Prev: Reflections on Defining “Groupishness” and Its Function in Human Society (part one of two)
I believe there is a meaningful distinction to be made between cultural commitments and an individual’s ability to equal that commitment. An individual’s cultural commitment to reason does not automatically result in an individual who is more capable of reasoning than another, but it is likely to result in an individual who will have their identity bound up with ideas around reason such that they will resist strongly any suggestion that they are not being particularly reasonable about something. There is a difference between someone who habitually votes for Democrat-party candidates and someone who has their identity bound up with the Democratic Party. The first is common place; the second, I suggest, is rare.
Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham & Craig Joseph argue, based on “Dan McAdams’s (1995; McAdams & Pals, 2006) three-level account of personality (dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life stories)” that:
“the single dimension of left-right is indeed a useful construct that describes a network of Level 2 adaptations (such as right-wing authoritarianism) closely linked to Level 1 traits (such as openness to experience), but the study of ideology requires us to look at the Level 3 narratives of self and society that people construct and internalize as they develop, join groups, and share ideologies.”(Above and Below Left-Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations, Psychological Inquiry, 20:110-119, 2009).
So, that is a mouthful. Earlier in their paper, they helpfully offered:
“Why do people vary in their views of human nature and their visions of the good society? Why do many people categorize themselves as ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘libertarian,’ ‘socialist,’ and so on? Some researchers try to answer those questions by starting with people’s self-identifications and then moving ‘down,’ examining traits (such as openness to experience) that underlie and predict endorsement of an ideological label (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003, and Sibley & Duckitt, 2008, for reviews). In contrast, others find it more informative to move ‘up’ from such labels, examining the network of meanings, strivings, and personal narratives that unite the individuals who endorse a label (e.g., Conover & Feldman, 1981; Geertz, 1964; Smith, 2003; Sowell, 1995, 2007).”
Which is all very interesting, but really concentrating on particular sorts of ideological commitments [a San Francisco Democrat can be quite culturally different from a South Carolina Democrat (or not)] rather than groupishness specifically. And that is a problem I will run into repeatedly: studies that brush up against my concerns around groupishness that are actually conceived around oppositional political sorts of “affinity groups” and what I would term coalitions, such as Liberal/Conservative and Democrat/Republican, rather than groups that are much more likely to be bound up with a person’s identity, such as Cubs fan or White Sox fan.
Right from the beginning, I find myself annoyed with the (entirely accurate within academia) assertions Haidt, Graham and Joseph make about the “trait approach” being “extraordinarily successful” to the point where “the Big Five taxonomy is widely accepted as a valuable high-order model of personality.” Sigh. I have looked at questions in the Big Five and they are so problematic that I am rendered the opposite of speechless whenever the topic comes up. (Conversely, Dan Kahan at his Cultural Cognition of Risk blog, argues that “These sorts of self-report measures predict vulnerability to one or another reasoning bias less powerfully than CRT and numeracy, and my sense is that they are falling out of favor in cognitive psychology.”)
First, the “Big Five” taxonomy is generated by a self-report questionnaire that asks a person to assess in a Likert scale (1 to 5) their agreement with statements like “I have a rich vocabulary.” It seems obvious to me that the correct way to assess these questions is to understand they are capturing cultural commitments, not innate personality traits. We don’t know if the person has a rich vocabulary, only whether or not they believe they have one, and whether or not a rich vocabulary is something worth claiming is entirely cultural. How that meaningfully assesses “openness to experience” is not clear, unless one means that people with interests in intellectual pursuits are inherently more open to experience, which is a tautology, not a finding. Second, the theory currently uses the descriptive “openness to experience,” which has a particular usage in Standard English that equates to “open-mindedness” but the theory delimits the phrase as psychological category that does not (necessarily) equal the standard usage. The questions asked in the Big Five questionnaire do not assess a person’s functional open-mindedness, though that is how the results are commonly described. (I have gone on and on about this before [http://isabel.penraeth.com/post/30209151045/the-moral-emotions-openness-liberals-conservatives &http://isabel.penraeth.com/post/32275404553/us-and-them-openness-groupishness-care-harm-and ]). Haidt, Graham & Joseph’s assertion around the “trait approach” being “successful” and perceived as “valuable” gets back to the definition of a theory in psychology: a framework that has proven generative of studies, not that it has proven fundamentally true [a definition offered in this textbook]. I sometimes fear the social sciences really are semantics all the way down. Well, that and statistics.
So, even when psychologists think they are dealing with a personal trait (as measured by the Big Five), at an individual-level construct, I would argue they are capturing cultural commitments, a groupish-level construct. That is what I mean about confusion around what is a trait of an individual and what is a cultural commitment on the part of the individual to a groupish standard. Haidt, Graham and Joseph suggest that some theorists work “up” and other theorists work “down,” but it seems to me nearly all of modern American psychology fundamentally atomizes everything to the individual not only because of a strongly individualistic American bias, but because of the functional limits of the preferred experimental method: the self-report questionnaire. [For much more interesting critiques of the Big Five, ones that are critical in quite different ways, see: The Five-Factor Framing of Personality and Beyond: Some Ruminations by Jack Block; The Five-Factor Model Describes the Structure of Social Perceptions, by Sanjay Srivastava; Two Cheers for the Big Five! [paywall] Donald W. Fiske.]
In their favor, Haidt, Graham & Joseph go on in their paper to ask of the trait approach, “Rather than arguing with success, an alternative response is to ask, Is that all there is?” They believe they can show there is more. But, yeah, me, I am absolutely going to argue with that sort of “success.”
Group Groupishness versus Individual Groupishness
Additionally, there are useful distinctions to be made between a “group groupishness” and an “individual groupishness,” where a group has traits that render it more “groupish” and an individual has preferences/habits that render groupish behavior more congenial to them. Triandis and Suh helpfully describe allocentrism and idiocentrism at the individual level, as well as work on collectivism and individualism at the cultural level:
The terms individualism and collectivism are used at the cultural level of analysis, where the number of observations is the number of cultures (e.g., Hofstede 1980). In such data individualism is the polar opposite of collectivism. As mentioned above, results at the cultural level may differ from results at the individual level of analysis. Thus, different terms are used to indicate the level of analysis. Individualism and collectivism are used at the cultural level, whereas at the individual level of analysis (i.e., within-culture analyses), the corresponding terms are idiocentrism and allocentrism (Triandis et al. 1985). Idiocentrism and allocentrism are personality attributes that are often orthogonal to each other. Idiocentrics emphasize self-reliance, competition, uniqueness, hedonism, and emotional distance from in-groups. Allocentrics emphasize interdependence, sociability, and family integrity; they take into account the needs and wishes of in-group members, feel close in their relationships to their in-group, and appear to others as responsive to their needs and concerns (Cross SE, Bacon P, Morris M. 2000. The relational-interdependent self-construal and relationships. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78:791–98).” (P. 140, Cultural Influences on Personality, Triandis & Suh, 2002.)
This becomes particularly useful when one wants to compare individuals who are personally allocentric yet are living in a collectivist society and individuals who are allocentric living in an individualistic society.
In all cultures there are both idiocentrics and allocentrics, in different proportions (Triandis et al. 2001). Generally speaking, in collectivist cultures there are about 60% allocentrics and in individualist cultures about 60% idiocentrics. The allocentrics in individualist cultures are more likely than the idiocentrics to join groups—gangs, communes, unions, etc. The idiocentrics in collectivist cultures are more likely than the allocentrics to feel oppressed by their culture and to seek to leave it. (P. 141)
[Susan Cain, in her recent popular non-fiction book Quiet, very busily conflates introversion with allocentrism. But I digress.]
There are other measures or attempts at measurement in the wild world of the social sciences. Is groupishness most accurately measured by the communitarianism side of the Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk group grid, leaving out worldviews that land on the individualistic side of the scale? Triandis gives us The Psychological Measurement of Cultural Syndromes (a measurement that maps quite nicely to the Cultural Theory Grid-Group schema). Is groupishness confined to Triandis’ vertical collectiveness? And if it is, how is that measured? Rayner & Gross, for instance, tried to measure communitarianism on the Cultural Theory of Risk grid-group scale with a mathematical computation based on observing how much time members of a group spent together (Measuring Culture). Or when we talk about groupishness, is it most properly referring to Triandis’ collectivism. Where does the individual fit? Can one individual be more groupish than another? Is one culture more groupish than another? Is groupishness confined to the Gemeinschaftliche “high group, high grid” world of hierarchical-communitarians? Sometimes those using the term groupishness seem to be attempting to describe a measurement of how controlling the members of the group are of other people (in the group or not): how much they want to force their viewpoint onto others, or how totalitarian they are. It is a theorized variation on this theme that results in the calculation that totalitarian regimes that espoused Leftist views were really Conservative.
So, it seems entirely reasonable to me to suspect that one can be functionally groupish yet, if one has a cultural commitment to individualism, to adopt an identity-protective denial around that trait. Similarly, it also seems entirely reasonable to me that a cultural commitment/acceptance of groupishness need not be as pathological as individualist groups [“I would never join a group that would have me as a member.”] might be inclined to believe.
I think the key to understanding groupishness and the current muddle around its use is the concept of authority. As Adam Seligman puts it in his book Modernity’s Wager:
Modernity, whether in the form of liberal politics, capitalist exchange, or the epistemologies of the social sciences, is inherently hostile to the idea and experience of authority and as a result has a hard time understanding its persistence. (P. 15 Seligman, Modernity’s Wager, Nook version)
So, of course, before we talk any further about groupishness, let’s talk about authority.
NEXT: Authority: Weber's Herrschaft
