From Collective Illusions (Todd Rose, 2022) pp48-9
If you believe your groups and your fellow members are largely homogeneous, then your social identity becomes simplified, less flexible, and less receptive to social difference. Conforming to your tribe becomes tangled up with your sense of self, and so you do so at all costs. You also grow suspicious of anyone who doesn’t seem to fit.
When stuck in this kind of identity trap, we find reasons to draw boundaries and exclude those who are “not like us.” We become less tolerant of diverse, cross-pollinating groups, and we embrace stereotypes. We seek comfort and assurance by drawing our social worlds in black and white.’ Writing in 2005, psychologists Marilynn Brewer and her colleague Kathleen Pierce predicted that “when individuals, or social systems, are threatened by psychological, economic, or political loss,” social identities will be defined based on more exclusive and less complex categories that simplify the world, driven by a desperate need to reduce uncertainty. The result is increased discrimination and resistance to change.
So how do we avoid falling into this trap? In this case, the answer is simple, and it is a proactive measure. If you want to avoid the identity trap, you must increase your identity complexity. That is, rather than investing everything in one single group, as cult members must, you can avoid this identity trap by belonging to a variety of groups, which also means you have a healthy, diversified portfolio of social identities. It doesn’t really matter what affinity groups you choose to join. They just need to hold some positive, personal significance to you. You can join a sports or music fan group; a book club, game night, or study group; a garage band or a choir; or just about anything else that engages you and is sure to make you feel happy on a regular basis. My wife, for example, joined a group of senior dog walkers twice her age and, to her surprise, found herself gaining a whole new, devoted cluster of friends.
A larger social portfolio doesn’t just lead you safely past the single-group quicksand to dispel the age-old “us versus them” curse; it directly benefits you, me, and all of society, Research has shown how, if one of your social identities feels rejected or inferior, you can shore up your self-esteem by putting more energy into another one. In one experiment, Euro-American women who initially said they identified equally with their ethnicity and their gender were told that an Asian American woman had scored better on a test than they had. The Euro-Americans responded by placing greater emphasis on their ethnic identity, as opposed to their gender.
In this way, having multiple identities allows us to subtly recast exactly who we are, shielding our sense of self-worth and neutralizing the impact of otherwise withering social comparisons. We also get a nice little reward signal each time we feel approved of by our tribes, which means we can maximize our chances of happiness by joining more of them (to a point, of course).
But the benefits of identity complexity go further. In the early 2000s, Sonia Roccas and Marilynn Brewer discovered something else about belonging to multiple tribes. They found that the more diverse you believe your groups to be, the more resilient you are, and the more tolerant, inclusive, and nuanced your overall worldview will be. Interacting with a greater diversity of people also provides you with better information and a well-rounded perspective that makes you less likely to fall for the illusions of a single group.
In this way, expanding our social identity portfolios is one of the most valuable things we can do for ourselves. But here’s the thing: identity complexity is also good for our groups. Just as we need to build up our immune systems by exposing ourselves to various germs, our groups can only survive and thrive by adapting to change. The greater diversity of understanding and ideas strengthens us all.
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