Belonging: Fitting in to Your Social Groups

BELONGING: FITTING IN TO YOUR SOCIAL GROUPS

In some religious communities, losing your faith can mean losing your marriage, family, and entire social support system along with it. That's an extreme case, but all social groups have some beliefs and values that members are implicitly expected to share, such as "Climate change is a serious problem," or "Republicans are better than Democrats," or "Our group is fighting for a worthy cause," or "Children are a blessing." Dissent may not get you literally kicked out of the group, but it can still alienate you from the other members.

To be clear, deferring to a consensus isn't inherently a sign of soldier mindset. In the web comic XKCD, a parent asks their child that age-old rhetorical question: "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?" The correct answer is presumed to be a grudging "No, of course not." But the child replies, "Probably," because after all, which is more likely—that his friends all went crazy at the same time or that the bridge is on fire?17 The kid's got a point. Deferring to the consensus is often a wise heuristic, since you can't investigate everything for yourself, and other people know things you don't.

What makes it motivated reasoning is when you wouldn't even want to find out if the consensus was wrong. A friend of mine named Katja grew up in what she describes as a small "hippie" town where everyone held strong environmentalist views, including her. But once she got to high school, Katja began to encounter arguments online or in her economics textbooks that some environmentalist policies are ineffective and that logging companies aren't as harmful as people think.

She would hunt for flaws in the logic. But sometimes, to her alarm, the arguments just seemed . . . correct. In those moments, her stomach would drop. "I just felt sick when I got the 'wrong answer,'" she told me, "like when there was some argument for forestry that I didn't immediately have a good counterargument to."

Fitting in isn't only about conforming to the group consensus. It also means demonstrating your loyalty to the group by rejecting any evidence that threatens its figurative honor. People who identify strongly as "gamers" (i.e., they endorse statements like "When somebody criticizes gamers, it feels like a personal insult") are more skeptical of studies that show violent video games are harmful.18 People who identify strongly as Catholics (i.e., they endorse statements like "I feel solidarity with Catholic people") are more skeptical when a Catholic priest is accused of sexual abuse.19

And in some groups, fitting in comes with restrictions on what you're allowed to want or to believe about yourself. It's been called tall poppy syndrome: anyone who seems like they're trying to be a "tall poppy," showing too much self-regard or ambition, is cut down to size. If you want to fit in to such a culture, you might acquire the habit of downplaying your achievements and goals—even in the privacy of your own mind.

---

• • •

When you think about all of the things we use soldier mindset for, it becomes obvious why the frequently proposed fixes for it are futile. Such fixes typically involve words like "teaching" or "training," as in:

We need to teach students about cognitive biases.

We need to train people in critical thinking.

We need to educate people in reason and logic.

None of these approaches have shown much promise in changing people's thinking in the long run or outside of the classroom. And that should not surprise us. We use motivated reasoning not because we don't know any better, but because we're trying to protect things that are vitally important to us—our ability to feel good about our lives and ourselves, our motivation to try hard things and stick with them, our ability to look good and persuade, and our acceptance in our communities.

However, the fact that soldier mindset is often our default strategy for getting what we want doesn't necessarily mean it's a good strategy. For one thing, it can backfire. In her section "Persuasion," Galef describes law students who become confident, after being randomly assigned a side and reading the materials for a moot court case, that their side is morally and legally in the right. But that confidence doesn't help them persuade the judge. On the contrary, law students who are more confident in the merits of their own side are significantly less likely to win the case—perhaps because they fail to consider and prepare for the rebuttals to their arguments.20

Even when soldier mindset doesn't completely backfire, it's still not obvious that it's our best option. Rather than boosting your self-esteem by denying your flaws, you could instead boost your self-esteem by noticing and fixing those flaws. Rather than pursuing social acceptance by suppressing your disagreements with your community, you could instead decide to leave and find a different community you fit in to better.