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Dissonance and Out-Groups

A class assignment for a forum post:

Story telling is an invaluable laboratory for learning about ourselves and others. Which of the stories and experiments cited by the authors did you find particularly meaningful? Can you share stories from your personal histories that we would also find informative?

I wrote my essay on this point, which begins around page 55. The concept of prejudice and of reinforcing my own ego through contrast with an outside group is one I've considered important for years.

In my mind, the process is something like this: the creation of a Them creates an Us by default. And an Us necessitates the existence of an I, thereby validating and reinforcing my ego. I enjoyed reading the perspective in Mistakes Were Made because it suggested some further detail about this. In my observation, much of our thinking either reinforces our sense of self, or threatens it. The concept of cognitive dissonance places a label on this thought for me and the explanations help me explore it further.

Travis & Aronson state that "stereotypes flatten out differences within the categories we are looking at and exaggerate the differences between categories" (p. 57). This is an awesome clue to the manipulations of mental functioning. I think it should be pretty obvious that I am not dealing with reality when I begin to group any set of individuals based not on the totality of each, but rather on only those characteristics I consider significant.

On pages 63-64, we read of an experiment where electric shocks were administered to students fitting the parameters of one group by those fitting the parameters of another. I liked this story because it illustrated to me just how superficial the distinctions are. The authors go on to expand upon the list of groups that have responded in similar ways, including those divided by gender, language, sexual preference and ethnicity. From personal experience, I might add sports team affiliation, religion, income level, political affiliation and computer manufacturer. My personal conclusion regarding this phenomenon is that it isn't about the actual topics involved, which are all arbitrary, but rather about the degree to which I internalize a given stance as part of my identity.

I have run into the behavior at work and amongst friends and family, too. Issues like abortion, dress codes, appropriate use of intoxication and even preferred weather seem to work just as well as any to establish in- and out-groups. Intelligent discussion or debate often takes a back seat to egotistical assertion.

The War on Terrorism is an interesting global display of Us vs. Them. In this, a terrorist is a label placed on a human being who commits a certain type of aggression. Although the terrorist may be a person responding to social or religious pressures and may be a family member and otherwise similar in many ways to me, he is labeled by his behaviors and thus fair game for out-grouping. In fact, he can now be subjected to behaviors on my part that mimic his own original transgressions, such as the killing of uninvolved parties as part of an effort to kill him!

Even more shocking is the fact that I can create new groups around him which don't even directly involve him. For instance, I can join a group that says it is not OK to accept collateral damage in pursuit of holding the terrorist accountable for past behaviors, while my friend joins a group that opposes this perspective. Although we both have far more in common than either of us do with the terrorist, we can become very heated in our defense of the two viewpoints, even to the point of doing irreparable harm to our friendship over them. And yet, rationality suggests that the issues are open to reasonable discussion and that such would require each of us opening his mind to the other's perspective. What is it that so commonly blocks such sensible behavior?

Why do I become angry over this issue but accept opponents of another without care? Is it really because one is so much more important than the other by some objective measurement? Or is it perhaps that I have made this issue over here more personal, more attached to me like some growth of my Self? Do I rage at the other group because of fundamental differences? Or because doing so reinforces my own identity? And if the latter, is my anger, my perspective, valid?

I think it is important to think about this concept because of the daily harm committed in the name of allegiance to ideas, membership and causes. And not only the interpersonal damage, but also the intrapersonal as well: whenever I limit my own identity to a concept, I've reduced the breathing reality to fit into a far smaller box than it really can. I am warping and contorting it and I have to live with the result.

D

Tavris, Carol; Aronson, Elliot. (2007). Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc.

A post from my Religious Thought in World Perspective class:

I used the word syndrome advisedly with regard to Us vs Them - the human tendency to divisiveness and depersonalization - because it refers to a cluster of behaviors and effects and that is how I see this phenomenon. In some cases, it is a simple and seemingly innocent teaching, as when a child is taught which humans belong to her family. In others, such as with religious fundamentalist activism, it can have more violent consequences. This is not a judgment on either of these scenarios, but a statement that it seems to me they represent the same drive.

Regarding your "local Hasidic Jewish community and their endless mission to separate and extricate themselves from the rest of us", I suspect it is indeed the same thing. When I identify with a given structure, physical or conceptual, I invest a bit of myself in it - it becomes a reinforcement for my existence. Thus, protecting it becomes self-defense. In my mind, again, this is the only way I can account for the desperate, sometimes homicidal fervor with which people will defend so many things from personal morality to religious systems to football teams.

It is a sad thought for me that I participate in these behaviors as well. To exclude someone, to create a Them for that excluded person to belong to, requires that I reduce him to a symbol, a nonhuman idea that I can push away. A person discovered in my living room at two in the morning becomes a "home invader", a man targeted in my rifle sights on the battlefield becomes "an enemy", a person who gossips about me is "a troublemaker", a person as seen from my jury box becomes "the accused." The people who yell at my dog are "those sons of biskets" and the people in front of me on my way to work are "Sunday drivers." The world's air is polluted by "careless self-serving corporate rapists" and the people responsible for the abused pets in that horrifying television commercial are simply "monsters."

It's easy to dehumanize someone in order to support judging, excluding and hurting her. It is more difficult to consider that there is a history of influences stretching back in time that led up to the current behavior, which is itself performed by a living human being just like me who is attempting to make sense of life. While this view doesn't invalidate the concept of personal responsibility as applied her, it does cause me to consider it more deeply in relation to my own actions. If I shoot the guy in the living room, for instance, I am not shooting some conceptual target labeled "home invader", but rather I am killing a human being because I have chosen my own safety over his.

I wonder how such a perspective affects the human ability to wage war?

D

Emptiness is Form

That line is from The Heart Sutra, and old essay on the nature of reality. It presents a paradox around how we view reality that has sparked many discussions. It describes my recent quandary at work.

Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.*

What I came up with:

1. Since entering the healthcare profession as an EMT, I've seen many people who appear to value the bureaucracy over the patient care. And I've seen a lot of tension around it. It has occurred to me (perhaps fertilized by many comments around the subject!) that many of these people started out more idealistically but then surrendered to the stresses of competing priorities - and resented that mindset.
   
   
2. Since entering Nursing, especially, I have been presented with numerous priorities that appeared to be in conflict. I have repeatedly framed them into two conflicting roles: idealistic caretaker and embittered burnout. Duality.
   
   
3. When presented with what I framed as related mistakes at work, I (my ego) regenerated the scenario of conflicting roles from memory and created anxiety around it.

Most of that is pretty obvious, I'd imagine. However, it is the nature of such anxiety structures that they are more obvious from the outside than from in here! I knew my intuitive mind would sort things out given a chance to work, so I slept on it.

The roles described above, and the conflict around them, do not exist, of course. I know people who have mingled the various parts (that I assembled into those roles) in a way that fits neither preconception. The roles seem real to people who buy into them, but they are concepts - mental creations, illusions. Take a few selected pieces of the Whole, bind them together with emotion and rationalizing, then set them up as Real. In this, we have the recipe for human misery.

Cars are not real. They are collections of parts temporarily connecting in certain ways. We call this collection "car" and think of car as a real thing, separate and distinct from all around it. We create form out of emptiness by making a concept called car. In out own inner Reality Model, car is real.

In the same way, I collect various tasks and anxieties together, create a form called "Charge Nurse" and make it real (to me.) I nourish my aversion to this role, which causes me increased anxiety when I see myself associating with it. Charge Nurse will rob me of my compassion, my human contact with my patients! It will slowly seep into my bones and transform me into embittered burnout!

Hogwash!! As many have proven with their own approaches to it, it is possible to arrange things so the paperwork waits in line behind the people we care for. But, being human, I gloss over these examples when faced with my fear of Charge Nurse - an imaginary form which represents to my fearful ego, entrapment onto the path to embittered burnout.

Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness there is no form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness; No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; No forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects of mind; No sight-organ element, and so forth, until we come to: No mind-consciousness element; There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so forth, until we come to: there is no decay and death, no extinction of decay and death. There is no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path. There is no cognition, no attainment and non-attainment.

Therefore, Sariputra, it is because of his non-attainment that a Bodhisattva, through having relied on the Perfection of Wisdom, dwells without thought-coverings. In the absence of thought-coverings he has not been made to tremble, he has overcome what can upset, and in the end he attains to Nirvana.*

There are no embittered burnouts, there are no charge nurses, there are no paths to doom. There is only this moment and the choices I make right now. All else is emptiness: forms I have created in my head to give structure to Reality so my ego can do its work. These forms are valid tools for the ego, but I must never forget they are not real. To suffer over a mental construct is to imagine one's own way into distress. Not very smart!

Love your enemies whether they are people or illusion, for they represent priceless opportunities for growth.

D

* Thanks to http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/emptiness.html for the Heart Sutra quotes!

Emptiness

For anyone lost in the unfamiliar verbiage, the general idea of Emptiness is that reality is a constantly shifting, evolving process in which everything influences everything else. The key point is that our minds, because of the way they are formed and the way they work, sort out conceptual structures for things and label those structures. Thus, I am seen as an animated body and labeled "man" even though this barely scratches the surface of what I am.

The usefulness of this is determined by what the observer considers as significant in the observation. There is, for instance, no practical reason to consider the dead cells lysing in my body, or the new cells forming, when trying to project my next move in heavy commuting traffic.

Emptiness, in the sense used here, can be considered to refer to the utterly conceptual nature of the structure created to represent me. I exist as a constantly changing process of physiological activities, mental processes, environmental influences and so on, but your mental image of me, which is the reality you interact with, is simply a snapshot of me from your point of view.

As children, we all saw things as bright and new and fascinating. Over time, we reduce our world to these mental snapshots and see things as repeated or bland or worn-out in a familiar kind of way. Yet the realities, upon which we based out models, continue to churn and evolve and grow, this way and that, depending upon the influences exerted on them. The reality changes, the snapshot model often does not keep up. Many traditions suggest it is beneficial to relearn to see the reality through the illusory models.

In a recent discussion on the way we see certain locations as sacred or special, the significance is that we do so because we build models of them that represent them so. The question I asked was whether all reality is sacred and we are the ones which build models that make some of it seem profane or ordinary. This captured my feelings of relativity around this subject.

My own thoughts are that sacredness and other labels are relative. Not insubstantial or without worth, but simply relative to individual perspective. Someone once said he could see the whole world in a grain of rice. Everything is sacred, of "ultimate importance", as James Livingston put it in Anatomy of the Sacred.

In the book The Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman, the lead character expresses an epiphany on this subject with the revelation that "there are no ordinary moments!" I've always liked that thought...:).

There are indeed no ordinary moments, nor any ordinary objects, places or happenings. Unless, of course, we choose to filter and label them so!

D