May we suggest one more resolution for this New Year? Take your groups seriously!
Issue 41: Why groups are good for you and can help you achieve your goals; the myth of tribalism; and here's to a socially vibrant 2022!
Turning the calendar from one year to the next provokes reflection—on what we’ve done and left undone over the past twelve months, and on what the next dozen may hold in store. Twenty twenty-two is still mostly a blank page, a chance to write a new chapter in our lives. Many of us compile ambitious lists of resolutions, inventories of the ways we hope to do and be better moving forward.
Katy Milkman (the author of How to Change) and her colleagues call this “the fresh start effect”. Using internet activity as a reflecting pool for our collective psyche, they found that Google searches for diet spike immediately following “temporal landmarks”—including the new year, national holidays, and even the start of a new week. In experiments, they found that these sorts of transition points help people start to pursue new goals because they provide a “psychological disassociation” and a parting of the ways with the imperfect self of the past.
So with a fresh start in mind, what have you resolved to change in 2022? Following the festive indulgences of the holidays, new diets and exercise regimes are perennial favorites. Or perhaps you’ve pledged to read more fiction, meditate, keep a diary, drink more water, take up a new hobby, be more environmentally conscious, spend less time on social media, or floss your teeth.
To these and whatever else found itself onto your list this year, we suggest adding one more resolution: take your groups seriously!
Too often change is treated as an individual thing. But this is a mistake. As eminent architect and astute observer of human flourishing, Christopher Alexander, put it:
“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself he need only change himself… But it is a one-sided and mistaken view that the individual is self-sufficient and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings.”
As this new year gets rolling, we encourage everyone to take their groups seriously for two reasons:
groups can help us achieve our goals, and
shared identities are often good for us.
Achieving Goals Together
One of the most influential models of human behavior—known as the Theory of Planned Behavior—predicts that the chances we engage in an activity like exercise, reading more fiction, or protecting the environment is a joint function of our personal attitudes toward the behavior, our beliefs about how successfully we can achieve it, as well as social norms (what other people are thinking and doing).
When we make a New Year’s resolution, we are at least temporarily expressing a positive attitude toward our chosen course of action—articulating that this is something we want to do. On their own, however, personal attitudes can be surprisingly weak and fickle things. Much better, therefore, to augment them with social norms that push us in the same direction. Seeing other group members strive for the same goals bolsters our own inclinations and makes it more likely we pursue our resolutions with resolve.
As the two of us argue in The Power of Us, the social norms that people are most motivated to follow are the norms of valued groups (we generally want to do what our groups are doing, not what out-groups are up to). In-group norms are powerful reinforcers of our intentions because they validate our goals—buttressing our belief that we are doing the right or sensible thing. They can also keep us accountable because we care about being accepted by fellow group members. We want to belong, to feel the solidarity that comes from pursuing and achieving goals together.
So whenever you declare a new resolution, it is a good idea to think about how your good intentions can be supported (or undermined) by groups and their norms. Perhaps making a new resolution is an opportunity to start a new group in pursuit of your shared goal. You might form a running group with friends or begin a book club with coworkers, for example. Or maybe there is an existing group to join that would help provide valuable psychic (not to mention practical) backup as you take on your new challenge—a local environmental organization or a regular meditation meet-up, for instance.
Of course, there is also the possibility that one of more of the groups you already belong to possesses norms that contradict or counteract the goal you have set for yourself. If you want to reduce your alcohol consumption, for instance, you might need to avoid hanging out with your drinking buddies. It might be helpful, at least for a time, to spend a little less time in their company and more in the presence of people whose own behaviors align with your intentions.
Groups are Good for Us
Beyond providing a way to bolster our good intentions, groups are also an important source of happiness and meaning.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, researchers asked experts to identify effective and feasible strategies for improving satisfaction with one’s life. From among many options, including getting more sleep, exercising, investing in health insurance, saving money, getting rich, laughing more, having children, and acquiring a pet, the experts “advise in the first place to focus on social bonds, such as by investing in friends and family, joining a club, acting nicely, marrying, and socializ[ing] with colleagues”.
The wellness benefits of meaningful social relationships and belonging to groups extend beyond positive influences on mental health and include physical health outcomes as well. A 2015 meta-analysis found that loneliness and social isolation are associated with a roughly 30% increased chance of early death. Many studies find that more socially integrated individuals are less susceptible to illness, including experimentally manipulated exposure to respiratory viruses.
In studies on what they call “the social cure”, Jolanda Jetten, Catherine Haslam, Alex Haslam, Nyla Branscombe, and colleagues find that the more groups people belong to, the better their health outcomes tend to be. This may be especially true during life transitions, including retirement, serious illness, or loss, when possessing multiple identities provides an important resource for coping.
It is best, they argue, “not to have all of your eggs (social identities) in one basket in case misfortune strikes. It is better, research suggests, to spread your metaphorical eggs around a number of baskets (that is, to have multiple social identities) so that the loss of one still leaves you with others.”
This key insight about the benefits of a meaningful group life led sociologist Robert Putnam to observe in his book Bowling Alone that someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and belongs to no groups would be equally well advised to quit smoking or join a group. We would suggest that they should probably join a group of nonsmokers, whose social norms could help them achieve both goals at once.
But the message is clear: shared identities are good for us. So whether you already belong to many groups or to only a few, try to maintain those bonds this year and consider joining at least one new group at some point in 2022.
The Myth of Tribalism
In The Atlantic this week, we challenge the idea that the toxic group dynamics invoked when people use words like “tribalism” are far from inevitable. Indeed, we argue that tribalism is a myth.
“Members who strongly identify with a group generally conform more to its norms. But those norms vary dramatically. For every hate group, another group, such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, exists that is committed to helping others. And the more deeply members identify with the latter, the more likely they are to help people different from themselves—even at significant personal cost. Recognizing that collective norms can be either positive or negative is a key to understanding why and when tribalism occurs.”
We got to write about some of our favorite recent studies published by other social scientists in this piece, so we hope you’ll check it out!
Happy New Year!
That’s all for this week. We wish you all a happy, safe, and socially vibrant 2022!
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