Social Identity Theory: Your Group Rules, Others Drool

Social psychology theory overview

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1:05that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit Optum.com to learn more. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And we're just

1:45a super cool in-group, looking down on your out-group, here on Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Did you hear that thunder? Can you hear that? No, it was a little too delicate, the sound was. Uh, yeah, it just started raining and it's thundering pretty good, so maybe people can hear that. It might add a little mood. That's nice. Because, yeah, I think we could use a little mood on this one. This is a very rigid look at, um, what I think is a very interesting

2:16social psychology theory. Oh, yeah? That's, yeah. Do you not find it very interesting? I didn't find this one super interesting. This, you know, like a lot of social psychology, this one I filed under, like, yeah, I guess you're, you know, you're observing something that happens. That's about where it ended for me. I get it. I get it. Um, to me, yeah, I mean, I sense what you're talking about. Like, there's just something, I feel like we're talking people out of listening to this episode right now.

2:47Okay. Well, we'll just clue everybody in and you can make up your own mind how you feel about this, guys. Well, what we're talking about is social identity theory, which you probably gleaned from the title. And in a nutshell, social identity theory basically says that we get a sense of self and belonging and, well, we help develop our identity from the groups we belong to. And that is very different from the idea that we just develop as individuals through normal developmental psychology. In fact, the guys who came up with social identity theory

3:21basically say it's the group that's the thing, not the individual. Like, that's where we really develop most of our identity is from interacting with other people. Yeah. You know, I think, I don't think anyone will be talked in or out of liking or thinking this is interesting because I think it'll be whether or not you're into social psychology generally as a whole or not. I bet. Yeah. Because for a lot of social psychology, for me, I'm like, sort of like I was saying, I was like, a lot of this stuff to me is like, well,

3:53yeah, duh. But like, what's the point? Sure. Well, here's the point. This is the point as far as I can tell. Like, the point, the part I just said is definitely duh. Yeah. But the reason they came up with social identity theory is to explain stuff that heretofore, and still, some people are like, I don't know about social identity theory, although it's the dominant framework for explaining this stuff. Yeah. Explaining things that are tough to explain. Like, why do normal people become fascists,

4:25get swept up in fascist movements? Yeah. Why do sports fans get in fights with sports fans from rival teams? Alcohol. Like, these things, sure. I mean, yeah, you can't really deny that. Yeah. But they're like, they don't quite make sense when you step back and look at things. And so, social identity theory says all of this can be explained with this theory. And I think that's where it gets interesting for me, especially the idea that this is so ingrained in our evolutionary

4:57history that we basically can't do anything about it. Like, even being aware of this can only help to such a degree. Like, you're still innately attracted to being a member of a group. Yeah. I think that's my deal. And I promise I'm not going to say, duh, like, a hundred times. Because I do think some of the social psychology stuff is fairly interesting. I'm just more of a person who's like, sort of a what, like, where does that get us in the end? You know what I mean? Yes. I totally get that. We should also give our caveat, because we make fun of social psychology

5:33and the studies involved so frequently, it would be pretty rich to just be like, yeah, this is super cool and proven. A lot of the studies, just like any other social psychology field or subdiscipline, is there are like 30 people who are grad students or undergrad students that were getting extra credit. That's what the study found, or that's what the study used. And then whatever they found, that's now just universally applied to everybody. And in a lot of cases, that's just not correct.

6:11But this one is so, like you said, duh, that it seems like, yes, this is very true.

Intergroup conflict and historical roots

6:16Yeah, for sure. And I guess we should start with conflict, intergroup conflict, which is not intragroup conflict. So in this case, we're talking about conflict between two different groups. It's sort of like, if you just think of like us versus them for a lot of this, you're along the right track. And in this case, it's, you know, if you develop an intergroup conflict, it's developing some sort of prejudiced or bias maybe against another group. Like, you know, like, let's say you're the in

6:49group. Everyone thinks you're the in group, but an in group versus an out group. And for a long time before these two, Henri Tajfel and John Turner came along in the seventies, there were people, other social psychologists explaining it in a different way. And mainly in a couple of different ways, starting with 1950 with Theodore Adorno and his publishing, along with his colleagues of the authoritarian personality and trying to trying to sort of describe like, hey, what's the deal with

7:23Nazis and like the aftermath of Nazis and like what kind of person is going to get swept up in that kind of thing? Right. So Adorno basically said that it's the people who are getting swept up that are essentially causing the sweeping in the first place, that if you put a bunch of what he called authoritarian personalities who aren't, that doesn't describe somebody who aspires to become an authoritarian leader. Those are people who feel most secure when submitting to an authoritarian leader. So you put a

7:56bunch of those people together, say in a Nazi party, that fascism is just going to take off and attract more like-minded people. It makes sense, but it's, I don't think anybody was like, that's it. That explains fascism. Yeah, for sure. And so the other one that I mentioned, you know, before the other two guys in the seventies that we're going to get to was in the 1960s, there was a social psychologist named Muzaffer Sharif, who he, again,

8:28these little like small experiments, this is at a Boy Scout camp. He'd separated two groups at Boy Scouts at camp. And he said, all right, you know, you're just in two groups, get to know one another, get to know each other. And everything was going pretty good and nothing was unusual until all of a sudden he introduced the idea of competition for prizes. Yeah. And that's when it became Lord of the Flies. Yeah, for sure. He was like, one group gets blue ribbons, the other gets participant ribbons. And it was on from that point, you know? So he came up with something called realistic group conflict

9:03theory, because once the prizes were introduced, there was all sorts of conflict that came out of it. Right now, all of a sudden group A was discriminating against group B and maybe they would get into like little fights or something like that, stuff that was completely outside of the competition. And he basically said, OK, that stands in for resources. Like if you switched out, you know, first prize with access to dwindling water, now you have a true general universal

9:36explanation for why groups get in conflict. It's over material scarcity. I'm not going to say duh. I promise. But even that one, realistic group conflict theory, people are like, yeah, that sounds kind of good. But still, it just doesn't smack of like, it doesn't smack of duh, as Chuck will eventually put it. And that's when Tajfel and Turner came around.

Henri Tajfel and John Turner

10:00Yeah. So Henri Tajfel, he was the first part of this twosome. He was a social psychologist at the University of Bristol. He was born to a Jewish family in Poland and immigrated to France in the 1930s and lost most of his family to the Holocaust and World War II. And so he changed over from chemistry to social psychology. I guess the inference there is in maybe some bid to try and understand what the heck happened. Yeah. Which was, I mean, he wasn't the only one. Like, that's where Adorno and Sharif were. Like,

10:36Nazi Germany just came out of nowhere. Yeah. And then, yeah, the idea that his family had perished at the hands of the Nazis, I could see that's what the reason was. Yeah. So he hooked up with John Turner. They met at University of Bristol. He was a PhD student. And as an undergrad, as far as his interest in this kind of thing, he dropped out of college a few times, ended up working just sort of, you know, regular old blue collar jobs. And through those jobs, had dealings with unions and things. And I guess just became kind of

11:08fascinated about the social dynamic and group dynamics within a union. Yeah. So when he met Tajfel, I guess love was in the air. And they said, hey, let's get together and work on this stuff together and ended up writing sort of the watershed paper, or the initial one, at least on this, from them, an integrative theory of intergroup conflict, which is like basically their statement to the world of like, here's what we think about all this. Yeah. This is where his social identity theory came from. This is the paper it was proposed

11:41in. And should we take a break now or dive into the nuts and bolts? No, no, no. I think it's a good, a good break time. Okay, everybody, you're gonna have to wait for the nuts and bolts after these messages.

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13:37that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit Optum.com to learn more. Want to learn about a pterosaurid and call it pterodactyl? How to take a perfect move with all about fractals? Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, the Lizzy Borden murders and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything to your brain

14:09explodes. It's Chuck and Josh. It's something you should know. Word up, Jerry.

The 1979 paper on group conflict

14:16All right, Chuck. So where we left off, we were about to dive into this seminal paper from 1979 by Tajfel and Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. And it sounds dry and boring, but it basically changed how psychology, but also people outside of academia, see the world, you know? I wonder if one of the reasons why it seems so duh is because this paper was persuasive and became pervasive. That now that we're living today in 2026, it just seems, of course,

14:50to us, but at the time it didn't necessarily. I wonder about that. You were eight years old. Do you remember if people were walking around already thinking this was duh? I didn't know at eight. By the way, that's the most Snoop Dogg way you've ever described something in your life. What did I say? Pervasive and persuasive.

15:10Or shizzle.

15:12Yeah, I don't remember that, of course. But in that paper, they proposed a few different, basically, processes that they think explain how people form into groups and group behavior and then get in conflict with others and have prejudice against others. And they started that with social categorization, which is basically you have to form into a group to begin with if you're going to have conflict with another group or compare yourself to another group.

15:43Yeah. And then so within categorization, so what Toshfell and Turner seem to have done is they took some other existing ideas in social psychology that hadn't necessarily been applied to groups or whatever and put them together to kind of form social identity theory and apply it to groups. But categorization had already been around. There's something that had been identified as the category accentuation effect. And it is basically like once we start identifying ourselves as members

16:16of groups and other people as members of other groups, in groups and out groups, we start, we go, we get busy categorizing. And when we get busy categorizing, what we're doing is using a very ancient process, which is heuristics, right? Like our brain loves to take shortcuts. So it's, it does away with all the nuance and details and just basically does this big lumpy thing that's good enough. And when we categorize people into groups, it goes through that process. So we start seeing

16:48them differently. Yeah, for sure. And the reason we've formed groups to begin with is kind of twofold is one, they think evolutionary is that we've always want to just sort of classify the world around us by seeking patterns and things. And then the sort of the obvious thing, which is that it's a benefit, especially early on when people were evolving, is to form a group for pulling resources and to divide up the hunting and gathering and co-parenting and protecting one another from either predators or

17:21other what would end up being, you know, competitive groups outside your tribe or whatever. And so for like defense purposes, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I mean, it's no fun to watch knots landing by herself. It's much better with a group. That's very good point. So because of that, the heuristics that our brains just innately use to, to kind of take these shortcuts and use less, less energy. When we start categorizing people and ourselves, the variability within our own group, the in-group

17:51starts to go away. So we start seeing other people say other Falcons fans, right? It's similar to us, right? Like we're all Falcons fans and everything else that makes us different just kind of vanishes because we're Falcons fans. And that's what we identify as. At the same time, it does the same thing in the out-group, but in a much less positive way. Those are Steelers fans. They all suck. They're terrible people. And then the differences between the in-group and the out-group are boosted as well.

18:25So all these things just basically go through this very distorted lens when we start categorizing people into groups. And that's, that's where trouble starts to come. And that's just one point of social identity theory. For sure. And by the way, we don't mean that against Steelers fans, because I have a strong feeling that Josh has no idea that the very first game of the season is Falcons versus Steelers this year. Of course I knew that. Who doesn't know that? No, we don't. If you were, you were certainly weren't trying to say Steelers fans or bad people

18:57because you would have said Eagles fans or Patriots fans probably. I think all three. It applies to all three. Oh, wow. Okay. Standing by it. I love it. You always get so much guff for talking about any Philadelphia fans. Yeah, I know. It's funny because people get really mad at you in the email. It's because they're bad people. That always reminds me of that Onion teacher that said, my local sports team is better than your local sports team. Oh, that's funny. Yeah.

19:27I love fans of all stripes. People of Philly know I'm just kidding around. I love the city of Philadelphia. I love to visit there. Don't have the best time when our teams play each other. And that's not my fault. I'll just say, I'll just leave it at that. But look, you just did something that I think is worth pointing out, right? You went from being a Falcons fan, which you remained, which is your in-group and then Phillies or Eagles fans are an out-group to you. But then you kind of rose up, your altitude increased and

19:58you went to like the 10,000 foot level and you included Eagles fans in the in-group with yourself as just fans in general. Yeah. Because if it was up to me, all rivalry like that would be just very good natured and fun and like, hey, let's just go have a good time at the game and maybe rib each other. So it's when like people take it seriously and curse in front of children and throw beers and like that's when it gets to the point where I'm like, well, that's no fun.

Social identification and comparison

20:29Well, that brings up the next point or the next nut or bolt, I guess, depending on your view of social identity theory, which is social identification. I think that kind of explains what you just described. I think you're right. That's when you start to identify with my group, let's say Falcons fans. And then that becomes part of my sense of self. But, you know, we're influenced by the values. And, you know, when it comes to sports, maybe it's values and stuff don't come

20:59as into play. But but the opinions and values and maybe behaviors of the larger group behavior, for sure. For sure. Yeah. And I mean, everybody, I'm sure, has met somebody who's like, wow, your whole identity is tied up in being a Falcons fan. Like this is your life, right? Well, not me, but yeah. No, not you. But there are people out there. I'm sure you've met them just from being a Falcons fan. You can't help but rub elbows with people who are you're like, wow, this is really important to you. Like you can tell that this person identifies throughout life as a Falcons fan, I think.

21:32That's true. But, you know, the problem with Falcons fans is that we're not as like that as much as a lot of cities. Well, that's that's Atlanta for you. Exactly. For anybody. Yeah, for sure. I do feel like we should at least acknowledge and give a hat tip to Anna, who helped us with this. Yeah. Every single example she used was the Mets. She's very clearly a Mets fan. She tried very hard to get the Mets in there. So, yeah, go Mets. That's pretty funny. And then the final of the third would be social comparison.

22:05And that's when and we've kind of been doing this a little bit with our joking around about sports is comparing our group or whatever, you know, what we think is our in group to the out groups and other groups. And, you know, it can be a lot of different things because we've just been doing just that. Like you said, sometimes it's a favorable opinion. Sometimes it's unfavorable. Sometimes it's neutral. But, like, we're incentivized in a way to make, obviously, favorable comparisons between our in group and the out group because that helps your own self-esteem and the self-esteem of

22:39a group overall and what they called positive distinctiveness. Yeah. Like we're different from the out group but in the best possible way. And, you know, best possible way can mean all sorts of things depending on the context of the group. Which is what I was just doing. Like we don't curse out in front of kids and throw beers and stuff. Exactly. Falcons fans don't do that. That seems to have kind of adopted a pre-existing theory called social comparison theory from 1954 by psychologist Leon Fetzinger.

23:11Yeah. And Fetzinger was applying this to individuals, basically saying that our self-worth is very commonly determined by or generated by comparison to others. It can be, you know, comparing ourselves to somebody we think is above us and then maybe that motivates us to do better. More often than not, we compare ourselves to people who are, say, below us. I made scare quotes just now. And that that generates attitudes of, like, superiority, prejudice, bias, all that stuff.

23:42So what Tajfel and Turner did was they seemed to have taken social comparison theory and made it a component of social identity theory and applied it to groups rather than just individuals. Yeah. And, you know, comparison, that can be tricky because when you're talking about comparing sports fans, it's not that big of a deal. But if you're talking about comparing, like, you know, an ethnic group that you're in or a socioeconomic group that you're in, that's when it gets really kind of sticky and gross.

24:15And that's when or why you hear, I think, famous sayings like comparison is the thief of joy from Roosevelt or Twain's comparison is the death of joy. Because that's when, you know, if you're really sitting around comparing yourself to people of a of like a higher financial class or something like that, that is truly the death of joy because it can consume you, I would imagine. Yeah. I mean, that's what makes Instagram in particular so toxic. But pretty much all social media is it engenders comparison like that's the that you can't

24:50help but do that. Yeah. You know, so, yeah, it's a it is the death of joy. Here's the thing about Taj, Fell and Turner, though, is and this is kind of an important point, like they don't think that like in the case I was just talking about with what like your socioeconomic status, that's obviously something that has like a material basis at its root. Yeah. But it doesn't have to have that. And that's what they posit. And I agree that conflict doesn't need a material basis. It can be, you know, there can be a situation like back in the days of Tuk Tuk where there

25:24are very, very limited resources and incompatible group goals maybe within a group. And like it doesn't have necessarily have to do with a material thing. So I disagree with that. I think that if you look deep enough or if you expand your definition of resources widely enough. Oh, yeah, maybe. There always is one. So dominance is probably a pretty common one. One group wants to dominate the rest and have say over what, you know, where the society

25:55that all the groups form goes. That's a big one. Good point. You could say winning is a resource. Like there's really only one group that can win unless you're playing soccer and then everybody wins.

26:08So, yeah, if you start to get more, you know, less tangible and more esoteric or ethereal, well, one of those, ethereal, I think, then to me, there's always some sort of resource at stake. Okay. So you disagree because there are ideas that prejudice doesn't require material inequality and you feel like it does. Yeah. Depending on your definition of material, I think. All right. Well, that makes sense. So Taj, Feld, and Turner were onto something, they felt. And so they were like, all right, what if we dig down a little bit deeper and we started

26:40kind of poking, or not poking holes, but asking questions about groups in a person's place within a group.

Strategies for low status groups

26:47And one question they came up with is like, what if you don't feel good about the group that you're in? Right. And that could be a group that you're born into. It could be an ethnic group that you're born into or a financial strata that you're born into. And they said, all right, there's a few different strategies that you can employ if you aren't so happy. And the first one was individual mobility, which is this idea of like, let's say it's a high school clique and you're in the Dungeons and Dragons club. Yeah. And you're starting to not feel so great about that.

27:18So what you think the move to do is to climb to what you perceive as a higher social status and become friends with like the popular kids or the jocks or whatever. And this is only, the key here is this is only a thing if that's something that's possible to do. Like, you can't change your race, in other words, but you may be able to elevate from the D&D group to the whatever perceived more popular crowd is. It depends. If that high school hierarchy is so rigid that the jocks are like, nerds need not apply, even

27:52former nerds. Yeah, maybe. Then, you know, now you're an outcast from both groups. You're just in the middle and you're up the creek. They make teen movies about this very thing. Oh, I mean, yeah. Every John Hughes movie almost is sort of has this as a basis. Right. And then the lesson that's learned is that that group that you originally felt superior to or thought were losers or whatever, that they are the ones that truly care about you. The jocks don't care about you guys. Let's let's just face it. Yeah. And in the movies, though, it's almost always possible to make that leap.

28:24Or if you don't make that leap to for someone from that upper group to peel away from them to recognize you anyway. Yes. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. What was the one with?

28:36He was like the hot guy on Grey's Anatomy at first. Mick Dreamy. Yes. What was the high school? Can't buy me love. Yes. I don't think it's ever been done better than that one. I love that movie and we're kind of that one's a little too far along for Ruby, but we did have recently watched some kind of wonderful and pretty in pink, which also have sort of this nice idea. But but yeah, can't buy me love really nails it. I love all three of those movies. I like I have forever. Like it's just in my head that scene where he goes to the Italian pizza guy who's like

29:11this kind of like Don Juan. And he's like, what do you what what have you done before? Like if your girlfriend's husband found out about you, he's like, I take a knife and I stab him a bunch of times. He don't bother me and no more.

29:29Oh, the 80s movies. Yeah, they're great. All right. So individual mobility is one. Social creativity is the next one. If you don't feel about like great about how your group as a whole is perceived, you can maybe just start sort of changing the language about how you're comparing your group to other people. So the first subgroup of that is comparing your in group to the out group in a different way. So like, you know, the D&D group, like we may not be as cool of the jocks, but like we're

29:59a lot smarter than them. Precisely. That's an excellent example. Yeah. Another one is you can basically change what attributes are focused on about your group. Right. So I guess go into the D&D one, say, I don't know. I can't figure out how to use that one. You got something for that?

30:22Well, it's sort of about how changing how others perceive your group. So like maybe the D&D group may not be looked at as as cool, but like we have the best like homemade like shirts. I guess so. That seems similar to the first one. It sort of does a little bit. But it's in it's in how like I think in the in the first one, it's like how they perceive themselves. Like we're smarter than they are and they'll just never know it. And the other one is, is we've got like these cool uniforms that we wear and everyone

30:54thinks they're awesome. Gotcha. Great. Great example. I'll bet D&D uniforms are awesome. Well, I was thinking of the in Stranger Things, the Hellfire Club and the cool T-shirts. Oh, OK. I only saw the first season. Yeah. You know, I liked it all, but it first season was great. Have you seen The Devil in Silver? It's the third installation of the terror series. I don't know about any of those things. Oh, well, just start watching the terror. Well, yeah, you've told us about that. I remember that now.

31:24So skip over season two and then just go to season three. It was pretty good. OK. Wasn't season one like sailboats and frigates and stuff? Yeah. Pirates or something? It was based on, I can't remember which expedition, but a lost British Navy expedition in the Arctic. And it was like based on that, but also had like all sorts of fiction. OK, so seasons one and three? Yes. Just do not watch season two. All right. So the third way you can do that is change what out group you're comparing yourself with.

31:57So the D&D group would say like, well, we may be D&D nerds, but have you seen The Chess Club? Right. Wow. You're just on fire today, man. And I love Chess Club. I love chess. I love D&D. I'm not slagging any of these. If anything, I'm anti-jock. There you go. Got to be anti-somebody, right? That's the whole in-group, out-group basis. Oh, man. I'm just getting myself in trouble to all our teen listeners. One of the things about the social creativity, too, is all three of those, they don't actually change anything in the way of like the hierarchy.

32:32The jocks are still, you know, at the top. They rule the school. But things have changed. Something has changed, right? Social mobility is like the group has changed because you've left, and maybe the hierarchy has changed because you joined this higher group or whatever. But social creativity does not actually change any part of like the larger structure, say, of society. Yeah, for sure. So those were the first two. The last one is very easy. It's social competition, and that's when you choose to take on the group that you perceive ahead of you like head-on.

33:05So that's Revenge of the Nerds. Yes, it is. That or any, like if there was some greedy developer who's trying to shut something down, that's the basis of it. Yeah. Whether it's a ski resort or a car wash or a hot dog stand, that's it right there. Taking it on. That's right. So one of the things these two guys, Toshfels and Turner, wanted to point out was that like resource or material inequality or scarcity, they don't always have to lead to social conflict.

33:44Like so sometimes if you're like a low status individual or something, you might align with a new group identity or try and redefine that group in a more positive light. Like the things kind of we were just talking about. Yeah. But there's no difference in like your access to resources. Like it might just happen within the group and how you're perceiving yourself or having others perceive you. It's not like you went out and got like cooler clothes for the D&D group to wear. Right. That's a much better way of what I was trying to say.

34:17Okay. Chuck, I say we take our second break now and then come back and talk more about social identity theory. Let's do it.

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37:03Genghis Khan. Achilla the Hun. The Lizzy Porter murders and the cannibal runs. It's going to explain everything to your brain. Explodes. Chuck and Josh. It's something you should know.

37:13Word up, Jerry.

Comparing theories and benefits of groups

37:15So I guess we should compare social identity theory with the two big ones that we talked about before. Adorno's and what was the other guy? I can't remember. That's right. Sharif. Oh, you want me to do that? Yeah. Well, the big one between Adorno's authoritarian personality theory and social identity theory is that Adorno is basically saying it's a bunch of individuals messed up issues coming together to create fascism or to create, you know, combative in-group, out-group behavior.

37:49Yeah. That it's these individuals who have problems. And that just is, it's not the opposite, but it really does not, it's not compatible with social identity theory because to social identity theory, people coming together as a group, that group is what generates. It's just the fact that people are together generates those issues. There are positives and negatives to the whole thing. Like, for example, some of the benefits, just a sense of belonging, which people make a case that we have developed that evolutionarily to keep us in groups, that deep sense of well-being that we get from feeling like we belong.

38:30Yeah, for sure. That's a huge, huge benefit of being in a group. A sense of purpose. Yeah. You know, groups typically have missions. I know that you Falcons fans like to go on weekend retreats at camps very often in the off-season to talk about the Falcons and their prospects for the next season. Yeah. That's a purpose. Yeah, totally. And then self-worth, just having a sense of self-esteem from belonging to a group like the Falcons fans. Right. You can't buy that kind of self-esteem that the Falcons give you.

39:04Boy, it's so funny that we're using the Falcons because I don't know if there's a collective group of humans on planet Earth that feels worse about themselves.

39:14That's funny. The other one was the realistic group conflict theory. So, social identity theory is probably a little closer to that one than Adorno's authoritarian personality theory or trait theory because it frames prejudice as a byproduct of an intergroup conflict. I think maybe one of the differences is that RCT, realistic group conflict theory, sort of frames it as like the resource scarcity that we're talking about.

39:47And Tajfell, again, and Turner, they say that scarcity doesn't necessarily have to be a part of that or a precursor at least to that. Yeah, and, like, there's a lot of different nuances that are different between the two. I think social identity theory, like, really spreads out much further. Yeah. But that's the main difference between them. Yeah, agreed. So, there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, duh, including you, Chuck. But there's also a lot of people who are like, have you guys proven this? Like, we're talking social psychology here. Are we just, somebody did, like, a study once and everybody says, well, now it's proven.

40:21That's, maybe.

Minimal group paradigm and studies

40:24So, there's this thing that they use to test social identity theory called the minimal group paradigm. And originally, I thought minimal referred to, like, the fewest number of people in a group. Which made me think of the special people club from Welcome to the Dollhouse. Yeah. With Don Wiener and the kid. Yeah, was it just, like, two people? Yes. Yeah. But they mean minimal as far as, like, the minimum circumstances that the people in the group have in common.

40:54Like, what is the least amount of stuff that those people can have in common and still belong to a group together where this behavior will develop? And using that as a test paradigm, I guess, that actually pans social identity theory out basically every time. Yeah. This is where I thought it got, like, a little more interesting for me in that they, in 1979, they got together with another social psychologist named Rupert Brown for a study called Social Comparison and Group Interest and In-Group Favoritism.

41:25And part of it would help is if they just sexied up these titles a little bit. For sure. But, again, they wanted to see, like, what if we just sort of arbitrarily grouped individuals together and then tasked them with some questions about something, which we'll see in a minute, and see what happens. And so, in this case, it was 62 14- and 15-year-old students. And to group them arbitrarily, they just gave them a series of abstract paintings and said, pick out which one you like the best, and that'll be your group or whatever.

41:56And that they ended up in four separate groups, the triangle group, the circle group, the dichromatic group, and the polychromatic group. Mm-hmm. Here's what I don't understand, is that she said, really, they were just all put in the triangle group? What does that mean? I think that, so, I didn't get that either. I went and looked. Essentially, they were arbitrarily put into two groups that had nothing to do with what the kids involved thought they were a group member of. So, that whole triangle, circle, dichromatic, polychromatic, it was just to fool the kids into thinking they were a member of a group, when really, they were just arbitrarily assigned to one of two groups.

42:36One was the control group, and one was the experimental group, essentially. But those kids didn't think in those terms. They thought, I'm team triangle, or I'm team dichromatic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you. All right, so, then they grouped them like this, and then they said, fill out these forms, and we're going to determine how much each group is going to get paid for the study. And they had, like, the forms were side-by-side with, like, a proposal for a dollar amount for each group. Mm-hmm. Some of them were equal, some were not equal. And what they observed was, I think, fairly interesting, is that even when, like, one of the things they observed was that even when they had a chance for both groups to make $11, they would choose to make $10 for themselves if the other group made $5.

43:24So, essentially, they wanted, they all chose to have a disparity between the groups. So, in other words, to make their group, like, get more money than the other one, even if there was an option to get paid equally, and it was more money. Yeah. So, to their own detriment, they wanted to, but essentially, the way that they explained it was that the people choosing that were trying to enhance the status of their group. They weren't trying to maximize their money. They were trying to maximize their group status by making twice as much as another group. Yeah, I mean, I think this is fascinating when you look at it in the terms of, like, the idea of, like, socialism versus capitalism and making sure everyone's taken care of versus, like, screw that guy, I want the most for myself.

44:09Right. These are teenagers. It's a little distressing. For sure. There's another one that we turned up in the Journal of Neuroscience from 2021, and it used a brain scan study. This was 34 people. I don't know how many were involved in the other one you just mentioned, but these people had their brain scanned, so they were figuring out what part of their brain they were using while they were doing this. But the thing that really has to do with social identity theory is that they showed people, like, a video of somebody doing something.

44:40This wasn't it, but, say, carrying a tray full of beer steins, full beer steins, right? Okay. And you were watching somebody give it a shot, and then you tried it yourself. And if you saw somebody, say, like, lifting it with both hands and they were successful or trying to lift it from the bottom and it fell over, if you thought that person was a member of a rival outgroup, in this case, Democrats or Republicans, you would not learn from their mistake or their successful way of doing it when you tried it.

45:14It's like you would refuse to learn from the enemy or this outgroup, even if it would help you. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. It is. Like, super fascinating. And it really kind of jibes and makes sense.

Real world examples of social identity

45:28But a lot of people are like, there's some real criticisms we can level against this. And one of them is, okay, you guys are scanning 34 people's brains, you're studying, like, 16 Boy Scouts, you know, like, the stakes are really low here. If you take this and apply it into the real world at higher stakes, like, say, expressing prejudice or bias against another group publicly and then potentially have being ostracized or shamed or whatever in response, like, are people still going to carry out these behaviors?

46:00Like, does it hold up in the real world? Yeah, for sure. And also this idea that, like, kind of what you were talking about earlier is sometimes with these studies, I feel like there's a lack of nuance. And so this idea that personal, that, like, the difference between personal identity and group identity isn't just so cut and dried as Tajfell and Turner think it is or propose that it is. Right. And there have been other social psychologists, one in particular named Masaki Yuki, who says that, or at least he argues that, you know what, the social identity theory has its limits if the society is a little more collectivist.

46:39Like, in East Asia was his example. And I think that makes sense because, you know, again, if you're taking these, like, small groups of, like, 60 teenagers or these Boy Scouts, it's hard to extrapolate that to, like, and this is true all over the world. It is. It is. And I saw someone say, like, it is universal people discriminating against out groups in favor of their in group. Like that part is. And you can make a case, like, there's a lot of rivalries between Japanese baseball teams in Japan.

47:09Oh, sure. You know, there's rivalries between China and Japan and South Korea and Japan. Yeah. Like, it does exist in one form or another. I think that's probably what Tajfell and Turner would point to if they were both still alive. Yeah. They could be pointing from their graves right now. We wouldn't know, though. That's right. So, back to the study with the kids choosing to pay the other groups less. Again, very distressed about that. They thought, like, hey, we nailed that study, everybody, because that really bolsters this idea that bias can occur in the absence of conflict.

47:45Like, there was no reason for these groups to, like, not want the other group to have as much money, yet they still did. And this idea of the desire for positive social identity can lead to bias because the students chose those financial options that made them different from the other group, even to their own detriment. Yeah. And just to restate it again, these kids had nothing in common. They weren't even in the groups that they thought they were in. And yet that immediate sense of group membership made them discriminate against people who they thought were in other groups.

48:22Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, I think Tajfel and Turner would be like, hey, we're still pointing. Let's talk about some of this stuff in real world. Like, you want some real world proof? How about some anecdotal proof, everybody? Yeah. One great example they came up with where a group, particular group, used social creativity to achieve, like, a positive distinctiveness that they were talking about, which can be attained, was the Black is Beautiful movement in the 1960s when Black Americans were like, you know what?

48:55We're sort of tired of hearing about how this idea of beauty is so Eurocentric and, you know, blonde hair and blue eyes is all that. Like, no, no, no, Black is beautiful. Our skin color is beautiful. Our hair and our culture is all beautiful. And just the Black aesthetic was, like, fully embraced and touted as a movement. And that did a, I think that was a huge, like, cultural change in the 1960s. Yeah, and that was a great example of social creativity, right? Yeah. And then another example of social creativity is poor white racism, where a group, in this case, poor white Americans, choose to discriminate against poor Black Americans because they are capable of feeling superior of that other group rather than comparing themselves to wealthy white Americans.

49:46And then kind of fast forwarding to today, there's also a lot, I mean, it's still very much going on, like, in the United States, the more you identify with not just your political party, but, like, what your political party stands for. The more you take that on yourself as part of your identity, the more likely you are to view the opposing party as, like, bad people, as dumb, as not having any idea what you're supposed to do with the country, that kind of stuff.

50:19Yeah, for sure. There are people that argue that in order to, like, radicalize somebody into maybe an extremist group, it really helps when you appeal to them with a real distinctive identity for the in-group that they're trying to get you in. Yes. Another one is that domestic versus foreign-made products, that in-group, out-group predicts that, your sense of ethnocentrism or nationalism.

50:51Sure. And then musical preference, there was a study done by a guy named Daniel Shepard who found that the more strongly you identify with your musical preference, the more likely you were to say other musical preferences suck. And that reminded me of Disco Demolition Night from 1979. Oh, yeah. You remember that? Yeah, for sure. Where all those rockers, like, rioted because they hated disco so much. Yeah.

51:18And I guess that's about it. Like, yeah, duh, definitely sums it up. But to me, it was, like, the nuts and bolts of the whole thing that were so interesting. That and all of your awesome examples. Well, I really enjoyed that study of the kids, like, choosing to pay the other kids less. I thought that was fascinating. And I think a lot of this stuff is fairly fascinating at the end of the day. So I think it won me over a bit.

Listener mail on Judy Blume rhyme

51:43Good. I'm glad. Well, since Chuck's been won over, you know, everybody, that automatically triggers listener mail. I'm going to do the shorter one to round this one. So, hey, guys, in the Judy Blume episode, you guys were talking about we must, we must, we must increase our bust. That actually wasn't invented by Blume. She's the same generation as my mother, and they did that in junior high school. The rest of the rhyme, according to my mom, goes, the bigger, the better, the tighter the sweater.

52:15The boys are counting on us. Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary shaped generations of young mind, guys. That is from Margo in New York City. And we had a few different people write in and tell us that. And I tried to find online, like, the origination of that. And almost everything says Judy Blume until you dig into Reddit. And then somebody has a pretty exhaustive list of, like, you know, in the 1950s, it was used in this thing. And it was used in this thing. But I don't think anyone ever nailed, like, the first person to say it. Good old Reddit.

52:45Good old Reddit. That was from Margo? That was Margo in New York City. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Margo. That was wonderful. And if you want to be like Margo and make us laugh and delight us, you can send us an email, too. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

53:04Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Life moves fast. At American Military University, they're ready to help you keep up. AMU's flexible, affordable online programs in cybersecurity, IT, space studies, and more are designed for service members, veterans, and their families.

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