Individual vs Group: Why Do People Change When They Belong to a Group?

When an individual interacts with a group of people, he or she usually feels that he or she is part of a group that exceeds him or her, and This feeling can lead you to detach yourself from your ethical values and direct your decisions and actions in a direction that you would never have imagined as an independent individual.

That is what many historical events have been able to confirm over the centuries.

Individual and group: investigating the influence of the collective on the subject

Research carried out by Carnegie Mellon University was recently published, which has delved into this phenomenon of social psychology to try to unravel How is it possible that people with moral values ​​can commit perverse acts? when they are protected or legitimized by a group, ignoring its ethical principles.

The researchers compared people’s brain functioning when they were alone and when they were in the company of a group of people.

The study arose from the inspiration that an experience during a soccer match caused one of the main researchers. Her husband went to a soccer match wearing the cap of one of the teams playing in the match, but had the bad luck to sit in a town surrounded by fans of the opposing team, for which he had to receive countless insults and expletives. The researcher, who accompanied her husband in the field in the next town, thought that if she put on the cap, her followers would moderate their insults (or even stop) out of respect for a woman.

However, that was not what ended up happening. In that moment, The psychologist wondered if there could be some neurological reason for this group behavior.

When enmities go from inter-individual to inter-group

Essentially, there are two basic reasons why individuals change their behavior when they form (or feel that they are part of) a group. These reasons are:

Basically, there are two fundamental reasons why people behave differently When they are part of a group, these are:

1. Perception of anonymity

2. Perception of less risk of being punished for bad behavior

However, in this research the intention was to investigate the ethical conflict that occurs to the individual when he is part of a group, and to see to what extent the group could have an inhibiting effect on individual moral principles.

In the experiment, participants were asked to answer some questions that showed a insight about its ethical principles. In this way, the researchers modeled some individualized statements, such as: “I have stolen food from a common refrigerator,” or “I always apologize when I bump into someone.”

Next, the subjects were invited to participate in a game in which they had to reflect on some of the aforementioned phrases, and while they played, their brains were observed using a scanner. In order to discriminate neurological effects, some participants played alone, while others played as part of a group.

Results

People who played alone and therefore reflected on their moral judgments alone showed an increase in brain activity in the region of the medial prefrontal cortex, which is the area where thinking about oneself operates. People completely identified with the phrases that were presented to them, so it was not strange to find these results.

Less expected was that when the subjects who played in a group reflected on these ethical statements, their response was of a lower intensity. This suggests that the level of identification of the sentences was weaker when faced with their own moral beliefs

The diffusion of the self

The scholars concluded that Our judgments regarding ethics become more flexible when we are part of a community, because we feel that the group has a value that tends to attenuate our personality and beliefs. In the context of belonging to a group, we become anonymous subjects since our priorities and beliefs mutate when changing from the identity of “I” to “we.”

Consequently, we tend to reconfigure our beliefs and values ​​to those of the group, which is detectable even at the brain level. This metamorphosis can have a perverse effect, since if we stop recognizing and identifying with certain moral values, we are more likely not to experience rejection or remorse in the face of certain actions or attitudes, and in this way we become benevolent in the face of spurious, violent or perverse behaviors.