When Identities Matter

Also published in Columbia University’s ICCCR blog.

A great deal of our most difficult conflicts appear to be identity-based: Israeli vs. Palestinian, Democrat vs. Republican, Christian vs. Muslim, and so on. Identities are pitted against one another in a win-lose fashion. The intransigent nature of so-called identity conflict has understandably lead some to conclude that we must transcend our concerns over identity in order to resolve the deep conflicts that plague our societies. Yet research on identity and conflict resolution suggests that it’s premature to toss the baby out with the dirty bathwater.

In an earlier post I addressed the importance of complexifying identity in order to foster tolerance for others. However, what about the relationship between identity and pro-social behavior? Addressing this question, Mark Levine conducted a creative experiment examining the association between identities and helping behaviors in emergency situations.

Levine and his team had British Football fans recruited to be in the study. Specifically Manchester United (MU) fans (all male) were selected from a larger sample of football fans. Each was given a questionnaire regarding how much and in what ways they liked their favorite team. They were also required, in each question, to write down the name of their favorite team.

After filling out the questions and having their identity as MU fans activated, the subjects were asked to go to another building on campus to do the 2^nd part of the study.

On the way a student (a confederate), would run by and pretend to fall and hurt his ankle. Three research assistants were hiding in the bushes (like Good graduate students!) and observing what was happening. The runner was wearing either Manchester United (in-group member), plain white (no visible social category) or Liverpool T-shirt (rival out-group member) jerseys.  What were the helping rates?

Manchester United T-Shirt: 12/13

Plain T-Shirts: 4/12

Liverpool: 3/10

Incredibly, after the subject’s identity as MU fan was primed, he/she was far more likely to help out a person within their own in-group than otherwise. This is a depressing finding.  However, it should be pointed out that although the study clearly demonstrated effects of in-group favoritism, social category information did not produce out-group derogation.  In other words, subjects were not less likely to help those wearing the Liverpool shirt as those with a plain white top (an outcome that is somewhat surprising given the intense rivalry between MU and Liverpool fans).

Next, Levine conducted a second study with the same methods, but subjects were primed to activate their identity as football fans, not specifically MU fans. What were the helping rates?

Manchester U T-shirts: 8/10

Plain: 2/9

Liverpool: 7/10

The findings from the study suggest that helping behavior is more likely when we perceive the recipient belonging to our in-group. This is all the more so when a certain identity is activated and made salient.  Fortunately, as the second study shows, most people have enough layers of complexity to their own identity that their in-group can be enlarged to include a greater number of people.

As conflict resolution practitioners we need to recognize that different levels of identity can be activated in different circumstances. For identity, like much of life, is fluid and dynamic.

  

Nominate Orphaned Land to 2013 Nobel Peace Prize

Here is my petition to nominate the Israeli metal band Orphaned Land to the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. Orphaned Land has managed to create a reality of coexistence in the region that has escaped politicians and peacemakers alike. This petition is just step one in the process of nominating this band. It’s goal is to generate support and buzz. If you haven’t already signed it, please do and share with your online community. Let’s make history.     

Israel, Iran and the Cuban Missile Crises.

Over at Al Jazeera, Trita Parsi and I explore both the limitations and potential of using the Cuban Missile Crises as an analogy to the current situation between Israel and Iran.

“Watching the conflict between Iran and Israel escalate, it’s hard not to draw analogies and lessons from history. Indeed, Netanyahu’s thinking in this regard is very much anchored in the past: “The year is 1938 and Iran is Germany”, time and again he has warned. Such analogs provide leaders with a quick and handy “user manual”: a way to sell a desired policy path and provide a platform for action.

Yet as mental shortcuts, analogs could easily lead to unwanted outcomes. Crucial decisions, like going to war, could be based on paying attention to the wrong lessons, or making a false comparison between two different situations. Indeed, it is neither 1938 (Iran is far from having a bomb or a delivery system) nor is Iran Nazi Germany (Iran’s military budget is fraction of that of Israel and the US). Claiming so, however, leaves no room for any response save military force.

Recently, another historical episode, the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been gaining traction. Just as the US, the analogy goes, faced the intolerable choice of either attacking Cuba or allowing Soviet nuclear weapons in its own backyard, so too Israel/US must decide between attacking Iran or allowing it to become nuclear.”

To read the rest, click here.

An Illness Within.

My latest in Haaretz. A look at the importance of language and metaphors in the recent anti-immigrant rhetoric in Israel. Sometimes (if I may paraphrase Nietzsche), one needs to opine with a hammer.

On the day that the first, and highly publicized “repatriation” of South Sudanese migrants begins, we need to look again at the rhetoric employed by Israeli politicians and broadcasters towards those seeking refuge and a better life in Israel.

The incitements that lead to the anti-immigrant riot of March 23 by Israeli politicians Miri Regev, Danny Danon, and Michael Ben-Ari have rightly shocked people of good conscience. Many have asked how, after all, can politicians representing the state of Israel call people living in its midst a “cancer in our body” and a “national plague”? However, a poll taken shortly after the incident (by the Israel Democracy Institute) has shown that 53 percent of Israelis identify with those statements and 33 percent of Jews (along with 23 percent of Arabs) supported the acts of violence against African immigrants.

More recently, media personality and Army Radio talk-show host Avri Gilad said the migrants who enter Israel are a threat by virtue of being Muslims; which according to him is “the most terrible disease raging around the world.” He further explained that even though many of them are moderate, they carry a “virus” that can “explode” at any moment.

To understand the seriousness of Regev, Danon and Gilad’s statements we only have to mine history for the way in which Jews and others have been on the wrong end of similar pronouncements. Almost every genocide in recorded history has been preceded by the instrumental use of language to dehumanize and demonize a particular population – not least the Holocaust, but also Rwanda and Cambodia at the time of the Khmer Rouge. In other words, language – particularly the use of metaphors – matters.

All Together Now

For a long time scholars have speculated that coordinated activities between individuals – dancing, singing, walking, and exercising – increases both cooperation and a sense of group cohesion. As early as 1915, sociologist Emile Durkheim spoke of “collective effervescence”, a type of ecstatic energy that is produced by group rituals. Similarly, the historian William McNeill (1995), reflecting on his own military experience during WWII, wrote about the bonding effects that synchronous movement had on his unit:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective rituals.

More recently, the synchronicity thesis has been given empirical support from Stanford University psychologists Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath. In their study, consisting of three experiments, they demonstrated that synchronous activity actually causes people to cooperate and increases group attachment.

Can Heavy Metal Save the World?

My latest on the way in which Orphaned Land, Israel’s biggest heavy metal band, is transforming relations between Muslims and Jews in the MENA.

Sometimes change happens in the most unlikely ways, fostered by the most unlikely of people. In the last few years, while Israel’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim world has drastically deteriorated, an Israeli heavy metal band has been uniting thousands of Jews and Muslims across the Middle East.

Originally published in Common Ground News, a longer version of this piece also appears in The Jerusalem Post.

When Doves Cry

It is said that wars begin in the minds of men. Considering the people charged with running Israel and Iran today, this is indeed a frightening prospect. But it’s also a chilling insight into the workings of the human mind in general. Why? Because our minds are filled with biases – unconscious and systematic errors of judgment – that make war with Iran an increasing possibility. We are, as psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman argues, hardwired to find hawkish arguments more convincing than dovish ones.

Kahneman’s lecture was given in 2006 (the english begins 1:48), but the implication for the current and escalating conflict between Israel and Iran are clear. Below I have selected a number of cognitive biases (not all mentioned by Kahneman) that I believe are influencing the recent bellicose rhetoric emanating from Jerusalem and Tehran. For the sake of familiarity I will concentrate on the Israeli hawkish narrative (you can read a recent example here).