Stuff You Should Know - Social Identity Theory: Your Group Rules, Others Drool

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

In the 80s, a pair of psychologists theorized why being part of a group can change people’s thoughts and feelings, both about themselves and other people. It sounds dry, but SIT explains everything from how people justify genocide to football rivalries.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're just a super cool in-group looking down on your out group. You're 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 of it. us. 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 what I think is a very interesting social psychology theory. Oh, yeah? That's, yeah. Do you not find a 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. 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. No, no, no, no. 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 We basically 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, yeah, 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 here to for, 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 fascist, get 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 with this theory and I think that's where it gets interesting for me especially the idea that this is so ingrained in our our evolutionary history 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 and 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 sub-discipline 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.

Yeah. And in a lot of cases, that's just not correct. But this one is so, like you said, duh, that it seems like, yes, this is very, very, Very true. Yeah, for sure. And I guess we should start with conflict, intergroup conflict, which is not intra-group 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 inter-group conflict, it's developing some sort of prejudice or bias maybe against. against another group. Like, let's say you're the end group. Everyone thinks you're the end group, but an end group versus an out group. And for a long time before these two, Henri, Tajfell, and John Turner came along in the 70s, 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 sort of describe like, hey, what's the deal with Nazis 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 bunch 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 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 70s that we're going to get to was in the 1960s, there was a social psychologist name, Mouzafer Sharif, who, he, again, these 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. 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 theory 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, okay, 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 explanation 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 Tajfell and Turner came around. Yeah, so Henri Tajfell, he was the first part of this, this two-sum. 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 in 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, Nazi Germany just came out of no. nowhere. 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 fascinated about this social dynamic and group dynamics within a union. Yeah. So when he met Tajvil, I guess love was in the air, and they said, hey, let's get together and work on this stuff together. Yeah. 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 in. And should we take a break now or dive into the nuts and bolts? No, no, no. I think it's a good break time. Okay, everybody. You're going to have to wait for the nuts and bolts after these messages.

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And stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry. All right, Chuck. So where we left off, we were about to dive into this seminal paper from 1979 by Tajfell 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?

Yeah. I wonder if one of the reasons why it seems so dumb. is because this paper was persuasive and became pervasive. That now that we're living today in 2026, it just seems, of course, to 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?

Didn't know it eight. By the way, that's the most snoop-dog way you've ever described something in your life. What I say? Pervasive and persuasive. for shizzle Yeah, 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 a 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. you're going to have conflict with another group or compare yourself to another group. Yeah. And then so within categorization, so what Tajfell 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. There's something that had been identified as the category accentuation effect. And it is basically like once we start identifying ourselves as members of groups and other people as members of other groups, in groups and outgroups, we start, 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 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 them 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 wanted 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 other, 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 Nott's landing by yourself. It's much better with the group. That's very good point. So because of that the heuristics that our brain's just innately used 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, starts to go away. So we start seeing other people say other Falcons fans, right? As 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. So all these things just basically go through this very distorted lens when we start categorizing people into groups, and 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, certainly weren't trying to say Steelers fans are bad people because 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. fans of all stripes, people of Philly, no, 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 what 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 you 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, the point where I'm like, well, that's no fun. Well, 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 its values and stuff don't come as into play. 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 could tell that this person identifies throughout life as a Falcons fan, I think. That'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 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 helps 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 go Mets. That's pretty funny. And then the final of the third would be social comparison. And 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 a group overall and what they called positive distinctiveness. Yeah.

Like we're different from the out group 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 an pre-existing theory called social comparison theory from 1954 by psychologist Leon Fetzinger.

Yeah. 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. So what Tajfell 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 in 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 social, socioeconomic group that you're in, that's when it gets really kind of sticky and gross, and that's when, or why you hear, I think, famous sayings, like comparison is the thief of joy from Roosevelt or Twain. 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 um 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 it engenders comparison like that's the that you can't help but do that yeah you know so yeah it's a it is 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 Took-Took where they're very, very limited resources and incompatible group goals maybe within a group. And like it doesn't necessarily have to do with the 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, there always is one.

So dominance is probably a pretty common one. One group wants to dominate the rest and have say over. over what, you know, where the society that all the groups form goes. Yeah, that's a big one. Good point. You can say winning is a resource. Like, there's really only one group that can win unless you're playing soccer and then everybody wins.

So, yeah, if you start to get more, you know, less tangible and more esoteric or ethereal, 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 Toschfeld and Turner were on to something, they felt. And so they were like, all right, what if we dig down a little bit deeper? And we started kind of poking holes, or not poking holes, but asking questions about groups in a person's place within a group. And 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. So what you think the move to do is, is to do. 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 former nerds.

Then maybe. 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 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 just face it. Yeah, and in the movies, though, it's almost always possible to make that leap, or if you don't make that leap 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, he was like the hot guy on Gray's Anatomy at first? McA Dreamy.

Yes. 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 and pink, which also have sort of this 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 this kind of like Don Juan. And he's like, what do you, what have you done before? Like if you're, you know, girl. 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. Oh, 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 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 end 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 a 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 going to the D&D one, say, I don't know, I can't figure out how to use that one. You got something for that? Well, 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 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 how like I think in the first one it's like how they perceive themselves. Like we're smarter than they are and they'll just never know. know it. And the other one is we've got like these cool uniforms that we wear and everyone thinks they're awesome. Gotcha. Great. Great example. I'll bet D&D. uniforms are awesome. Well, I was thinking of the, uh, in stranger things, the Hellfire Club and the cool t-shirts. Oh, okay. I only saw the first season. Yeah. You know, I liked it all, but it, it, 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. Skip over season two and then just go to season three. It was pretty good. Okay. Wasn't season one like sailboats and frigates and stuff? 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. Okay. 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 outgroup you're comparing yourself with. So the D&D group would say like, well, we may be D&D nerds, but have you seen the chess club? Right. Wow. You were 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-joc. There you go. Got to be anti-s 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.

The 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've left, and maybe the hierarchy has changed because you join. 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. So 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, 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, Toshvils and Turner, Toshvils, Tashvell 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. 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. Okay. Chuck, I say we take our second break now and then come back and talk more about social identity theory. Let's do it. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts everyone's talking about.

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welcome home. This is Pros Society. The weekly podcast, that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessive. and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

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Want to learn about a terrorist art and color tarotidactyl. How to take a perfect boop with all about fractals. Gang is con. A till of the hunt. The Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Run. Don't explain everything to your brain explodes. Just chuck. And job.

That's stuff you should know. So 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. 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. Just the fact that people are together generates those issues. There are positives and negatives to the whole thing. Yeah.

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. Yeah, for sure. That's a huge, huge benefit of being in a group. A sense of purpose. 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. That, like, you can't buy that kind of self-esteem that the Falcons give you. Boy, 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.

Yeah. That's funny. The other one was the realistic group conflict theory. So social identity theory is probably a little closer to that one. Yeah. 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, that like the resource scarcity that we're talking about. Right. And Tajfell, again, in 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.

We just somebody did like a study once and everybody says, well, now it's proven. That's, maybe. So there's this thing that they used to test social identity theory called the Minimal Group paradigm. And originally, I thought Minimal referred to like the fewest number of people in that group, which made me think of the special people club from Welcome to the Doll House. Yeah. With Don Weeder 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. Like 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. 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 task 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.

And that they ended up in four separate groups, the triangle group, the circle group, the dichromatic group, and the polychromatic group. 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 the whole triangle, circle, dichromatic, polychromatic, it was just to fool the kids and thinking they were a member of a group when really they were just arbitrarily assigned to one of two groups. One 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 him 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. Some of them are equal. Some were not equal. And what they observed was, I think fairly interesting, is that even when like, 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 at the other group made five. So essentially they all chose to have a disparity between the group. 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're 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. Right. 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 scan, 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. doing something. This wasn't it, but say, carrying a tray full of beersteins, full beersteins, 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 want. learn from their mistake or their successful way of doing it when you tried it. It's like you would refuse to learn from the enemy or this out group, even if it would help you. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. It is. It's super fascinating. And it really kind of jibes and makes sense.

But 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 voices. 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? Like, 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 or proposed that it is. Right. And there have been other social psychologists, one in particular in a name 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, like 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, too. 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. Oh, sure.

You know, there's rivalries between China 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. Like, 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.

made them different from the other group even to their own detriment. Yeah, and just to restate 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. Yeah, for sure. So I think Tajfell 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. And one great example they came up with where a 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, we'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, 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.

Yeah. And 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,

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. Yeah, 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 products, like domestic versus foreign-made products.

Yeah, yeah. That in-group, out-group predicts that, your sense of ethnocentrism or nationalism. Sure. 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, say, other musical preferences suck. And that reminded me of Disco Demolition Night from 1979. You remember that?

Yeah, for sure. Where all those rockers, like, rioted because they hated disco so much. Yeah. And 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. Good. 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 Bloom. 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. The boys are counting on us. Judy Bloom and Beverly Cleary shaped generations of young mind, guys.

That is from Margot in New York City. And we had a few different people write in and tell us that. And I tried to find online the origination of that. Almost everything says Judy Bloom 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. Good 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 Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app.

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