The Minimal Group Paradigm

Published Mar 30, 2023, 4:56 PM

Humans obviously don’t have any difficulties finding division and tribalism, but just how little is required for factions to form? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the minimal group paradigm in social identity theory. 

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, fair warning, folks. If I if I sound like I speak with the voice and mind of some kind of decrepit bog monster today, it is. It is because I'm on the mend from a from a bad cold. Sou so apologies on whatever's happening in your ears right now. But but but here I am on Mike. Well, sometimes bog monsters are quite wise, so you know, it depends on the story you're looking at. I hope to bring a real meg muckle bones energy today's episode, so you'll have to tell me how I do. But yeah, what are we talking about today, Rob, Well, we're gonna be talking about about a little something called the minimal group paradigm, which sounds I know, if you're not familiar with it, sounds a bit a bit duffy. Perhaps perhaps sounds a little bit clinical, but I think it's it's a very fascinating little topic. Shouldn't make for a nice one part episode here because it attempts to come down to some of the major concerns regarding human civilization and human interactions basically coming out of the question of like, just how divisive are human beings and how little does it take for us to split into factions over something or next to nothing even And I think for many of us, the answer seems to be that we're, you know, who are very divisive and that it doesn't take much at all for us to split off into factions. And I think this has been played to great effect in literature and cinema, especially comedically, and two examples always come to my mind. So one of them, Joe, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this. I don't know if we've talked about this before, but in the nineteen fifty three story from Doctor SEUs the Sneeches has this the butter the bread one. No, no, you're thinking of the Butter Battle Book, which does get into a similar situation. That's a where you have two different groups and one side thinks you should do the butter side down there those butter side up, and they get into this big Cold War stalemate. This is an arms race, an escalation of their weaponry based on the butter ideology difference. Yeah, so that's a good one to bring up to the sneeches concerns this population of avian creatures that in their entire social hierarchy is based on which ones have a star on their bellies and which ones don't have a star on their bellies, and the star bellies sneeches are the ones that live at the top and the rest live at the bottom. But then a con artist moves into town with a star on machine and then later a star off machine to capitalize on their divisiveness. Though at the end of that, the Sneeches move beyond all of this and they unite as a single people. So it's kind of a nice message. Oh that's that's very nice. That's a much happier ending than the butter Battle Book, which, as I recall, it ends with basically both sides on a hair trigger with their ultimate weaponry. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a real clincher that one. But another example that comes to mind, and I know you're familiar with this one is of course Monty Python's Life of Brian. There's a memorable scene in which the anti Roman resistance is split more than split between the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea and various other fragments of their independence group. One of the characters in the Judean People's Front proudly proclaims that the only people they hate more than the Romans is the People's Front of Judea. I think this is meant to play on a concept that was called the narcissism of small differences by Sigmund Freud. I don't know if Freud was the first person ever to observe this, but I think that's where the phrase comes from, is his writings about the idea that it's actually like the most bitter, hateful, divisive struggles in the world tend to be between people who actually share a lot of things in common but have some difference that really appears minor to people looking in from the outside. Now, I think a lot of you out there. You may be able to think of examples from other works of fiction, or certainly from real life, many of the various serious things we divide ourselves over, or you know, some of the equally seemingly silly, at least from the outside, things that we get that we're very divisive over, and to your points, sometimes they're within like subgroups and fandoms. Even all manner of brand and sports team loyalty can lead to division that doesn't necessarily make much sense on closer inspection. Perhaps you prefer Puma shoes and this other person prefers Adidas. How could the two of you ever see eyed eye? And this specific example ties into I think, what is a great example of division in human beings and human groups? One I originally saw pointed out by and it's it's been well documented for a while by j Van Babel and Dominique Packer in a ted Ed video. This is like an animated educational short that ted Ed puts on Wonderful Shorts. It's regular viewing in my household with my family. But the title of this one is the sibling rivalry that divided a town. So I thought i'd cover the basics of this sibling rivalry all right, So are you familiar with this story, Joe, I'm not What all starts in around nineteen nineteen. That's when these two brothers, Adolph and Rudolph Dassler found a shoe company called Gabruda Dassler Shoe Fabric or GAETA in their hometown of Herzogen. I rock in Bavaria. It turns out they were very successful. These shoes were really took off. You even had a situation where in the nineteen thirty six Olympics American runner Jesse Owens apparently was wearing some of these shoes. But then World War two breaks out. This disrupts everything, to say the least, Rudolph is drafted into the An Army, the factory is transformed into a weapons factory, and again everything is just super disrupted until after the war the brothers reunite, their work continues ad Is until nineteen forty eight when they split over some personal issues. And I think there are a few different analyzes of what those personal issues might have been, but the results are the same. Meaning anyway you cut it, the company is split into that means material, workforce, and so forth. Rudolph founds Ruda, which becomes Puma, and Adolph starts Adidas. Now that's not that crazy, right, It's just one shoe company splitting into two shoe companies. Now. The interesting thing about this, though, according to Javan Babble and Dominique Packer and that ted Ed video, is that the brothers feud and business division ultimately divides the entire town quote residents became fiercely loyal to one brand of shoe, local businesses chose sides, and marriage across lines was discouraged. Herzegoganak eventually became known as the town of bent necks because its residents looked down to ensure they were interacting with members of their group. Oh, look down at the shoes. That one took me a second. Yeah. So I think it's a great example, not because not only because it's kind of has some sort of comical elements to it, kind of like belly stars, but also we do see these various elements to the division, the personal, the business, the social, and the schism is is quite real, and it is funny to think how how split people can be about brands. I mean sometimes I think it's it's meant jokingly. You see a lot of joking comments today, even about things like coke versus Pepsi, or Twizzlers versus red vines or something. And then also things that are not even brand oriented, like overhanded versus underheaded toilet paper rolls. I recall divisions of this type. We're big on like early Facebook, like mid two thousands Facebook, where people would make all these joke groups, and it would be like, you know, for people who like red vines, because twizzlers are for cowards. I mean, it's still I think, very prominent in like name making. You know, people like to get in on this sort of thing. I don't know, maybe, especially when it's meant jokingly. It's kind of like low stakes things to sort of mock disagree about. I'm not sure. But then at what point does does does just sort of trolling and mock fund At what point does that then become like an actual entrenched belief or opinion? Oh? I think rather quickly actually, So in this episode of Stuff to Blow your mind, where you're going to look at a at a social psychology concept that ties into all of this, the minimal group paradigm, a method for sussing out what might be the absolute minimal conditions for discrimination to take place between two groups. Will their findings be twiddlers versus red vines? Is that the minimal thing? I don't know, you'll just have to find out, all right, So where does this minimal group paradigm come from? All right? So, one of the sources that I was looking at specifically in order to understand the minimal group Paradigm and its History was The Origins of the Minimal Group Paradigm by Rupert Brown of the University of Sussex, twenty twenty, published by the American Psychological Association. Brown points out that the basis of prejudice and inner group discrimination has of course been a human concern for a long time, and certainly was a long time concern of people in psychology. But the MGP or the minimal group paradigm as we know it generally is attributed to Polish social scientists on Retash Fill who of nineteen nineteen through nineteen eighty two, and also a British social psychologist Michael Billigg, who worked with him, was born nineteen forty seven. Typically, I see a lot of references to work they did in the early seventies. One of the main citations is on retash film Michael Billig, Robert Bundy and Claude Flament, and the title is Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, nineteen seventy one. If you want to go back to the source now, tash Fell it's worth noting was a survivor of the Holocaust, and this is important to keep in mind because much of his work does ponder the question of what drives groups of people to take up extreme prejudice views and does the transference rely on extreme personality types or is it something more mundane. So yeah, in the early nineteen seventies, tash Fell at all conducted a series of experiments on MGP studies that would end up having an enormous impact on the field of social psychology. More on this in a second, but I also want to point out that Brown stresses that there is also a pre tash Fell origin in the work of Dutch social psychologist Yap Robbie in nineteen sixty four. So Robbie suspected that common fate was the essential component for a group to hold together and for intergroup discrimination to occur. Common fate is a distalled psychology concept that says that objects functioning or moving in the same direction appear to belong together, kind of like we're off to see the wizard, right, I mean, you're going to see the wizard, while I'm going to the sea. We'll see the wizard. Or I'm going down this road. Well, I guess we're we're a group, Okay, so under this view, the thing that would make you prefer and show favoritism to members of your in group is a basic belief that the same kind of thing is going to happen to all the members of this group. Yeah. Yeah, and I think you can probably you know, cut it a few different ways, but yeah, it's like there's something about your your sort of common direction, common fate, if you want to put it that way, that this sort of binds you together. Now, Robbie's experiments involved classifying subjects into groups to explore inner group discrimination, but he ultimately concluded that mere classification was not enough to elicit in group favoritism. So um again Worth noting that he was looking at some of the some of the same stuff that would become important to the mental group paradigm and what kind of lays some of the groundwork for it, even but his findings were different. Now, this raises a question that Brown explores, why was Robbie overlooked and why is he still sort of overlooked and some of the documentation surrounding MGP and Brown breaks it down and attributes it to three reasons. So, first, tash Fell's findings were counterintuitive and therefore more newsworthy. That's one of the big things about MGP is that you know a lot of people going into it, you don't expect to see the results you see. You don't expect to see this thing that seems to explain a lot of the division that goes on in groups and the discrimination that occurs between groups. Just based on as we'll get into, like just sort of random grouping of people, it makes more sense to assume that if people are showing in group favoritism, it would be because I don't know, they assume that all of the members of the group are sharing a common fate or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind is toash Fell's MGP work helped inspire and like the groundwork for social identity theory, which became huge, so that that in turn elevated his work with MGP, and in fact, the social identity theory was formulated by tash Fell and John Turner, who lived nineteen forty seven through twenty eleven in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. And then the third factor that Brown points out is that personality differences between the two men. So tash Fell has been characterized as more of a go getter, essentially someone who really, you know, took full advantage of any opportunity to you know, sort of explore his ideas and get his ideas out there, whereas Robbie was more unassuming. So some combination of these three factors, according to Brown, So tash Fell was quite aware of these studies, but suspected that the opposite was true and was already experimenting with the social comparison theory. So fast forward to the nineteen seventies and the first MGP experiments. I'm not going to bust these experiments out blow by blow necessarily, but certainly hitting the really important parts the basics of the MGP experiments. So the first part is you have subjects carry out a task, and the task is often described as something like estimating the number of dots on an image or answering an opinion question about a work of abstract art. All right, Next, presumably based on these results, subjects are placed into groups. But known only to the researchers, not to the subjects, is the fact that the group assignment is actually random. Okay, So, for example, if the question you were given had to do with like estimating the number of dots. You might break people into groups, say and tell them that, okay, group A is the people who overestimated the number of dots in the image, and group B is the number of people who underestimated the number of dots in the image. Or with the question about art, you might separate people into different taste categories. You say like, oh, you were the people who preferred the art by this artist, and group B is the people who preferred the art by this other artist. Yeah. Yeah, you can certainly break it down like that, But I think on the other end, you could also just not explain what the what the methodology is at all, Like you could just put people into groups and it's just the idea that there's something about data that originates in you that informed this choice because it's actually random. But you don't want people to think it's random, that you want them to think that it's based on something. Yes, now there's no interaction between the resulting groups, no room for interpersonal bonds, you know, not enough to be like, hey, those the people who apparently guess differently from me about jelly beans in a jar. They seem a little stuck up, or they seem a little sting. You know, there's no room for that at all, or likewise, no room for you to say, well, they seem like decent people, even if they count dots differently or estimate dots differently than I do. In fact, a group membership was anonymous, right, so you didn't know who was in the other You couldn't like look around the room and be right, here are the group a people. Yeah, and that's important to stress too, because yeah, it's just really the beauty of this experiment and the attractiveness of it is that it does just strip everything else away, everything that you could use and also could therefore muddy and complicate the findings. Okay, so people are assigned into these random groups. They think there is a reason for the assignment. They don't know who's in the groups. They just know they're in one of them. Right, So now it's time to get busy. Here, a second task is assigned, in which subjects had to assign reward tasks to anonymous individuals, either two from the end group, two from the outgroup, or one from each These individuals would be marked by a code number, and your code number would never come up, so it wasn't completely self serving, right, And these would be what are known as allocation tasks, tasks that are used in a number of different experiments to try to see what people value or reward. And generally these are just experiments where subjects play some kind of game that involves distributing rewards off in monetary rewards like a number of dollars or tokens of some kind that can be exchanged for something to these anonymous players belonging to the in group or the outgroup or both. Yeah, and you might think that this would all favor even handed distribution, since there's just so little to go on aside from group affiliation in divvying it up. And I've read that in some cases many subjects did try to distribute things kind of fairly. Like one of the later reviews of minimal group paradigm I was looking at by Sabine Oughton from twenty sixteen said that basically quote fairness concerns strongly guided intergroup allocations, but that didn't always hold true. There was a number of exceptions. Yeah, Ultimately, subjects consistently engage in constant in group bias, so the groups were again entirely made up by chance, there was no contact here, but it was enough to generate a sense of group belonging. It created in us, and it also created a them which you then see borne out in the study results. So that's the big take home from the minimal group paradigm, even without factors such as religion, race, nationality, socioeconomic class, even without things like what do other people? What do people in the outside group look like or act like? When you know, what do I have in common with the people around me? It was even stripping all that away, humans rather swiftly foreign factions and discriminate against others. So, to offer a little bit more detail from that later piece I mentioned this was a paper called the Minimal Group Paradigm and its Maximal Impact in Research on social categorization. This was published in Current Opinion and Psychology in twenty sixteen by Sabinet. One thing Oughton mentions is that when Tashfell and colleagues first came up with the minimal group paradigm, their original intention was apparently to investigate whether people would display in group favoritism even in situations where there was no actual conflict for resources between the two groups. So their original question was a little bit different, but as a preliminary avenue of research to that project to address this other question. First, they wanted to just find out what were the minimum criteria that could be leveraged to cause people to show in group favoritism. So this was originally supposed to be just like trying to establish what they would need to do in this other test oughten Wrights quote. They planned to start with a most minimal setup and to successively add elements to the design until intergroup discrimination would emerge. So they started with these novel social categorizations based on things that they expected to have no power of social cohesion at all, like tendencies in you know, the numerical estimation game, the dots game, or preferences for the types of paintings. And again these were only pretenses. The people were actually assigned to groups randomly in most are all cases, And instead what they found was that these fake, made up bases for social categorization were good enough to kickstart in group favoritism. So they were trying to find the minimum criteria, and it turns out they just didn't really have to look very hard. There's barely a minimum at all. Yeah, and that again I think is the thing that that that floored everybody, and I in still floors people when they hear about it for the first time or reminded him. Oughton recognizes three experimental features for recognizing what authors in this experimental domain college mere categorization effect. That's what's going on in the minimal group paradigm. It's like people are behaving in ways that indicate group favoritism, but only based on merely being categorized in a group, and like nothing happening in the real world. The three features, as autenlists of them are. Number one, categorization is novel and arbitrary, no history of experiences within group and or out group, so it's got to be all new in the experiment. Number two, categorization is anonymous, no face to face interaction between group members, because you can obviously see how that would introduce complications and see no utilitarian self interests can be directly served by intergroup evaluations or allocations. So you don't want to complicate your study by having people have the ability to pay money out to themselves because that would obviously add in new variables, right right, That would be the self interest kicking in for sure. But a really interesting thing emerges with the allocation tasks, that is, along the lines of self interest. Instead of individual self interest, it is in group interest. So Otton says, as we've discussed, there were fairness concerns that did guide some inner group allocations, but also there was evidence of in group favoritism even when the group had just been formed. It meant essentially nothing and the members were anonymous. And here's a really interesting thing. In some cases quote, the tendency to positively differentiate the in group from the outgroup was stronger than the tendency to maximize the in group's profit. So the example Latton gives here would be, instead of giving twelve dollars to the in group and eleven dollars to the outgroup, some subjects would select a strategy that gave eleven dollars to the in group and nine dollars to the outgroup. Everybody gets less, but the difference between the rewards of the two groups is greater. And if you were on the top of that difference, even if you got less, some people preferred that, oh wow, and this thing about sacrificing the overall objective gains of the in group for a greater distinction in gains between the in group and out group made me think about a thing I read in the context of a different paper exploring a different theory, but it was won by the Harvard psychologist Jim Sidenius and co authors called Vladimir's Choice and the distribution of social resources a group dominance perspective. This was exploring a different theory called social dominance theory, but it starts off with this anecdote that apparently comes from an Eastern European fable. The authors related as following, one day, God came down to Vladimir, a poor peasant, and said, Vladimir, I will grant you one wish. Anything you want will be yours. However, God added, there is one condition. Anything I give to you will be granted to your neighbor if on twice over. Vladimir immediately answered, saying, okay, take out one of my eyes. Oh that's grim, that's very gram. Now, the stakes in these minimal group paradigm experiments are certainly not that high, but I think we can all think of examples where, you know, sometimes you just see a case where what appears to be spite or maybe something else like that overrides a person's own objective self interest, like they would rather have a higher degree of advantage over a known neighbor or adversary than a greater objective advantage overall. It'd be like if you sort of had it in for your buddy and it was your turn to pick the type of pizza you get, and you'd make sure you've got a flavor that you weren't crazy about, but you knew that your your friend hated. Yeah, like you're you're willing to choke it down just because more refreshing to you, more delicious to you is is the fact that they are going to dislike it more than you do, which, again is illogical. It shouldn't be a thing that someone would do. But I think we can all easily imagine a scenario where someone's pettiness in spite would lead to such an occurrence, and maybe this one, like that's a version of it, and maybe is a little more real world accurate as opposed to the blinding the gulf between your okayness and your friend's misery is more valuable to you than the extra pleasure you would get from getting a topping you really liked. Right, And for some reason, this like, this whole scenario makes more sense concerning friends than it does like enemies of any sort. I don't know, I don't it. Perhaps the suggests a lot about about the way relationships work. Now there's some caveats to this that I want to get into in a second, because to come back to that paper by Aughton, one thing I was interested in was criticisms of the minimal group paradigm. It does seem that the MGP findings have been widely replicated with a lot of superficial variations, So it does look to me like the finding is robust. But while the finding itself is sound, you could argue that people might be drawing the wrong conclusions from it, and so there are a number of criticisms along those lines. One thing that comes up in Aten's paper here is is the minimal group paradigm really revealing something about how people would behave in the real world or does the experiment quote merely create a situation in which social category information receives unrealistic attention. I was like, Oh, I think that's interesting, because Okay, you're in a contrived laboratory scenario. Your membership in one group or the other is highlighted to you, people are telling you about it, and the situation is stripped of a lot of other contextual information that would exist in the real world that would normally inform your behavior. Maybe people are placing undue weight on group membership even though it's arbitrary, because it's really like the only variable they're being aware of in this situation. On the other hand, while that criticism makes a lot of sense to me, I think these experiments are just as valuable if you think about them with that caveat in mind, Like, they show a certain irrational way that some people behave showing in group preference for utterly arbitrary groups when group membership is made salient when it is brought to your attention and people are talking about it, which is something that does happen in the real world all the time. Actually, Like, there is some category distinction between people that was maybe not previously much noted, and for some reason suddenly it is made salient people start paying attention to this difference and talking about it. It seems to me that in reality this is enough to trigger minimal group paradigm effects. This is only partially related, but it reminds me of that thing when an arbitrary, factual question that previously had no political valence suddenly becomes politicized for some reason. Yeah, maybe by like a prominent politician taking a stance one way or another on this question, and now suddenly, like what you think about this, this question that previously involved no political values, now is a major part of your identity, and people will factionalize on the basis of it. Yeah, And sometimes it takes the form of just sort of of a you know, fear mongering about something that normally had no real kind of like fear weight to it. Like I instantly think of various things going on doing say the Satanic panic, where you know, it's a suddenly there's you know, there's some sort of an outrage over a particular piece of music that is interpreted by somebody as having some sort of subliminal, demonic message inside it, even if there's little or no proof that that is even possibly the case or certainly the intent of the artists. It ends up picking up steam all its own. And then where do you fall on this divide totally? Now, to be fair, things like that are not purely minimal group paradigm, because once you're talking about like cultural artifacts and preferences, you do start bringing in like, well, maybe that already touches certain things about you know, cultural identity, which people would have opinions about and would have some in group outgroup associations and so forth. But it's sort of halfway there. I wonder if there might be a comparison to draw here to the there were two things that in recent years. There was the whole like what color is this dress? Right? And people were split over that. I don't know, I mean, not to the point where I guess you really saw outgroup discrimination. But it was interesting to see how quickly people's became, like they were quick to state what their interpretation of it was and become a part of that group that sawd a certain way. I do not remember what I thought of this dress or even who wore it. Oh, I just remember being amused that it was a thing at all. I think I remember when I first saw it, it it looked blue and black to me, So hate me if you want. But anyway, coming back to this issue, so it may be a good criticism that this has some limitation in how it applies to the real world. Once you bring in all the context of culture and all that, But I do think it still probably highlights something very interesting, which is that group sort of in group favoritism can emerge with minimal stimulation just by like drawing a lot of attention to the presence and division differentiation of the groups. Another interesting limitation that Otton mentions. Subsequent research has shown that in group favoritism with the minimal group paradigm is quote mostly restricted to allocations of positive resources into valuations regarding positive traits. So when you're talking about things like assigning actual punishments or negative personal assessments, it seems that the mere categorization effect no longer reliably produces results, which should be a good result, right Yeah, yeah, knowing that eye gouging actually wouldn't play out all that well in this scenario. Right, So, maybe experiments show the minimal group stuff is enough to make you treat your in group better and maybe even in some cases prefer them to get a better leg up over the other group as opposed to more pay out overall. But it doesn't extend to actually wanting to hurt or punish the outgroup. Yes, though not to imply though, that just not wanting or not thinking about actively hurting the group doesn't mean that in the like the real world implications of the minimal group paradigm, that that plenty of hurt might be inflicted, you know, especially if you're dealing like you know, any kind of outgroup discrimination could of course have terrible effects in the real world, but in those situations you'd be going beyond the conditions of the minimal group paradigm and sort of bringing in the real world. Yeah, but anyway, I thought this was an interesting dynamic. So people might be more willing to allocate monetary payments to their own group, even if that group is novel or arbitrary. But studies don't reliably show people to be willing to dule up punishments or disparagements against a novel, arbitrary outgroup. Why might this be? One interpretation given in this paper is it's possible that the the in group favoritism in minimal group paradigm experiments shows up because people have positive associations with themselves and hey, I'm part of the in group, so I'm good in deserving and I'm part of group A, and therefore group A is good in deserving, and there might not really be an equivalent mechanism of comparison with the outgroup. So the same logic doesn't lead someone to conclude that group B is bad and undeserving, So you might not actually go so far as to select punishments and disparagements for them. Yet this would raise interesting questions. It would bring me back to that thing about why people so often in these experiments will sacrifice overall rewards of the in group to get a bigger leg up on the outgroup. Because again, remember, like you know, a lot of these findings are If I'm in group A but not personally receiving any rewards, I might choose a plan where group A gets ten and group B gets seven instead of a plan where group A gets twelve and group B gets a leven. If this is not to be interpreted as an attempt to punish group BE, what does it mean. Maybe it means that some people sometimes interpret it as a greater personal reward to get significantly more than your neighbor, then it would be to get a greater objective reward overall. Like some people would just rather come in second place and have Jeff come in sixth place, rather than come in first place myself and have Jeff come in second. Yeah, it's interesting to sort of crunch that and I try and apply it to some sort of you know, hunter gatherer scenario and try and figure out how that makes sense even even you know, like in a in those situations. But yeah, I don't know, that is a weird little wrinkle in human nature. Yeah, you know, sometimes I see this disgust and I think of it in terms of it's kind of like the idea here is that MGP is kind of like a bedrock scenario, you know, and that again, when you bring into the real world, everything else is going to be built on top of that bedrock. Or you could think of it in terms of like just sort of the initial like laying out with stakes of what will become a cathedral. And so you're not necessarily going to get the full picture of the cathedral looking at the basic shape that you've marked out in the dirt, but you may be able to figure out some things, some of the sweeping ideas that will be present in the final design. But then again, you have no idea like what all the different cultural structures on top of it are ultimately going to produce. But it's still an interesting exercise to sort of strip things down to this level. Now, I want to come back to Brown for just one last thing here, because in that paper Brown stresses the historical context of MGP and says it is also to consider especially as it regards two major points. So first of all, he says that during the mid to late sixties there is a so called crisis and social psychology in which North American scholars in particular were questioning whether European studies involving a great deal of laboratory experimentation could actually apply to real world social issues of the time. So this led to a lot of soul searching and changes in Western psychology in general. And ironically, there were a lot of questions about quote unquote experiments in a vacuum. Now it's ironic because, I mean, as we've been discussing, the minimal group paradigm is very much an experiment in a vacuum like that, a lot of effort goes into sucking all of the real world complexity, sucking all the air out of the chamber of this experiment. But it also could be seen, especially in the time period, is kind of like a stripping down to a new bedrock, to a new level upon which to try and understand, like sort of like sweeping out, removing all those other experiments that were potentially complicating things. And Brown also stresses that prior to minimal group paradigm, the main ideas for why you had social prejudice is in the real world we're tied to personality dynamics often connected to things in your upbringing, built up frustration, and negative interdependence among groups, and all of these ideas as sort of sweeping definitions were challenged by experimental data. Instead, the mental group paradigm creates this against super stripped down simple experiment that does seem to reveal a lot about someone, like the basic mechanics of how we think about our group and outside groups, coming back two memes and so forth. It also reminds me of a common thing you I think still see and that as people saying, well, there are two types of people in the world. There are the people that do or believe X and those who do or believe why. And I guess the thing that often makes them funny is that it will or potentially makes them funny is that they'll hit on a division you did not realize was a thing, but then suddenly You're just presented with this spark of an idea that this is truly a defining choice to make. And you know, even though it's generally played for laughs, you know, you can kind of feel it, sort of you can feel the divide sort of moving and you've sort of forced to step to one side or the other, even if you don't actually engage with said meme or said conversation. Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about those memes is they tend to it's kinna. I feel like we should give an example. What do they say? There are two types of people, those who peel back the slim gym rapper as they eat it, or those who take the slim gym out in one go and then eat it with their hold it with their fingers. You know, do you get your fingers greasy or not? Those memes are funny because they ask people to read a lot into a behavior that, on its space we would assume does not tell you much about a person. And exactly the humor is in trying to like extrapolate everything you could possibly want to know about a person from from that one thing. Though that that is often kind of what we do, like You can imagine sitting in these these early experiments with Tesh Fell and saying like, you know, okay, what are the people who counted the dots, you know, the people who counted the dots differently? What does that say about their personality? And trying to like work that up into something meaningful about reality. Yeah. I mean, as humans, we tend to look for the patterns and things. So even when there's a random splitting, like if there's a if it's supposedly based on how we counted the jellybeans in a jar, how we saw the dots and in some sort of an array, we're going to think about all the ways that that could potentially define who or what we are. You would say that because you're a dot undercounter probably, Yeah, I mean it does make you think like, oh, does that mean I'm a I'm a pessimist? Does that mean I'm just not that into sugar? What does it mean? We can't we can't help but try and figure that out and come up with all sorts of ridiculous theories as to what it says. All right, well, we're gonna go and close it out right there, but hopefully we gave you just a good taste of the minimal group paradigm, like where it came from, it, what it seems to mean, what it seems to tell us about human nature. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have some more great fictional examples or real world examples of some of some of what's going on here right in we'd love to hear from you. We read listener mail every Monday, and the Stuff and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feeding our Stuff to Blow your Mind listener Mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. Tuesdays and Thursdays are our core episodes, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just watch a weird film. Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows

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Deep in the back of your mind, you’ve always had the feeling that there’s something strange about re 
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