How are we different?

Lessons from a summer camp

Saturday thoughts about in-group out-group bias

There was no rush getting out of bed, after a day of working from the office. Finally, after months. Being reunited, working in the same space. It was great. Funny — your colleagues, over the past year, have ended up being the people you see the most, albeit virtually. I guess it’s always been like that, but it has definitely felt much more intense. But my colleagues are great, so I don’t mind that.

So Saturday morning was spent in a somewhat typical way — coffee and reading in bed. I’m currently, and slowly, getting through the articles in Emergence Magazine. Is this my favorite magazine ever? I think so. Have I mentioned this in the newsletter at least once or twice? Most probably.

One of the articles I read was called The Language of the Master. In this article Kingsnorth asks what defines a human, and what makes us different from other species. How are we apart? How did we become different — did we evolve to earn our different-ness? I didn’t finish reading the article. I got distracted and thought about the us versus them mentality. I was reminded of the Robbers Cave experiment — a study I first heard about in my Behavioral Economics module in my undergrad. This was a study involving a bunch of 12 year old boys in a remote summer camp in Oklahoma, Robbers Cave State Park.

It’s a fascinating study with insights into how our brains work when it comes to conflict, and how intergroup conflict can occur when two groups are in competition for limited resources.

So what are the key takeaways from the study and why should we care?

The study shows that the boys quickly developed an attachment to the group by doing activities together

In the camp, the boys did various activities such as swimming and hiking, among other things, and this helped build a strong connection with the group. Sounds familiar enough to me. Being part of a group and doing something together with the people in that group — e.g. work, yoga, football clubs — you develop an attachment to these things pretty fast.

The boys used favorable words to describe their own group, and unfavorable ones for the outgroup

This happened after a period of competitions between the two. In this experiment, there were instances where one group would gain at the expense of the other, increasing the tension even more. They weren’t just verbally abusive with each other — it escalated pretty quickly that they often had to be physically separated. Interestingly, none of them came from a violent background, which shows that discriminatory behavior can be caused by conflict between groups.

Sharing one big goal helps resolve conflict

The experimenters tried different ways to reconcile the two groups. Things like increasing contact between the two definitely didn’t help. What helped was, interestingly enough, being given a problem, or a goal so large they had to work together to achieve it. One of them was to fix the water supply which suddenly stopped working. When it was finally fixed, they drank their water in peace and were happy to let the other drink first.

The experiment only involved a bunch of 12 year old boys, so you might question how relevant the findings are in the real world. But I know this is something I, and a lot of people, have experienced. We identify with certain groups and think we’re better than ‘them’, whoever they are. I think the place I work at is great, better than other Behavioural Science consultancies out there. I know a lot of us at the company have said this, jokingly or not. But ‘they’ probably have too, and they probably think they’re better than us.

It does make sense, evolutionarily speaking, why we would feel like this. Survival of the fittest and all. But maybe sometimes it’s helpful to think about the bigger picture of where we all are in the grand scheme of things.

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