between maximizing profit for both participants (i.e. both the ingroup and the outgroup member) and maximizing the difference between the ingroup and the outgroup member, it was the second option that won out. This was despite the fact that maximizing profit for their own group constituted an important goal, as indicated by their choices on the matrices where maximizing the difference between ingroup and outgroup was not pitted against maximizing ingroup profit. Taken together, these findings indicate that favouring the ingroup over the outgroup member was not primarily to increase the ingroup’s financial profit – an explanation based on materialistic motives. Rather, favouring the ingroup member was motivated by the desire to maximize the difference between the ingroup and the outgroup, and therefore the ingroup’s supremacy over the outgroup – an explanation based on psychological motives. Even more revealing were the findings from the other two types of matrices. On these matrices, both the top and the bottom row referred to either two ingroup or two outgroup members. The study found that participants’ choices relating to the ingroup members were significantly nearer the ‘maximum joint profit’ end of the matrices than were the ones relating to outgroup members. This means that when it came to making choices relating to the ingroup, participants ensured that their ingroup members earned as much money as possible from taking part in the study. By contrast, when it came to making the same kind of decision in relation to outgroup members, participants made choices that meant the two outgroup members would earn considerably less than the maximum amount for taking part in the study. As Tajfel argued, these findings provide clear evidence that as a result of being categorized into groups, participants discriminate against members of the outgroup. Maximizing the joint profit for outgroup members on those matrices did not mean that ingroup members were getting any less money. As such, the discrimination did not arise out of a conflict of interest between the two groups. Therefore, the boys were making a clear choice not to allow ‘the others’ to achieve their full earning potential for taking part in the study, thereby furthering the difference in profit between ingroup and outgroup. This finding was an even clearer demonstration that for the boys, asserting their supremacy over the other group was of paramount importance.

Psychology and the social identity perspective 17 The findings from Tajfel’s ‘minimal group studies’ have generated much controversy. This is because they indicate that at least under certain circumstances, simply being part of a group is enough for group members to discriminate against members of other groups. In an attempt to eliminate alternative explanations, subsequent experiments recreated an even more minimal intergroup situation. Billig and Tajfel (1973) categorized their participants as belonging to the ‘X’ or the ‘Y’ group instead of the more personal ‘Kandinsky’ or ‘Klee’. They also made it explicit to participants that they had been allocated to these groups on a random basis rather than as a consequence of stated preferences on a decision-making task. This served to eliminate the possibility that participants would favour members of their own group due to perceiving them as having similar aesthetic tastes to themselves. In a further simplification of the study, Turner (1978) asked participants to allocate points instead of money, in order to eliminate explanations based on money-as-perceived-advantage. Other studies shed light on the question whether the findings could be due to participants conforming to the way they thought the experimenters wanted them to behave. For example, do participants conform to what they perceive as a requirement of the study – to act competitively towards members of the other group? Findings from several studies indicate that this is not the case. For example, studies reveal that discrimination is not associated with awareness of being under surveillance (Grieve & Hogg, 1999). Nor do participants perceive that there is a competitiveness norm that they are expected to conform to. In fact, when participants were encouraged not to discriminate, the discriminatory behaviour was reduced (Tajfel & Billig, 1974). However, researchers found evidence of discrimination even when they explicitly asked participants to follow a cooperative norm (Hogg et al., 1986). These findings were replicated through hundreds of other studies using the minimal group paradigm. The studies were conducted with a wide range of participants and in different parts of the world. Overall, the findings all point towards the conclusion that under certain conditions, the simple fact of perceiving oneself as a member of a group, regardless of any conflicting interests with another group, is sufficient reason to behave in ways that discriminate between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This became the foundation for the social identity perspective.

The social identity perspective The social identity perspective consists primarily of two complementary theories: social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979, 1986) and selfcategorization theory (Turner et al., 1987). Both these theories provide

18 Psychology and the social identity perspective insights into the way our group membership impacts on our behaviour towards others, but each has a different focus. Broadly speaking, social identity theory focuses on relations between groups – ‘intergroup relations’. For example, this theory allows us to understand how the way in which group members interpret the intergroup situation influences the development of relations between groups. Social identity theory also provides insights into the different strategies used by members of subordinate groups to make up for their subordinate status. Self-categorization theory, on the other hand, focuses on the consequences of categorizing ourselves as a member of a particular group. For example, self-categorization theory provides an understanding of how perceiving someone as an ingroup or an outgroup member changes their ability to influence us. While social identity theory and self-categorization theory focus on different aspects, there is also some overlap. This is partly due to their shared focus on the group-based aspect of our behaviour and partly because some of the same researchers were involved in both their development. For the sake of simplicity, throughout this book we will refer to the insights provided by these two theories by the more general term ‘social identity perspective’. The findings of Tajfel’s minimal group studies provided the initial impetus for the development of the social identity perspective. These studies showed that by introducing a category distinction such as ‘overestimator’ and ‘underestimator’, participants made intergroup choices that favoured members of their group over outgroup members. Therefore, instead of thinking of themselves and others as individuals and making fair allocations, participants acted as representatives of their group. What is it about perceiving ourselves in terms of a group membership that leads to this shift from relating to others as individuals to relating to them as group members? The answer, as provided by over two decades of social identity research, is the concept of ‘social identity’ – an identity we take on by virtue of perceiving ourselves as a member of a particular group. One of the core tenets of the social identity perspective, therefore, is that there is a distinction between our social identity and our personal identity (Tajfel, 1978a). In other words, we think and act differently when we think of ourselves as a member of a particular group than when we think of ourselves as an individual. Our social identity relates to our group memberships. Each of us belongs to many groups. Some of these groups – such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality – we belong to over the long term. Other groups, such as opinion-based groups, we may belong to only on a temporary basis. As we have seen, even artificially created groups, as the ‘overestimators’ and ‘understimators’ in Tajfel’s study, can provide us with such a group membership. How can we find out which of these groups makes up our social identity? The answer is

Psychology and the social identity perspective 19 that even though each of us belongs to a multitude of groups at any particular point in time, it is the way in which we perceive ourselves at that particular point that constitutes our social identity at that moment. This identity is therefore dynamic and highly dependent on contextual factors. I may think of myself primarily as a woman in a context where gender becomes relevant, or as a writer in a context that emphasizes occupation. I may even think of myself as a ‘female writer’ in a context that emphasizes two of my group memberships simultaneously, such as a women’s writing group. Based on the group membership that becomes relevant to us at a particular time, we will perceive those around us as either ingroup or outgroup members. As such, the same person can be seen as an ingroup member in one instance and an outgroup member in another. For example, in a context that emphasizes gender, I would perceive women as ingroup and men as outgroup members. On the other hand, if that same context emphasized occupation, it would be writers – female or male – whom I would perceive as ingroup members. By contrast, our personal identity relates to those aspects of ourselves that define us as an individual. Our appearance and particular personality features, for example, constitute aspects of our personal identity; so do our friendships and other types of interpersonal relationships we have with others. Our behaviour towards others is guided by whether at that moment we think of ourselves in terms of our personal identity or our social identity. When we think in terms of our personal identity, we relate to others as individuals – we respond to their personal characteristics and actions. For example, we may talk to them if we like them, or avoid them if we do not. By contrast, when we are guided by our social identity, we relate to others in terms of their group membership. For example, we perceive ingroup members as more similar to ourselves than outgroup members, and as such are more likely to agree with them. To illustrate the distinction between relating to others as individuals and relating to them in terms of their group membership, consider the behaviour of the prison guards towards Tajfel during his time as a prisoner of war. Within that context, the guards did not perceive Tajfel in individual terms. They did not consider whether they liked him or not, his youth, or whether he was lazy or hardworking. Within the context of the prison camp, the only aspect about Tajfel that mattered to the guards was his group membership – whether he was a French Jew, in which case his life would be spared, or a Polish Jew, in which case he would be killed. In making this judgement, the prison guards also thought of themselves as group members rather than as individuals. As such, their encounter with Tajfel did not represent an encounter between individuals, but an encounter between representatives of different groups – an intergroup encounter. While this is an extreme example,

20 Psychology and the social identity perspective this is precisely the way we relate to other people when our behaviour is governed by social identity: we perceive group members as interchangeable with one another. As their interpersonal characteristics become blurred, it is only the group to which they belong that matters to us. Turner (1985) termed this process which makes group members appear to be interchangeable with one another ‘depersonalization’. This term is not a negative one, such as ‘dehumanization’. Depersonalization simply refers to stripping away someone’s personal characteristics and focusing only on that person’s group membership. As such, we do not only apply depersonalization to others, but also to ourselves. When we think in depersonalized terms, we perceive ourselves as interchangeable with members of our own group. In such circumstances, ingroup members can act as our psychological representatives. It is based on depersonalization that concepts such as political movements or leadership make sense. Without our ability to think of others as similar and interchangeable to ourselves, we would not be able to act in concert with others, nor would it be possible for anyone to coordinate our actions as a group. The process of depersonalization is therefore essential to our ability to engage in collective action – a central aspect of politics. An important consequence of depersonalization is that once we think of ourselves as members of a particular group, it is only ingroup members that can exert social influence over us. This is because by blurring interpersonal differences, depersonalization makes ingroup members appear to be similar and interchangeable with ourselves. As such, we expect to agree with ingroup members at all times. In instances when this does not happen, we experience uncertainty and are open to adjusting our beliefs and behaviours to match those of the rest of the group. It is based on this motivation to seek consensus within the group that social influence becomes possible. In turn, social influence allows group members to coordinate their actions effectively, making their collective efforts count. Depersonalization has the inverse effect on outgroup members’ ability to influence us. As we perceive them to be different from us, we do not expect to agree with them. Therefore, instances in which we disagree with outgroup members do not lead to uncertainty and to the motivation to adjust our beliefs and actions. It is only if outgroup members succeed in invoking a context in which they are perceived as ingroup members that they can exert social influence. When we depersonalize, we are no longer guided by our own individual norms of behaviour, but by the norms of the group. Therefore, an important consequence of depersonalization is that it makes the norms of our group relevant to us. These norms not only describe how ‘we’ behave as group members; they also prescribe how we should behave. It is due to this prescriptive aspect that group members are able to act together to accomplish a

Psychology and the social identity perspective 21 common goal. However, this aspect of group behaviour also has a dark side. When the norms of the group relate to inflicting harm on others, such norms will exert a strong influence on group members’ behaviour. It is norms such as these that make tyrannical regimes possible. The categorization studies we have discussed in this chapter show that we have a strong desire to keep categories distinct from one another. It is because of this motivation that participants overestimated the distance between the two types of nonsense syllables in Campbell’s (1956) study, or the difference between the two lines that were closest in length in the study by Tajfel and Wilkes (1963). In the social world, this motivation leads group members to ensure that their group is as distinct as possible from any relevant outgroups. Tajfel’s (1970) second minimal group study demonstrated that for group members, maximizing the difference from the outgroup was more important than increasing the ingroup’s monetary gain. In the outside world, this need to make our group distinct from the outgroup means that our behaviour as a group depends on the behaviour of those whom we perceive as ‘them’. This has two implications for group norms. The first implication is that these norms are subject to constant change. The second implication is that the content of group norms depends, to a large extent, on the specific outgroup that is the most relevant to the ingroup at that particular point in time. As the relevant outgroup changes, perhaps in response to changes in context, so do the norms of the group. Group norms are related to the group ‘prototype’ – a set of attributes such as perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that describes one group in ways that distinguishes it from relevant outgroups. The notion of ‘prototype’ and the ways prototypes work has its origins in cognitive science, particularly the research on categorization was initiated by Rosch (1973). A well-known finding is that some members of a category are more strongly linked with that category and are therefore perceived as more central than others. For example, when thinking of the category ‘furniture’, the word ‘chair’ comes to mind more readily than the word ‘stool’ (Rosch, 1973). What makes one member of a category appear more strongly linked to that category than another? The answer relates to our need to distinguish between members of different categories. Because of this need, we perceive those category members which are the most distinct from those of another category – the shortest A lines and the longest B lines in the study by Tajfel and Wilkes (1963) – as more representative of their category, and therefore as more prototypical. Indeed, Rosch and Mervis (1975) found that the degree to which a member of a category is seen as prototypical depends on the extent to which it is similar to other members of the same category, while concurrently having the least in common as possible with members of other categories.

22 Psychology and the social identity perspective Within the social world, the prototypical position of an ingroup member will therefore vary as a function of which other groups the ingroup is being compared to. Those individuals who are most similar to members of the ingroup and most dissimilar to members of the relevant outgroup will be seen as prototypical (Turner, 1991). The extent to which an ingroup member is perceived as similar to other members of the group has, as we have seen, important implications for how representative they are of the group. Their representativeness is not only obvious to outgroup members, but also to ingroup members. As such, when group members are unsure about how they should behave in a particular situation, it is the most prototypical members that they are likely to follow. This provides prototypical members with a higher degree of social influence than anyone else within the group, and makes them ideally suited for leadership. So far, we have discussed one important factor that guides our behaviour in relation to categories: our need to keep our own group distinct from another group. As Tajfel’s (1970) minimal group studies demonstrate, however, group members are also motivated for this distinctiveness to be positive – we want our group to be not only distinct, but to be distinct in a way that makes it ‘better’ than the relevant outgroup. As such, the social identity perspective highlights two psychological factors that influence the way in which we interact with members of other groups. The first factor, which we have discussed so far, relates to our ingroup being defined in terms that makes us distinctive from any relevant outgroups. The second factor relates to our need to feel that our group is ‘better’ than any relevant outgroup. As suggested by Tajfel and Turner (1979, 1986), group members are motivated to seek positive distinctiveness for their group. An important consequence of this need for positive distinctiveness is that as group members, we are strongly motivated to assert the supremacy of our group over the relevant outgroup, as we have seen in Tajfel’s (1970) minimal group studies. However, what if our group is in a subordinate relationship to another group? What if ‘we’ are fans of a football club on a losing streak, women in a sexist society, or Catholics in a Protestant town? Indeed, this emphasis on positive distinctiveness as a core motivator is only the starting point for the social identity perspective. Based on this, one of the key questions becomes how group members’ quest for positive distinctiveness manifests itself in contexts in which such distinctiveness is difficult to achieve, as in the case of a subordinate group in relation to a dominant group. The social identity perspective argues that the strategies that group members in subordinate groups adopt depend on their beliefs regarding the nature of the intergroup relationship with the dominant group (Tajfel, 1978b; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Three factors are of particular importance. The first

Psychology and the social identity perspective 23 factor relates to beliefs about how permeable the group boundaries between the subordinate ingroup and the dominant outgroup are (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). The second and third factors relate to beliefs regarding how legitimate and how stable the relations are between the groups. If the relations are legitimate, group members are unlikely to want to confront the dominant group. If the relations are perceived as illegitimate, group members are likely to want to confront the dominant group. Similarly, if the relations are unstable, group members may become aware of cognitive alternatives, ways in which relations can be changed. By systematically examining these issues, the social identity perspective provides powerful insights into how subordinate groups can challenge dominant groups to change the status quo.

Implications for politics Respect group distinctiveness Several of the studies we have discussed throughout this chapter show that group members are strongly motivated to keep their group distinct from other groups. As such, policies that ignore this crucial aspect of social identity are at best ineffective and at worst a cause for conflict. This is particularly important in contexts in which several groups have to coexist under the banner of a larger, all-encompassing group. Within such contexts, political messages suggesting that ‘we are all one happy family’, without respecting group members’ need for boundaries among the different groups, have the opposite effect from what they intended – they make it more difficult for group members within the different groups to identify with the larger group. This is because by not acknowledging the distinctiveness of its constituent groups, the larger group is perceived as a threat to group members’ social identity. As such, the existence of the larger group is likely to lead to unnecessary conflict. It is only by promoting a larger group while at the same time acknowledging the positive distinctiveness of each of its component groups, and allowing time for the larger group to be accepted as a potential social identity by group members, that such policies are likely to succeed in the long term. To reach ‘us’, focus on social rather than personal identity The distinction between personal and social identity has important implications for the way in which political leaders should target their messages for maximum effectiveness. Those leaders whose messages focus on individual interests (e.g. lowering taxes) are likely to be ineffective over the

24 Psychology and the social identity perspective long term, as they target followers’ personal identity while ignoring their social identity. When thinking of ourselves in individual terms, we focus on our personal interests with little regard for those of others. While such messages may spark our interest in the short term, they are unlikely to generate the kind of long-term commitment needed to put our personal concerns aside and coordinate our efforts with others in order to make the leader’s vision a reality. By contrast, political messages that target our identity as group members make us focus on the interests of the group as a whole. Such messages therefore have the potential to create a shared social identity that stimulates collective, organized action – the kind that is needed to make social change possible.

Chapter 1 summary 1 2

3

4

5 6

The development of the social identity perspective was motivated by the need to understand a major political phenomenon – the Holocaust. Tajfel’s categorization studies suggested that imposing a category distinction on a group of stimuli increases the perceived contrast between the most similar members of the group. He suggested that this is similar to the effect of categorization in the social world. When we perceive people in terms of their group membership, their individual differences become unimportant – the only aspect that we focus on is the extent to which they represent their group. Sherif’s Robber’s Cave study examined the way in which groups enter into conflict with one another and reconcile. While Sherif’s interpretation focused on conflict of interests as a primary motivating factor, a closer examination of the evidence suggests that the mere act of splitting people into groups can be enough to spark rivalry and discrimination. Tajfel’s minimal group studies indicate that the discriminatory behaviour resulting from categorization is motivated by group members’ need to achieve positive distinctiveness for their group; they want their group to be seen as distinct and as better, on a particular dimension, than the relevant outgroup. The social identity perspective is based on two complementary theories: social identity theory and self-categorization theory. Social identity theory focuses on relations between groups, while selfcategorization theory focuses on the consequences of categorizing ourselves as a member of a particular group.

Psychology and the social identity perspective 25

Focus questions • • • •

Critically analyze Sherif’s interpretation of the Robber’s Cave study findings. What is the evidence behind the formulation of the social identity perspective? What effects does categorization have on our understanding of the social world? What is the difference between personal and social identity?

Further reading Brown, R. J. (1995). Prejudice: Its Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. Hogg, M. A., & Abrams, D. (1988). Social Identifications: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes. London: Routledge. Hogg, M. A., & Abrams, D. (Eds.) (2001). Intergroup Relations: Essential Readings. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Robinson, W. P. (Ed.) (1996). Social Groups and Identities: Developing the Legacy of Henri Tajfel. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. (1961). Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robber’s Cave Experiment. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago, IL: Nelson Hall. Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

2

The psychology of social influence

Learning objectives • • •

•

gain an overview of social psychological evidence relating to social influence; learn to differentiate between individualistic and group-based explanations of social influence; gain an in-depth understanding of well-known studies relating to social influence and how the insights they provide apply to politics; identify how social identity plays a part in social influence.

In the previous chapter, we have introduced the social identity perspective – the studies that led to its development, and the implications it has for a psychological analysis of political behaviour. One of the core tenets of the social identity perspective is that there is a distinction between personal and social identity. While our personal identity guides our behaviour in instances when we think of ourselves as individuals, our social identity comes into play when we think of ourselves in terms of a particular group membership. In this chapter, we will delve deeper into our understanding of the role played by social identity. Our discussion will be based on the premise that as group membership is inherent in political behaviour, a psychological analysis of politics should focus on our social rather than our personal identity. In particular, we will use the concept of social identity to examine an element that is at the very core of political behaviour: social influence. Without social influence, voters would not be swayed to change from voting for one party to voting for another, there would be no negotiation between parties, nor would minorities ever persuade majorities to reconsider entrenched habits or

The psychology of social influence 27 hierarchies. Everything would stay the same, as social and political change would be impossible. The social identity perspective allows us to clearly define the circumstances which make social influence possible. Traditionally, social influence has been attributed to our dependence on other people for two types of resources: information and social approval (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). The first type of resource relates to instances when we ask others to provide us with information, or when we request confirmation from them that what we are perceiving is correct. The second type of resource is connected with circumstances when we conform to what we think others expect of us. According to Turner (1987, 1991), the fundamental problem with this dependence model is that it focuses on our individual rather than our social needs. By suggesting that social influence takes place because individuals depend on one another for a particular resource (e.g. information or social approval), this approach does not acknowledge the importance that social identity plays in social influence. For example, the dependence model does not address how the people who are doing the influencing are perceived (i.e. as ingroup or outgroup members), or the effect this has on how their message is received. By contrast, the social identity perspective suggests that the extent to which attempts at social influence are effective is directly tied to social identity considerations. According to the social identity perspective, we are influenced by those whom we perceive as ingroup members, whereas we remain cold to the influence attempts of those whom we perceive as belonging to the outgroup. This is because when a particular social identity becomes salient, we perceive ingroup members as similar to ourselves and therefore expect to agree with them. In instances when this does not occur, we experience uncertainty and become open to readjusting our beliefs to match those of our ingroup members. Outgroup members, on the other hand, are not perceived as similar to the self. As such, we do not expect to agree with them. Disagreement with outgroup members does not lead to uncertainty, and in fact aligning ourselves to their views amounts to betrayal of our own group. Disagreement with outgroup members is therefore not only likely but also expected. Throughout this chapter, we will provide empirical evidence for the above argument. To do so, we will discuss a series of well-known psychological studies and experimental paradigms relating to social influence that have generally been interpreted using the dependence model. In discussing these studies, we will argue that social influence in these studies was in fact due to participants’ shared social identity rather than their individualistic needs for resources such as information or social approval. We will conclude by outlining several implications that the social identity perspective on social influence has for politics.

28 The psychology of social influence

Sherif’s studies on norm formation Sherif’s studies on norm formation provide some of the earliest social psychological findings relating to social influence. In these studies, Sherif (1936) made use of the autokinetic effect, an optical illusion that makes a fixed point of light appear to move in a room that is completely dark. Participants, unaware that the movement is not real, were first tested individually. They were asked to estimate how much the light moved over a series of trials. Unsurprisingly, given the illusory nature of the movement, participants’ estimates were very different from each other’s. However, the way in which participants’ responses progressed followed the same pattern. Initially they responded differently from trial to trial. After several trials, they gradually began to focus on a narrow range of estimates that became their own personal range for the rest of the trials. The participants were subsequently put into groups of three. They were asked to take turns in a random sequence, calling out their estimates over a further series of trials. The study found that once in groups, without discussion or prompting, participants converged on a group range which they used to guide their own estimates. Interestingly, even when participants were once again tested on their own a week later, their estimates now fell into the range adopted by the group, rather than their previous, personal range from the first stage of the study. Sherif’s (1936) findings are usually interpreted using the dependence model as a clear case of the first type of social influence – influence based on participants’ need for information from the other members of the group. The argument in favour of this interpretation is that a point of light appearing to move in a dark room represents an ambiguous stimulus. Therefore, participants depend on each other for confirmation that their own estimates of the light’s movement are accurate. As they are unsure of their own estimates, any conflicting information from the group is likely to influence their own perceptions, therefore leading to the emerging group range. From a social identity perspective, however, the above interpretation is based on the problematic premise that even when tested as a group, participants still think of themselves as individuals. What is more likely in such group situations, as argued by Turner (1985), is that once the participants are tested as a group, they perceive themselves as group members rather than as individuals. They therefore think and behave in terms of their newly acquired social identity as members of that group, rather than as individuals taking part in an experiment. Given that participants are unaware that the movement of the light is in fact an optical illusion, they expect to agree with the other members of the group on what is, to them, an objective reality. When participants find that these other group members, whom they perceive as

The psychology of social influence 29 similar to themselves, have different estimates, they are open to questioning their own perceptions. The group range that is generated under these conditions therefore becomes a group norm, to which the group members align their estimates. This alternative interpretation is supported by Sherif’s (1936) finding that when tested individually a week later, participants’ responses were in line with the group range rather than the one they had generated themselves before being put into a group with other participants. This demonstrates that the participants now perceived themselves as representatives of their group, rather than simply as individuals. Even though they were being tested on their own, their perception of themselves as group members prescribed that they need to adhere to the norm that their group had previously established. Their estimates were therefore in line with the norm established by the group rather than their previous personal range. There is also direct empirical evidence to support the alternative interpretation put forward by the social identity perspective. A study by Abrams et al. (1990) examined the effect of introducing a category distinction (‘us’ and ‘them’) between participants in the Sherif paradigm. This category distinction was introduced with the help of stooges. Tested in six-person groups, three of the group members were stooges who were instructed to initially provide estimates that were 5 cm greater, and later 2 cm greater, than those provided by the real participants. The study examined the extent to which the stooges were able to influence the real participants’ estimates across three different conditions. These conditions varied in the extent to which the category distinction between the real participants and the stooges was visible. In the control condition, no mention was made of the categories, and the participants were referred to by a personal code number throughout. In the categorization condition, the participants and the stooges were given different category labels (‘H’ and ‘J’, respectively) under the pretext of a randomization procedure. The distinction between the members of these two categories was reinforced through the two labels being used in referring to members within each group. Furthermore, the participants were also asked to use these labels before calling out their estimates. In the grouped condition, the two distinct group identity labels were further reinforced through the group members being asked to work on an unrelated task in their two distinct categories before taking part in the actual study. The study found that the real participants converged most towards the stooges in the control condition and least in the grouped condition. In the grouped condition, the difference between the two groups even increased a little over the course of the study. This shows that the participants resisted information that came from people whom they perceived as outgroup members. It also shows group members’ tendency, as a group, to move away

30 The psychology of social influence from the position embraced by the outgroup. This is in line with Tajfel’s finding from the minimal group studies discussed in Chapter 1, that groups are motivated to ensure the distinctive identity of their group in relation to the outgroup. In this particular context, the participants used the only means available to them to keep their group distinct from the outgroup – they adhered to a norm that went in the opposite direction from that of the outgroup. These findings pose difficulties to the explanation put forward by the dependence model. This explanation attributes social influence in the Sherif (1936) paradigm to participants’ need for information. However, according to this explanation, the introduction of a category distinction in the Sherif paradigm should have no effect on the formation of a group norm. If group members act as individuals seeking reassurance from one another regarding the accuracy of their estimates, group membership such as ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’ would not matter; participants should converge towards the stooges’ estimates irrespective of condition. By contrast, these findings make perfect sense from a social identity perspective. If participants think of themselves as members of a group, then convergence to a group norm depends on shared social identity. As such, the more a category distinction is visible between the real participants and the stooges, the less the stooges’ estimates will influence those of the participants. This is because, once a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is introduced, social influence is restricted to those perceived to be members of the ingroup. By contrast, outgroup members do not exert influence, and may in fact even push ingroup members in the opposite direction, as findings in the grouped condition indicate. Overall then, these findings provide an initial demonstration, to be found repeatedly throughout this chapter, that we are influenced by people whom we perceive as being members of our own group. On the other hand, when we categorize people as belonging to the outgroup, their social influence over us decreases dramatically.

Asch’s conformity studies Asch’s (1951, 1956) studies are well-known for demonstrating the effect of social influence through conformity. Asch presented groups of seven to nine young male college students with two large white cards under the guise of a visual discrimination task. On one card, there was a single vertical black line – the target line. On the other card there were three vertical black lines, one of which matched the length of the target line (see Figure 2.1). Participants were asked to state out loud which of the three lines on the second card was the same length as the target line. While this task seemed infantile in its simplicity, only one of the members of the group was in fact a real participant. The others in the group were stooges who had been instructed to give the

The psychology of social influence 31

1

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Figure 2.1 The cards used in Asch’s conformity studies. Adapted from Asch (1956).

same erroneous answer on 12 out of the 18 trials. The real participant was made to answer second to last. On those trials on which the stooges were instructed to provide erroneous answers, the real participant therefore witnessed five to seven other members of the group, one after the other, providing the same erroneous answer. It was then the real participant’s turn to state which of the three lines matched the length of the target line. Would the real participant pick the line they could clearly see matched the target line, or would they conform to the answer provided by the rest of the group? This was the question posed by the Asch paradigm. The study found that approximately half of the real participants conformed on six or more trials, with 5 per cent even conforming on all 12 occasions on which the stooges gave the same erroneous answer. Only one quarter of participants remained completely independent and did not conform. The overall conformity rate, computed as the total number of instances of conformity across the study divided by the number of participants and the number of trials in which the stooges provided an erroneous answer, was 36.8 per cent. Unlike Sherif’s (1936) task using the autokinetic effect, the task in the Asch (1951) paradigm was completely unambiguous. In a control group,

32 The psychology of social influence where there had been no stooges giving erroneous answers, the participants named the correct line 99 per cent of the time, suggesting that the task was straightforward. How can we therefore explain this high rate of conformity to what were obviously erroneous answers? The dependence model explains the findings based on individualistic considerations. According to the model, the high conformity rate in the Asch paradigm is due to our dependence, as individuals, on other peoples’ social approval. As the participant is under surveillance by the stooges when providing their answer, they conform so as not to stand out and become ostracized by the group, or elicit other forms of social disapproval. Their public behaviour is therefore different from their private beliefs. Even though they privately know the correct answer, the participants publicly conform to the stooges’ erroneous answers. Indeed, Asch reported that when asked at the end of the study why they had conformed, some of the participants said they knew the others were wrong, but it was easier to go along with the group consensus. From a social identity perspective, this explanation is riddled with the same problems as previously discussed in relation to the dependence model explanation in the Sherif paradigm; it assumes that participants think of themselves as individuals in a situation in which they are being brought together as a group. By contrast, the social identity perspective emphasizes that the conformity in the Asch paradigm occurs in the context in which the real participant is a member of a group. The experimental condition, where the high rate of conformity was found, is different from the control condition, in which participants are tested individually, and are therefore likely to think of themselves in individual terms. Given the inherently group-based aspect of the context in which conformity occurs, the social identity perspective argues that we need to interpret the findings in terms of participants’ social identity. In the experimental condition, the real participant is brought together with six to eight other young male college students. In this situation, they are likely to think of themselves as a member of that group and perceive the other group members as similar to themselves. They therefore expect to share the same perceptions of objective reality with the other group members, especially on a task that appears so simple. When the other group members begin to provide the same erroneous answer, however, one after the other, the real participant is likely to experience uncertainty. To the extent that this uncertainty increases, they become open to social influence from those they regard as similar to the self – the other members of the group. From this perspective, participants conform because they perceive themselves as belonging to a group which, to their surprise, sees a line that does not match the target line as in fact matching the target line. Picking one

The psychology of social influence 33 line over another therefore functions as a group norm, and becomes a criterion for being seen as ‘one of us’. The participant therefore conforms to what is perceived as normative within that group, which means picking the line that all the other group members chose. Indeed, Asch (1955) notes that even those participants who did not conform were not unresponsive to the others in the group. However, these participants either succeeded in reasserting their own (individual) sense of reality, or continued to give correct answers based on their belief that they needed to report what they saw. This indicates that even those participants who did not conform were sensitive to the existence of the group and the norms governing it, but chose not to take on the group’s shared social identity but rather think of themselves as individuals. As such, the group norm did not guide their actions. By contrast, other participants were so sensitive to the norm that it influenced their perception of reality. Indeed, some participants began to think that their different perception was a sign of an internal deficiency, which they attempted to hide from the rest of the group. The alternative interpretation put forward by the social identity perspective finds several sources of support. The first source comes from the many subsequent studies done by Asch (1955), in which he varied the extent of the unanimity among the stooges. Having one of the stooges give correct answers while the rest of the stooges gave wrong answers reduced conformity to 5.5 per cent – a sixth of the conformity rate in the original study. This finding would make little sense from a dependence model perspective; if the participants need others’ social approval, they would be more likely to conform to the incorrect majority than risk social disapproval by siding with the correct minority. By contrast, the findings make perfect sense from a social identity perspective. The stooge providing correct answers is perceived by the real participant as sharing the same social reality, and therefore provides them with an alternative social identity, an ‘us’ in relation to which the rest of the group become the outgroup. Asch (1955) also notes that when asked, participants reported feeling warm and close to the stooge who gave correct answers, and credited them with inspiring them with confidence. These self-reported feelings are in line with how, according to the social identity perspective, we feel towards ingroup members, especially in a context where we feel surrounded by an outgroup majority. In another variation, the stooge who initially gave correct answers started conforming with the majority halfway through the trials. This caused conformity levels to rise from 5.5 per cent to 28.5 per cent. The dramatic rise in conformity suggests that once the other participant had become an ‘ingroup member’, the fact that they then joined ‘the others’ caused these ‘others’ to be re-categorized as part of the ingroup, and therefore as a source of social influence.

34 The psychology of social influence By contrast, in a subsequent variation in which the stooge giving the correct answers left the room halfway through the experiment under the pretext of a previous appointment, conformity levels remained low. The fact that the influence of the ‘ingroup’ stooge outlasted their departure is in line with the way in which the social identity perspective describes social influence. As long as someone sees themselves as belonging to a particular group, they will conform to the norms of the group regardless of whether they are on their own or together with other group members. Indeed, we have already seen this process in operation in the case of the Sherif (1936) paradigm. When participants were tested on their own a week after having answered as group members, their estimates were in line with the group range rather than their previous personal range. Similarly, in this variation of the Asch paradigm, the influence of the ‘ingroup’ stooge remained even after the stooge had left the room. Another strand of evidence in favour of the social identity interpretation comes from an experimental study by Deutsch and Gerard (1955) based on the Asch paradigm. As we previously mentioned, the dependence model attributes conformity in the Asch paradigm to participants’ attempt to gain social approval while being under the surveillance of the other members of the group. If this is so, it should be possible to eradicate the pressure to conform by removing this element of surveillance. The study tested this hypothesis by introducing conditions in which the participant was not under surveillance. In one condition, to replicate Asch’s paradigm, the participant was put in a group with three stooges who made unanimous incorrect judgements on several of the trials. In another condition, the participant was put in the same type of group, but this time they were asked to be as accurate as possible. In the third condition, after listening to the responses given by the other group members, the participant was asked to provide their responses while alone in a cubicle, where their responses were private and where they themselves could remain anonymous. To examine the role of uncertainty, half of the participants were asked to respond with the stimuli present, while the other half after the stimuli had been removed. The study found that even in the third condition, where participants had responded anonymously and while alone in a cubicle, without any group surveillance, and with the stimuli present, participants still conformed at a rate of 23 per cent. These findings suggest that once participants perceived themselves as group members, they still conformed to a remarkably high degree despite not being under surveillance by the other group members. These findings counter the argument put forward by the dependence model that participants conform publicly while disagreeing privately. On the other hand, the findings are consistent with the group-based explanation put forward by the social identity perspective. The findings indicate that under conditions

The psychology of social influence 35 of shared categorization, we internalize the norms of the group and behave according to them even when not under surveillance by the group. The third strand of evidence comes from a study examining the effect of introducing categorization in the Asch paradigm. Abrams et al. (1990) used four-people groups consisting of one real participant who was a psychology student and three stooges. The stooges were introduced as either members of the ingroup (psychology students) or members of an outgroup (ancient history students). The three stooges and the real participant were seated in a row facing the computer monitor on which the lines were presented. The real participant was always placed at one end of the row through subtle manoeuvres by the stooges. The group members gave their answers in turn, beginning at the opposite end from the real participant. The three lines and the target line remained on the screen until the final member of the group (the real participant) had given their response. In one condition, the real participant had to call out their answer publicly, in the same way as the stooges. In another condition, the experimenter asked if one of the participants would note down the responses, on the pretext of having to operate the computer, and assigned this task to the real participant. In this condition, therefore, the three stooges gave their answers publicly while the real participant recorded their own responses privately. The study found that conformity was at its peak for those participants whose group members had been introduced as ingroup members and who had to provide their answers publicly. By contrast, those participants who had been told that their group members belonged to an outgroup and who had to answer publicly showed the lowest level of conformity. These findings would be difficult to explain using the dependence model. According to this model, conformity occurs due to participants’ need for social approval. If this were the case, in the condition where the participants had to answer publicly, it would not matter whether these individuals were members of the ingroup or the outgroup. The rate of conformity would be the same, as social approval would be equally sought after regardless of the source. The fact that this is not the case supports the interpretation put forward by the social identity perspective, which emphasizes shared social identity as a necessary precursor to social influence and therefore to conformity. Indeed, as these findings show, we are concerned with the social approval of ingroup members, but not with that of outgroup members.

Group polarization Group polarization refers to the tendency for groups to embrace a more extreme position on a particular issue than the positions expressed individually by members discussing the issue as a group. Research in this

36 The psychology of social influence area typically involves participants indicating their personal opinions on one or several controversial items, then discussing these in a group, and finally being asked for their opinions on the items once again. Group polarization therefore provides an example of social influence over opinions, rather than over perceptions of cognitive stimuli as in the Sherif and Asch paradigms. Group polarization has been explained using the same dependence-based model discussed before. The dependence model suggests that social influence happens in the group polarization paradigm because individuals depend on others for both information and social approval. According to this model, participants’ need for information leads to social influence as participants take new arguments on board during group discussion that strengthen their previous opinion (Burnstein & Vinokur, 1973). Participants’ need for social approval also leads to social influence as they align themselves with the opinion that proves to be the most popular within the group (Sanders & Baron, 1977). By contrast, the social identity perspective attributes social influence in the group polarization paradigm to the shared social identity of group members and their attempt to achieve consensus (Turner, 1991). For participants to embrace a more extreme opinion following group discussion, they have to find a common social identity during the discussion that allows social influence to take place. Once the participants take on this common social identity, they are open to social influence from the rest of the group, as they perceive them as ingroup members and therefore similar to themselves. The process is in some ways similar to what happens in the Sherif paradigm, in that group polarization occurs because of conformity to a norm. However, some aspects of this process also differ from the Sherif paradigm. In particular, as no outgroup is implied, the emerging norm in the Sherif paradigm tends to be more closely associated with the mean of individual members’ estimates. By contrast, in the group polarization paradigm, the opinions that are brought into discussion imply, through their very nature, an opposite opinion. The group discussion therefore implicitly invokes an outgroup. As we have previously mentioned, group members are motivated to see their group as distinct from any relevant outgroups. Group members also favour their ingroup members over outgroup members, which includes perceiving the opinions embraced by one’s own group as correct and those of the outgroup as incorrect. Indeed, as we have already seen in the study by Abrams et al. (1990) using the Sherif paradigm, the presence of a clearly defined outgroup led group members to embrace a norm that was as distinct as possible from that of the outgroup. In the context of the group polarization paradigm, the norm that is shaped during group discussions tends to be as distinct as possible from the position attributed to the outgroup. It is group members’ motivation to keep the ingroup norm as distinct as possible from

The psychology of social influence 37 the outgroup norm that gives rise to the classic group polarization finding – that the emerging group opinion is more extreme than participants’ individual opinions previous to the group discussion. By contrast, if a category distinction is made between members of the group on the issue under discussion, participants are unable to find a common social identity. They are therefore unlikely to converge on a norm that shifts away from an implicit outgroup, and no group polarization will develop. Under such circumstances, two attitudes will emerge within the group. These attitudes are likely to be diametrically opposed to each other and therefore extreme, each positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum. Abrams et al. (1990) provided empirical support for this argument. The participants were pre-tested a week before the study on 15 controversial attitude items under the pretext of a nationwide survey on a range of issues. Based on participants’ responses, five of these issues were chosen: exams, discrimination against women, cigarette smoking, censorship of adult material, and parental control over children’s social life. The study used four-person discussion groups for each of the five issues, with a new discussion group being formed for each issue. The participants were allocated to these groups in such a way that the groups contained two members who were in favour and two members who were opposed to the statement. In one condition, the participants were not made aware of this division of opinion. In another condition, the participants were told that they would find a sharp division in the opinions expressed within their group. The opinion demarcation was reinforced through participants being asked to write down the names of the two people in each opinion camp, and to sit next to the person who shared their opinion. After group discussion, the participants were asked to record their opinions on the items again. The researchers examined the shift in opinion between what the participants had stated on the pre-test and their post-discussion responses. The study found that in the condition in which the participants were made aware of the division of opinion within their group, they did not reach consensus. In such cases, group polarization did not occur. This is because instead of identifying as a member of the four-person group, they were more likely to identify as a member of a two-person subgroup, in relation to which the other two participants within the four-person group were perceived as outgroup members. Even though across both conditions, the four-person groups were split in the middle in relation to their opinions, the participants were more likely to influence each other in the condition in which they were not made aware of the split in opinion. This is because in this situation, they did not have an alternative basis for social identity and were therefore more motivated to find a shared social identity as members of the same group.

38 The psychology of social influence Overall, these findings demonstrate that the way in which we present ourselves to others – as ingroup or outgroup – matters for our chances of influencing them, regardless of the objective content of our message. This has important implications for the next type of social influence we will consider, minority influence.

Minority influence Social and political change would not be possible if majorities always won out over minorities. Much of the research on minority influence was initiated by Moscovici and his colleagues (Moscovici 1976; Moscovici & Faucheux, 1972; Moscovici & Personnaz, 1980). This research can be classified into two phases. The first phase of research focused on the means by which minorities succeed in influencing the majority view. Using a series of experimental studies, Moscovici and his colleagues revealed that consistency is the most important factor that allows minorities to influence majorities. In one of the most widely cited minority influence studies, Moscovici et al. (1969) presented groups of six participants with a series of coloured slides and asked them to name the colour. All the slides shown to the participants were blue and varied only in intensity. The study assigned participants to one of three conditions. In the two experimental conditions, two members of the six-person group were in fact stooges. In the first condition, the stooges were consistent, always calling the slides ‘green’. In the second condition, they were inconsistent, calling the slides ‘green’ only two-thirds of the time. In the third (control) condition, there were no stooges and therefore there was no minority influence. The findings revealed that the consistent minority in the first condition generated a conformity rate of 9 per cent, whereas the inconsistent minority in the second condition led to less than 2 per cent conformity. These findings seemed to support Moscovici’s argument that consistency is crucial to minority influence. In an extension of this experiment, participants’ colour perception was tested privately after the experimental manipulation described above. Interestingly, participants in both the first and the second condition tended to see the ambiguous green-blue slides as ‘green’. This effect was even more pronounced among those participants who in the previous stage of the study had resisted the minority by not publicly calling the blue slides ‘green’. Based on these findings about the importance of consistency, Moscovici (1980, 1985) developed the second wave of research, which focused on examining minority influence in relation to majority influence. This second wave of research was based on the premise that majorities and minorities exert influence in different ways. In particular, Moscovici argued that people are motivated to ‘fit in’ with majorities. As such, majority influence leads to

The psychology of social influence 39 public compliance. However, as this behaviour is motivated by the need for social approval rather than private convictions, majority influence leads to little private change in attitudes. By contrast, minority messages are processed indirectly and slowly, so there is a delay between encountering and embracing them. However, they are more likely to lead to conversion and to a private change in opinion. Evidence for this difference in minority versus majority social influence comes from Moscovici and Personnaz (1980, 1986). Based on the same bluegreen paradigm as the one used by Moscovici et al. (1969) in investigating the role of consistency, the researchers matched each participant with a stooge. Both the participant and the stooge were presented with blue slides that varied only in intensity, and asked to name the colour of the slides. The stooge was instructed to name the colour ‘green’ instead of blue. There were two conditions. In the first condition, the participants were told that the majority (82 per cent) of people agreed with the stooge that the slides were green. In another condition, they were told that only a minority of people (18 per cent) agreed with the stooge on the colour of the slides. In this way, the first condition replicated the circumstances leading to majority influence, while the second condition those of minority influence. After the slide was removed, participants were asked to write down privately the colour of the after-image. Unbeknownst to the participants, the after-image when being exposed to a particular colour for a length of time is always the complementary colour: yellow after seeing blue, purple after seeing green. The study therefore examined which after-colour the participants reported in order to determine whether minority or majority influence had privately had an effect on participants’ colour perception. The study found that in the condition where participants had been told that 82 per cent of people respond like the stooge, the after-image was yellow. Majority influence had therefore not had an effect on participants’ private perceptions. By contrast, in the condition where participants had been told that only 18 per cent of people had identified the colour of the slide as being green, as the stooge did, the participants described the after-image as purple. This suggests that in this second condition, under circumstances leading to minority influence, the participants had been influenced by the stooge and had started to perceive the slide as green rather than blue. Moscovici and Personnaz interpreted these findings as evidence that minority influence leads to private change in opinion whereas majority influence does not. Subsequent research indicates that these findings, while supporting Moscovici’s theoretical considerations, may be the result of a methodological artefact. Attempts by other researchers to replicate the effect only led to inconsistent findings (Doms & van Avermaet, 1980; Sorrentino et al., 1980). To conclusively settle the argument, Martin (1998) conducted a series of five

40 The psychology of social influence careful replications using the same paradigm. The findings confirmed that the effect reported by Moscovici and Personnaz (1980, 1986) is most likely due to a methodological artefact. The findings showed that the after-image shift occurred mainly among those participants who were either suspicious of the experiment and therefore spent a long time examining the slides, or who were exposed to many more slides than those participants with whom the shift did not occur. Based on these findings, Martin (1998) suggested that the reason why some participants might show a greater shift in opinion may at least partly be due to the amount of attention these participants were paying to the green in the slides, rather than to the private conversion caused by minority influence. From a social identity perspective, Moscovici’s arguments about minority influence – the emphasis on consistency and the distinction he draws between majority and minority influence – are problematic. This is because, as we have seen throughout this chapter, social influence depends on shared social identity. If those attempting to influence us are part of the ingroup, disagreeing with them leads to uncertainty and to the motivation to align our own perceptions to theirs. By contrast, we expect to disagree with outgroup members and perceive their opinions as deviant. As such, if a minority is perceived as belonging to the outgroup rather than the ingroup, no amount of consistency or attempts at slow private change will convert us to their message. David and Turner (1996) provided empirical evidence for this argument in a study conducted in Australia. The study used an issue that is controversial within that particular context – the conservation of the rainforest. The participants were selected on the basis of self-identifying as either proconservation or pro-logging. They were exposed to either a pro-conservation policy statement from ‘Friends of the Forest’ or a pro-logging policy statement from ‘Friends of the Timber Industry’. Within each of these two conditions, the message was presented as coming from either a minority or a majority of the respective policy group. The participants indicated their attitudes to logging the rainforest on a questionnaire which was administered both before and after the influence message. The researchers then examined the shift in attitudes between participants’ pre- and post-influence ratings on the questionnaire. The findings showed that whether the message came from a numerical majority or minority, the participants shifted their opinions towards the ingroup, and away from the outgroup, after being exposed to the influence message. These findings indicate that when thinking in terms of their social identity, people are not influenced by members of the outgroup, regardless of their numerical status. The social identity perspective is in agreement with Moscovici’s (1980, 1985) argument that minority messages are scrutinized more carefully than

The psychology of social influence 41 majority messages, thus requiring a longer time before being accepted. However, the reasoning for this is different from Moscovici’s (1980, 1985) explanation regarding public compliance versus private conversion. From a social identity perspective, the delay is due to the fact that minorities are only able to exert social influence over majorities to the extent that they are perceived as ‘one of us’. From being seen as a potential outgroup when the focus is exclusively on the majority ingroup, the minority has to shift the context to one in which it is perceived as part of the larger ingroup and against a relevant outgroup. Positioning themselves in this way takes minorities time, thus leading to the delay before their message exerts influence. David and Turner (1999, 2001) provided empirical evidence for this through a study involving participants who self-identified as moderate feminists. The participants were asked to rate their attitudes to feminism in a questionnaire administered immediately before and after an influence message, and again after two weeks. In the first condition, the influence message focused on a context that only invoked feminist values. In the second condition, the message focused on a context that included anti-feminist values. The study made use of existing divisions among the feminist movement. Within this group, moderate feminists constitute the majority, while separatist feminists are in the minority. While this minority is seen as an important subgroup, they are generally not considered influential. This is because the separatist feminist minority is perceived as too extreme in its rejection of men. However, based on the social identity perspective, a context that included anti-feminists would make the moderate majority more receptive to the separatist minority’s message. The findings revealed that in the first condition, in which the influence message focused on a feminist-only context, the moderate feminist participants did not show any evidence of being influenced by the separatist minority. By contrast, in the second condition, in which the message focused on a context that included anti-feminists, the moderate feminist participants were more receptive to the separatist message coming from the minority. These findings indicate that minority influence is most likely to succeed in an intergroup context, where the majority is pitted against a relevant outgroup. This is because in this type of context, which highlights the distinction between the ingroup and a relevant outgroup, the message promoted by the minority is more clearly seen as coming from ‘one of us’. By contrast, in an intragroup context, as the focus is exclusively on the ingroup, the minority’s position in relation to the majority is more ambiguous. On the one hand they are part of the ingroup, but on the other hand they can easily be perceived as outgroup given that their message is different from that of the majority. As such, they are not perceived as representative of the group as a whole and their message is easily dismissed.

42 The psychology of social influence These findings suggest that in order to become influential, minorities need to invoke contexts that allow them to be perceived as being part of the ingroup, while avoiding social comparisons that focus on their otherness in relation to the majority group. By focusing the majority’s attention on the minority’s ingroup credentials, the minority becomes able to gradually change the meaning of what constitutes ‘us’, thus exerting long-lasting influence on the majority.

Rethinking groupthink So far in this chapter we have discussed the importance of social identity for social influence. We have argued that we are only influenced by those whom we perceive as ingroup members. Therefore, a strong social identity is crucial to any group process requiring social influence. In this section, we will focus on group decision-making – a group process that is crucial to politics and that relies on social influence. In particular, we will examine how the social identity perspective on social influence can help us revisit research suggesting that cohesive groups make bad decisions due to groupthink. ‘Groupthink’ is one of the few psychological terms that has found a stable home outside the discipline. The term was coined by Janis, a social psychologist with a strong interest in political group decision-making. According to Janis (1972), groupthink refers to a mindset that highly cohesive groups engage in when making decisions. An important feature of this mindset is that group members prize agreement within the group over critically evaluating all available courses of action. This mindset, according to Janis, inevitably leads to bad decisions. Janis (1972) emphasizes two factors that lead to groupthink within a group. The first factor relates to the avoidance of any criticism directed towards the group or its favoured course of action. Instead, group members prefer to believe that the group is more powerful than it really is, and to underestimate and derogate competing groups. The second factor, linked to the first, relates to the fact that the group is highly cohesive. As such, consensus is given priority over raising concerns. Group members are discouraged from voicing disagreements, and the group tends to reach a decision before having considered all the available options. Discussions within the group are subsequently focused on reinforcing the merits of this premature decision and of the group as a whole, rather than considering alternatives, or even potential problems and contingency plans should the decision fail to reach the best possible outcome. Within this highly cohesive setting, group consensus is protected by what Janis calls ‘mindguards’ – group members who make it their mission to shield the rest of the group from information that contradicts the group’s favoured course of action.

The psychology of social influence 43 Individual members are therefore led to overestimate the extent to which all the other members agree with the group’s favoured course of action. They are also less likely to voice their own concerns for fear of ridicule or other forms of social disapproval by the rest of the group. Janis issues a strong warning to group members not to let their group fall prey to groupthink. He argues that groupthink invariably diminishes group members’ ability to make rational decisions, as individual rationality is replaced by the desire to fit into the group at all costs. Instead of relying on their independent powers of analysis, group members censor their own critical thoughts so as not to dampen the positive feelings that arise out of belonging to the group. Eventually, they surrender to what they perceive is the general position embraced by the group. Janis (1972) provides empirical evidence for his conceptualization of groupthink through an extensive archival study of decisions taken by US White House advisory committees between 1940 and 1970. The study considered decisions that led to bad outcomes as well as some that led to good outcomes. The differentiating factor, according to Janis (1972), is that the former were guided by groupthink. Two of the most contrasting group decisions studied by Janis relate to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bay of Pigs invasion happened in April 1961, when the USA attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime. This was due to Castro not keeping his promise of holding free elections in Cuba and persecuting those who stood against him. Initially, the CIA officer in charge of the operation had proposed an invasion plan involving 750 men landing on a beach near the port of Trinidad, on the south coast of Cuba – a hotbed of opposition to Castro. It was predicted that within four days the invasion force would be able to recruit enough local volunteers to double in size. Airborne troops would secure the roads leading to the town and the rebels would join up with the guerrillas in the nearby Escambray Mountains. Even so, this proposal was only given a 30 per cent likelihood of success and advised against by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy’s military advisors. Kennedy and his close group of advisers, on the other hand, generally embraced the plan but believed it called for too many resources. Consequently, Kennedy asked for a revised proposal requiring fewer resources and a more remote landing site than Trinidad. The revised proposal set the landing on the Bay of Pigs, located 80 miles from the destination and across an impenetrable swamp. Despite realizing that this revised proposal would not work against Fidel Castro’s military force of 200,000 soldiers and militia, the officer in charge presented the plan as having a two out of three chance of success. He believed that Kennedy would order a full-scale invasion once the plan was under way and showing signs

44 The psychology of social influence of trouble. Instead of asking for outside opinions on the likelihood of success or taking the projected risk seriously, Kennedy and his advisors embraced the revised plan. They discouraged those urging Kennedy to abandon the project and went ahead with the proposed invasion. So high was the group’s confidence that Kennedy even reduced some of the military contingency assets, such as air cover for the landing party and a second air raid, to half of what had been recommended. Once again, those in charge of the plan’s execution reluctantly accepted, believing more resources would be made available once the plan was under way. Unsurprisingly given the high risk and lack of resources, the invasion quickly developed into an unmitigated disaster. The invading forces were killed or captured within 72 hours, and the US government was forced to send food and supplies to Cuba as ransom to ensure the safe return of the survivors. How could Kennedy and his elite advisory group have made such significant errors of judgement in planning the invasion? Based on the archival material he collected, Janis points to two factors in particular, both of which he also identified in other disastrous group decisions that he attributed to groupthink. The first factor was that the group insulated itself from outside criticism. As members of the group were worried that details would be leaked to Castro or to the press, they were extremely secretive. Group members even withheld vital information from the Joint Chiefs of Staff when asking for recommendations regarding the proposed invasion. As such, the group deprived itself of the valuable strategic information and critical evaluation it would have received from outside experts. The second factor was that the group was highly cohesive. Janis emphasizes the longstanding friendships that existed between some of the members of the group, and their pride at the high regard they enjoyed from outsiders for being part of Kennedy’s trusted team of advisors. The decision-making process in the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred a few months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, stands in stark contrast. The Cuban Missile Crisis arose when it emerged that the Soviet Union was building a missile base in Cuba in retaliation to the US missile bases in Turkey and Italy. Kennedy’s new advisory group was far more elaborate and diverse than the one planning the Bay of Pigs invasion. The new group consisted of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, experts on Latin America, representatives of the CIA, and cabinet ministers. The group also included some of the original members of the group who had advised Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs invasion. However, the attitude of these group members was very different. This time, the decision-making process avoided the factors leading to groupthink. The group considered several strategies for dealing with the crisis,

The psychology of social influence 45 such as not reacting to the news, negotiating with the Soviet Union, invading, organizing a blockade, bombing missile bases, and using nuclear weapons. In discussing these options, Kennedy and his advisers took into account how both the Soviet Union and Cuba would react to the various courses of action. The group members did not simply assume their plans would work, as they had done in the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Instead, they were aware and consistently reminded each other of the disastrous consequences an illconsidered decision would have. They took into account all the potential risks and dangers involved in the different courses of action, and considered and then reconsidered the potential effects of their actions. Unlike the Bay of Pigs invasion, the group did not underestimate ‘the others’, in this case the Russians and the Cubans. Instead, they ensured that they were fully informed of any retaliation measures these other groups had at their disposal. They also brought in outside experts, in order to ensure their decision would be based on solid facts and as much information as possible. Furthermore, group members’ statements were not taken as fact until independently verified, and the ideas of younger, lower-level staff were also taken into consideration. Even once they had decided on a course of action, the group members made detailed contingency plans in case their strategy failed. For example, after hearing evidence from the CIA, the general feeling of the meeting was for an air-attack on the missile sites. However, remembering the Bay of Pigs invasion disaster, Kennedy decided to wait and instead called for another meeting to allow for further discussion. During this second meeting, several of the group members expressed doubts about the wisdom of a bombing raid, fearing that it would lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Kennedy therefore resorted to a diplomatic solution to the problem. The diplomatic negotiations were successful, and the Russians agreed to dismantle the launching sites. Based on these and other good decisions by political groups, Janis suggested a range of measures that groups can adopt in order to avoid groupthink. In particular, Janis emphasized the need to expose the group to outside critics, who can rationally evaluate the group’s favoured course of action and make group members aware of potential problems. Furthermore, Janis strongly recommended that group members maintain their independence from one another, and consistently prioritize their individual opinions over those emerging from the group as a whole. From a social identity perspective, Janis’ portrayal of groupthink as negative is problematic. In arguing that group members should avoid cohesion and continuously remind themselves that they are independent individuals, Janis takes an individualistic perspective to group decision-making – a process that is, by its very nature, based on the existence of a group. As we

46 The psychology of social influence have discussed repeatedly throughout this chapter, such an approach is misguided. A further problem is that the elements Janis criticizes in groupthink – perceiving ‘us’ as better than ‘them’, group cohesion, seeking out agreement with the members of one’s own group – are all aspects of developing a shared social identity (Haslam et al., 2006). As we have argued so far, the process of social influence depends on this shared social identity. It is only by developing a shared social identity that group members can develop the sense of ‘us’ that makes it possible to work together in an effective, organized manner. A group whose members do not exhibit at least some of the elements of groupthink is simply a collection of individuals with no sense of purpose. This constitutes a poor basis for group decision-making. Instead, the social identity perspective argues that we should examine the positive consequences that a shared social identity can provide for collective action. A re-analysis of the evidence suggests that groupthink does not necessarily lead to negative outcomes. Indeed, detailed archival analysis by Peterson et al. (1998) demonstrates that groupthink processes tend to be as prevalent in good as they are in bad group decisions. Janis’ (1972) consistent split between good and bad decisions fitting into the ‘no groupthink’ versus ‘groupthink’ categories is due to the fact that his study relied almost exclusively on historical material and eye-witness accounts by participants. This type of evidence may have led to ‘hindsight wisdom’ (Henningsen et al., 2006), as some events are perceived as more meaningful than others once they have run their course. Furthermore, Kramer (1998) has found that documentary evidence pertaining to decision-making in the Kennedy administration fails to support Janis’ distinction between the misguided handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had it been successful, the Bay of Pigs invasion would have been perceived as an illustration of heroism in the face of adversity. By contrast, the group members’ indecision during the Cuban Missile Crisis could have been fatal had the diplomatic process not worked. As argued by Haslam et al. (2006), whether the outcome of group decision-making is negative or positive is not a consequence of the process through which the outcome was achieved. Instead, the outcome depends on the content of the decision reached by the group, and also on the value judgement attributed to the group’s actions. Janis’ (1972) recommendations for how groups should avoid groupthink are also problematic. The first recommendation is that the group’s decisions should be subjected to criticism by outsiders. The problem with this recommendation is that, as we have already seen throughout this chapter, people whom we perceive as outgroup members have little social influence over us. We expect outgroup members to be critical of us, if only to diminish what as

The psychology of social influence 47 ingroup members we perceive as being the ‘better group’. Outside criticism, when labelled as such by group members, is unlikely to be taken into consideration, and may even provoke defensiveness and sensitivity within the group. For criticism to be taken into consideration and to have an impact on the thoughts and actions of group members, it has to come from a source that we perceive as ‘one of us’. Hornsey et al. (2002) provided direct empirical evidence for this argument through three experimental studies. The studies compared the way in which criticism is received by group members when it is attributed to an outgroup as opposed to an ingroup member. In the first study, Australian participants were asked to read a script in which the speaker made either positive or negative comments about Australia. In one condition, the speaker was identified as an ingroup member (Australian), while in the other condition the speaker was identified as an outgroup member (Canadian, American, New Zealander, or British). The scripts provided the speaker’s name, age, nationality, and place of residence, as well as a fictional biography. The crucial information in the script related to the speaker’s opinion of Australia, which was either positive or negative. After reading the script, the participants were asked to rate the speaker on a variety of personality attributes such as intelligence and trustworthiness. The participants were also asked to indicate whether they would consider becoming friends with the speaker, and how fair they thought the speaker’s comments about Australia were. The study found that in the condition in which the comments were negative, they were rated as more negative if coming from an outgroup member as opposed to when the speaker was identified as a fellow Australian. Participants were also more likely to show their disagreement with the criticism by rating it as unfair when the criticism came from an outgroup as opposed to an ingroup member. The study also found that outgroup members who had made negative comments were evaluated less positively on personality dimensions than ingroup critics, and were less likely to be considered as potential friends. The same findings were successfully replicated in a second study using a different group – university students – therefore showing that the findings do not only apply to national groups. In the third study, Hornsey et al. (2002) examined the potential factors that might have caused the discrepancy between the way outgroup criticisms were evaluated compared to ingroup criticisms. The study employed maths– science students as participants. The participants were asked to read a script in which the speaker was introduced as either an ingroup member or an outgroup member (social science student). As in the first two studies, the speaker made either positive or negative comments about maths–science students. The study asked the participants to indicate how constructive and legitimate the comments were.

48 The psychology of social influence The study found that negative comments were rated as less constructive and legitimate when they were attributed to an outgroup member than when they were attributed to an ingroup member. These findings indicate that the reason behind the discrepancy in how outgroup criticism is received compared with ingroup criticism is tied to the fact that ingroup members are more likely to question the outgroup critic’s motivation. Outgroup criticisms are more easily dismissed as strategic (therefore as not constructive), motivated by the desire to diminish the ingroup’s status in relation to the outgroup. In addition, outgroup criticism can also be dismissed as illegitimate, made by people who are not entitled to pass judgement on the group. Outgroup critics are therefore likely to become the target of hostility, and their criticism to motivate the group even more strongly than before to defend the object of criticism. By contrast, ingroup members are perceived as entitled to pass judgement (their criticism is perceived as legitimate), and as motivated by the desire to serve the best interests of their group (their criticism is perceived as constructive). Group members are therefore more inclined to perceive criticisms made by an ingroup member as valid, and the criticism itself is likely to be taken seriously, being more difficult to dismiss. Overall, these findings suggest that the way the membership of the critic is framed (either by the critic or by the group members) is crucial to the way the criticism is received. For the criticism to be taken on board, the critic has to be able to frame themselves as a member of the ingroup, motivated by the desire to improve the reputation of the group. To achieve this, the critic may introduce a context in which they are perceived as part of the ingroup, as in the case of the separatists feminists in the study by David and Turner (1999, 2001). Janis’ second recommendation is that group members should focus on their individual opinions and avoid being influenced by those emerging from the group as a whole. He argues that a high level of cohesion in groups spells disaster for the decision-making process. In such groups, according to Janis, the group members tend to be proud of being part of the group, and are therefore less likely to undermine the group’s confidence by expressing doubts regarding the group’s chosen course of action. Raising concerns becomes more difficult under these circumstances, as members are worried that their criticism will lead to being ridiculed by other members or even to expulsion from the group. From a social identity perspective, Janis is suggesting that group members should avoid thinking of themselves as such. Instead, they should avoid identifying with the group and remain fully focused on their personal identity. First, this is unlikely to happen. As we have already seen in the Sherif, the Asch, and the group polarization paradigms, putting people into groups makes them more likely to think of themselves as group members rather than as

The psychology of social influence 49 individuals. Second, there is empirical evidence that even in group decisionmaking situations where personal identity is emphasized, this does not in fact lead to positive outcomes. Haslam et al. (2006) conducted an experimental study to compare the decisions made by groups that were cohesive with groups that were less cohesive in relation to a project that encountered increasing difficulties over time. The participants were put in groups of three or four, and told that they would have to decide on the progress of plans for a childcare centre. The study had three phases. At each phase, the participants were provided with information (press releases, letters from interested parties, official documentation) about the progress of the project. The information provided during the first phase was overwhelmingly positive about the prospects of the childcare centre. During the second phase, the information offered mixed views. During the final phase, the information brought up significant problems related to the childcare centre: the centre was behind schedule, it had gone over budget, toxic material had been discovered in the children’s sandpit, and parents were threatening legal action. Although none of these problems were fatal, they put the viability of the project into question. The study had two conditions. In the first condition, participants’ personal identity was emphasized. They were told that they would be requested to make an individual contribution to decisions. They were then asked to list three things that they personally did well, and three of their personal views about spending on community projects that differed from those of the other group members. They were also asked to write their initials on the response book and on a badge which they were to display prominently on their clothes. In the second condition, participants’ social identity was emphasized. The participants were told that they would be participating in group decisions and asked to list three things that people in their group did well and three views that they shared as a group about spending on community projects. The participants were also asked to generate a codename for their group that reflected their group’s common perspective on the issue of community childcare centres. They were requested to write this codename on their response book and display it prominently on a large badge. The study found that in the first condition, which emphasized participants’ personal identity, the increased difficulties encountered by the project led to loss of faith and reduced financial commitment. By contrast, the participants in the second condition, where their shared social identity was emphasized, remained committed to the project even when it encountered difficulties. These findings indicate that a shared social identity is crucial to collective action. Indeed, group cohesiveness and group members’ commitment to a particular course of action can become an advantage in the face of adversity. Projects that are progressive and most likely to change the status quo are often

50 The psychology of social influence the ones most often plagued with difficulties. As such, a high level of group cohesiveness is required to overcome difficulties and bring these bold projects to fruition.

Implications for politics The importance of being ‘one of us’ As we have discussed throughout this chapter, social influence happens in interactions between people whom we perceive as ‘one of us’. This implies that it is only those political messages that are perceived as coming from ‘one of us’ that will be taken into consideration and that have the potential to persuade and initiate change. By contrast, no matter how well organized and rational, messages that come from someone who is perceived as an outgroup member will at best be ignored and at worst be perceived as a strategic attempt to undermine the group. Being perceived ‘one of us’ is therefore at least as important as the content of the message. Being ‘one of us’ is a matter of perception, not objective reality As shown by the group polarization and minority influence studies discussed in this chapter, whether someone is an ingroup or an outgroup member depends on group members’ perception of the relevant context. This has two implications. The first is that being seen as ‘one of us’ is likely to change depending on the context. Those perceived as ‘one of us’ in one context can easily be perceived as outgroup members in another. Therefore, those seeking to exert social influence within the group have to continuously invoke contexts within which their ingroup membership is not in question. The second implication is that those seeking social influence can find ways to bolster the extent to which they are perceived as ‘one of us’ even in circumstances in which objective circumstances place them in a marginal position within the group. As we have discussed in relation to minority influence, this is most easily achieved by invoking a relevant outgroup that presents a threat to the ingroup. This bolsters the ingroup credentials of those seeking social influence, helping them to achieve their aim.

Chapter 2 summary 1

Sherif’s norm formation studies, Asch’s conformity studies, group polarization studies, minority influence studies, and research on groupthink all have important implications for the way in which social influence works.

The psychology of social influence 51 2

3

4

5

6

7

One way of understanding social influence is through the dependence model, which argues that we are influenced by others due to our dependence on them for either information or social approval. The social identity perspective criticizes this approach for taking an individualistic view of what is inherently a group-based process. According to the social identity perspective, social influence works through establishing a shared social identity. It is only those whom we perceive as ingroup members who can exert influence over us. The social influence in the Sherif paradigm has been attributed by the dependence model to participants’ need for information that confirms their estimates. By contrast, social identity research shows that the common norm emerges due to the other participants being perceived as ingroup members. Conformity in the Asch paradigm has been attributed by the dependence model to participants’ need for social approval. By contrast, social identity research shows that it is when no other social identity is available to participants, thus making the other group members be perceived as the ingroup, that participants are most likely to conform. Group polarization has been attributed by the dependence model to participants’ need for information and social approval during group discussions. Social identity research, on the other hand, provides evidence that group polarization occurs due to the group discussions invoking a relevant outgroup. Group polarization is caused by participants converging on a norm that is as distinct as possible from the one attributed to this relevant outgroup. Moscovici emphasizes the role of consistency in making minorities effective in influencing majorities. By contrast, the social identity perspective argues that no matter how consistent, minorities that we perceive as an outgroup cannot influence us. To exert influence over the majority, minorities have to invoke a context (e.g. a relevant outgroup) that bolsters their ingroup credentials. Janis’ conceptualization of groupthink emphasizes the need for groups to invite outside criticism, and warns against the negative effects of group cohesiveness. By contrast, social identity research shows that criticism is only effective when coming from ingroup members, and that group cohesiveness is crucial to the successful continuation of projects with uncertain outcomes.

Focus questions •

How does the social identity perspective on social influence differ from the dependence model?

52 The psychology of social influence • • • • • •

How does social influence work in the Sherif and the Asch paradigms? How can we explain group polarization? What methods could a minority use to influence a majority? Critically evaluate Janis’ recommendations for avoiding groupthink. How would a prospective political activist ensure that their criticism is taken seriously? What are the advantages and disadvantages of group cohesiveness in political decision-making?

Further reading Brown, R. J. (2000). Group Processes (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Martin, R., & Hewstone, M. (2007). Social influence processes of control and change: Conformity, obedience to authority, and innovation. In M. A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Psychology: Concise Student Edition. London: SAGE. Moscovici, S. (1976). Social Influence and Social Change. London: Academic Press. Turner, J. C. (1991). Social Influence. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

3

The psychology of crowd events

Learning objectives • • • •

gain an overview of theories and empirical research on crowd events; develop a critical understanding of research on deindividuation; gain an in-depth understanding of the way in which norms develop in the course of crowd events; identify how the social identity perspective can be useful in managing encounters between different groups during crowd events.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the importance of being seen as ‘one of us’ for exerting social influence. In this chapter, we will examine the way in which social influence works in one particular context: crowd events. Such events are often the way in which social and political movements express their discontent with the status quo, and as such they are central to politics. Traditionally, psychological research has represented crowd events in a negative light, even going as far as to suggest that they unleash the irrational side of human nature. This negative portrayal has been extremely popular and enduring. Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, published in the late nineteenth century and launching a scathing attack on crowds, was hailed as a bestseller and is still influential today (Reicher, 1999). Later empirical work on deindividuation further reinforced the notion that the anonymity provided by groups leads to a loss of self, which can result in antisocial behaviour, from stealing to murder (Zimbardo, 2007). The social identity perspective challenges this negative portrayal of groups in general, and crowds in particular. Social change is largely brought

54 The psychology of crowd events about by organized, large-scale collective action. Therefore, social identity researchers have focused their efforts on understanding the specific circumstances within which crowds turn violent, and have developed practical strategies that authorities can use to prevent such circumstances from arising. In particular, the social identity perspective has emphasized the importance of group norms for the way in which crowd events unfold. As historical evidence demonstrates, when crowds are governed by pro-social norms, they have the potential to become tremendous forces of positive change within society. Gandhi’s deliberate use of pro-social norms within his group provides a prime example. When analyzed from a social identity perspective, Gandhi’s work provides important insights for political campaigners.

Crowds as irrational: A social identity critique By far the most celebrated and influential psychological work relating to crowds is Gustave Le Bon’s book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Frightened by the Revolution of 1848 and subsequent rebellions threatening his family’s priviledged status in his native France, Le Bon’s (1895) book was a reaction against crowds. The book was written in an accessible style and gained a wide readership, becoming a tool used by authorities to discredit collective attempts at political change (Reicher, 1999; Reicher et al., 1995). Throughout the book, Le Bon describes crowds as exerting a hypnotic effect on its members, who become irrational and guided only by their animalistic instincts. According to Le Bon, this is because the crowd provides individuals with anonymity, thus removing the fear of negative consequences for any wrong-doing. Faceless and devoid of personal responsibility, individuals lose the usual constraints and sense of morality that guide their behaviour in their day to day lives. This new-found freedom allows crowd members to unleash their repressed animalistic impulses, making them lose their rationality and sense of self – the sense of identity that comes with being recognizable to others and accountable as an individual. The loss of self also makes crowd members more suggestible to the emotions of others through what Le Bon called ‘contagion’ – a process through which basic emotions such as anger and fear spread rapidly through the crowd. According to Le Bon, these features make crowd members easy prey to agitators aiming to harness the energy of the crowd for their own self-serving goals. Le Bon’s ideas were extremely popular with political figures during his time, and were later taken up by right-wing dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini in crafting their speeches and interactions with crowds (Reicher, 1999). Mussolini openly acknowledged his debt to Le Bon, and Horkheimer and Adorno (1973) suggest that Hitler’s Mein Kampf bears the stamp of Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. As such, Le Bon can be seen

The psychology of crowd events 55 as one of the architects of twentieth-century right-wing politics (Barrows, 1981). Although largely rejected by the academic elite of his time, Le Bon posthumously found huge popularity among academics and other thought leaders. For example, he influenced the development of Freudian terms such as ‘suggestion’ and ‘the unconscious self’, and Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. His influence has also been documented within other fields such as sociology, political theory, philosophy, and history (Reicher, 1999). Despite Le Bon’s popularity, his conceptualization of crowd members as irrational and devoid of a sense of self is problematic. Empirical research documenting the development of crowd events shows that the behaviour of crowd members can be seen to follow a very clear, rational pattern. For example, in his analysis of the 1960s American race riots, Fogelson (1971) found evidence that the rioters did not engage in violence indiscriminately, but rather that their attacks were selective and targeted at specific individuals and groups. In particular, the violence was primarily focused on outsiders and noted white racists. Studies of riots by social identity researchers indicate that this selectivity in relation to the targets of violence is the result of rioters’ shared social identity. Reicher (1984) provided empirical evidence of this through analyzing the unfolding of a riot in the St Pauls district of Bristol in April 1980. At that time, the St Pauls community was one of the most disadvantaged areas of Bristol, with high unemployment rates. The riot constituted a protest against the UK government which was perceived by the rioters as the source of their disadvantage. As in Fogelson’s (1971) study, Reicher (1984) found that the violence and looting were not unconstrained. In addition, Reicher’s analysis showed that it was the rioters’ shared social identity that served as a guide to their actions. For example, the rioters were very selective in only looting places that were symbols of power, such as banks, police stations, and businesses. They also remained within the bounds of the St Pauls community, in line with their shared social identity as members of that community. Furthermore, it was only those actions that were consistent with the interests of the group that gained the support of other group members. By contrast, actions that were not in line with the social identity shared by the rioters were either ignored or actively stopped. These findings directly counter Le Bon’s argument. Instead of losing their sense of self, members of the crowd shift from a personal to a group-based definition of the self. As such, their actions become guided by their social rather than their personal identity. This allows them to act in concert in a way that serves the interests of the group as a whole. Another problematic aspect of Le Bon’s argument relating to crowds is that it disregards the specific context within which the crowd is operating

56 The psychology of crowd events (Reicher, 1999; Reicher et al., 1995). For example, even though Le Bon was writing about crowds during nineteenth-century France, he did not dwell on the specifics of that time and place in his analysis. Had he done so, he would have been forced to acknowledge the structural factors that motivated the crowd members to come together as a group. Indeed, by starting with the premise that crowd behaviour is irrational, there is no need to consider any motivating or contextual factors (Reicher, 1999). Historical research, on the other hand, suggests that such factors are crucial to both the initiation of crowd events and the way in which such events unfold. By decontextualizing the crowd, the focus is taken away from the specific groups opposing it. These groups usually consist of authorities such as the police, military, or government – institutions which aim to maintain the status quo. These institutions often feel threatened by crowd initiatives, particularly those seeking social and political change, and react to such initiatives in ways that are perceived by crowd members as repressive. In turn, crowd members react towards the authorities in line with their perceptions of how the authorities act towards them. Outbreaks of violence are therefore not solely caused by the crowd, but rather by the dynamics that develop in the encounter between crowd and authorities. Le Bon’s conceptualization makes no distinction between a crowd that behaves violently and a peaceful demonstration. Nor does he differentiate between a crowd that only behaves violently at a later stage, once the police and other forces are attempting to repress it. By contrast, the social identity perspective argues that the way in which authorities respond to the crowd can either lead to an escalation of the initial conflict or to the development of peaceful relations that allow dialogue to take place. A study by Reicher (1996) provides evidence for this. The study examined the unfolding interaction between a student demonstration and the police occurring in the vicinity of the British Houses of Parliament in November 1988. The demonstration had been organized by the National Union of Students (NUS) as a protest against the government’s plans to replace student grants with student loans. At first, most student demonstrators saw themselves as peaceful protesters who were simply trying to get their message across to Parliament. However, what started as a peaceful protest quickly developed into a riot. Through analysis of television reports, newspaper articles, student magazines, and interviews with some of the participants, Reicher (1996) shows how the rising tension between demonstrators and the police was caused by each group perceiving the other group’s actions as illegitimate and therefore as a provocation for conflict. At the beginning of the demonstration, while most students followed the official route to a park in South London, some took an alternative route towards Westminster Bridge, aiming to carry out their protest in front of the

The psychology of crowd events 57 Houses of Parliament. When asked about their decision, the demonstrators who took this alternative route indicated that they perceived relaying their message to MPs as a democratic right. However, the demonstrators found their path to the Houses of Parliament blocked by police. Given that the demonstrators saw themselves as fully entitled to march towards the Houses of Parliament, the police blockade represented a denial of this entitlement. The high number of police, the fact that they were dressed in riot gear, and that some were mounted on horses also contributed to making the demonstrators interpret the police blockade as illegitimate. Reicher (1996) shows how the perceptions of the two groups mirror one another. While the demonstrators perceived the police behaviour as illegitimate, the police perceived the presence of the students in the vicinity of the Houses of Parliament as such. For police officers, the demonstrators were in breach of an explicit order which prohibits demonstrations within a mile of the Houses of Parliament while Parliament is in session. From the police point of view, the demonstrators’ attempt to march as a large group towards the Houses of Parliament broke official rules. As such, the police saw it as their responsibility to push the demonstrators back. In doing so, they did not discriminate between those demonstrators whose actions were peaceful and the more aggressive members of the group. Instead, they clamped down on the demonstrators indiscriminately. The indiscriminate police action led demonstrators, even the peaceful ones, to perceive the relationship between their group and the police as negative. From demonstrators’ point of view, the police’s action of indiscriminately clamping down on the crowd constituted an unprovoked attack. As such, the demonstrators felt they had to defend themselves by any means necessary. Police attempts at restoring order only led to further conflict. For example, their attempt to arrest some of the demonstrators was perceived by the crowd as random and unjustified. Resistance towards such arrests by crowd members subsequently led the police into conflict with more students, thus causing more arrests. The fact that the demonstrators perceived their actions against the police as an act of legitimate defence rather than an act of aggression is shown by the way in which the group responded to those members who went beyond defensive actions. For example, when some of the students threw missiles at police, they were booed and told to stop by the rest of the crowd. Through acting in a way that they perceived as legitimate resistance, the demonstrators were united in their fight against the police. This unity, brought about by a shift from perceiving the police as an ally to seeing them as the enemy, was in stark contrast with the initial disunity among students at the start of the demonstration, when they had marched along in small university groups, each group behind their own separate banner. Therefore, through their

58 The psychology of crowd events misguided actions, the police had galvanized a largely disorganized and peaceful collection of small groups into a united, angry crowd. The shift from perceiving the police as an ally to seeing it as opposition was particularly apparent among those who were attending their first demonstration. Not only did this cause unnecessary problems in the short term, but the loss of trust in the police expressed by demonstrators in interviews indicates that the mismanagement of this crowd event set a bad precedent. The culmination in this intergroup encounter between NUS students and the police occurred when approximately 30 police horses rode into the demonstrators, leading to intensified confrontation between the two groups. Over the course of only a few hours, what had started out as a mostly peaceful demonstration had turned into a violent intergroup encounter, and ultimately a full-fledged riot. Reicher’s (1996) analysis shows how important it is that authorities understand the circumstances in which their behaviour is interpreted as antagonistic by crowd members, and how to prevent such perceptions from taking hold among the crowd. Reicher’s (1996) work was taken forward by Stott and his colleagues in investigating the interaction between police and crowds of football supporters (Stott & Pearson, 2007). Across a series of studies, they found that the way in which the police behave towards crowd members at the beginning of their interactions sets the tone for further interactions. Furthermore, the way in which the police are perceived by the peaceful majority within the group has a strong effect on the way crowd members subsequently behave. One study focused on the interactions between the French police and two different groups of football fans during the 1998 World Cup: English and Scottish fans (Stott et al., 2001). Stott and his colleagues observed that from their very arrival at the games, Scottish fans were perceived by police as nonviolent and easy to deal with. Even remarks and behaviours by Scottish fans that could have been seen as aggressive were interpreted as good-natured fun and led to exchanges of camaraderie and banter. Within this amicable context, the majority of Scottish fans perceived the police as an ally which could be called on if any trouble arose with other groups. Aggressive behaviour towards the police by members of the group was discouraged by the other group members, as this type of behaviour was perceived to be inconsistent with the norms of the group. Stott and his colleagues noted the way in which the amicable relations between Scottish football fans and the French police contrasted with those between English fans and the police. Having established a bad reputation at previous international events, England football fans were seen and treated by French police as troublesome from the very beginning. This led police members to take strong, indiscriminate action against any outbreaks of violence involving England football fans.

The psychology of crowd events 59 Similarly to Reicher’s (1996) analysis, Stott and his colleagues argue that the indiscriminate actions by police led even the peaceful England football fans to distrust and harbour resentment against them. In particular, the empirical research by Stott and his team indicate that perceptions of legitimacy were crucial in determining the fans’ response to the police. Interviews with football fans and data from participant observers show that it was in those contexts where the actions of the police were seen as illegitimate that the more moderate fans were, through discussions with other fans and their direct experience, gradually converted to violence. This interpretation is supported by the fact that most of the violent incidents that were reported by French police in relation to England football fans involved individuals who had no previous record of having been involved in violent acts. These findings can be understood in terms of an aggressive minority exerting influence over the peaceful majority due to a shift in the context perceived as relevant by the majority. In the previous chapter, we saw how being perceived as ‘one of us’ enables the process of social influence. We examined the implications this has for situations in which a minority is attempting to persuade a majority to engage with its message. As we discussed in relation to the study by David and Turner (1999, 2001), when the relevant context included anti-feminists, the moderate feminist majority became more interested in what the separatist feminist minority had to say. This is because within that intergroup context, the separatist minority was perceived as ‘one of us’. In the same way, in the case of England football fans, once the police was perceived as an outgroup that stands against ‘us’, the initially noninfluential aggressive ingroup members gained in social influence. Within this new context, they were seen as protecting ‘our’ interests (England football fans) against ‘them’ (the police). Behaving violently towards the French police thus became consistent with the norms of England football fans, due to this violence being interpreted as legitimate retaliation towards a group that was antagonistic towards the ingroup. Despite their small numerical size, these circumstances had allowed the aggressive minority to influence and subvert the norms of the entire group. Based on this new understanding of how the reaction of authorities can lead to the development of violence norms within the group, Stott and his colleagues designed a strategy for police intervention in the context of football events. This strategy proved highly successful during the 2004 European Championship in Portugal (Stott & Pearson, 2007). Members of the police force in one part of the country were trained by Stott and his team to engage with England football fans under the assumption that most of them were peaceful. The police were therefore encouraged to treat them without prejudice for their bad reputation, and to develop a positive relationship with them.

60 The psychology of crowd events When violence did break out, the police were trained to only constrain those members of the group who were acting violently. In another part of the country, Stott and his colleagues did not provide any training. Police in that part of the country adhered to the strategies they commonly use, such as intimidating fans in order to constrain them and clamping down on crowd members indiscriminately. Stott and his team monitored how the relationship between England fans and the police developed in these two parts of the country. The findings revealed that in the area where police had received special training, the relationship between the England fans and the police remained positive over the entire course of the games. The few members of the group who acted aggressively did not exert any influence on the other fans, and were generally kept in check by the more peaceful group members even before they behaved in such a way that required police intervention. As such, even on the few occasions when police had to intervene, the violent behaviour was stopped before it had a chance to escalate. By contrast, in the areas where Stott and his team did not train the police in their newly developed strategies, the relationship between the football fans and the police went from bad to worse. When some of the fans initiated violence within the group and the police clamped down on the entire group, the moderate fans joined in and the violence quickly escalated. These findings show the importance of contextual factors on the development of group norms. In that part of the country where the police acted courteously towards English football fans and focused any intervention on the aggressive minority, a context was created within which violence towards the police was seen by the peaceful majority as anti-normative. By contrast, where the police did not distinguish between the violent minority and the peaceful majority, their actions were perceived as illegitimate. In that context, the behaviour of the few violent members quickly influenced the norms of the group as a whole, and behaving violently towards the police became the way ‘we’ behave towards ‘them’. Overall, these findings show the importance of the way in which crowd members are perceived by authorities. When authorities’ perceptions are in line with Le Bon’s conceptualization of crowd members as irrational, they are likely to over-react at any outbreak of violence and clamp down on the crowd indiscriminately. This sets in motion a set of negative consequences that, as we have seen, leads to an escalation of violence. By contrast, authorities that are trained to be sensitive to crowd members’ social identity concerns are more likely to act in ways that help alleviate conflict.

The psychology of crowd events 61

The importance of group norms Le Bon’s negative portrayal of crowds was taken forward in more recent times by research on deindividuation. The term ‘deindividuation’ was originally coined by Festinger et al. (1952) based on Jung’s definition of ‘individuation’ – a process through which a person becomes fully realized as an individual (Jung, 1946, p. 561). Deindividuation therefore refers to the loss of self which, according to Le Bon, accompanies the immersion of the individual into the crowd. By contrast to Le Bon’s work, deindividuation research has largely been empirical and laboratory-based, therefore focusing on groups of participants rather than crowds. In one of the earliest deindividuation experiments (Festinger et al., 1952), the researchers asked participants in the experimental group to dress in lab coats, so as to blur their individual identities. To further reinforce participants’ anonymity, these participants were tested in a poorly lit room. By contrast, control group participants remained dressed in their own clothes and were tested in a well-lit room, so they were easily identifiable. Both groups were asked to discuss their parents. The study found that participants in the experimental group made more negative comments about their parents than participants in the control group. In a similar study, participants in the experimental condition were found to be less inhibited when discussing erotic literature than participants in the control condition. The researchers attributed these findings to the anonymity provided by the uniform dress and the poorly lit room, and suggested that the participants in the experimental condition took advantage of this anonymity to behave in a less constrained manner than under ordinary circumstances. Deindividuation was also found to have an effect on children. Diener et al. (1976) used the trick or treat custom during Halloween to record the behaviour of children who were trick or treating. Some of these children were alone, while others were in groups. In order to reduce the deindividuation provided by their costumes, half the children were first asked their names and where they lived. All the children were told to take one of the candies from a bowl. The study found that children in groups, as well as the deindividuated children, were twice as likely to take extra candy compared to the children who arrived on their own and were asked the individuating information. Zimbardo (1969) took this argument further, and suggested that the anonymity that is part of deindividuation leads people to lose personal responsibility for their actions. This results in aggressive behaviour – a similar argument to Le Bon. Zimbardo therefore chose to systematically examine, over a series of studies, just how aggressive deindividuated participants are prepared to be towards others. These studies typically examined the extent to which deindividuated participants were prepared to inflict pain on stooges, compared to individuated participants.

62 The psychology of crowd events In one such study, female college students were asked to deliver a series of painful shocks to two female stooges, under the pretext of examining the effects of stress on creativity. At the beginning of the study, the participants were dressed in hoods and loose, oversized lab coats, allegedly to mask their non-verbal behaviour so that others could not detect their reaction. In one condition, the participants were deindividuated. This was done through replacing the participants’ names with numbers, and the experimenter treating them as a group rather than as individuals. In another condition, participants were individuated by being given name tags to emphasize their uniqueness. The participants were asked to listen to pre-recorded interviews of the two stooges in groups of four. The aim of the recordings was to create divergent attitudes in the minds of the participants about the two stooges. Indeed, the participants assessed one of them as ‘very nice’ while they assessed the other as ‘bitchy’. Participants were then asked to administer electric shocks to the two stooges. They were themselves given a sample shock (75 volts) so they could experience how painful the shocks were. They could also see how much pain they were inflicting on the stooges by watching them through a one-way mirror, as the stooges were trained to react as if in pain when the shock light lit up. To eliminate group conformity, the participants administered the shocks in separate cubicles. The study examined whether and for how long the participants administered the painful shocks to each of the two stooges. The study found that participants in the deindividuation condition delivered electric shocks that were twice as long as the ones administered by participants in the individuated condition. The deindividuated participants also did not discriminate between the ‘very nice’ and the ‘bitchy’ stooge, and increased the shock time for both over the course of the 20 trials. In contrast, participants in the individuated condition shocked the ‘very nice’ woman less over time than the ‘bitchy’ one. Zimbardo (1969) interpreted the fact that the deindividuated women ignored their previous opinion of the two target women as evidence that deindividuation leads to rationality being replaced by aggressive behaviour. This behaviour arises from an increasing sense of one’s domination and control over others, which is self-reinforcing; an increase in aggressive behaviour leads to a stronger, less controlled subsequent reaction. Zimbardo (2007) also cites cross-cultural evidence in favour of his argument that deindividuation leads to an extreme level of aggression. In particular, he summarizes a study using the Human Relations Area files, an archive of reports by anthropologists, missionaries, psychologists, and others gathering data on cultures around the world. Watson, a cultural anthropologist leading the study, mined this data for information on societies in which warriors did or did not change their appearance before going to war. He also examined the extent to which they killed, tortured, or mutilated their victims.

The psychology of crowd events 63 These two data sets were present in 23 societies, and in 15 of these warriors changed their appearance before going to war. Twelve of these brutalized their enemies, whereas seven of the eight societies in which warriors did not change their appearance did not engage in this type of destructive behaviour. In 90 per cent of the cases when warriors in these societies killed, tortured, or mutilated their enemies, they had deindividuated themselves by changing their appearance. This evidence was taken by Zimbardo (2007) as confirmation that when permission is given to behave in aggressive ways that are ordinarily prohibited, such as in the exceptional circumstances provided by war, the anonymity provided by deindividuation leads to destructive behaviour. By contrast, other studies provide evidence that the effects of deindividuation are not as clear-cut as Zimbardo (1969, 2007) suggests. Johnson and Downing (1979) conducted a study based on Zimbardo’s (1969) deindividuation paradigm under the pretext of a paired association learning experiment. The study had two conditions. In the first condition, the participants were asked to wear cloaks and hoods which the experimenter described as resembling Ku Klux Klan outfits – the same kind of deindividuating clothes generally used in Zimbardo’s studies. In the second condition, the participants were asked to wear outfits that resembled nurse uniforms, and were described as such by the experimenter. Half of the participants in each condition were also asked to wear a large badge with their name, to individuate them. Therefore, even though all the participants in the study were asked to wear deindividuating clothes, half of the participants dressed as Ku Klux Klan members and half of the participants dressed as nurses were individuated through the use of the name badges. Once the participants had changed into these outfits, they were asked to decide on the level of electric shock to be administered to another person for making mistakes in the paired association learning task. The participants’ choices had to be between the level of -3, the lowest level of electric shock, and +3, the highest level. Before indicating their choices, the participants were shown photos of three other participants dressed in similar clothing to themselves, and told the estimates these other participants had given. In reality, the photos were of stooges, and the researchers ensured that their scores averaged zero, so as not to bias the real participants towards a higher or a lower level of electric shock. The participants were also told that the researchers were interested in the group average, not their individual responses. The study found that similarly to Zimbardo’s (1969) findings, the participants wearing the clothes resembling Ku Klux Klan outfits and who did not wear a name badge displayed higher levels of aggression than individuated participants. By contrast, the participants who wore nurse uniforms and no

64 The psychology of crowd events name badge were significantly less aggressive than the participants wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits. In fact, those participants displayed the lowest level of aggression of all the participants in the study, even the individuated ones. Therefore, in the case of the deindividuated participants wearing nurse uniforms, deindividuation led them to behave in a more pro-social manner than individuated participants. These findings counter Zimbardo’s argument that deindividuation leads to an increase in aggressive behaviour. From a social identity perspective, the effect of deindividuation depends on the norms that are prevalent within the group. In the previous section, we saw how through sharing a common social identity, group members behave in line with the norms of the group. Therefore, while for Scottish football fans violence against the police was anti-normative, for England fans it became normative through the social influence exerted by an aggressive minority. Once such behaviour was perceived as normative within the group, it guided the behaviour of all group members, even those with no history of violence and who had initially behaved peacefully. In the context of deindividuation studies, the costumes the participants are asked to wear serve to blur interpersonal boundaries and increase the sense that the other members of the group are interchangeable with the self. This reinforces the shared social identity that is inherent in groups. As such, group members are even more strongly influenced than in most group situations by what they perceive are the norms of their new group membership, which are indicated by their costumes. As most deindividuation studies have used costumes resembling Ku Klux Klan outfits, it is unsurprising that the studies found that deindividuation increased aggression. By contrast, the findings reported by Johnson and Downing (1979) show that the same mechanisms that lead to norms of aggression can also be harnessed to encourage pro-social norms. The findings can be understood in terms of the norms of the group, as suggested by participants’ costumes: Ku Klux Klan members administer electric shocks, nurses do not – in fact, their norm is to prevent suffering. Wearing a nurse’s outfit is associated with pro-social behaviour. As a result, those participants who were deindividuated through wearing nurses uniforms exhibited the least amount of aggression, thus the highest level of pro-social behaviour among all participants in the study, even the individuated ones. Overall, these findings demonstrate that far from leading group members to behave more aggressively, as Zimbardo argues, being a member of a group can have positive consequences for behaviour. As we have seen, the behaviour of group members depends on the norms of the group. Groups that embrace violent norms encourage group members to behave violently. By contrast, groups that embrace pro-social norms encourage group members to behave in a pro-social manner.

The psychology of crowd events 65

Crowds as agents for positive change If a group has strong, explicit norms of non-violence, group members can remain peaceful in even the most extreme circumstances. The struggle for Indian independence led by Mahatma Gandhi provides a prime example. We will focus on one particular campaign led by Gandhi: the Salt March of 1930. The march constituted a protest against one of the British rules within colonial India which stated that it was illegal to collect or manufacture salt without paying tax to the British Empire (Dalton, 1993). Gandhi’s purpose throughout the march was to persuade the British to abolish this rule by raising awareness amongst his fellow Indians and asking them to join him in protest. However, for Gandhi, it was of crucial importance that the protest did not lead to any violence against the British, but that the goals be achieved through entirely peaceful means. The Salt March was therefore governed by strong norms of non-violence. The protest was guided by ‘satyagraha’ (loosely translated as ‘truthforce’), a set of principles that provides clear guidelines for deploying nonviolent methods as a means of protest (Parekh, 2001). Satyagraha states that means and ends are inseparable. Peaceful independence can therefore only be achieved through peaceful (non-violent) methods of resistance. Instead of focusing on harming the opponent, the goal of satyagraha is to cooperate with them to abolish injustice. Satyagraha states that this course of action is to be followed even if the opponent behaves violently. Other satyagraha rules include harbouring no anger against the opponent, not insulting the opponent, and being willing to undergo suffering without ever retaliating (Hatt, 2002). Gandhi knew that Indian independence could only be achieved through a collective effort, and that any violence erupting within the crowd would only lead to an escalation of the conflict with the British, loss of many more lives than through non-violent protest, and a gradual defeatism among the Indian people as to the likelihood of achieving their goals (Parekh, 2001). Therefore, Gandhi consistently emphasized to his followers that the road to independence was going to be long, arduous and entail many sacrifices, but that it was essential that the Indian people collectively adhered to the very strict norms of satyagraha (Dalton, 1993). The non-violence norms were important both for the way in which Indians perceived themselves as a group, as well as for the way in which the world perceived their efforts towards independence. Through satyagraha, Gandhi hoped Indians would build a strong distinctive identity that would allow them to gradually break away from the British. In making the norms of satyagraha become part of the public consciousness, Gandhi went to great lengths to emphasize how integral they were to any successful campaign against the British. For example, during his first

66 The psychology of crowd events years of campaigning for independence, between 1920 and 1922, Gandhi suspended a protest involving millions of Indians when a group of unarmed British police officers were killed by the crowd (Parekh, 2001). Through such actions, Gandhi made it clear that he measured the success of a campaign in his followers’ ability to adhere to satyagraha throughout their protest rather than in the amount of support it attracted. In addition to emphasizing the importance of adhering to non-violence through suspending protests that turned violent, Gandhi also introduced the satyagraha norms within a core group of his followers who called themselves ‘satyagrahis’ (Parekh, 2001). Their role was to act as Gandhi’s ambassadors and to spread the satyagraha norms as widely as possible among the Indian people. Gandhi believed that the satyagrahis must undergo rigorous training to ensure a strict adherence to the satyagraha norms even in the most extreme circumstances. It was particularly important that the satyagrahis could keep calm and not react to any violence, no matter how much suffering the authorities bestowed upon them in order to break their resolve. In this way, the satyagrahis could act as role models for the other protesters. The Salt March constituted Gandhi’s third significant campaign using satyagraha. The march started with a core group of 78 satyagrahis, whom Gandhi took great care in selecting. Some of the satyagrahis were selected on the basis that they had been his disciples for years, learning and working alongside him; others had proven their commitment to satyagraha when they participated in the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928, a campaign that had been successful in winning significant concessions from the British (Dalton, 1993). All 78 satyagrahis were therefore highly committed to non-violence norms and could be counted on to serve as role models for those who were to join the march along the way. Another way in which Gandhi ensured that non-violence remained normative within the crowd as more people joined the march was through his chosen route. He selected the route in such a way that the march would pass through many of the same villages as over the course of the previously successful Bardoli protests (Dalton, 1993). By following the same route, Gandhi ensured that non-violence was already normative among those joining the march as the protest gathered pace. To further reinforce this, Gandhi sent scouts to the villages where they planned to stop along the way, to gather information and prepare the villagers for the arrival of the march. Gandhi’s talks at each stop reminded the local population of the importance of the nonviolence norms and how these norms had previously led to success. By capitalizing on past successes achieved through satyagraha, Gandhi ensured that the non-violence norms would be more easily taken up by those villagers for whom the norms were relatively new, and would spread quickly with the least amount of resistance.

The psychology of crowd events 67 The march lasted 24 days and passed through 48 villages, ending 200 miles away from where it had started. With every village through which the march passed, it gathered more followers and more momentum. Thousands of satyagrahis and respected members of the community joined the march. Every day, more people joined, until the procession of marchers became approximately two miles long, with more than 50,000 people marching along. Through the length of time allocated for the march, Gandhi ensured that the norms had time to spread through the crowd gradually. By the time the protest gained critical mass, the non-violence norms were strong enough that the crowd members and the Indian people in general adhered to them without the need for continuous reminders or monitoring by the rest of the group. The culmination of the march happened on 6 April 1930 when Gandhi broke the salt law by collecting natural salt from the seashore and encouraged his fellow Indians to do the same. This sparked large-scale acts of civil disobedience against the British by millions of Indians. The protest gradually extended to items other than salt. British cloth and goods were boycotted, unpopular forest laws were defied, and some of the peasants refused to pay tax. The British government attempted to put an end to the protests by introducing more laws and harsher measures against the protesters. Over 60,000 Indians were jailed and hundreds of non-violent protesters were beaten up by the British police (Dalton, 1993). However, even when the British troops opened fire with machine guns on an unarmed crowd that had gathered to protest against the arrest of one of the satyagraha leaders, killing an estimated 250 people, the protesters remained non-violent and willingly faced the bullets without retaliating in any way. British documents show that the British government was shaken by the Salt March. Furthermore, the march drew worldwide attention to the Indian independence movement through extensive media coverage. The satyagraha against the salt tax continued for almost a year and constituted a milestone in India’s fight for independence. More than 30 years later, the satyagraha campaigns and the Salt March exerted a strong influence on Martin Luther King, Jr, who used Gandhi’s methods to gain civil rights for black people and other minority groups in the USA. The way in which Gandhi made non-violence normative among his group represents a prime example of how those group members with strong social influence over their group, such as group leaders, can actively redefine what it means to be ‘us’. In circumstances when this redefinition introduces positive norms, such as those introduced by Gandhi, the group will have a positive effect on the behaviour of group members. This counters Le Bon and Zimbardo’s arguments that the anonymity provided by a crowd or a group leads to antisocial behaviour. On the contrary, when positive norms are prevalent, crowds can and do change the political landscape for the better.

68 The psychology of crowd events

Implications for politics Authorities should be sensitive to crowd members’ social identity Authorities will be more effective at preventing outbreaks of violence if they understand that the unfolding of the encounter depends on how crowd members perceive outside intervention. From the very beginning, authorities should interact with the crowd in ways that encourage crowd members to perceive them as allies, perhaps as a group of people whose job it is to ensure that ‘our message will be heard’. By contrast, if authorities are seen as an outgroup intent on antagonizing the ingroup, their intervention will be perceived as illegitimate, and outbreaks of violence are likely to escalate even further following their attempt at squashing them. Prospective group members should carefully consider the norms of the group Before joining a group, political activists should carefully consider if the norms of the group are in line with their own personal values. In many cases, such norms are implicit rather than explicit, so it is important to ‘read between the lines’ and not commit to a group with norms that are implicitly destructive. Prospective group members need to be aware that once they join the group, these norms will not only describe but also prescribe their own actions, even when not under the surveillance of the group. As such, they need to evaluate the norms of the group before their commitment to the group grows and they develop a shared social identity with the other members of the group. How political movements should organize themselves Crowd members should carefully monitor the implications that interactions with outgroups have on the group’s behaviour. By exerting their social influence over other ingroup members, crowd members can ensure that aggressive members do not gain the ability to redefine the norms of the group. It is through understanding how to effectively promote positive norms within our own groups that we can ensure these groups have the potential to lead to positive social and political change.

Chapter 3 summary 1

Previous theorists such as Le Bon have conceptualized the crowd as irrational, leading group members to lose their sense of self. By contrast, social identity research shows that crowd members’ actions are guided by their shared social identity. As such, crowd members are rational and

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2

3

4

5

do not lose their identity. Instead, they identify as group members rather than as individuals. The violence that Le Bon attributes to crowd events arises as a result of the dynamic between crowd and authorities. As such, authorities are at least partly responsible for occasions where outbreaks of violence escalate. Social identity research shows that when trained to understand the way crowd members’ social identity influences their perceptions of other groups, authorities can provide a context in which violence is easily preventable. Le Bon’s theoretical work influenced empirical research on deindividuation, which suggests that the anonymity provided by groups leads to increased levels of aggression. However, other research demonstrates that deindividuation can also engender pro-social behaviour. The social identity perspective allows us to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings by focusing on the importance of group norms. In groups that are governed by rules of aggression, deindividuation is likely to encourage group members to behave aggressively. On the other hand, groups that embrace pro-social norms increase this type of behaviour in their members. An examination of Gandhi’s Salt March from a social identity perspective shows that when crowds embrace norms of non-violence, they have the potential to bring about a tremendous amount of positive social and political change.

Focus questions • • • • •

What advice would you give law enforcers in charge of managing a crowd? In what ways is the social identity perspective to crowd events different from previous work on such events? Critically analyze research on deindividuation. How can minority influence become relevant in the context of crowd events? What role do norms play in the unfolding of crowd events?

Further reading Le Bon, G. (1947). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. London: Ernest Benn. (Original work published 1895.) Stott, C., & Pearson, G. (2007). Football “Hooliganism”: Policing and the War on the “English Disease”. London: Pennant Books. Turner, J. C. (1991). Social Influence. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

4

The psychology of political leadership

Learning objectives • • •

gain an overview of the different perspectives on leadership; discover the social identity perspective on leadership; develop an understanding of how the social identity perspective differs from other approaches to leadership.

We concluded the previous chapter by discussing how a leader – Mahatma Gandhi – was crucial in introducing and cementing particular norms within his group. In this chapter we delve deeper into the relationship between the group and its leader. Most approaches to leadership have examined this relationship from an individualistic perspective, treating the leader as separate from followers. By contrast, the social identity perspective argues that leadership depends on being seen by followers as embodying what it means to be ‘us’.

Leaders as extraordinary individuals: The importance of leader attributes The oldest approach to leadership, going as far back as the philosophers in Ancient Greece, is based on the premise that leaders are born, not made. According to this approach, leaders are heroes, people with extraordinary qualities. These qualities place them above the rest of humanity and make them pre-destined for leadership. Often referred to as the ‘great person theory’ in the academic literature, this approach has led to numerous attempts to identify and measure those attributes that separate leaders from everyone else and give them their above-average potential. Some of these attributes refer

The psychology of political leadership 71 to physical characteristics. For example, it was believed that people above average in size, health, or attractiveness have a better chance of becoming leaders than those who do not possess these qualities. Other attributes relate to personality characteristics such as self-confidence, sociability, need for dominance, intelligence, and talkativeness. The empirical evidence supporting the great person theory is scarce. For every trait that has been identified as a possible indicator of leadership, there are examples of leaders who do not possess that trait. Furthermore, if traits such as ‘sociability’ or ‘need for dominance’ are necessary pre-requisites, we would expect these traits to be associated with effective leadership. However, attempts to establish such links have only provided unconvincing results. Indeed, systematic analysis of the empirical evidence suggests that the correlation between traits that have been identified as relevant to leadership and actual leadership effectiveness is only 0.30 – a low correlation coefficient, indicating that the link is tenuous (Stogdill, 1974). Despite lack of empirical support, the great person theory has re-emerged in different guises throughout time. The most recent recycling of this theory can be found in contemporary transformational approaches to leadership, which we will discuss in the final section of this chapter. In this new incarnation, ‘charisma’ has replaced attributes such as attractiveness and sociability. The endurance of the great person theory to the present day points to its intuitive appeal. Indeed, it is difficult not to think of leaders such as Gandhi as possessing some special characteristic which launched their path to greatness – but if so, what is this special factor? From a social identity perspective, the crucial aspect that makes or breaks a potential leader centres around their ability to embody the features that best represent ‘us’ – i.e. the leader’s prototypicality. The term ‘prototypicality’ is based on the extent to which a member of a category (e.g. a prospective leader) resembles the ‘prototype’ for that category. In turn, ‘prototype’ refers to a set of attributes that describes one group in ways that distinguishes it from relevant outgroups – what makes ‘us’ different from ‘them’. The notion of ‘prototype’ has its origins in cognitive science, particularly research on categorization of cognitive stimuli initiated by Rosch and colleagues. A well-known finding from this area is that some members of a category are more readily associated with that category and are therefore perceived as more central than others. For example, when thinking of the category ‘furniture’, the word ‘chair’ comes to mind quicker than the word ‘stool’ (Rosch, 1973). The notion of prototype (and of prototypicality) is therefore inextricably linked with categorization. As we discussed in Chapter 2, the social identity perspective suggests that we are influenced by ingroup, but not by outgroup members. For example, as previously mentioned, Abrams et al. (1990) showed that it is only those

72 The psychology of political leadership perceived as being ingroup members who exert social influence in the Sherif and Asch paradigms. A series of studies by Hornsey et al. (2002) also showed that group members accept criticism directed at their group only if that criticism is attributed to an ingroup member. By contrast, if attributed to an outgroup member, that same criticism is more likely to elicit defensiveness and to be perceived as a strategic attempt by the outgroup to undermine the ingroup. These studies demonstrate that to influence others, a crucial requirement for leadership, potential leaders have to be perceived as ‘one of us’. Social identity research also suggests that not all ingroup members exert the same degree of social influence. Those ingroup members who are perceived as being the best at embodying what is distinctive about the group (i.e. the most prototypical members) are our primary source of information about what being ‘one of us’ entails. Therefore it is these members that are the most influential within the group and most likely to be instated as leaders. In a study conducted by van Knippenberg et al. (2004), law students were presented with a student leader’s arguments for or against university entrance exams. In one condition, the student leader was presented as having prototypical views about a relevant ingroup issue – the time students should be given to complete their degrees. In another condition, the student leader was presented as having non-prototypical views about the ingroup relevant issue. The study found that in the condition in which the student leader was presented as having views that were prototypical of the ingroup, participants aligned their attitudes to those of the leader. Interestingly, this was the case whether they had previously argued for or against exams. By contrast, in the condition in which the student leader was presented as having nonprototypical views, their arguments in relation to university entrance exams did not exert influence over the participants. These findings suggest that being seen as prototypical of the group is essential to prospective leaders’ ability to exert social influence. How do prospective leaders gain prototypicality? Rosch and Mervis (1975) found that the degree to which a member of a category is seen as prototypical depends on the extent to which that member is similar to other members of the category, while at the same time having as little in common as possible with members of other categories. The extent of a leader’s prototypicality therefore relates to being seen by group members as embodying what ‘we’ have in common with each other as well as what makes ‘us’ different from ‘them’. Social identity research suggests that prototypes function in a similar way to norms, in that they polarize away from the relevant outgroup to emphasize the ingroup’s distinctiveness (Turner, 1991). For example in the previous chapter, we discussed the way in which Gandhi gradually made non-violence normative among the Indian population. By adhering to the non-violence

The psychology of political leadership 73 norm, the Indian people became different from the relevant outgroup within that context – the British. Therefore once the norm of non-violence took hold among his group, Gandhi became prototypical. This is because among the Indian people he represented the embodiment of non-violent resistance. There are important distinctions between the way in which the social identity perspective promotes the notion of prototypicality as defining of leadership and the approach taken by the great person theory in identifying what marks someone out as a leader. The first distinction is that the leader’s prototypicality is not seen as being ‘located’ within the leader, as the great person theory would suggest. The prototype is an ideal case, which may not be fully matched by any member of the group. Instead, prototypicality is a matter of degree. Turner (1985) uses the term ‘relative prototypicality’, which refers to the extent to which someone is more similar to other ingroup members and more different from outgroup members compared to the other members of the group. The greater this similarity to the ingroup and difference from the outgroup relative to other ingroup members, the more that person is perceived to represent ‘us’. The second distinction is that prototypicality is not a fixed attribute. Instead, a leader’s prototypicality emerges in the interaction between the leader and the group. Leaders are not separate from their followers. Instead, their ability to exert social influence and therefore leadership is directly tied to their followers’ perceptions of them and of the intergroup situation. It is due to this dynamic nature that prototypicality cannot be measured in the way suggested by the great person theory. Prototypicality is therefore an emergent property of the interaction between leaders and followers. As such, the way in which the leader behaves towards followers as well as towards any relevant outgroups is central to leadership.

Leaders as doers: The importance of leader behaviour In previous research, matters of leader behaviour have been addressed by the contingency approach. This approach suggests that different types of situations call for leaders who behave differently. Effective leadership becomes a matter of matching the situation with the kind of leader who exhibits the behaviours that are best suited to it. As such, in every situation there are several people who would serve equally well as leaders – but how do we find the perfect situation–leader match? The focus of the contingency approach in answering this question has been on leadership style. This notion refers to the particular behaviour adopted by prospective leaders towards their followers. Lewin initiated a series of experimental studies in this area, subsequently taken forward by two of his colleagues, Lippitt and White (Lewin et al., 1939;

74 The psychology of political leadership Lippitt and White, 1953). These studies aimed to investigate the effect of different styles of leadership on group productivity and morale. In one of these studies, reported by Lippitt and White (1953), researchers invited 10- and 11-year-old boys to meet after school in five-member groups to work on hobbies such as woodwork and painting. Each group was led by an adult stooge who was instructed to adopt one of three styles of leadership: autocratic, democratic, or laissez-faire. Leaders adopting the autocratic leadership style behaved in an aloof manner and focused exclusively on efficiency. They organized the group’s activities, gave orders, and made all the decisions without asking for input from the boys. By contrast, leaders adopting the democratic leadership style called for suggestions from the boys, rarely gave orders, and discussed their plans with the group before setting them in motion. Leaders adopting the laissez-faire style interfered minimally and provided information only if asked. They generally gave the group minimal guidance and left them to work on the tasks in their own way. The study was designed in such a way that stooges could be swapped between the different conditions and adopt a different leadership style every seven weeks, so that each group would be consistently exposed to the same leadership style as used by different leaders. This enabled Lippitt and White to ensure that any variations between groups were due to the different leadership styles rather than the idiosyncrasies of the stooges. The study found that while groups led in the autocratic style spent more time working (74 per cent) than the ones led in a democratic (50 per cent) or a laissez-faire style (33 per cent), the democratically led groups (as well as the groups led in the laissez-faire style) kept on working even at times when the leader left the room. By contrast, the teams led in the autocratic style only worked when under the leader’s surveillance. In terms of productivity, therefore, the autocratically led teams performed by far the best, while the laissez-faire led teams performed the worst. However, in terms of the leader’s social influence on the team, it was the democratic leadership style that fared the best. Observers also found that group members being led using the autocratic style displayed a higher level of hostility towards each other than the groups led using the other two styles. Group members led in the autocratic style also made more demands for attention and developed the tendency to single out a scapegoat amongst the group and make this boy a target for ridicule and abuse. Lippitt and White (1953) suggested that this was most likely an attempt to diffuse the pent-up emotions they could not display towards their leader. Taken together, these findings provide a fascinating insight into the importance of social influence for leadership. Even though the teams were less productive under democratic leaders than autocratic ones, the motivation to work without supervision, as well as the harmonious group relations the

The psychology of political leadership 75 democratic leadership style engendered, more than made up for the difference in productivity. Subsequent attempts at examining different leadership styles were undertaken by Bales (1950) and Fiedler (1964). While their approaches differ when examining the specific details, both identified two key leadership roles: task specialist and socio-emotional specialist. Leaders in the ‘task specialist’ category focus mainly on completing the task with maximum effectiveness. As such, they offer opinions and directions relating to the task without much thought to the group itself. By contrast, leaders in the ‘socio-emotional’ category focus on maintaining harmonious relations between members of the group. Their main input is therefore focused on the way in which the group members interact with one another rather than on completing the task. The contingency approach represents a step forward in the study of leadership over the great person theory. Instead of emphasizing internal leader dispositions that are difficult to quantify, the notion of leadership style focuses on the leader’s observable actions. We can therefore compare the merits of different leadership styles, as in the study by Lippitt and White (1953). Furthermore, we can match different leadership styles to different situations, based on the work by Bales (1950) and Fiedler (1964). Nevertheless, similarly to the great person theory, the contingency approach is inflexible. While the great person theory assumes that a leader’s personal attributes are fixed, the contingency approach assumes that the particular context in which leaders operate is fixed. In practice, however, leaders have to deal with a continuously changing context. One of the contextual aspects that is in a continuous state of change is the outgroup that is seen as most relevant by the ingroup. In Chapter 2, in the study undertaken by David and Turner (1999, 2001), we saw how the same group of moderate feminists became more responsive to the message by separatist feminists once the context changed from one that only included feminists to one that also included anti-feminists. A feminist leader would therefore have to adapt both their behaviour and their message to these changes in context. It is only by adapting their behaviour that the leader can ensure that they are still perceived as prototypical of the group and maintain their leadership position. There are numerous examples of political leaders who, for various reasons, were unable to adapt to the changing context and were consequently sidelined from their role. In the USA, Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most important people in George W. Bush’s team, provides a prime example (Haslam et al., 2011). While before the Iraq War he was rumoured to be on his way out, once the war started he rose to the top of his powers. However, soon after it was revealed that there were in fact no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he lost his leadership position. This is because Rumsfeld’s effectiveness as a leader

76 The psychology of political leadership depended on the extent to which he represented what the USA stood for at a particular point in time – his prototypicality. While Saddam Hussein’s regime was seen as the relevant outgroup, Rumsfeld’s belligerence stood for a strong USA that was no match for a small country such as Iraq. However, once perceptions of the war changed in the USA, Rumsfeld’s values were no longer prototypical. As such, his ability to exert social influence dwindled in this changed context. This example shows that a leader’s effectiveness is dependent on the extent to which they are able to remain prototypical of the group in the face of changes in context. Indeed, many leaders have successfully adapted to such changes. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was able to emerge from 27 years of imprisonment and adapt his message despite a radical shift in the South African political landscape. Similarly in Romania, Corneliu Coposu – an emerging young leader during the pre-Communist era, who spent most of the Communist era in prison – was able to adapt his message and lead one of the main political parties after the collapse of the Communist regime. As these examples indicate, it is only by taking into account followers’ perceptions that leaders can maintain their position despite contextual changes.

Leadership as perception: The importance of followers Followers’ perceptions constitute the main focus of the perceptual approach to leadership. One of the main theorists to embrace this approach was Max Weber (1958). He suggested that followers’ perceptions of the leader, such as whether a leader has charisma or not, are key to a leader’s effectiveness. Note that the argument here is not whether the leader possesses charisma, which would be the focus of the great person theory, but whether followers perceive the leader to have charisma. This emphasis on perceptions of particular leadership attributes later influenced the development of ‘leader categorization theory’, the most recent theoretical incarnation of the perceptual approach. This theory, developed by Lord and his colleagues (Cronshaw & Lord, 1987; Lord et al., 1982), attempts to explain how and why we categorize someone as a leader. Lord suggests that prospective leaders gain access to their coveted role only if followers perceive them as matching particular leadership characteristics and behaviours. According to leader categorization theory, followers have specific ideas about a leader’s attributes and behaviour. These ideas take the form of readymade cognitive schemas, which followers gain through their experiences with leaders and which they hold in their memory. Some of these schemas relate to leadership situations in general, while others are connected to leadership within particular areas, such as in the fields of politics, sports, or business. Prospective leaders are assessed in relation to these cognitive schemas. The

The psychology of political leadership 77 closer the match, the more likely they are to be perceived as a leader and gain followers’ support. Leader categorization theory seems to combine elements of both the great person theory and contingency theories of leadership. On the one hand, like the great person theory, it emphasizes the importance of leaders possessing particular attributes. On the other hand, similarly to contingency theories, it acknowledges that different fields of endeavour require different leader attributes and behaviours. Leader categorization theory also brings us one step closer to the social identity perspective by emphasizing the role of followers’ perceptions in making or breaking prospective leaders. Despite these improvements, similarly to the great person and contingency theories, leadership categorization theory is too inflexible to provide a comprehensive understanding of leadership. While the great person theory is inflexible regarding leader attributes, and contingency theories do not leave room for changes in context, leader categorization theory conceptualizes followers’ cognitive schemas of leadership as fixed. According to this theory, leaders within a particular field are always expected to conform to a specific list of characteristics and behaviours in order to be perceived as suitable for leadership within that field. This emphasis on conformity to a specific list, regardless of context, generates several problems for leader categorization theory. One problem is that the theory does not acknowledge the possibility that followers may adjust their perceptions of leadership. Indeed, there is evidence that in practice, followers adapt the way they believe leaders should behave to suit a particular leader. This point is illustrated by the responses to a poll run by CBS News in 2000, just a week before the US presidential election (Haslam et al., 2011). The poll asked about some of the characteristics of the two presidential candidates – George W. Bush and Al Gore. While 59 per cent of respondents rated Al Gore as highly intelligent, 55 per cent rated Bush as being of only average intelligence. In fact, as many as 28 per cent of Bush’s own supporters rated Gore as more intelligent. Why would respondents support a political candidate whom they perceive as less intelligent than their opponent? Some insight comes from another question on the poll, asking about the kind of president respondents wanted. While 72 per cent of Gore supporters said they wanted a president with above-average intelligence, only 56 per cent of Bush supporters agreed with this statement. Therefore, even though intelligence is generally a characteristic associated with effective leadership, particularly in the field of politics, Bush supporters devalued this quality. Instead, they focused on other dimensions on which they saw Bush as superior to his opponent. From a social identity perspective, a leader’s prototypicality is more important to followers than the extent to which they exhibit particular abstract

78 The psychology of political leadership behaviours associated with effective leadership. Indeed, social identity research comparing the importance of prototypicality and leader attributes shows that what matters to group members is behaviour that is seen as prototypical of the group. A study by Hains et al. (1997) shows that when the group is psychologically significant, group members will favour leaders displaying characteristics prototypical of the ingroup over and above those that are associated with leaders in general. The researchers asked university students to consider arguments for and against increased police powers. In one condition, in order to make the group psychologically significant, the participants were told that they would be discussing their ideas in a group with other like-minded students. The participants were also asked to develop arguments in support of the group’s views. In the other condition, there was no attempt to make the group psychologically significant. Participants then read about a leader who was either prototypical or non-prototypical of their group. Half the participants in each condition read that the leader described themselves in terms of behaviours that emphasize group goals, planning, and communication – behaviours that leadership categorization theory had found to be perceived as being associated with effective leadership (Cronshaw & Lord, 1987). In the case of the other half of participants in each condition, the leader did not mention such behaviours. The study found that in the condition in which the group had not been made psychologically significant, participants rated the prospective leader as more appropriate for the role and more effective if they had described themselves in terms of the leader-stereotypic behaviour emphasized by leader categorization theory. By contrast, in the condition in which the group had been made psychologically significant, what mattered over and above such leadership behaviour was whether the leader was perceived as prototypical of the group. These findings suggest that in circumstances where the group is psychologically significant, as it often is in the case of leadership outside the laboratory, group members care more about whether a prospective leader represents what the group stands for than whether they behave in ways generally associated with leadership. Another problem with the inflexibility inherent in leader categorization theory is highlighted by social identity research on fairness – a behaviour we most often associate with effective leadership. We expect leaders to be fair, and support them to the extent that they are. It is only authoritarian leaders whom we associate with unfair behaviour – a trait to which we generally attribute their downfall. As such, we would expect leaders behaving fairly to gain follower support, and leaders not displaying this characteristic to be severely penalized through decreased follower support. Indeed, behaviours that emphasize fairness feature prominently in the leadership behaviours put

The psychology of political leadership 79 forward by leader categorization theory. However, several social identity studies by Platow and his colleagues on fairness suggest that in practice, the extent to which we support leaders who behave in a fair manner depends on the context within which this behaviour takes place (Haslam & Platow, 2001; Platow et al., 1997, 2000). In a study by Platow et al. (1997), participants who were New Zealand nationals were asked to read a memorandum which was attributed to the CEO of a Health Authority. The memorandum proposed procedures for dividing time on a kidney dialysis machine between two equally needy patients. In the first condition, the CEO and both patients were described as life-long New Zealanders. From participants’ perspective, this meant that they were all members of the ingroup. In the second condition, the CEO and one of the patients were described as life-long New Zealanders, while the second patient was described as a recent immigrant to New Zealand. This second condition therefore introduced an intergroup context; while the CEO and one of the patients were ingroup members, the other patient belonged to the outgroup. In the third condition, the CEO and one of the patients were described as life-long Australians and the other patient as a new immigrant to Australia. This third condition therefore introduced an exclusively outgroup context. In each of these conditions, half the participants were told that the CEO had proposed equal distribution of time on the dialysis machine for the two patients. The other half were told that the CEO had proposed an unequal distribution of time. In the second and the third condition, this unequal distribution was in favour of the life-long New Zealander or Australian. All the participants were asked the extent to which they supported the CEO’s decision. The study found that when the patients were both described as life-long New Zealanders (therefore as ingroup members), the CEO received strong endorsement if proposing an equal distribution, and weaker endorsement if proposing an unequal distribution of time. However, this pattern of results was reversed in the condition in which one of the patients was described as a recent immigrant to New Zealand. In this condition, the CEO received stronger support if they proposed an unequal distribution of time that favoured the ingroup member. These findings held true regardless of the extent to which participants expected to personally need such life-support systems at some point in the future, or believed that the life-long New Zealander deserved more time on the dialysis machine because they had contributed more to the country in taxes. How are we to make sense of these findings? From the perspective of leader categorization theory, the CEO who acted unfairly did not conform to the type of behaviour associated with effective leadership. The theory cannot therefore explain why it was that by acting unfairly in the intergroup context

80 The psychology of political leadership the leader received more support than by acting fairly. However, from a social identity perspective, the findings are in line with the ingroup favouritism that generally marks intergroup encounters. We first discussed this feature of intergroup contexts in Chapter 1, in relation to Tajfel’s (1970) first minimal group study. In that study, Tajfel found that when asked to make monetary allocations between two ingroup or two outgroup members, participants acted fairly by allocating similar amounts to both people. However, when they were asked to make allocations between an ingroup and an outgroup member, participants consistently allocated more money to the ingroup than to the outgroup member. In the same way, the pattern of participants’ support for the leader in the Platow et al. (1997) study was different depending on whether the context was ingroup-only or intergroup. When the context only involved ingroup members, the CEO received more support if they acted fairly. Indeed, a leader who acts unfairly, favouring some ingroup members over others, does not provide the group with a sense of ‘us’, and therefore does not deserve the support of the group. In the intergroup context, on the other hand, the leader who makes an equal distribution between the ingroup and the outgroup member does not display ingroup favouritism – a behaviour we expect in intergroup contexts. By making a fair allocation, they are in a sense betraying their ingroup allegiance. Such a leader does not foster a sense of ‘us’, and therefore does not elicit the same amount of support as the leader favouring their own group. Even more interesting were the results of the third condition, in which the CEO and one of the patients were Australian while the other patient was a recent immigrant to Australia. In this context relating to two outgroups, as in the context that focused entirely on the ingroup, the fair CEO received more support than the unfair CEO. These findings show that it is only ‘our’ leaders whom we expect to display ingroup favouritism. In purely outgroup contexts, we expect leaders to conform to the kind of leadership behaviour emphasized by leader categorization theory. Taken together, these findings show that although fairness is a trait generally associated with effective leadership, the extent to which fair leaders gain followers’ support depends on the context. When the leader has to make allocations between ingroup and outgroup, those leaders who favour the ingroup are more likely to gain followers’ support than even-handed leaders. We may think that findings such as these only apply to life-threatening matters. As we perceive ingroup members to be similar and interchangeable with the self, we may be more focused on saving ingroup than outgroup members’ lives. However, evidence suggests that in intergroup contexts, leaders who display ingroup favouritism elicit more support regardless of how important or trivial the issues are. In another study by Platow et al.

The psychology of political leadership 81 (1997), participants were assigned to minimal groups and given a short problem-solving group task to increase identification with the group. Subsequently, they were asked to complete a series of individual computerbased tasks. The participants were told that some, but not all, participants would receive extra tasks from a group leader. In order to eliminate selfinterest as a factor influencing the findings, it was made clear to the participants that none of them personally would receive any of the extra tasks; these would be allocated to other participants. Subsequently, the leader allocated these tasks. In one condition, the extra tasks were allocated between two ingroup members, while in another condition, they were allocated between an ingroup member and a participant from another laboratory (outgroup member). The distributions were either equal between both participants, or unequal. In the intergroup condition, the inequality was in favour of the ingroup. As receiving extra tasks was burdensome to participants, this meant that the ingroup member received fewer tasks than the outgroup member. The study found that when the leader made allocations between two ingroup members, they received strong support when these distributions were equal. If one of the ingroup members received more extra tasks than the other, the leader received little support. By contrast, when the distributions were between an ingroup and an outgroup member, the reverse pattern was found. The leader who made equal distribution of extra tasks received little support, while the leader who favoured the ingroup member received strong support. Overall then, even though behaving in ways we generally associate with leadership is important for leaders, such behaviours are overridden by attributes or actions that make the leader stand for ‘us’. Indeed, even in the case of fairness, a behaviour we generally associate with effective leadership, it is those leaders who favour the ingroup over the outgroup who elicit followers’ support. This is because by acting unfairly towards outgroup members at the risk of damaging their own reputation, prospective leaders demonstrate they are committed to advancing ‘our’ interests as a group. By contrast, the approach we will consider in the next section emphasizes leaders’ ability to fulfil followers’ personal interests.

Leaders as givers: Personal versus group interests One of the main approaches to leadership, the transactional approach, is based on the premise that leaders gain followers’ support by focusing on followers’ personal interests. There are two strands to the transactional approach: the exchange model and the power model. We will discuss these in turn. The exchange model suggests that leadership works along similar principles to an economic exchange. Leaders set the goals which followers have to achieve. They subsequently reward followers with recognition or other

82 The psychology of political leadership incentives for working towards these goals. In turn, followers reward leaders with status and power – resources which leaders need in order to turn their vision for the group into reality. Hollander (1958), one of the main proponents of the exchange model, argued that leaders become effective through a phased process. During the first phase, prospective leaders have to behave in ways that are in line with the established norms of the group. They also have to be seen to identify with the group’s ideals and aspirations, and demonstrate they have the competence to fulfil the group’s objectives. If successful in building a support base and winning the trust of followers during this initial phase, leaders are given ‘idiosyncrasy credit’. This is similar to the monetary credit offered by banks – a form of deferred payment based on trust. Leaders can use this ‘credit’ during the second phase to deviate from the group’s existing norms and engage in behaviours that are idiosyncratic, creative, and innovative. This serves to establish them not only as effective, but also as visionary and as capable of pushing the group to new heights. Similarly to Hollander (1958), the social identity perspective also suggests that prospective leaders have to go through a gradual process to win followers’ support. However, the reasoning for this differs. Hollander (1958) emphasizes followers’ personal interests. Leaders are entrusted with ‘idiosyncrasy credit’ based on their promise that followers will have a better life under their leadership, and their ability to prove that they are capable of achieving this if provided with the right resources. By contrast, the social identity perspective argues that leaders are entrusted with the kind of support required for taking the group in a new direction because they have proven themselves to represent ‘us’. In order for prospective leaders to gain the social influence required for leadership, therefore, they have to prove their readiness to champion the group’s interest. This is particularly important in circumstances in which the ingroup is set against a relevant outgroup. Leaders’ propensity to gain social influence by promoting the group’s interests is demonstrated through a study by Platow et al. (2000). The participants were psychology students, and this shared social identity was made obvious to them at the beginning of the study. Participants were told that they would be asked to evaluate a series of abstract paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and then complete a series of computer-based tasks. Before asking the students to judge the paintings, the experimenter told them that extra computer tasks had to be distributed to some, but not all, the participants. The experimenter then publicly made distributions of extra tasks between two stooges, thus making it clear to the real participants that they themselves would not be receiving the extra tasks. The distributions made by the experimenter were either fair (both stooges received the same number of extra tasks) or unfair (one stooge was allocated more extra tasks than the

The psychology of political leadership 83 other). The two stooges were introduced as either two psychology students (two ingroup members) or one of them was introduced as a psychology student (ingroup) while the other was introduced as a dental student (outgroup). In this latter case, when the distribution was unfair, the ingroup member was allocated fewer tasks – so the unfair allocation favoured the ingroup member. Having made these distributions, the experimenter proceeded to introduce the painting judgement task. At the start, the experimenter made a seemingly throw-away comment that they themselves prefer Kandinsky over Klee. As the experimenter was in charge of the study procedure, they fulfilled the role of prospective leader within this context, while the participants fulfilled the role of followers. As such, the experimenter’s stated preference of Kandinsky over Klee was expected to exert social influence on those participants who perceived the experimenter as an ingroup member. The aim of the study was to examine whether the experimenter’s previous behaviour of allocating the extra tasks even-handedly or in ways that favoured the ingroup had an effect on their ability to influence participants’ choices on the painting judgement task. The study found that the experimenter’s even-handed versus ingroupfavouring distribution of extra tasks between the two stooges did indeed influence participants’ choices. When the experimenter had made equal allocations and the two stooges had both been introduced as ingroup members, the participants chose Kandinsky over Klee, in line with the experimenter’s stated preference. By contrast, when the experimenter had made unequal distributions between the two ingroup members, the participants chose Klee over Kandinsky. These findings indicate that the experimenter’s previous fair or unfair behaviour had affected their ability to influence the participants’ choices. Had the participants simply conformed to the experimenter’s opinion based on their position of authority, there would have been no difference between the two conditions; all participants would have simply aligned their choices with the experimenter’s stated preference. Even more revealing was the difference in findings in the intergroup context, in which the experimenter made equal or unequal allocations between an ingroup and an outgroup member. The study found a reverse pattern to the ingroup-only condition. Indeed, in the intergroup context, participants aligned themselves to their stated preference of painters and chose Kandinsky over Klee if the leader had favoured the ingroup member over the outgroup member. As argued by the social identity perspective, this is because prospective leaders who are seen to be championing their group are perceived to have the group’s best interests at heart and are therefore entrusted with social influence. By contrast, when the experimenter made an equal distribution between the ingroup and outgroup member, participants chose Klee over Kandinsky. This shows that by not acting in ingroup-favouring

84 The psychology of political leadership ways, the prospective leader had forfeited their ability to exert social influence over their followers. Promoting the ingroup’s interests also has important implications for the kind of support followers are prepared to offer, as demonstrated in a study by Haslam and Platow (2001). In this study, student participants were told about Chris, a student leader who had devised a new plan to lobby the university to erect permanent billboard signs on campus. Among his other duties as a student leader, Chris was described as being responsible for deciding who, among his student council, should be given prizes for their previous performance as councillors. Some of the council members were described as having engaged in ingroup-normative actions, such as supporting gun control and opposing university funding cuts. By contrast, other council members were described as having engaged in anti-normative actions such as opposing gun control and supporting funding cuts. The study had three conditions. In the first condition, the participants were told that Chris had given more prizes to councillors who had behaved in normative ways. In another condition, that he had given more prizes to those who had behaved in anti-normative ways. In the third condition, participants were told that Chris had awarded an equal number of prizes to normative and anti-normative councillors. The study measured the extent to which the student participants supported Chris’ reward policy as well as his new initiative. Participants were also asked to make open-ended comments and suggestions about Chris’ proposal for the billboard signs. The researchers counted the number of suggestions provided by each participant, and also assessed whether these suggestions were justifying or attempting to undermine Chris’ proposal. The findings revealed that participants were more supportive of Chris if he had rewarded normative ingroup members than if he had rewarded antinormative ones. The extent to which they supported Chris’ billboard campaign also depended on his past behaviour. When he had rewarded normative group members, Chris was more likely to receive support for his future plans. The most interesting aspect of the findings, however, consisted in the answers to the open-ended questions. Based on the previous element of the study, in which participants expressed the extent of their support for Chris through scores, the findings showed that he had gained equal levels of support for the billboard policy when he had rewarded both normative and anti-normative councillors, as well as when he had promoted the interests of the group by only rewarding normative councillors. However, when taking into account participants’ open-ended comments, there was a clear distinction between the two conditions in the level of support participants were willing to give Chris. When Chris had promoted the group’s interests by only awarding prizes to those councillors who had acted normatively, the participants provided at least one argument in support of his policy. By contrast, in the condition in

The psychology of political leadership 85 which they were told that Chris had given prizes to both normative and antinormative councillors, participants hardly offered any helpful comments. Even in those cases when the participants did offer supportive comments, these were far outnumbered by their critical ones. Therefore, by not acting in a way that promoted the interests of the group, Chris’ social influence only extended to forms of token support from followers, such as easily filled out scores on a questionnaire. By contrast, in order to receive the kind of follower support that made an impact but also required effort, such as generating comments that strengthened and justified his plans, Chris had to demonstrate his willingness to promote the interests of the group. Taken together, these studies show that for group members to accept the leader’s social influence and support the leader with full conviction, rather than just offering token support, the leader needs to promote the interests of the group. In doing so, prospective leaders gain access to a range of resources that they can use to turn their vision for the group into reality. Such resources, as we have discussed so far, include social influence as well as the ability to harness group members’ energies in a way that makes a real impact. The second strand of transactional theories, the power model, is based on the premise that effective leadership is contingent on leaders having control over resources that followers are dependent on. According to this model, leadership is the result of power, which in turn is a consequence of control over resources. French and Raven (1959), the best-known proponents of this approach to leadership, developed a taxonomy identifying six resources that independently put leaders in a good position to achieve power over their followers: rewards, coercion, expertise, information, legitimacy, and respect. As Turner (2005) suggests, the causality chain put forward by the power model is problematic on several grounds. One problematic aspect is that the type of leadership advocated by the power model is not sustainable in the long run. By coercing rather than inspiring followers to achieve particular goals, leaders would have to keep them under constant surveillance, thus requiring far more resources than if using a process based on social influence. Furthermore, this coercion-based system would lead to the kind of autocratic leadership we discussed in relation to the study by Lippitt and White (1953). As we have already seen, the teams led by autocratic leaders were the most productive, but the relationships between group members were plagued by problems. By contrast, leadership is far more effective and sustainable when the leader provides inspiration. This was demonstrated by Lippitt and White (1953) through comparing the performance of the autocratic leaders to that of the democratic leaders. Although less productive, the teams led by democratic leaders were far more harmonious and did not need the leader’s constant surveillance. This is because the group members worked not for the leader, but for ‘us’ (Haslam et al., 2011).

86 The psychology of political leadership Through shared social identity, group members who are perceived as the most prototypical gain social influence and thus the ability to control resources. Indeed, as Turner (2005) argues, the ‘resources’ invoked by the power approach – even material resources, such as guns – always come down to people, particularly to groups. As we have discussed throughout this book, social influence is the most sustainable way to encourage people to carry out our will. Therefore, power is something leaders only have by virtue of the social influence they are able to exert over their followers.

Leaders as visionaries: Transforming social reality Contrary to the transactional approach considered in the previous section, which makes followers’ personal self-interest central to successful leadership, the transformational approach views leaders as visionaries. Rather than promoting a mechanical structure, reducible to a simple algorithm, the transformational approach argues that true leadership is about working with and inspiring followers, motivating them to become the best they can be. Instead of being motivated by obtaining rewards or avoiding punishment, this approach sees followers as people who engage with the leader because they believe in the leader’s vision. Even more importantly, leaders themselves change into more actualized individuals during the process of leadership, and inspire followers to undertake their own self-actualization journey. The transformational approach identifies three components of leadership: individualized considerations, intellectual stimulation, and charismatic leadership (Burns, 1978). Each of these relates to multiple aspects of leadership. The first component, ‘individualized considerations’, relates to leaders’ ability to understand and fulfil followers’ needs, abilities, and aspirations. The second, ‘intellectual stimulation’, relates to their ability to challenge followers’ basic thinking through helping them develop better attitudes and practices. The third, ‘charismatic leaders’, relates to leaders’ ability to provide a sense of urgency for followers to become better people. Unlike any of the other approaches discussed so far, the transformational approach acknowledges the collective aspect of leadership. Leaders share the transformation process with their followers and work together to fulfil the new aspirations that are generated by this process. In this way, the transformational approach suggests that leaders and followers work in tandem. However, the transformational approach has important limitations. While promoting the idea of transformation, this approach does not specify what psychological factors or mechanisms are at play and how they impact on followers. As such, ‘transformation’ becomes a black box that has a range of positive effects but leaves out crucial questions, such as how changes are

The psychology of political leadership 87 introduced to followers, under what circumstances they are accepted or rejected, and at what point followers start sharing in the leader’s vision. An even more important problem from a social identity perspective is that while emphasizing the collective aspect of leadership, the transformational approach does not fully escape individualism. In particular, similarly to the great person theory, the transformational approach emphasizes the importance of leaders’ attributes. However, instead of focusing on specific traits, as the great person theory does, the focus is on the more general concept of charisma (Judge et al., 2002). Therefore, despite its aspirations to address the collective dimension of leadership, the transformational approach is in fact steeped in an individualistic perspective. By contrast, the social identity perspective emphasizes leaders’ ability to represent ‘us’ through the prototypicality achieved based on a shared social identity with group members, rather than through the individualistic notion of charisma. The concept of prototypicality, as we have discussed throughout this chapter, is central to leaders’ ability to exert social influence and gain followers’ support. However, as we have seen, who is prototypical of a group depends on the particular context, and is therefore continuously subject to change. Depending on which outgroups become relevant to the ingroup, and the way in which the leaders’ actions in relation to these outgroups are perceived (e.g. as promoting the ingroup’s interests or not), leaders can either maintain or lose their prototypicality and with it, their social influence and leadership position. There are two ways in which leaders maintain their prototypicality within the group. First, leaders adapt to the changing context, as we have mentioned in relation to Nelson Mandela and Corneliu Coposu. Second, leaders change the context in a way that bolsters their own prototypicality. In the previous chapter, we discussed in-depth how one leader, Mahatma Gandhi, gradually introduced the norm of non-violence as a defining characteristic of his group’s struggle for resistance against another group. This example shows that leaders not only adapt to the social context but also actively transform it in ways that bolster their own prototypicality. As already mentioned in relation to Gandhi, once the non-violence norm took hold within his group, he became the most prototypical member of his group. This enabled him to exert more social influence over his group, thus strengthening his leadership position. In changing the context to bolster their own prototypicality, leaders use language in a way that is favourable to their ability to represent ‘us’. This is particularly obvious in political speeches, where competing political leaders represent the same event in different ways, making themselves look as the most prototypical and therefore the one best suited for leadership. A prime example of leaders jostling for prototypicality is provided by Reicher and Hopkins (1996) in their analysis of two political speeches. The two speeches

88 The psychology of political leadership were given in 1985 by the Conservative leader and British Prime Minister at that time, Margaret Thatcher, and the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, at their respective annual party conferences. Both speeches focused on the miners’ strike that had dominated the domestic political landscape of that year. The strike had escalated into violence, as the miners taking part were trying to make working miners join their protest. The analysis by Reicher and Hopkins (1996) shows that, despite focusing on the same event, the two leaders represent the strike in completely different ways. The analysis also shows that the way in which the two leaders conceptualise the strike bolsters the extent to which they (in contrast to their opponent) are the ones who represent ‘us’. Thatcher represents the strike as a general struggle between two sides. The first side is composed of ‘the British’, while the other side consists of the National Union of Mineworkers (the NUM) executive who had organized the strike. Thatcher constructs these two categories as being in total contrast to one another. The first category, ‘Britishness’, is defined by courage, respect for the law, and support for the democratically elected government. This category is represented by the working miners and their families, who are described as ‘the best of the British’ and as role models for the rest of the group. The second category, ‘the NUM’, is defined in direct opposition to ‘Britishness’. This category is represented by the NUM executive, whom Thatcher conflates with the IRA extremists who only a day before had bombed the residence where Thatcher was staying. According to Thatcher, those within this second category show no respect for the law or for the democratically elected government, and are therefore excluded from the ‘Britishness’ category. As Reicher and Hopkins (1996) show, Thatcher goes to great lengths to make the second category as numerically insignificant as possible. She achieves that through a process of elimination. The second category does not include the miners, or the striking miners, or even the Labour party, but consists exclusively of the NUM executive. Throughout her speech, Thatcher places the national audience firmly within the first category. Thatcher also clearly defines the norms of this group as being opposed to the strike. By contrast, the NUM executive represents the relevant outgroup within the context invoked by Thatcher. By promoting the strike and encouraging attacks on the government, this outgroup is waging an attack on democracy itself. As such, it falls within the remit of the Conservative government, the representatives of democracy and of the British people, to protect the ingroup from the outgroup’s attacks. The categories in Kinnock’s speech are in direct contrast to Thatcher’s, but the process he undergoes to bolster his own prototypicality within the group is similar. Kinnock establishes a divide between those who understand the everyday working experience and those who are isolated from it. On the one

The psychology of political leadership 89 side, Kinnock places the British people, represented by the striking miners; on the other, he places Thatcherism. The experience of the miners in relation to Thatcherism is made to stand for the British people in general. They are compassionate, caring, concerned with their community, and opposed to conflict. As ordinary working people who understand the realities of production, they embody those understandings which differentiate the ingroup from the outgroup. It is for them that the Labour party speaks. On the other side, Kinnock places ‘Thatcherism’. As Thatcher does in relation to the NUM executive, Kinnock narrows this second category as much as possible. Indeed, Kinnock narrows this category to only one person – Thatcher. Neither those opposing the strike, nor the upper or middle classes, the Conservatives, the government or even the cabinet itself, are included in this category. This specificity emphasizes that the position embraced by Thatcher does not reflect anything collective, but is simply a reflection of one person’s will. Furthermore, this person is defined in negative terms, as coercive, out of touch with ordinary people, and irrational. Throughout his speech, Kinnock places the national audience within the first category. As such, the audience are looking to the Labour party to represent their interests in their struggle against Thatcher. Kinnock therefore invokes a context in which it is normative to take the side of the (striking) miners and to oppose Thatcher. The analysis by Reicher and Hopkins (1996) of these two speeches shows that the two leaders do not simply take the social context for granted. Instead, they reconstruct it in ways that favour their own prototypicality within the group. In doing so, the two leaders both undermine their opponent’s prototypicality as well as attempt to persuade their audience of their ability to promote ‘our’ interests in an intergroup context.

Implications for politics Leaders are not separate from followers As we have discussed throughout this chapter, a prospective leader’s ability to attract support and exert social influence depends on the extent to which they are perceived as prototypical by ingroup members. In general, personal attributes such as a high level of intelligence make a prospective leader seem ideally suited for leadership. As such, prospective leaders may think that emphasizing these qualities will increase support from followers. However, if these attributes are not seen by group members as representative of ‘us’ and as distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’, they can in fact hinder the prospective leader’s prospects by setting them apart from those they seek to lead. Instead,

90 The psychology of political leadership the prospective leader should emphasize characteristics which make them representative of the group they are hoping to lead. It is by emphasizing what they have in common with followers, not what sets them apart, that prospective leaders will win hearts and minds. How leaders can maintain their prototypicality Once a prospective leader is instated, it is important that they begin the work of cementing their new position. In particular, they should ensure that being instated as leader is not perceived by followers as an aspect that sets them apart from the group. Instead, new leaders should focus on taking steps to bolster their prototypicality. One of the most important actions new leaders should undertake is to behave in ways that are perceived as promoting the interests of the group. Circumstances in which the leader’s identity-affirming behaviour makes them a target of opposition from a relevant outgroup present particularly good opportunities for new leaders. This is because by acting in identity-affirming ways in such situations, new leaders not only show their commitment to the ingroup, but are also emphasizing their ability to represent the ingroup as distinct from the outgroup. As we have seen in this chapter, leaders who favour the ingroup over the outgroup not only increase their social influence over the ingroup and gain followers’ support, but also gain their loyalty and hard work for their future plans. This allows leaders to gradually push the group in new, innovative and challenging directions, and to be able to count on followers’ support to turn their vision into reality. Having gained followers’ trust in embracing new directions, leaders should focus on redefining the norms of the group in a way that bolsters their prototypicality. For example, in Chapter 3 we discussed how Mahatma Gandhi used his growing social influence to introduce norms of non-violence among his followers. Once these norms became widespread within the group, Gandhi’s prototypicality increased, thereby cementing his leadership position for the future. Regardless of how effective they are, leaders continuously have to ensure that they remain prototypical of the group despite changes in context. They should use situations that threaten their leadership position to their advantage by invoking relevant outgroups that allow the leader to embody what is most distinctive about ‘us’ in relation to ‘them’. For example, in this chapter we discussed the way in which UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher constructed the year-long miners’ strike, an event that threatened her social influence over the British population, in ways that bolstered her prototypicality among the British. She achieved this by invoking a numerically

The psychology of political leadership 91 insignificant outgroup in direct opposition to the ingroup she was representing. In doing so, she turned an event undermining her prototypicality into one that bolstered it. As this example shows, leaders need to continuously reconstruct the social context in a way that suits their image in order to maintain their prototypicality. The more they succeed in doing so, the more secure their leadership position will be. Followers monitoring the leader’s norms The process of effective leadership is the same for leaders whose intentions are to lead the group in a democratic way as it is for leaders who plan to instate themselves at the helm of authoritarian regimes. Followers need to be aware that a leader’s effectiveness does not guarantee their pro-social or democratic intentions for the future. In the next chapter, we will discuss the way in which groups can resist falling prey to leaders whose intentions are destructive.

Chapter 4 summary 1 2

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Unlike other approaches to leadership, the social identity perspective emphasizes the shared social identity between leaders and followers. The great person theory attributes effective leadership to particular physical or personality traits; however, empirical evidence is scarce. By contrast, the social identity perspective emphasizes the role of prototypicality in leadership. A leader’s prototypicality is not a fixed attribute, as the great person theory would suggest. Instead, it is a dynamic property that arises from the interaction between leader and followers in relation to changes in the relevant context. The contingency approach focuses on leaders’ observable behaviour through the notion of leadership style. According to this approach, leadership is a matter of the leader’s behaviour providing a good match for the situation. However, similarly to the great person theory, this approach is inflexible by assuming that the situation is fixed. The dynamic notion of prototypicality put forward by the social identity perspective, on the other hand, does not present this drawback. The perceptual approach focuses on the role of followers’ perceptions. Based on this approach, leader categorization theory argues that followers match leaders’ behaviours to a set of cognitive schemas. However, social identity research shows that when the group is psychologically significant, the extent to which a leader displays prototypical behaviours is more important to group members than the extent to which they match the abstract characteristics put forward by leader categorization theory.

92 The psychology of political leadership

5

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Furthermore, evaluation of a leader’s behaviour depends on contextual factors. For example, fairness is expected in ingroup contexts, but may hinder a prospective leader’s chances in an intergroup context. The transactional approach emphasizes leaders’ ability to satisfy followers’ personal interests, either through an exchange-based system between leader and followers, or through the use of coercive power. From a social identity perspective, this approach does not lead to a form of leadership that is sustainable. By focusing on followers’ personal interests, this approach ignores the importance of social influence, which is crucial to leadership and based on a shared social identity between leader and followers. By contrast, social identity research emphasizes the need for prospective leaders to show their willingness to promote the ingroup’s interests. Only leaders who are perceived as being identityaffirming receive the kind of enduring support which enables them to turn their plans into reality. While emphasizing leaders’ ability to inspire their followers and acknowledging the collective dimension of leadership, the transformational approach is steeped in individualistic notions such as charisma. This approach therefore does not do justice to the collective dimension of leadership. By contrast, the social identity perspective addresses leaders’ ability to generate transformation within the group by emphasizing leaders’ propensity for reconstructing social reality in ways that bolster their prototypicality. Leaders who succeed in such attempts increase their social influence within the group, gaining the ability to turn their vision into reality.

Focus questions • • • • •

In what ways does the social identity perspective differ from other approaches to leadership? How is prototypicality relevant to leadership? What does the great person theory and the transformational approach have in common? In what ways can it be said that leadership is bestowed on by followers? What advice would you give prospective leaders on gaining and maintaining a leadership position?

Further reading Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Platow, M. J. (2011). The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power. London and New York: Psychology Press.

The psychology of political leadership 93 Hogg, M. A. (2010). Influence and leadership. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.). Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed.), Vol. 2. New York: Wiley. Turner, J. C. (1991). Social Influence. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

5

The psychology of authoritarian regimes

Learning objectives •

• •

gain a critical understanding of Milgram’s obedience studies and Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, and their implications for resisting authoritarian regimes; develop an insight into the process through which authoritarian regimes gain access to power; recognize the dynamics of resistance in political settings.

In the previous chapter, we touched on leaders’ ability to construct the social context in such a way as to bolster their prototypicality and therefore their social influence within the group. This aspect of leadership can be used just as effectively by leaders wishing to safeguard democratic processes as by leaders intent on using their social influence to impose authoritarian, tyrannical regimes. In this chapter we consider the psychological underpinnings of such regimes. We discuss two social psychological experiments that in different ways have influenced the public consensus on our ability to resist tyrannical systems: Milgram’s obedience studies and Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. These studies are widely known outside the discipline and are often perceived as showing that human beings are helpless in the face of tyranny. The source of tyranny is located within an authority figure in the Milgram studies, or within ourselves in the case of Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. From a social identity perspective, this interpretation is problematic, and not supported by the data. In fact, when examining the findings with a focus on social identity, we discover that they can be interpreted more fruitfully in terms of our ability to withstand tyranny.

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 95

Deference to authority: Milgram’s obedience studies Milgram’s (1974) research on obedience constitutes one of the best-known social psychology experimental paradigms. This research was widely publicized through a short educational film titled Obedience. Despite being carried out in the 1960s, the study depicted by the film is still widely discussed in relation to a diverse range of subjects today. The participants, recruited amongst the working population, were told that the study aimed to examine the effect of punishment on social learning. Each participant was invited to the University of Yale psychology department where they met the experimenter and another participant. In reality, both the experimenter and this other participant were stooges. The real participant and the stooge-participant drew lots to assign one of them to the ‘teacher’ and the other to the ‘learner’ role. This was rigged so that the real participant would always become the teacher, while the stooge would become the learner. The ‘lesson’ consisted of a paired-association learning task. The teacher was asked to read a series of word pairs (e.g. blue box; nice day; wild duck; etc.) to the learner. The teacher then read the first word of the pair along with four terms (e.g. blue: sky; ink; box; lamp). The learner, whom the experimenter strapped into a chair and attached wires to at the beginning of the study, had to indicate which of the four terms had originally been paired with the first word by pressing one of four switches. The learner gave a predetermined set of responses to the word-pair test, based on a schedule of approximately three wrong answers to one correct answer. After every mistake, the teacher had to administer an electric shock to the learner using an electric shock generator. With each new mistake, the teacher was told to increase the level of shock. The shock levels were 15 volts apart, with the lowest level being 15 volts and the highest being 450 volts. Therefore the first shock was 15 volts, the second 30 volts, the third 45 volts, etc. The experimenter’s role was to prompt the teacher to continue administering the shocks. Whenever the teacher resisted, the experimenter used a series of pre-rehearsed prompts, delivered in a voice that was polite but firm: ‘please continue’, ‘the experiment requires that you continue’, ‘it is absolutely essential that you continue’, and ‘you have no choice, you must go on’. The prompts were used in sequence, so that if the first prompt was unsuccessful, the experimenter used the second prompt and so on. This sequence restarted with the first prompt each time the teacher resisted administering the electric shocks. If the teacher still resisted after the fourth prompt, the experiment was concluded. Milgram’s aim was to examine to what extent the teacher would conform to the experimenter’s prompts in administering the increasingly painful and dangerous electric shocks to the learner. The best-known finding from this

96 The psychology of authoritarian regimes research is that 65 per cent of participants obeyed the experimenter’s requests, and some even dispensed shocks beyond the point labelled ‘danger, severe shock’. Milgram attributed these findings to obedience, as the name of his film and experimental paradigm both indicate. This focus on obedience was inherent in his experimental paradigm from the very beginning. Indeed, the paradigm represented an attempt to transpose some of the strategies used by the Nazis in eliciting obedience from their subordinates into the laboratory, so the effect of these strategies could be investigated systematically (Russell, 2011). The strength of the findings was taken by Milgram as evidence that this attempt had been successful. He therefore argued that participants had undergone a similar process to those who in uncritically obeying Nazi orders had become perpetrators in their own right. Furthermore, Milgram argued that his findings had allowed him to provide an explanation for obedience during the Nazi regime. He argued that the reason why participants, similarly to the Nazi subordinates, obeyed the orders of their superiors, was that they had entered what Milgram termed an ‘agentic state’ – a mindset that led them to defer power to an authority figure. In the case of the teacher, the authority figure was represented by the experimenter, whose prompts served as commands for obedience. Around the same time as Milgram was carrying out his studies, a realworld event was taking place that both influenced and gave credibility to his interpretation: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key players of the Holocaust. As a leader within the Nazi hierarchy, Eichmann had orchestrated the transport to the gas chambers of millions of Jewish men, women, and children. Due to the atrocity of his crimes, Eichmann’s trial before a Jerusalem court aroused a huge amount of interest around the world. This interest increased even further following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a book on the Eichmann trial. This book put forward a controversial explanation for Eichmann’s actions during the Holocaust – an explanation that Milgram used to support his own interpretation. The book had been written by Hannah Arendt, a German Jew whose life had been turned upside down by the Nazi Regime. She had narrowly avoided death by fleeing Germany and settling in the USA. Arendt had been commissioned by the New Yorker to report on the trial from Jerusalem. Given her background, witnessing the trial had made a deep impression on Arendt. The book represented a more in-depth exploration of the material she had gathered during her journalistic commission. Throughout the book, Arendt (1963) argued that the prosecution was wrong to portray Eichmann as a sadistic monster. Instead, she argued that he was motivated by his very conscience, which made him honour his oath of allegiance to the Fuehrer under all circumstances, unthinkingly and without reservation. Similarly to

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 97 Milgram, Arendt was therefore suggesting that once he had deferred his judgement to the Fuehrer, Eichmann’s actions simply took the Fuehrer’s orders to their logical conclusion without filtering them through his own critical thinking. Therefore, according to Arendt, the monstrous aspect in Eichmann’s actions was that he had led to millions of deaths without devoting any thought to the meaning of his actions. The book culminated in the phrase that made it so controversial, and which was also used in the subtitle – that Eichmann’s actions epitomized the ‘banality of evil’. Together, Arendt’s theoretical work regarding Eichmann and Milgram’s empirical work on obedience painted a compelling, disturbing, and highly consistent picture of human nature. In Milgram’s words, the conclusion that emerged from both was that ‘ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process’ (1974, p. 6). From a social identity perspective, Milgram’s interpretation is problematic for several reasons. To begin with, there were over 20 different conditions in Milgram’s study – the film only presented one of these. The other conditions systematically introduced and removed particular variables to observe their effect on the rate of obedience. For example in one condition, the learner could not be seen nor heard until the electric shocks reached a high level, at which point he banged on the wall of the laboratory. In other conditions, Milgram varied the teacher’s physical proximity to the learner or to the experimenter. Some conditions were located in a rundown office building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, employed more than one experimenter, or introduced additional stooges to serve as a second or third teacher. In gathering data from these different conditions, Milgram found a huge amount of variability in the extent to which participants obeyed. This variability ranged from 0 to 92.5 per cent in the official findings, and even goes up to 100 per cent if we consider the findings from a discarded pilot study reported by Russell (2011). As these findings span the entire range from obedience to disobedience, interpreting them simply in terms of obedience is problematic. In the preface to the second edition of a book outlining the different conditions, Milgram expressed his frustration at the fact that although his research had fired up the public imagination, the variability revealed by the many experimental conditions he undertook has been ignored (Milgram, 1983). Indeed, by not acknowledging this variability, the focus has generally been placed on the behaviour (obedience) rather than the process leading to this behaviour. The message from Milgram’s studies therefore becomes easily misunderstood as suggesting that we as humans cannot prevent ourselves from obeying authority figures. Reicher and Haslam (2011) have provided empirical evidence of this. They report asking 100 high-school pupils who

98 The psychology of authoritarian regimes were studying psychology to write a few sentences on the key message they had drawn from Milgram’s studies. The researchers found that 93 per cent of those who were able to accurately describe the study interpreted it along the lines of ‘people obey instructions of people in authority’ (p. 165). Over half of these high-school pupils added suggestions that obedience was unconditional, such as the example ‘even when this involves harming others’ (p. 165) reported by the researchers. The way in which the findings were presented in the Obedience film is largely responsible for the lack of acknowledgement of variability in the rate of obedience. The film only briefly discussed some of the other experimental conditions in the narration. It was mentioned, for example, that in one condition, 90 per cent of participants disobeyed. However, it was only the shocking film footage, focusing on the one condition that was filmed, that fired up the public’s imagination (Millard, 2011). The fact that the Obedience footage has generally been taken as evidence in favour of Milgram’s interpretation is also problematic. This is because the film was carefully art-directed and edited to make for compelling viewing, and put forward a particular narrative of obedience (Millard, 2011). Milgram himself termed it ‘laboratory drama’, and wrote that his aim was to combine elements of science and art. The fact that the film comes across as an unmediated documentary is due to Milgram’s effort to present it as an authoritative piece of scientific research. For example, Milgram did not credit himself as writer or director, even though he performed both roles, as well as overseeing all the creative aspects of the film through to post-production. Instead, Milgram conferred authority on the documentary as a scientific endeavour by crediting himself as ‘Chief Investigator’. After initially making reference to staged material in the film’s end credits, he later dropped that reference (Millard, 2011). Another major problem with Milgram’s interpretation is that his notion of ‘agentic state’, central to his argument, only focuses on the relationship between the teacher and the experimenter. By contrast, as attested by the film footage as well as the transcripts provided by Milgram, both the learner and the experimenter exert influence over the teacher. Indeed, Milgram (1974) himself was highly aware of these conflicting demands and many of the experimental conditions focused on examining the effect of increasing the influence of one side against the other. There is evidence of this in Milgram’s own documentation of the findings, in which he refers to the importance of what he calls ‘incipient group formation’. From a social identity perspective, the teacher’s decisions in the Milgram paradigm depended on the strength of their shared social identity with the experimenter versus the learner. In the conditions where the learner expressed discomfort, even the most compliant of Milgram’s teachers consistently

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 99 showed signs of feeling torn between two competing obligations: ‘science’ on the one hand, as represented by the experimenter, and what we may call ‘humanity’ on the other, as represented by the learner. Let us first examine the teacher’s shared social identity with the learner. The teacher believes that the learner is another participant in the study. As such, there is a shared group membership between the teacher and the learner. However, this shared group membership is put in question when they draw lots and the teacher is assigned to be the one administering the social learning task. On the one hand, the teacher believes that this selection was done at random, so it could have been them having to receive the painful electric shocks. On the other hand, by being put in charge of administering the electric shocks, the teacher’s obligation becomes to act in accordance to the norms of ‘science’. This includes the impassive, objectifying stance modelled by the experimenter. In this context, the extent to which the learner makes their presence felt becomes an important factor in the teacher’s decision. In his archival study investigating the development of Milgram’s paradigm, Russell (2011) reports the findings from a pilot study in which once the learner was strapped in the chair they did not provide any feedback other than the answers to the learning task. This pilot study found that all participants followed the experimenter’s commands to the very end, without showing signs of internal conflict. From a social identity perspective, this is because the teacher’s shared group membership with the experimenter, as representatives of ‘science’, is not in conflict with the group membership they share with the learner, as study participants. As such, the teacher goes along with the experimenter 100 per cent of the time. In the condition in which the learner makes their presence felt through pounding on the wall, obedience falls to 65 per cent. As the learner becomes increasingly present in different conditions by being heard, seen, and felt, obedience falls to 62.5 per cent, 40 per cent, and 30 per cent. In these conditions, the experimenter is present, thus competing with the learner for the teacher’s allegiance. In a subsequent condition, in which the experimenter leaves after giving instructions, obedience falls to 21 per cent. As such, the experimenter’s presence is crucial to the high levels of conformity with their requests. When they are not sharing the same space with the experimenter, the teacher’s allegiance shifts to the learner. When considering the participant’s relationship to the experimenter from a social identity perspective, it becomes clear that their actions are characterized by a shared group membership rather than by obedience. The study was presented as a social learning experiment examining what effect different people have on each other as teachers and learners, and also what effect punishment has on learning. By putting themselves forward as a participant,

100 The psychology of authoritarian regimes the teacher shares the experimenter’s social identity as a contributor to a scientific endeavour. In pursuing this endeavour, the experimenter is prototypical of science, while the teacher is a marginal member of the group. As such, the teacher is likely to take their cues about what is normative within ‘science’ from the experimenter. The experimenter’s prototypicality is reinforced in several ways. One way in which Milgram reinforces the experimenter’s prototypicality is by dressing the non-professional actor playing the part of the experimenter in a costume generally associated with science – a white lab coat. Furthermore, Milgram instructed the experimenter to behave in the way a scientist is expected to behave – impassively, without emotional attachment. The experimenter’s prototypicality is also reinforced through conferring a scientific look to the main prop used in the study – the electric shock generator. Milgram put a great deal of thought into its design, to make it seem highly realistic and indicative of serious scientific research. The final version was labelled ‘shock generator type ZLB, Dyson instrument company, Waltham, mass. output 15 volts–450 volts’. The switches were set in a horizontal line, and each switch was clearly labelled with a voltage designation. In addition to the elaborate labelling, the shock generator also flashed lights and made a series of sounds upon each use, adding to the sense of realism. When the teacher used one of the switches, the light corresponding to that switch lit up in bright red, there was an electric buzzing sound, and a blue light (labelled ‘voltage energizer’) flashed while the dial on the voltage meter swung to the right. The kind of institution in which the studies took place, and which by association the experimenter represented, also reinforced the experimenter’s prototypicality. In most of the conditions, the studies were conducted at the University of Yale, a prestigious academic institution renowned for its rigorous academic standard. Through being perceived by the teacher as a member of the university’s staff, the institution’s high standard increased the experimenter’s prototypicality. This was demonstrated in the condition where the studies were relocated to a commercial building in Bridgeport. When the prestige of the institution no longer bolstered the experimenter’s prototypicality, obedience fell to 48 per cent. Based on all these factors, the experimenter is more prototypical of science than the learner is. This is demonstrated by the conditions in which the learner issues commands rather than the experimenter, or when there are two experimenters and one of them is assigned the role of the learner. In both cases, obedience falls to zero. These findings demonstrate that even in those conditions which Milgram classified as ‘maximum obedience’, the teacher conformed to the experimenter’s requests because of a shared categorization with the experimenter.

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 101 The findings cannot therefore be attributed to obedience as such, but rather to the social influence exerted by the experimenter through their prototypicality in relation to science. This is most clearly demonstrated by considering the experimenter’s requests to continue administering the electric shocks in instances in which the teacher resisted. As previously mentioned, there were four prompts: ‘please continue’, ‘the experiment requires that you continue’, ‘it is absolutely essential that you continue’, and ‘you have no other choice, you must go on’. As Burger (2009) notes, the first three are requests or justifications. It is only the fourth prompt that is in fact an order, which would qualify acting in accordance to it as obedience. In Milgram’s transcript, he notes only one response to the fourth prompt, and recorded that the participant disobeyed. It is interesting to consider what the participant said and what this response tells us: ‘if this were Russia, maybe, but not in America’ (Milgram, 1974, p. 48). Burger’s (2009) replication of Milgram’s study also shows that every time the experimenter issued this fourth prompt, participants disobeyed, thus bringing their session to a close. These findings indicate that every time the experimenter issued an order, it produced disobedience rather than obedience. As argued by Reicher and Haslam (2011), the nature of the fourth prompt as an order introduces a category distinction between the experimenter and the teacher. This is because by issuing an order rather than a request, the experimenter implicitly puts themselves above the teacher. From a social identity perspective, therefore, Milgram’s studies show that the teacher only conforms with the experimenter’s prompts when there is a basis for a shared identity with the experimenter. In such cases, the prototypicality of the experimenter in relation to science wins out over the less prototypical learner. By contrast, when the experimenter gives orders, they are shattering this shared identity with the teacher. The identity shared between the teacher and the learner is therefore emphasized. This leads the participant to disobey the experimenter, whom they now perceive as outgroup, in favour of the learner, their ingroup member. This alternative interpretation provided by the social identity perspective therefore suggests that authoritarian regimes can only impose their domination if they succeed in establishing a shared social identity with those they seek to dominate.

Evil in uniform: Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment Milgram’s notion that we are defenceless in the face of evil was reinforced by another social psychological study, Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, undertaken in 1971. Unlike Milgram’s study, where the ‘evil’ was seen as coming from the authority figure, Zimbardo’s study located it within ourselves.

102 The psychology of authoritarian regimes The study took place in a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University. The initial aim of the study was to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there. The participants, split into prisoners and guards, were scheduled to spend two weeks in the simulated prison environment. The participants were students who had signed up to take part in an experiment on the psychology of imprisonment. In order to ensure that any findings were due to the situation itself and not to participants’ personality characteristics or mental health issues, applicants with prior arrests, medical or mental health problems were screened out. The 24 selected participants were divided into prisoners and guards. Nine of the participants were assigned to be prisoners, while the rest of the participants were assigned to be guards. There were three crews of three guards covering the prisoners around the clock, with the rest available for emergency duty. Zimbardo went to great efforts to ensure that the prisoners saw themselves as such. For example, he arranged for real police officers to arrest them at their homes, without prior warning, and following the standard procedure – the reading of the rights, the searching, the handcuffing, being brought to the police station for booking, fingerprinting, filling out criminal identification cards, and being put in cells. The researchers subsequently transferred the prisoners to the simulated prison after blindfolding them, so they would not know where it was located. Zimbardo (2007) reports that his initial interest in the study was mainly in how the prisoners would adjust to their situation. The guards were only included to add to the realism of the prison environment. However, it soon became evident that the behaviour of the guards was as interesting, if not more so, than that of the prisoners. The guards began asserting their authority over the prisoners from the very beginning. For example, as the prisoners arrived in the simulated prison and were ordered to strip naked in order to be sprayed with an alleged delouser, some of the guards began to make fun of prisoners’ genitals. Subsequently, the guards also used the ID call – a routine Zimbardo had introduced to make the prisoners identify with their new status – as a way to display their absolute power over the prisoners. For example, the ID call became a pretext for the night guards to wake the prisoners up at the start of their shift and make them recite their ID numbers in various ways, as entertainment for the guards. At first, the prisoners resisted the tyrannical system imposed by the guards, making fun of them for taking their new-found superior status so seriously and generally attempting to engage with them on friendly terms. However, these attempts met with increasingly severe punishment and abuse. The

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 103 prisoners therefore abandoned engaging with the guards as equals, gradually resigning themselves to their subordinate status. Even without any provocation by the prisoners, the guards became both physically and verbally abusive, submitting the prisoners to an unnecessary level of harassment. Zimbardo notes that already by the end of the first day, some of the prisoners stated that they regretted ever having signed up for the study. When some of the prisoners mounted a rebellion, the guards increased the level of abuse towards them in order to discourage any further disobedience attempts. After the failed rebellion, the prisoners ceased to work together against the guards. Their sole aim became to protect themselves, individually, against the guards’ tyrannical regime. As the study progressed, the problems between prisoners and guards intensified. After only two days, one of the prisoners showed signs of suffering from acute stress reactions and had to be released from the study. More prisoners had to be released on the subsequent days, due to serious concern about their deteriorating mental health. The remaining prisoners seemed to live in constant fear of being punished. Eventually, after the guards started sexually harassing and humiliating the prisoners, Zimbardo decided to stop the experiment. From beginning to end, the study had lasted only six days. Zimbardo (2007) attributes the unexpected unfolding of the study to an ingrained tendency in people to conform to the roles that are cast upon them. He argued that when finding themselves in situations in which they are cast into evil roles, ordinary people turn evil. To support this argument, Zimbardo places a great deal of emphasis on the fact that both guards and prisoners came from the same homogenous group of college students. Indeed, the participants had been assigned to the prisoner or guard role based on a coin toss. As such, he attributes the increasingly monstrous behaviour of the guards to being cast into that particular role. According to Zimbardo, this role gave them free rein to express their natural tendency towards evil in relation to the prisoners without any consequences to themselves. Zimbardo’s assertion, however, is not supported by the evidence. Indeed, examining his own transcript of the orientation session he provided to the guards from a social identity perspective provides a very different picture. Zimbardo instructed the guards: you can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me – and they’ll have no privacy . . . We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. (Zimbardo, 1989)

104 The psychology of authoritarian regimes As observed by Reicher and Haslam (2006), not only does the transcript provide evidence that Zimbardo gave specific instructions that made it normative for the guards to act aggressively towards the prisoners, but he also refers to the guards as ‘we’. By introducing a shared category between himself and the guards, Zimbardo exerted social influence over them, making the norm he introduced all the more influential (Reicher et al., 2005; Turner, 1987). A second criticism of Zimbardo’s interpretation relates to the variability in the guards’ behaviour. Far from acting in the same way, guards differed widely in the extent to which they engaged in violent behaviour towards the prisoners. Indeed, Zimbardo (1989) himself divides the guards into three categories: those who sided with the prisoners, those who only acted brutally when provoked, and those who engaged in active humiliation of the prisoners. Among the guards, there were the ‘good guards’, who would do little favours such as giving out an apple or a cigarette to the prisoners and who treated them humanely. For example, one of these guards distanced himself from his abusive night shift colleagues and even stopped wearing his guard’s sunglasses and military shirt. He even told the researchers later that he had thought about asking to become a prisoner because he hated being part of a system that was grinding people down. Other guards were tough and demanding in ways that were not particularly abusive, but showed little sympathy for the plight of the prisoners. These guards went ‘by the book’. Although they punished infractions, they were rarely personally abusive towards individual prisoners. Finally, there were the ‘bad guards’, who soon became abusive, continuously finding more creative ways to hurt the prisoners. One of these guards, who was nicknamed ‘John Wayne’, provided an extreme example of this behaviour. Those participants cast as guards chose whether or not to be brutal, and in the case of ‘John Wayne’, used a great amount of creativity for this. The data reported by Zimbardo himself therefore does not justify describing the guards, as a group, as unable to resist the temptations provided by their new-found power. From a social identity perspective, there is interplay between person and situation, where each influences the other. From the very beginning of the process, however, people have agency over the way in which they interpret and use the situations in which they are placed. As such, the destructive and violent behaviour perpetrated by the Nazis during the Third Reich or by the ‘bad’ guards in Zimbardo’s study are driven by people’s own willingness to engage in evil acts. Reicher and Haslam (2006) designed a study loosely based on Zimbardo’s paradigm. The aim of the study was to challenge Zimbardo’s interpretation that participants were powerless in adhering to the roles they had been assigned to. As argued by Reicher and Haslam (2006), the key aspect of the

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 105 Stanford prison experiment is the interaction between a low-status group (the prisoners) and a high-status group (the guards). It was these status differentials that the researchers aimed to replicate from Zimbardo’s study. Therefore, the guards were given far better living conditions than the prisoners. Their meals were of better quality, they were given extra supplies of drinks and snacks, and well-made uniforms. They were also allowed to organize themselves in shifts so they would not have to be working around the clock. By contrast, the prisoners only wore a printed T-shirt with a threedigit number, loose trousers, and flimsy sandals, and their heads were shaved on arrival. The study aimed to examine whether it would be possible to elicit circumstances, within the constraints imposed by these status differentials, which would encourage the prisoners to challenge the guards’ dominant position. To do so, the study examined the effect of a number of factors that, according to the social identity perspective, make it more likely that a subordinate group will take collective action to change their subordinate relationship in relation to the dominant group. As outlined in Chapter 1, the social identity perspective argues that the strategies that group members in subordinate groups use in relation to the dominant group depend on their beliefs regarding the nature of the intergroup relationship (Tajfel, 1978b; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Three factors are of particular importance. The first factor relates to beliefs about how permeable the group boundaries between the subordinate ingroup and the dominant outgroup are (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). How easy is it to cross over, to leave one’s own subordinate group behind and become a member of the dominant group? Group members who perceive these boundaries to be permeable have the option of individual mobility – they can individually cross over and become a member of the dominant group. This is generally done through emphasizing individual qualities, downplaying group membership, and even finding ways to distance oneself from one’s original group. On the other hand, in cases where group boundaries are fixed or are perceived as impermeable (e.g. in the case of gender or ethnicity), group members are more likely to identify with their subordinate group and seek out ways in which to challenge the dominant group collectively in order to improve the ingroup’s position. The second and third factors relate to beliefs regarding how legitimate and how stable the relations are between the groups. If the relations are perceived as illegitimate, group members are likely to want to confront the dominant group. Similarly, if the relations are unstable, group members may become aware of cognitive alternatives – ways in which relations can be changed. Subordinate groups are therefore most likely to challenge the dominant group if the boundaries between the groups are perceived as impermeable

106 The psychology of authoritarian regimes (so they cannot individually cross over into the dominant group); if they perceive the relations between the groups as illegitimate (so they are motivated to establish a fairer situation); and, in addition, if these relations are perceived as unstable (so challenging the other group is within the realm of possibility). The permeability of group boundaries was introduced into the study by the researchers. At the initial guard briefing, they told the guards that they had been selected on the basis of their reliability, trustworthiness, and initiative as gleaned from the pre-selection assessment scales. They were also told that these scales were not perfect. It was therefore possible that the experimenters had mis-assigned one or more of the prisoners. The guards were told to observe the behaviour of the prisoners to see if anyone showed guard-like abilities. If they did, there was provision for a promotion to be made on the third day of the study. This information was also announced to the prisoners upon their arrival in the prison. The participants were thus initially led to believe that movement between the groups was possible. After one of the prisoners was promoted to the position of guard, the researchers announced that no further promotions would take place, therefore making the boundaries impermeable. The study’s findings directly contradict Zimbardo’s (2007) interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment. In particular, the study found that taking on particular roles (prisoner and guards) was in no way unconditional, but rather depends on the permeability of group boundaries. There were two phases of identification for the prisoners. The first phase covers the initial three days of the study, when the prisoners thought it was possible to improve their conditions individually. The prisoners therefore attempted individual strategies of crossing over into the dominant group. As a result, there was no shared identity among the prisoners and no consensus about how they should behave. The second phase began once one of the prisoners was promoted to the position of a guard and the experimenters announced that no further promotions would be made. This led the remaining prisoners to realize that the only way in which they would improve their living conditions was by working together as a group, against the guards. The prisoners thus began to develop a much stronger sense of shared social identity as a group. This is confirmed by the quantitative measures, which indicate that prisoners’ level of identification with their group rose the day after it was no longer possible for them to be promoted to the dominant group on an individual basis. As the prisoners developed a shared social identity, they generated norms to govern their actions as a group and a goal to work towards. The norms were particularly strong in relation to their behaviour towards the guards.

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 107 Furthermore, the prisoners’ goal was also centred on their relationship to the guards; they aimed to bring down the guards regime and gain better living conditions for themselves. This ability to coordinate their actions as a group rather than only act according to their individual interests provided them with a considerable advantage over the guards. By contrast, as the study progressed, the guards did not develop a shared social identity. In fact, the quantitative data they filled in regularly shows that their level of identification with their group gradually decreased. As a result, the guards became less able to work together effectively. With only their own individual interests as a guide to behaviour, they could never be sure whether their colleagues would support them in any attempts they made to take control of situations involving the prisoners. The guards’ inability to trust one another impeded their effectiveness as a group, both overall and in the organization of daily activities. For example, although the researchers had told the guards to organize themselves into working shifts, and despite the fact that their numbers allowed them to do so, their lack of trust in each other did not make this possible. The guards were too worried that in their absence, their colleagues would do things that they would disapprove of. As a result, all five guards worked around the clock, without any respite from the task of looking after the increasingly rebellious prisoners. Furthermore, due to clashes in individual agendas, they hindered rather than helped each other, and became increasingly frustrated, exhausted, and unable to organize themselves in even the most basic ways. As they did not trust their colleagues to take action on their behalf, they had to carry out any initiatives they put forward themselves, and hope that none of their colleagues would undermine their authority. This brings us to the second finding of the study, once again a direct challenge to Zimbardo’s assertion that people take on the roles they are ascribed to and act in accordance with them. In Zimbardo’s study, the prisoners quickly became despondent and stopped challenging the guards, giving in to their tyrannical demands. By contrast, this study found that identifying with a group that has a subordinate position does not necessarily lead to resigning oneself to that subordination. Furthermore, the guards’ reluctance to identify as group members also counters Zimbardo’s assertion that people cannot help but take on the roles they are assigned to. Being assigned to a dominant group may have made the guards uneasy about their elevated social status in relation to the prisoners. Their lack of identification with this group therefore demonstrates their ability to use their agency in continuing to think of themselves in terms of their personal rather than their social identity. The disorganization of the guards was apparent to the prisoners. This had implications for the prisoners’ perception of the legitimacy of their

108 The psychology of authoritarian regimes subordinate position in relation to the guards. Initially, as already mentioned, the researchers had indicated that the guards had been chosen due to their display of particularly desirable qualities. As such, there had been a legitimate reason for the guards’ superior status. However, through their behaviour, the guards did not show the qualities that the researchers said marked them out from the prisoners. As such, the prisoners had reason to doubt the legitimacy of their superior status. The legitimacy of the guards’ superior position was also threatened by the fact that, from the very start, the prisoners were dissatisfied with their inferior living conditions compared to those available to the guards. Indeed, it is not surprising that coming from the outside world into the artificial prison, those participants assigned to be prisoners would question why one group would receive better conditions than another group. As such, once it was no longer possible to improve their living conditions on an individual basis, the prisoners began to work collectively to change the illegitimate inequality between themselves and the guards. The third factor that, according to social identity theory, contributes to subordinate groups challenging the dominant group – stability – was also put into question by the prisoners. There were several indicators that the guards’ dominant position was unstable. The guards’ disorganization was the first indicator that the possibility existed to change the status quo. This became particularly important after the promotion on the third day. A second indicator consisted of an incident which occurred on the fourth day, one day after the promotion had taken place and the prisoners had started developing plans to collectively challenge the guards. The incident started when the prisoners decided to stage a small rebellion during lunch, to gauge the guards’ reaction. One of the prisoners threw his lunch plate to the ground and demanded better food. As the guards tried to intervene, two other prisoners joined in with further demands for smoking rights and receiving treatment for a blister. The guards’ response at that particular moment is very indicative of the level of disorganization and disorientation that reigned within their group. Instead of taking decisive action to quell the rebellion, perhaps by delegating a member of their group to take the lead and enforce order, the guards were totally disunited in their response towards the prisoners. Some of them wanted to take disciplinary action while others attempted to reach a compromise with the prisoners. In the end, one guard gave in to the prisoners’ request for a cigarette in order to encourage the prisoners to return to their cells. The contrasting reaction of the two groups is also indicative of how they both interpreted the significance of this incident for the stability of the intergroup situation. While the prisoners danced with joy, the guards began

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 109 arguing amongst each other about what should have been done in that situation and whose fault it was that it had not happened. One of the guards stated that this set a bad precedent and would encourage further prisoner rebellion. The incident therefore marked a point during which both groups expressed their growing certainty that the unequal living conditions between prisoners and guards were open to change. By the evening of the sixth day, the guards were depleted of energy and motivation. They had by now suffered several defeats in confrontations with the prisoners while working around the clock. When some of the prisoners succeeded in breaking out of their cell and occupying the guards’ quarters, it became clear that the guards’ dominant position in relation to the prisoners could no longer be sustained, and that the prisoners had succeeded in their quest to change the status quo. These findings are in direct contrast to Zimbardo’s study, in which the prisoners resigned themselves to their subordinate status. The difference is due to the extent to which the groups in each study developed a shared social identity. While most of the guards in Zimbardo’s study identified with their dominant position and enforced it at every opportunity, the guards in the study by Reicher and Haslam (2006) were reluctant to do so. Furthermore, while the prisoners in Zimbardo’s study became resigned to their subordinate status and chose individual strategies for protecting themselves from the tyranny imposed by the guards, the prisoners in the study by Reicher and Haslam (2006) perceived their subordinate status as illegitimate and unstable. Once the possibility of gaining access to the superior living conditions of the dominant group was no longer within reach by individual means, the prisoners developed a shared sense of identity and worked together to collectively improve their lot. Therefore, the study by Reicher and Haslam (2006) shows that neither the abuse of power by the dominant group nor the subordinate group’s acceptance of their lower status are inevitable. On the contrary, the extent to which people conform to these roles depends, to a large extent, on the way in which they interpret the intergroup situation and their shared social identity with the other members of their group. The subsequent unfolding of the study by Reicher and Haslam (2006) also has important implications for resistance versus acceptance of authoritarian regimes. After the prisoners asserted their victory over the guards, most of the participants were in favour of organizing themselves as a commune, with prisoners and guards now part of the same group. The new system posed a threat to those former prisoners who had led the prisoner attack on the guards. With the old divisions put aside, these members felt they had lost their influence over the group, and with that their position of leadership. They were disturbed by the fact that their former group members joined forces with the guards in completing chores. To oppose this

110 The psychology of authoritarian regimes new system, they initially attempted to sabotage the commune by not contributing to the workload and not adhering to some of the rules. As this did not have an impact, they began actively seeking out ways to destroy the commune. Their plans succeeded, and by the morning of the commune’s second day, participants had to admit that the system was not working and that a different system would need to be implemented. The crisis situation arising within the commune allowed the saboteurs the opportunity to propose a more stringent division between guards and prisoners, with them as the guards and the rest of the group as prisoners. Dejected by the collapse of their egalitarian system, the rest of the group did not object to their proposal. Having lost confidence in their ability to organize themselves, they were prepared to accept this proposed system, even though it was in fact more unequal and tyrannical than the one at the beginning of the study, which the prisoners had rebelled against. Even though the experimenters put an end to the study at that point, the participants’ answers during the debriefing session indicate that without their intervention, this more authoritarian system would indeed have become the new status quo. Contrary to Zimbardo’s (1969, 2007) argument that being part of a group encourages aggressive behaviour, these findings show that it is when group members do not find a way to organize themselves effectively as a group that they are likely to give in to tyrannical systems.

Implications for politics How tyrannical groups gain social influence The process by which tyrannical groups gain social influence mirrors the process of being instated into a position of leadership which we examined in Chapter 4. However, while the aim of true leadership is to encourage followers to work together towards a positive outcome, the process in the case of tyrannical groups is used to repress followers. The process is also similar to the way in which aggressive minorities gain social influence in the context of crowd events, a process we examined in Chapter 3. Initially, aggressive minorities establish a shared identity with the moderate majority by emphasizing their shared social identity with the larger group. This is the same process as described in Chapter 2, with regards to the way in which an extremist feminist group gains influence over a moderate feminist majority. Similarly, in the case of the Nazi regime, the Nazis initially gained the attention of the German people by invoking the winners of World War I as the relevant outgroup, and attributing the problems Germany was experiencing to their attempt to undermine the ingroup and to the

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 111 government’s reluctance and inability to oppose such attempts. As such, the Nazis promoted themselves as the only ones who had the best interests of the German people at heart. The second step taken by authoritarian minorities is to increase their prototypicality through redefining the norms of the larger, more moderate group. In doing so, they can gain wider influence and eventually be elected into positions of leadership, which gives them access to resources that they can employ to further promote their message. This is what happened in the case of the Nazi party. Once they were elected to Parliament and Hitler gained access to a range of leadership positions within the majority group, the minority Nazi group used their increasing social influence to be seen as representing the German people, while anyone opposing them was cast as the enemy. As the findings of the study by Reicher and Haslam (2006) show, and as we can see in the case of the Nazi rise to power, it is in circumstances where the initial moderate group is weak and unable to organize themselves effectively, that members are at the highest risk of their group becoming hijacked by extremist minority groups. These groups promote themselves as being able to restore order through quick, draconian measures. It is only if the moderate group decides to take action themselves instead of letting the extremist group take over that they will succeed in bringing the group back to a healthy state. For this, the moderate group needs to be aware that it is only through collective action that they will succeed. Leaders of the moderate group need to be firm in their assertion that the larger group can function effectively without the extremist group at the helm, and provide evidence to support their stance. This is so as to counteract the alarmist messages by the extremist groups who will try to undermine the prototypicality of those leading the moderate group. Overall, authoritarian regimes thrive by invoking an outgroup that makes them – the more extremist group – part of the ingroup, and prototypical of ‘us’ in relation to ‘them’. Once they gain power, they have the ability to manipulate the social context to further bolster the extent to which they represent ‘us’. Within the new context they are attempting to introduce, even the most tyrannical behaviour becomes commonplace. To resist such groups, members of the moderate majority need to invoke cognitive alternatives whereby the group can organize itself effectively without these extremist influences. How to resist tyrannical regimes If the extremist group does succeed in imposing a regime of tyranny over the moderate group, it is likely that they will present this state of affairs as the

112 The psychology of authoritarian regimes way things are, rather than acknowledging the fact that this is not how things should be. However, as we have discussed throughout this chapter, we have agency in the extent to which we accept this construction of social reality. Through awareness of social identity processes, we can stop tyrannical systems from defining what it means to be ‘us’. First, we need to monitor the messages we promote through both our actions and the way we interpret scientific research and outside events. We need to ensure that particularly young, impressionable people are not drawn into the idea that ‘resistance is futile’ and instead understand the potential they have in turning a bad situation around. We also need to be aware of the power that collective action has of opposing tyranny, and harness that power for the good. We should focus on introducing positive norms into the group, and making members aware of cognitive alternatives to the status quo if the tyrannical regime has already taken hold. In framing messages, we need to find ways to bolster our own prototypicality within the group so as to increase our social influence and therefore our ability to counteract the messages promoted by the tyrannical groups. As shown by Reicher and Haslam (2006), groups that are able to organize themselves to collectively challenge the status quo have a considerable advantage over groups in which the members attempt to improve their conditions individually. The key is to understand how to develop a sense of ‘us’ and then use it to make our followers agents of positive change.

Chapter 5 summary 1

2

3

Milgram interpreted his findings as showing what happens when ordinary people surrender their better judgement to someone they perceive as possessing authority. However, examined from a social identity perspective, Milgram’s studies show that conformity to the experimenter’s demands depends on the extent to which participants categorize the experimenter as belonging to the ingroup. Therefore, Milgram’s findings show that we can resist authoritarian regimes by refusing to categorize them as ‘us’. Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment was interpreted as showing that when cast in evil roles, ordinary people turn evil. However, a closer examination of the findings reveals a great variety in the extent to which the guards conformed to their role. Social identity research based on Zimbardo’s paradigm provides further evidence that Zimbardo’s findings were due to the particular dynamics of the situation. When these dynamics were changed, the prisoners developed a shared social identity that allowed them to triumph over the guards, who lacked this shared social identity within their group.

The psychology of authoritarian regimes 113 4

Further developments of the study also show, contrary to Zimbardo’s critique of groups, that it is when groups are ineffective that they become susceptible to influence by authoritarian groups.

Focus questions • • • • •

What do Milgram’s interpretation of his obedience studies, and Zimbardo’s take on the Stanford prison experiment, have in common? What are the psychological factors that led to the experimenter’s effectiveness in Milgram’s study? Critically analyze Zimbardo’s interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment using evidence from social identity research. What are the psychological underpinnings of the rise to power of authoritarian regimes? What psychological tools of resistance are available when confronted with authoritarian regimes?

Further reading Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Blass, T. (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World. New York: Basic Books. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. London: Tavistock. Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 1–40. Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

Glossary

Accentuation effect Overestimating the extent to which members of the same category are similar, and members of different categories are dissimilar to one another. Accessibility The ease with which a particular category comes to mind in relation to individuals or objects. Agentic state Term used by Milgram to explain the reason why participants in his studies transferred personal responsibility for their actions to the person giving them instructions. Autokinetic effect Optical illusion giving the impression that a point of light shining in complete darkness is in motion. Categorization The cognitive process of segmenting a particular social context into groups, based on properties that individual members are perceived to share or not. Charisma A leader characteristic, conceptualized as a personality trait and/or an attribute conferred by followers, which enables the person who possesses it to attract and inspire followers. Cognitive alternatives Group members’ awareness of how to restructure social relations to bring about social change, usually in situations where the status quo is perceived as unstable and illegitimate. Cohesion A sense of solidarity among members of a group that binds them together and to the group as a whole. Collective action The behaviour that ensues when a large number of people act together to achieve a particular purpose, such as social change in the course of dramatic events (e.g. through strikes and protests) or as part of a longer-term goal (e.g. recycling). Conformity The tendency to change behaviour as a result of social influence. Contingency approach Approach to leadership that considers the effectiveness of a particular leader as dependent on whether the leader’s behavioural style matches the features of the situation in which they have to operate.

Glossary 115 Dehumanization Perceiving a particular person or group of people as less than human. Deindividuation Process through which people lose their personal identity through becoming submerged in a group. Depersonalization The process of perceiving self and others as categorically interchangeable with other members of a social group. Discrimination Prejudice expressed through action. Empowerment Process through which individuals or groups that were previously powerless gain power. Experimental method Manipulating independent variables to examine their effect on dependent variables. Great person theory Approach to leadership that emphasizes the extraordinary abilities that set leaders apart from followers. Group identification (strength of) The extent to which people see themselves as belonging to a particular group, as well as their attitudes and emotional commitment to that group. Group polarization The tendency for group discussions to lead to more extreme decisions than the mean of members’ individual decisions, in the same direction as the mean. Group salience The extent to which a particular group membership stands out in people’s minds. Group status The value attached to a group membership. Some groups are considered low-status or subordinate, while other groups are seen as high-status or dominant. Groupthink Term coined by Janis to describe the process through which highly cohesive groups fail to adopt rational decision-making procedures, often leading to bad decisions. Idiosyncrasy credit Term coined by Hollander to describe the process through which followers reward leaders for the success of their initial efforts with trust in future innovative ideas, which leaders can use to initiate change. Individuation Jung’s term to describe a state in which an individual’s personality is fully developed. Ingroup A social group to which someone sees themselves as belonging, within a particular context. Ingroup favouritism The tendency to favour one’s own group over other groups through attitudes and behaviour. Ingroup norms Norms that are related to a particular group membership. Intergroup behaviour Behaviour between members of different social groups that is regulated by group rather than interpersonal considerations. Intergroup discrimination Behaving towards members of another group differently to members of one’s own group.

116 Glossary Intragroup behaviour Behaviour between members of the same group that is regulated by group rather than interpersonal considerations. Leadership The process of influencing others in such a way as to generate a sense of common purpose in pursuing particular goals. Leader categorization theory A theory of leadership that attributes a leader’s success to their ability to conform to followers’ pre-existing leadership stereotypes. Legitimacy (of group status) The extent to which the state of affairs between two groups (e.g. where one is perceived as dominant and the other as subordinate) is perceived as fair. Maximizing difference The tendency to overestimate the difference between members of two categories. Minimal group An experimental group that has no meaning to participants prior to the experiment. Minority influence The process by which a minority group succeeds in exerting influence over the majority group. Negative interdependence A situation involving two groups, in which one group’s achievement of its goals depends on the other group’s failure to achieve its goals. Norm (group) Attitudes that are shared by members of a particular group and that guide group members’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Outgroup A group to which one does not see oneself as belonging. Perceptual approach Approach to leadership that focuses on followers? perceptions of the leader. Permeability (of group boundaries) The ease with which members are able to move from one group into another. Personal identity Unique personal attributes and interpersonal relationships that define the self. Positive distinctiveness A feature of social identity that all group members aspire to, which refers to their group being seen as different and better than a relevant outgroup. Positive interdependence Term describing two groups being related in such a way that one group cannot achieve its goals without the other group being equally successful. Power The capacity to influence others’ behaviours in the way one intends to. Prejudice Negative attitude towards a group and its members, which is likely to lead to discrimination on the basis of group membership. Prototypicality The extent to which a category member represents the other members within that category. Psychological group A group that contributes to someone’s social identity within a particular context.

Glossary 117 Realistic conflict theory Sherif’s theory of intergroup conflict, according to which prejudice is caused by competition between groups for scarce material resources. Salience The extent to which a category is readily available to the perceiver for the purpose of categorization. Self-categorization The process of categorizing oneself as a member of a particular group. Self-categorization theory Theory developed by Turner and colleagues, primarily focusing on the consequences of categorization for the attitudes and behaviour of group members and groups. Self-enhancement The process of emphasizing the positive attributes of the self, at the relevant level of categorization (e.g. the personal level in interpersonal contexts; the group level in intergroup contexts). Social categorization The process of classifying people as members of particular groups. Social change Collective action leading to a shift in the status quo, such as a change in existing intergroup relations. Social creativity A self-enhancement strategy at the group level, which involves improving the ingroup’s image without directly attacking relevant outgroups. Social identity A sense of self that derives from group membership rather than personal characteristics. Social identity perspective A psychological approach based on the principles of social identity theory and self-categorization theory. Social identity salience The extent to which a social identity category is readily available to the perceiver within a particular context, for the purpose of categorization. Social identity theory A theory developed by Tajfel, Turner, and colleagues, which focuses on the psychological underpinnings of intergroup relations. Social influence The process through which people shape each other’s attitudes and behaviours. Social mobility A self-enhancement strategy based on individual rather than collective action, which entails leaving one’s existing group and joining another, usually higher-status, group. Social movement A group that aims to change the status quo in a particular aspect of social life. Social psychology The systematic study of psychological processes associated with social interaction. Stability (of group boundaries) The extent to which the existing relationship between two groups is stable, or open to change, either as a result of external factors or through the subordinate group engaging in conflict with the dominant group in order to change the status quo.

118 Glossary Stooge A person who takes part in an experimental study but is in fact not a real participant, having been instructed by the experimenter to deceive the real participant(s) in particular ways. The purpose of employing stooges is to allow the experimenter to examine the effect of the stooge’s deception on the behaviour of the real participant(s). Superordinate goal A goal which can only be achieved through the cooperation of two or more groups. Transactional leadership Approach to leadership focusing on how leaders and followers exchange resources in a way that is mutually satisfactory. Transformational leadership Approach to leadership focusing on the way in which both leaders and followers continuously develop towards a higher-order sense of morality and purpose, with the leader being a few steps ahead of followers. Uncertainty reduction The need to reduce the degree of uncertainty about the social world. Unstable status differences Differences in status between groups that are perceived as untenable and likely to change.

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Index

agentic state 96–98, 114 Arendt, H. 96–97 Asch, S. 30–35, 36, 48, 50 authoritarian regimes 91, 94, 109, 111 autokinetic effect 28, 31, 114

group polarization 35–38, 48, 50–51, 115 groupthink 42–50, 51, 115

Bush, G.W. 77

idiosyncracy credit 82, 115 ingroup favouritism 13, 80, 115

Campbell, D.T. 2, 7, 21 categorization 1–4, 10, 21, 24, 71, 114 charisma 71, 86–87, 92, 114 cognitive alternatives 23, 105, 111, 112, 114 cohesion 45, 46, 48, 114 collective action 20, 46, 49, 50, 54, 105, 111, 112, 114 conformity 30–35, 36, 38, 51, 62, 99, 112, 114 conformity studies 30–35, 50 contingency approach x, 73–76, 91, 114 Coposu, C. 76, 87 crowds 53, 54–60, 61, 65–67, 68, 69 crowd events 53, 54–60, 69, 110

Hitler, A. 54, 96–97, 111

King, M.L. 67 Kinnock, N. 88–89 Le Bon, G. ix, 53, 54–60, 61, 67, 68 leader categorization theory 76–81, 91–92, 116 legitimacy 23, 57, 59–60, 85, 105, 106, 107, 108 Mandela, N. 76, 87 Milgram, S. x, 94, 95–101, 112 minimal group 10–17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 30, 80, 81, 116 minority influence 38–42, 50–51, 116 Moscovici, S. 38–41, 51

deindividuation ix, 53, 61–64, 69, 115 dependence model 27–49, 51 depersonalization 20, 115

Nazi 96, 104, 110, 111 negative interdependence 6–7, 116 norm formation 28–30, 50–51

Eichmann, A. 96–97

obedience studies x, 94, 95–101, 112

Gandhi, M. 54, 65–67, 69, 70, 71, 90 great person theory 70–73, 75, 76, 77, 87, 91, 115 group norms 21, 28–37, 60, 61, 64, 65–67, 69, 116

perceptual approach x, 76–81, 91, 116 permeability of group boundaries 23, 105–106, 116 personal identity 18–19, 23, 24, 26, 48, 49, 55, 116

Index 129 Platow, M.J. 79–81, 82–85 positive distinctiveness 13, 22, 23–24, 116 positive interdependence 7, 116 prototype 21, 71–73 prototypicality 21–22, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 100, 101, 111, 112, 116 power 81, 85–86, 92, 116 tealistic conflict theory 7–8, 117 Reicher, S.D. 55–59, 87–89, 97, 101, 104–112 tiots 55, 56–58 Robber’s Cave 1, 4–9, 10, 11, 14, 24 Rumsfeld, D. 75–76 self-categorization theory 17–18, 24, 117 Sherif, M. 1, 4–9, 10, 11, 14, 24, 28–30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 48, 50, 51, 117 social change 24, 53, 117

social identity theory 17–18, 24, 117 social influence 20, 22, 26–51, 53, 59, 64, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74; 76, 82–87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 101, 104, 110–111, 112, 117 social movement 53, 117 Stanford prison experiment x, 94, 101–110, 112 stability of group boundaries 23, 105–106, 108–109, 117 Stott, C. 58–60 Tajfel, H. vii,1–4, 10–17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 30, 80, 117 Thatcher, M. 88, 89, 90–91 transactional approach x, 81–86, 92, 118 transformational approach x, 71, 86–89, 92, 118 Turner, J. viii, 12, 20, 27, 28, 40–41, 48, 59, 73, 75, 85–86, 117 Zimbardo, P. x, 61–64, 67, 94, 101–110, 112–113

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