Identity and Belonging

I’m going to spend a couple of blog posts thinking out loud about identity and groups, because I feel that despite how common a topic it is in the current political discourse, not many people are thinking about what really underpins things like identity and what it all really means, and whether we should care about it. This post is about group membership signalling, which forms part of the picture on identity.

I’ve had a couple experiences when I was in primary school where I’d be doing some repetitive action to piss somebody off like tapping them with a stick of something and they’d call me out in front of everybody and say ‘can you stop being fucking annoying please?’ and suddenly I didn’t even want to keep annoying them but I continued to do it anyway because now I had no choice. Why is it so hard to switch gears behaviourally in front of other people? Is it because you don’t want to submit to the demand of somebody in your group you were trying to subvert? That sounds plausible. Is it because you want to retain a locus of control around your own actions, and ending your stick-tapping game would be a concession of the fact that you don’t have control?

I think that it is some combination of these things, but combined with one more: humans have evolved to stick to their behavioural guns, because when all your peers’ brains are working overtime to try and model the world around them, the last thing they want to deal with is a person whose current behaviour can’t be reliably extrapolated into the future. If you’re frequently switching up how you behave in mutually incompatible ways, people will fail to place you into a category, and will probably keep their distance because they just don’t understand what motivates your actions. The typical example that comes to mind is a crazy old man jumping around and being erratic. But why do people care so much?

Brains are prediction machines. There is a reason why it is more painful to have high hopes and be disappointed than to have never had the high hopes in the first place: because the former requires an adjustment in your brain’s prediction mechanisms. If you were going to a live concert and you were excited to see the band because you’ve listened to all their albums, but then you find out that they do a horrible live performance, the pain you experience in your disappointment is the feeling of your brain doing some internal refactoring. The mapping from ‘good discography’ to ‘good concert’ gets rewritten so that your brain considers the former a poor predictor of the latter. Even worse, the mapping from ‘I’m excited’ to ‘I actually should be excited’ gets written down a bit as well. So next time you feel excited about anything, your brain will dampen the strength of the emotion so as to guide your actions into better outcomes than you achieved with your ‘faulty’ prediction mappings last time.

That’s why if a person is continually disappointed, they reach a point where they don’t see any reason to get excited about anything, because every time they make a prediction that convinces them something is worth being excited about, the prediction is proven wrong, and mappings are written down, until there is nothing left that your brain considers a reliable predictor of an excitement-worthy outcome.

What does this have to do with social interactions and identity? A person’s brain is tirelessly modelling the world around them and making predictions to guide their actions. That means they need reliable prediction mappings assigned to all of their peers. For example, if somebody wants to borrow your earphones and says they’ll have them back to you by the end of the day, but then take them home with them accidentally, your brain needs to write down the trustworthiness of that person (I’m looking at you, James). If it turns out it wasn’t accidental and was actually intentional, your brain needs to write them down even more. A person’s identity signals many things about the extent to which a person values integrity and trust. If you’re the kind of person who is hard to aggrieve, you might not care if someone borrows something of yours and takes a while to give it back. You’ve got other ways you can spend your time than using whatever thing you lent to your friend. But if you advertise that identity as a happy-go-lucky individual, a comparatively prideful and sensitive person can read those signals and keep their distance, knowing that the kind of person who is fairly insensitive is unlikely to express consideration of other people’s sensitivities, especially in the realm of personal property.

You might say ‘but that’s not a person signalling their identity, that’s just them being themselves’. The truth is that once upon a time in evolutionary history, everybody was just being themselves. But as our brains grew bigger, people got better at making predictions based on other people’s behaviours. Then people got better at communicating to eachother about other people’s behaviours, through mechanisms like gossip. Then people got better at piggybacking on the gossip system to disseminate self-appraising sentiments without having to actually having to prove anything about how they would actually act in certain situations. You might score some reputation points for borrowing something and giving it back on time, but for a marginally smaller amount of points you can just talk shit about somebody else who still hasn’t returned something of value that they borrowed, thus distinguishing yourself from the other person in a redeeming way without having to actually prove whether or not you can be trusted returning the things you borrow.

A common example that comes to mind: you’re at a party, and the host says ‘Hey this guy said they were feeling under the weather and couldn’t come, but check out his instagram story’ and it shows the person partying it up somewhere else. Everybody jumps on to say the guy is a dickhead, because it’s a low-cost opportunity to signal that they could be trusted if they ever declined a party invitation with the same excuse.

Here people are signalling their trustworthiness generally, but more specifically they are signalling in a way that assures their peers that they are all united within their group, and that the instagrammer is an outsider. In fact one of the easiest ways to signal membership in a group is to show how you are distinct from outsiders. This is a consequence of the fact that you cannot define a group in purely inclusive terms. There is always an exclusive element. For every statement about a group you are in, there is an equivalent statement about a group you are not in. I am an Australian, and so I am not an American, European, Japanese, etc. Even if you were both Australian and American by virtue of dual citizenship, you would now belong to the group of people with dual citizenship, as opposed to the group of people with only single citizenship.

It’s not obvious why people have an inclination to work so hard in defining which groups they do and do not belong to. Part of it comes down to the limitations of the human brain.

Say it’s cavemen days and in a particular geographical region everybody either has blue eyes or green eyes. Everybody gets along, everybody joins in on the hunting, the festivities, and the socialising.

Now lets say that a Ko Ko, who has green eyes, has three negative experiences in a row with blue-eyed people by complete chance. Maybe they beat him up or stole his tools. Being a human being, Ko Ko adjusts his prediction mappings so that ‘Blue-eyed person’ and ‘Bad experience’ are strongly linked. He becomes distrustful of blue-eyed tribesmen, and is disinclined to cooperate with them. Now lets say there is a hunting party to go out and get some deer, composed of four blue-eyed people and four green-eyed people, one of which is Ko Ko.

The group of eight does more or less a good job of all working as one, except that every now and then Ko Ko barges into his blue-eyed counterparts and steals the killing shot that takes down a deer. And every now and then Ko Ko disproportionately shares more deer with the green-eyed tribesmen than with blue-eyed tribesmen. The other three green-eyed tribesmen start to catch-on that Ko Ko can be trusted to give preferential treatment to them, so when picking who they hunt with, they always want to go with Ko Ko. The blue-eyed tribesmen are starting to get a bit flustered. They are sharing the food equally among all of them, but Ko Ko has created an insular sharing system just among just the people with green eyes, and for the blue-eyed group to continue hunting in a colourblind way, they’d be signing up to a bad deal. So they decide to set some of their own internal rules about how they hunt. From now on, blue-eyed people preferentially share food with other blue-eyed people. And so over time they just stop hunting with the green-eyed people altogether.

A group of eight people working as one is obviously the best outcome here, but as soon as you have one person defining a group boundary on any characteristic, in this case eye-colour, and giving perks to his ingroup (the green-eyed tribesmen), the fact that hunting is a zero-sum game means that for the other group to just go along with it, they would be losing out. So although the definition of the groups starts off from something arbitrary like eye colour, the distinction between the two groups soon becomes very real. If everybody with green eyes has prediction mappings that say to trust people with green eyes and distrust people with blue eyes, and vice versa, then if you happen to be a green-eyed person, it’s in your best interest to follow suit. No blue eyed person is going to want to cooperate with you for hunting anyway, and you already know that other green-eyed people are going to happily share with you. And even if you’re a green-eyed person who didn’t make a conscious decision to favour the green group, your prediction mappings are going to converge with the people in your group anyway because over time you’re simply going to have more good experiences with green-eyed people than blue-eyed people. In game theory this is called a Nash Equilibrium; where although the whole system could be made better if everybody stopped caring about eye colour, for any individual person to not care about eye colour, they would be giving themselves a disadvantage.

The distinction between green and blue eyes in this tribal setting is a metaphorical truth, the same way that the fact that money has value is a metaphorical truth. It’s not actually true that a ten dollar note has any value, but if there is consensus agreement about its value, then there is utility in believing that it has value, regardless of whether it’s true or not. You might think your brain cares about what is true, but it actually doesn’t. It cares about what is useful: what prediction mappings yield the best decisions that guide your life in the right direction. Conveniently, ‘useful’ things and ‘true’ things have a lot of overlap (e.g. the fact that fire can cook meat is both true and useful), so your brain has developed some mechanisms like logic to obtain truth, but your brain does not on a fundamental level care about truth. If your brain has to choose between a useless fact and a useful fiction, it will pick the useful fiction every time, especially in the context of group distinctions where failing to act out the fiction can mean exile or death.

The reason group distinctions and group rivalry develops so quickly is because the equilibrium state of everybody just getting along is extremely fragile, and once a single person makes a group distinction and starts acting out that distinction in who they cooperate with and who they don’t, an individual’s perceived payoff of making the best of the new divided social landscape outweighs the perceived payoff of trying to keep everything together.

Fast forward some time with our green and blue eyed tribespeople and they’re going to war with eachother. Because it’s hard to tell from a distance whether a person has blue or green eyes, they now have other symbols of their group membership like blue or green bracelets or necklaces or cloth. People born with hazel eyes, which contain both green and blue hues, pick one of blue or green to identify with and then go HARD on the peripherals, decking themselves out with whichever colour they chose. They fear being outed as having any allegiance to the other colour, given they are half-caste, so they work harder than anybody else to show how much they love their ingroup, and how much they hate the outgroup.

Within both groups, accents develop, as well as new cultural rituals and norms. Some of these changes are just cultural drift: an unconscious accumulation of arbitrary quirks, and some of them are intentionally created in contrast to the other group. The green group have their religious ceremonies in the morning, the blue group have theirs at night. A point comes when Ko Ko had died many generations ago.

Then a new tribe shows up: whose members all have brown eyes. They outnumber both the blue and green tribes, and they have no respect for either of them, in fact it’s rumoured that they have a propensity for genocide. The brown tribe does not distinguish between the blue or the green tribe, it’s all the same to them. So there is no incentive for the green or blue tribe to view themselves as distinct in comparison to the brown tribe. The blue and green tribes start to remember the time long ago when they were one people, united. They start singing songs that had not been sung for generations; appealing to a history of cooperation though their new signalling efforts. The reason why the green and blue tribe can unite now is because although it was always true that as a group they could achieve more by putting aside their differences, only now has the payoff for an individual cooperating with the other eye colour superceded the payoff of sticking to their own group, because as an individual they’re likely to be killed in a genocide by the brown eyed tribe if they merely depend on the strength of their own group. The once fragile equilibrium state of ‘everyone getting along’ is now far more sustainable in the presence of a greater evil.

As an aside, now hazel eyed tribespeople enjoy a noticeable reduction in day to day stress, and don’t need to signal quite as hard anymore which of the green or blue groups they more strongly identify with.

The story of two groups putting aside their differences to team up against a greater force is a well known story because it happens all the time. But what underpins it all is individual prediction mappings combined with cooperation incentives. What’s the takeaway for today’s age? Humans are simultaneously becoming more fragmented and more united than ever. We have more subcultures and subgroups to signal identity with, but we also have some common enemies that are growing in strength like global warming. These enemies can only be defeated with globally coordinated cooperation efforts. In the face of death, our differences seem far more trivial than they did years ago. I wonder if there’s something to be learned here about how to resolve group conflicts in general. Some appeal to a greater threat that necessitates cooperation between the groups. Even if the evolutionary adaptations of ingroup/outgroup signalling run deep, by understanding the rules of the game we can know how best to play it.

I’m gonna wrap this post up now because it’s getting lengthy and my signalling effort of knowing what I’m talking about is becoming more tenuous by the minute, but next time (or at some point) I want to bring this topic back to my younger self in primary school whacking my friend with a stick. It’ll have something to do with identities being a contract with prepackaged prediction mappings that anybody can use to confidently predict your behaviour.

Until next time!