Group identity: a sense? an emotion? a state of mind? is it even real?

You’ve probably heard it many times — our biology teacher in grade school was wrong to teach us we only have five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and scent. We have many more — though there’s disagreement how many exactly, the number is probably higher than 10 — from some which sit on firmer scientific ground, like the sense of balance or gravity in our inner ear, to some which are murkier and may fall into the myths and legends rubric, like your parents “feeling” when you’ve got yourself in trouble

How about emotions? Many researches have tried to answer this and everyone seems to be in agreement that one can’t enumerate all possible emotions as they’re virtually limitless, but could still distill what is believed to be the set of basic emotions leading to all of the others. However, even the number of basic emotions is disputed and ranges from as low as only 2 (pain and pleasure) to 11 or more (anger, aversion, courage, dejection, desire, despair, fear, hate, hope, love, sadness).

Being interested in human personality and what shapes it, I can’t stop but wonder if we’ve truly explored the effect of the emotions on what most people (including myself) call group identity — the main driver that seems to be shaping individual humans that belong to a given group to behave more alike, thus increasing the group coherence.

If you can’t win them … invite more! – Can parents soften the influence from the peer group?

How is it possible that kids who don’t have a chance to attend the best schools or grow up in “not so nice” neighborhoods sometimes manage to “escape” from the grip of their environment and grow into adulthood to be regarded as well-mannered, successful, respected, etc? The opposite may happen as well — most parents would say it happens way too often — but the question of going from bad to good has a less obvious answer than what the common sense may suggest for the good to bad direction.

I find many people confusing the notion of peer pressure and peer group influence when it comes to the question what shapes their kids’ personality. They’re too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion: the kids go to school and this is where they socialize with their peers, so it is this interaction and pressure to conform to fashions and accepted trends among the peers in their school that ultimately has the biggest influence to them. The accepted wisdom, then, suggests the answer is simple, in their early school age years, the kids are shaped by their schoolmates!

It’s compelling to extend the same line of reasoning to the cases where the kids spend a lot of time doing activities outside school — like spending lots of time “on the street” with the neighbourhood kids, training for a certain sport for many hours each day, spending huge amount of time on Facebook and similar. To make the answer work for those case instead of referring to the school peers, we can just point at the peers in these other groups as the ones shaping the kids in question. If only this was so easy — good parenting would simply turn into a research to find the best school to send your kids to, or the best sports club to sign them into! While parents do this (including myself here too the answer is unfortunately not that simple.

Blind people – a special case for nurture to win over group socialization?

Last night, I was watching a short clip made by the Department of Expansion about the Blind Children’s Center, a non-profit organization that is providing support to blind and partially sighted children in forms of early education, therapeutic services, etc.

The center provides and inclusive environment that consists of about 50% blind and 50% sighted children, providing unique opportunity for both kinds of children to socialize with the idea of blindness as something natural and acceptable. According to the people working at the center, this gives the blind kids an ability to attend traditional schools later in their lives and live successful lives without getting their disability limit their opportunities down to a handful of jobs which are traditionally available to blind people.

I have to admit that my knowledge of how the blind kids get education and are immersed into the daily live is very limited. As a student, while struggling to survive my freshman year financially  I had an opportunity to lodge an inexpensive accommodation for one semester in the barracks of the School for visually impaired children – Dimitar Vlahov, Skopje, Macedonia.

What I remember from that period were the invisible walls that surrounded us, the sighted University students, from them, the blind kids struggling to get a chance for a normal live at a time and a country where people with disabilities already had very rough life. Granted, part of the reason for those walls was the school administration implementing separate entries into the barracks for us to enter without having to invade into the space for the blind kids, but I believe the blame was largely ours too, as we didn’t want to identify with those kids and felt only sorry for their condition — it took some “growing up” for me to be able to realize and admit this I guess.

Could knowledge get parents back in the game of nature vs. nurture?

In my earlier article I argued that by bestowing as much knowledge as possible on their kids, the parents can improve the odds for their kids making better choices in life and ultimately steer away from nihilistic behavior leading to problematic adult lives. This, of course, sounds neither prophetic nor would cause many to feel wizened by it — I can see many eyes rolling around thinking that I am just repeating common sense.

The reason why I think our children’s knowledge runs deeper than most of us assume is because we usually equate knowledge to the common subjects thought in schools like reading, math, etc. While those are important and many parents are already trying to help their kids acquire such skills before going to school, I don’t actually refer to them!

Can parents score few points for nurture?

It’s been a while since I have written my last article so I thought I should secure my inner peace by making a public vow: No matter how busy life gets I shall not give up writing on this blog! There, I said it so I hope this will, if not motivate me, then keep gentle pressure on me not to drop the ball on writing, unlike some New Year’s resolutions from the past involving such mundane issues like diet, exercise and similar

While I was busy playing the game of “real” life, I still kept some of my interests, like reading, afloat. Being busy kept my mind active even when going to bed, so I had opportunity to think about few things that have bothered me and I want to write here about one in particular.

Very recently — just as I was conceiving the idea of this and the articles to follow — a friend of mine used the words “to encourage a different way of thinking” about my reaction with my two daughters when they got hurt in some way. This helped me frame the premise I want to elaborate on:

Could parents act in a way that opens the kids minds to alternative perspectives and encourages them to approach the problems in their lives in different ways from the “accepted” wisdom in their environment, e.g. their peer group?

Furthermore, could this, if applied consistently through the age the kids are growing up, have a lasting impact and allow the parents to grab few percent from the influence of the peer group in the tug of war for shaping their kids behavior?

Nature vs. nurture – digression

I have a vision — in 20-30 years from now, education in particular, but also almost all other areas of human life will be profoundly different from what we’re used to now. And I’m not talking about technologies like the Internet, cellphones and similar that have shaped the world so far.

They surely will continue to impact everything around us, but I believe something more profound will happen — something that has a potential to truly define the Anthropocene as an epoch in which us humans have truly raised over nature.

In the late 18th century, by many regarded as the starting point for the Anthropocene, we’ve got industry. I won’t mention the impact to the societies that this had as we all learned about that in school but I’ll emphasize that this change have started an accelerated population growth and with it the need to efficiently grab more resources from the planet to sustain it.

Shortly after, during the 19th century many other revolutions followed — such as medicine with the discovery of vaccine, and technology with the introduction of electricity in the homes in the 19th century, to mention few. Needless to say, the 20th century have seen the most rapid advances in many areas, not to mention the advent of computer, global communication and Internet technologies.

All these advances have managed to almost completely remove all evolutionary selection pressures from humanity, letting us rise over nature and take out future in our hands. But did we? Are we truly free of the grips of the evolution that have shaped the life on Earth for almost 4 billion years and the Homo genus in particular for over 2 million years?

Nature vs. nurture – set 5

Goal: bring the three organs together

I’m faced with a challenging task — how can I paint a complete, yet easy to understand, picture of the three systems involved in the human personality development working together to make YOU the persona you are — at the same time very different than ME in many aspects, but still similar enough in many others?!

It is challenging because my goal is to reach to the casual reader who have some understanding how evolution works and is curios enough to learn the brain’s role in our behavior. And I think I somewhat failed at this task in my previous articles explaining the Relationship, Social and Status organ! I’ve got some feedback from few people that would fit my target profile that following my line of thinking was challenging for them at times because it was too technical or hard to understand without previously having read books like The Nurture Assumption, How The Mind Works, etc.

While I still want to bring an engineering angle and discuss feedback loops and data storage, retrieval and matching processes, I decided to take a different approach in this article and tell a story instead of drawing diagrams and discussing how could certain traits like group identification or differentiation come about through evolution! Let me start by introducing you to my three key actors in the story — Maven, Connector and Salesman.

Nature vs. nurture – set 4

Goal: describe the Status organ

In this set I’d like to discuss the following question: “If the Social organ makes us more alike, how come we’re still so different?” After all, I personally suggested that even identical twins turn out to be very different people with distinct characteristics and desires — see the introduction about Laleh and Ladan in set 1.

When discussing the Social organ in set 3 I didn’t mention one intriguing side-effect to our behavior caused by the drive to conform to the groups norms and customs. That is the drive to be different from people belonging to other groups. Not only that, but to often feel certain level of repulse for the behavior of those people or even get downright competitive, or worse, aggressive towards them — with the Vancouver 2010 Olympics behind us one just has to think of the sport fans supporting different teams, though other examples are abundant around us, including religious, racial, gender and similar intolerance.

I mentioned that symbols play a powerful role in the group identification, but our own behavior is the ultimate signaling to the other members of our group that we belong to or identify with the same group. The side-effect of using the behavior as a signal for group identification is that for it to be successful as a group passport, it needs to be distinctive enough so that members of other groups don’t mistake it as a passport for another group. Therefore, the behavior between any two different groups — when exposed to each other through e.g. shared social interactions — enters some kind of arms race that ultimately leads to group differentiation, causing each group to adopt behavioral norms that are very different from the other group — even if the groups are artificially created using a superficial criteria like choosing different names as in the famous Robbers Cave Experiment.

Nature vs. nurture – set 3

Goal: describe the Social organ

There is no other way to start describing the parts of the brain shaping our social behavior than to admit in the outset that it is probably among the most complex structures our brain possesses! If you think our eye with the accompanying brain organs responsible for our vision are a masterpiece of engineering think again — vision has been “invented” and “re-invented” in many branches of the tree of life and is almost ubiquitous among most animals. The “social” (or “group”) function, on the other hand, is possessed by only a limited number of species – with social insects like termites, beehives and alike being rather more like single super-organisms instead of groups of unique individuals working in a group. Not only that, the social behavior of humans is very distinct from most other species that expose it — we don’t group only by kin, sex, tribe born into and similar, we also do so by totally abstract attributes like being Star Trek aficionados or believing in different gods!

Kin selection and group selection theories aside, the ability of distinct individuals from particular species like ours to co-operate together with other distinct individuals from the same species is pretty amazing. The most amazing part, in my opinion, is that this ability is made most difficult in our species by our super-sensitive Relationship organ that can pick-out even the smallest differences between two individuals and use them to identify those individuals as unique persons. Though this makes the choice of people to socialize with daunting, our Social organ is happily (and often without conscious thought) choosing only certain individuals by using some (suspicious, if you ask the parents of teenage kids) criteria and drives us to prefer hanging out with them, while avoiding others not selected by the same criteria.

Nature vs. nurture – set 2

Goal: describe the Relationship organ

A general stereotype about identical (monozygotic) twins is that they are clones. They act alike, look-alike, and are expected to be “identical.” After all, they share 100% of their genes, don’t they? Yes, they do and this is clearly visible to anyone who have spent time with them — telling them apart can be quite challenging!

Well, luckily evolution selected for a set of modules in our brain that are up to the task! These modules are involved in that box in the middle of my system diagram at the end of my earlier article — the Relationship organ — but before discussing how, let me stay focused on the problem of telling identical twins apart for now.

I would bet that the most common question parents of identical twins get is “How do you tell them apart?” Somehow they do and most would just say “I can’t explain, I just do!” The majority of parents do not go out of their way to make this easier by e.g. writing the kids’ names on their forehead with a permanent marker — they actually make the task harder by using matching clothes, giving them matching hair style, etc.