Principles of Identity (p.31)
1) the groups people belong to are fundamental to their sense of self...
2) people have a remarkable readiness to find collective solidarity with others, even if only temporariliy
3) when a particular social identity is salient and active, it can have a profound effect on people's goals, emotions, and behaviors [jch and cognitive skills and implicit biases]
4) most people will conform to the norms associated with an active identity and try to act in ways they believe will advance its interests, making personal sacrifices if necessary.
p. 183 "British football fans do not have the best reputation. but they are willing to help their own. Mark Levine and colleagues invited Manchester United fans to his psychological laboratory at the University of Lancaster. They arrived and completed a series of tasks designed to remind them of how much they loved Manchester United and being a fan of the team. Then they were asked to walk to another building to complete the study. On the way they encountered an emergency. A young man ran out across the path ahead of them, tripped, fell, and clutched his ankle, moaning in pain. Would they help this man in distress?"
[YES! if they were wearing a Manchester United jersey (92%) else if Liverpool or plain shirt only 33% of the time. However, if the tasks reminded them of how much they loved the "beautiful game", then they were equally likely to help the Liverpool fan. Plain shirt was still out of luck]
This illustrates the concept of "salient and active identity". The first group is primed by activating their Man U identities. The second group is primed to have their futball (soccer) fan identity be "salient and active".
Another key idea from this book is that two rival groups will be fine with each other. Disliking members of the out-group needs to be cultivated and reinforced.
p.157 "The psychology of social identity can be used to bridge divides rather than create them. Given our species' capacity to form identities around new groups, finding different ways of dividing up the social world can have positive effects. Indeed, creating new identities can reshape the automatic mind."
p.153 "if humans were truly hardwired for racism, we would expect that our species had evolved in environments where it was adaptive to differentiate among and discriminate against people from other races. Yet from everything we know about human evolution, this is unlikely."
p.154 "The drive to defend group hierarchies is what political psychologist Jim Sidanius described as an orientation toward social dominance. This tendency provides the psychological foundation for much of the racism that exists around the globe. From this perspective. racism is not grounded in genetic racial differences, despite what White supremacists would have you believe. Instead, it is built on mental tendencies to carve the world into groups and defend inequitable systems and power disparities."
p.160 "Each subject's brain responses reflected the person's new identity as a Leopard or a Tiger. Unlike in previous studies, we could see that our participants were not responding to the race of the faces but to their new group identity — their team. More specifically, we observed greater activity in our participants' amygdalae when they saw members of their in-group compared to members of the out-group—and, critically, this occurred regardless of their teammates' race. Now that another identity was central to the situation, race had little to no bearing on how their brains responded to the faces."
p.161 "In one of the largest studies, involving more than seventeen thousand participants, Calvin Lai and his colleagues tested seventeen different possible strategies for reducing implicit racial bias. They found that shifting group boundaries to form new identities, as we had done, was one of the most effective. Mere membership in a group is sufficient to change one's identity and preferences. It can bridge old divides, like race, while creating new ones. In this way, identity is, of course, a mixed blessing—it can bring you closer to a stranger but also push you away from a neighbor."
p. 265 "tend to have more violent crime, higher infant mortality, more mental illness, and lower life expectancy. The same sorts of relationships hold if you compare American states; for instance, rich but unequal California has worse outcomes on these metrics than poorer but more equal Iowa. In fact, this comparison makes a key point: It seems that inequality rather than poverty is often more powerfully associated with negative outcomes at the societal level. Societies do worse when the incomes and assets of the rich are wildly divergent from those of the poor and, increasingly, the middle class."
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