Individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than help an opposing group

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215633119

by sohkamyung • 4 years ago

135 176 4 years ago

syzarian10• 4 years ago

A great example of this phenomenon is the white response to desegregation in the United States. White union workers voted against their labor interests, white flight from major cities, municipalities closing down public swimming pools, disappearance of social clubs, etc. Community services were shut down in favor of the "free market" and we've seen the rise of pay as you go government services. Even obviously true notions like "it takes a village" were derided. Collectivism and the notion of "community" were greatly reduced in response to desegregation. The nation self immolated its social fabric in response to desegregation.

EDIT: In the last sentence I wrote above “nation” should have been written as “white people of the nation”.

zrail• 4 years ago

The (white people) self immolated the social fabric of the (white people) in response to desegregation.

It's important to note that Black people never had access to those things to start with. They were destroyed out of spite and moved to private clubs that could get away with not admitting Black members.

dangerlibrary3• 4 years ago

And when they managed to build them, white people burned them to the ground out of spite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

syzarian10• 4 years ago

Yes. I made an edit to my comment as a result of you pointing this out. I did not chose my words carefully in my last sentence. Thank you for pointing this out.

AnonCoward42• 4 years ago

Because the white club is one uniform group. In that case I don't even need any more details, since this is such an obvious oversimplification and frankly speaking even racist. "The white response" ...

Spivak4• 4 years ago

It really isn’t. You’re just uncomfortable with a group of people that you’re a member of did something bad that was directly related to their membership in that group and you want a carve out so you can feel separate from them. We’re talking about an era in the US where white people were literally in control of everything, nobody else could have done this. And the response was directly related to their whiteness and racism.

So sure, it was only white racists that did this, and without a doubt you wouldn’t have been one of those had you been born back then despite it being the view of the overwhelming majority at the time.

syzarian10• 4 years ago

We can talk about the “white response” to desegregation in the same way we can talk about any other historical event involving massive social change. This does not mean there is absolute uniformity. It means a pattern emerged and that by and large this is how members of said group reacted. For instance it is an undeniable fact that white flight from major cities occurred. Of course not every white person fled a city but, as we normally speak and communicate, it’s correct to say that white flight occurred.

flanked-evergl5• 4 years ago

White union workers voted against their labor interests

What were these interests, and was their intent at the time of "voting against their interests" to injure their own group, and if not what was it?

Do we have any insights into their state of mind when taking these actions, and a clear objective understanding of their actual interests, or is this just your interpretation of their actions?

tokai• 4 years ago

I'm not into the subject but this article covers race and unions in the US. Might be relevant.

https://racial-justice.aflcio.org/blog/est-aliquid-se-ipsum-...

mannykannot2• 4 years ago

Was their intent at the time of "voting against their interests" to injure their own group?

This is beside the point. From the paper:

However, real-world decision-making often entails making choices where harm is unavoidable (7, 8). Groups may have to choose between in-group losses and out-group gains, a circumstance that has not been previously studied and reveals that individuals’ decisions cannot be explained by existing theories.

Do we have any insights into their state of mind when taking these actions?

Often we do, because people generally are not all that shy in telling one another - and the media - what they think.

It is also highly improbable that a group which fought hard for union representation, or made considerable use of a public pool, suddenly decided these things were against their own interests right at the time these benefits were being extended to other people.

giraffe_lady2• 4 years ago

Yes it was in living memory and your elders who are honest about can tell you. Go ask your grandaddy I get the feeling he might have some insight.

They also wrote books, letters, and op-eds, all part of the historical record, and available if you were willing to spend a little energy on this subject.

stcroixx2• 4 years ago

As if it's unfathomable that preventing gains by groups seen to be competing with a groups interests could be an interest in and of itself.

The groups interests were not correctly understood. The progressive course when this happens would be to attempt to improve understanding of the groups interests. Alternatively, you can keep the invalid assumptions, disproved by the groups behavior, and assert the group is illogical and harming itself - at this point you're no longer reflecting on reality.

trs8080• 4 years ago

"Millions of white working-class and middle-class Americans vote against their own economic interest by defending policies that hurt them while profiting the rich, including the 1% wealthiest Americans. Several factors help explain this peculiar dimension of U.S. politics: myopia fostered by anti-intellectualism; the relationship between religious fundamentalism and free-market fundamentalism; blind faith in the American Dream; and how racism hinders economic solidarity."

- https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/...

Another: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0023656920089018...

Unfortunately don't have free links but if you're able to read these, they'll answer your questions.

blueflow3• 4 years ago

Implied in this: White and black people are distinct, different groups. Good luck approaching these issues with that preconception.

ambicapter• 4 years ago

Are you saying that in the US during the Civil Rights era, they weren't?

scottLobster2• 4 years ago

Uh, they quite literally were under the law back when segregation existed. Yes there were rich black people and white people who marched with MLK. Zoom out to a population level however and they were clearly distinct groups and treated as such.

Good luck understanding the world while refusing to apply historical perceptions to historical issues.

runsWphotons• 4 years ago

lol

mikewarot• 4 years ago

A great example of this phenomenon is the white response to

In picking an example, you're forced to be reductive. Rather than considering the content of the character, all the comments are focused on the color of its skin.

We could be having a productive conversation about how working class run societies and government (The basic core of the US experiment in self rule) were divided and conquered by the Owner class.

But instead, we'd rather pick apart the example. This is far, far too common here on HN. It leads to a reduction of the value of HN as a whole.

PS: What's the HN shorthand to name syzarian's comment that I'm replying to?

syzarian10• 4 years ago

Indeed. And the way the ruling class divided the working class in the U.S. was by using race as the talking point instead of class. I do maintain though that this was especially easy to do because with desegregation white working class Americans had a target to blame that wasn’t the ruling class.

x86_64Ubuntu4• 4 years ago

Class reductionism doesn't provide a concrete example of "harming their own group rather than help the Other" as much as the changes the U.S went under in response to the end of Jim Crow.

wittycardio• 4 years ago

You're offended that someone is using white as a descriptor ?

dangerlibrary3• 4 years ago

Heather McGhee's "The Sum of Us" talks about this in detail - she refers to it as "drained pool politics." It's a great read.

https://www.powells.com/book/the-sum-of-us-9780525509561

refurb2• 4 years ago

White flight was more about racial unrest and riots.

I don’t exactly blame people for leaving. You can support civil rights and not want to live in a neighborhood where quality of life is getting worse.

UI_at_80x24• 4 years ago

I don’t exactly blame people for leaving. You can support civil rights and not want to live in a neighborhood where quality of life is getting worse.

The quality of life declined BECAUSE the majority of tax-payers left causing city services to fail.

syzarian10• 4 years ago

White flight became inevitable with forced integration of schools.

dkjaudyeqooe• 4 years ago

This is evident in America where you'll find some people take a position against free or subsidised healthcare and other social support, because some undeserving person (who is not in their group) might get it.

martin_a4• 4 years ago

I don't think this is limited to America or healthcare.

We're seeing these effects in corporate life, too: A charging station for EVs has been put up for the company and client EVs. I'm the first employee to have received "free access" to the charger as a benefit instead of more money. (to be fair: I'm the only one with a pure EV until now, too).

Now people are voting against putting up more chargers and enabling employees to charge for a smaller fee than normal, because "there's no normal gas pump being installed".

Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations. But before somebody with another car gets "something nice", people prefer getting nothing at all now.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

But this isn't so much a foot shoot. The gas-guzzling employees are voting (why is there voting anyway?) for "I get nothing, you get nothing" over "I get nothing, you get something" - perhaps arguing that the cost of the something has to come from somewhere.

The described action would be more like "remove all parking lots instead of letting martin_a charge his car in a space" - which would harm the guzzlers to own the EVs.

thesuitonym• 4 years ago

It's not limited to the US or healthcare, but it is extremely evident there. Look at how many politicians get elected solely on the platform of "We won't help a certain group," regardless of who that hurts.

jcampbell1• 4 years ago

When you account for opportunity costs, i.e. no such thing as a free lunch, then your opponents' position is rational. People see installing chargers as depleting the pool of funds for employee benefits for which they receive no benefit.

Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations

Money doesn't grow on trees.

brodouevencode6• 4 years ago

Or we see the problems in other countries that have such systems and think we can provide better solutions. That's not to say the current system is the best, but that's not what many want either.

Sharlin3• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure most Americans don't "see" anything outside the US. Even on Hacker News you see the phenomenon where people tend to dismiss solutions popular and proven to work everywhere else as somehow hypothetical and untested, or at least immediately confabulate some random knee-jerk reason why "it could never work in the US". American exceptionalism is truly a force to be reckoned with.

machina_ex_deus2• 4 years ago

You can have good socialistic healthcare, and welfare country. You can also have open borders. You can't have both.

It's basic stability condition. People will flow to the socialistic welfare or against it, and it's not going to stop until forces equalize, a.k.a it's just as good staying in the worst country as it is moving to the better welfare one. Since people moving tends to harm the other country the immigration is from, it should bring both down.

Only one side has a stable condition. It's a matter of common sense at this point. If one side advocated for closed borders with subsidized healthcare, that's fair enough and maybe even better choice.

P.S. socialized healthcare works well in Israel for example.

jameshart3• 4 years ago

This is what’s called a ‘false dichotomy’

‘Open borders’ is a strawman, anyway. You can have policies which promote immigration, provide legal pathways for immigrants to provide labor to the economy (including unpaid labor like raising kids and domestic elder care), and can structure social benefits in such a way that you provide a social safety net, without having to just throw the border open to all or pay out unemployment benefits to anyone who shows up out of work.

Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. People are willing to come to (for example) the US and work illegally without legal access to any social safety net. But allowing people to live under those conditions is both a moral failing (we should not be comfortable relying on the labor of people who face destitution if they lose their job) and a societal risk (people with no safety net are more likely to end up engaged in criminal activity that harms society).

So why not create a more structured arrangement? Create paths to legal immigration, with access to defined, limited, temporary benefits, and with a pathway that over time - as an immigrant’s stake in the country increases - converges towards the full security afforded to citizens.

tomstokes2• 4 years ago

because some undeserving person (who is not in their group) might get it.

Surely someone, somewhere feels like this, but it’s more often a strawman argument used to make opposing arguments more easily dismissible. The discussions I have with people offline aren’t interested in these types of dismissals. I know many people who genuinely want better healthcare, cheaper education, and stronger social safety nets but who disagree with the specifics of proposals. Like most things in politics, if an argument reduces the other side to an easily-dismissible evil, it’s probably not an accurate representation of the counterarguments.

From real world anecdotes, the concern about things like student loan forgiveness (as the most recent example of an expensive social program being debated) are more about the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures. People are nervous about the amount of government spending and how it’s being distributed semi-randomly. This goes back to the rampant COVID loans to businesses, the stimulus programs that far overshot their target, and now proposals to give certain households with up to $250K income a free $10K.

People understand that these things do matter in a society where we’re all bidding for a limited supply of homes and such. It’s nice to imagine someone having a reduced debt load, but people still think about where that money comes from and how the uneven distribution of that money gives some people (excluding those who paid their loans off early) a financial leg up in places like the competitive housing market.

It’s all connected. The money must come from somewhere, and we’re all operating within the same markets. It’s disingenuous to pretend that there are no consequences for these programs, which IMO is where politicians fall far short of structuring them and pitching them to a wider audience.

judge2020• 4 years ago

But what are the consequences? People has similar revelation when the national debt was about to surpass GDP, and yet no economy-ending consequences rose from that. In reality nobody really knows how debt works on a global scale, and those that try to understand it seem to do a fair job at keeping the economy afloat when they join FRB or the multinational conglomerates that have a stake in the US remaining economically stable.

zimpenfish2• 4 years ago

the concern about things like student loan forgiveness [...] the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures.

SLF is a one-off cost (of between $400Bi and 1Ti depending on which plan you subscribe to) though. It's not like, say, the DOD which is currently burning $800Bi a year and rising - I would venture that the people happy to shoot down SLF are equally happy to keep that budget going up.

People are nervous about the amount of government spending

...going to people they deem undeserving. They're perfectly happy with the amount spend on the DOD, DHS, etc.

ss1082• 4 years ago

We must live in alternate realities; I am old enough to remember polls from 2016-2018 that showed that rural conservative voters liked the Affordable Care Act and its provisions when it was labeled as such, and hated it when it was labeled as Obamacare.

I have also mostly heard "fairness"-based arguments against student debt relief.

ilyt4• 4 years ago

They seem to be way less opposed for government to bail out corporations from same tax money tho.

And I definitely knew many people that oppose to tax break or something for someone that's not in their group all while they enjoy some other tax break without problem and excuse that their one is fine.

winReInstall• 4 years ago

The printing press, carried by atlas who needs the dollar?

kayodelycaon3• 4 years ago

Surely someone, somewhere feels like this

That would be my family when I was growing up. A lot of their beliefs are centered people should work for a living. If someone can't work, they are lazy and working people shouldn't have to pay to support them.

My parents have since moderated their stance on this but my dad still believes this is the way things should be. :(

I've moved away from home and very much do not share their view and don't associate with people like this. I still see this belief often enough to believe it's pretty dang common in the midwest among the lower middle class.

Edit:

I should note, everyone I've talked to do make exceptions for a few people they know.

Most of them are otherwise good, kind people. They abhor the idea of anyone else getting something they haven’t earned.

oifjsidjf• 4 years ago

"Free healthcare" lmao.

Who do you think pays for it? TAXPAYERS! It's not free!

And usually in those kind of "free healthcare" systems the private clinics get looked down upon or are even restricted/blocked via laws in order to "preserve the 'free' healthcare system".

Thus the people have even less choice. There are many countries with this kind of a "free healthcare" system.

I'm living in one of them.

Want to go to a specialist? Sorry bro, that's gonna be 6 months of waiting time...

So anyone who is not piss poor will go into a private clinic.

SamoyedFurFluff3• 4 years ago

I wanna go to a specialist in the United States and it’s still 6 mo waiting time…

waboremo• 4 years ago

Why did you take such huge offense to the phrase free healthcare when they explicitly mention subsidized a second later?

the_gipsy• 4 years ago

You know that "free healthcare" does not mean it magically costs nothing, and you know that others wouldn't believe that.

swfsql• 4 years ago

The same can be said from the opposite side of the argument.

People will be on the side of free or subsidised healthcare and other social support regardless of their unpayable public debt rising even further and that it eventually may crush individuals from society that are perhaps not even born yet.

The "opponent" in this case is the wrong person who has a different political view.

x86_64Ubuntu4• 4 years ago

Reagan's Welfare Queen is a prime example of how government support systems were not only dismantled, but met with disdain because of the feeling that they were helping undeserving people.

josephcsible4• 4 years ago

This is a straw man. The actual viewpoint is "I don't want more of my hard-earned money to be taken from me via higher taxes and then wasted".

bell-cot• 4 years ago

That I have seen, this behavior is smaller-scale than "group". Given a (metaphorical) chance to shoot themselves in the foot, in order get somebody they don't like shot in both feet - a whole lotta people will instinctively go for it.

mhb• 4 years ago

Could be, but that has nothing to do with this study.

DougN7• 4 years ago

In my opinion we’re seeing exactly this with the US Senate race in Georgia right now.

brodouevencode6• 4 years ago

What you're seeing in Georgia is a terrible candidate put up against someone who if not for outside influence would not have been there to start.

tomrod3• 4 years ago

I'm having trouble parsing your sentence.

For others not in the US, the state of Georgia has a legislature runoff face where a Texan is running against a Georgian. The Texan appears to have failed to establish residency (does not actively live in the state they are campaigning to represent) and, being a popular sports figure, has been a source of a lot of discussion around mental health and traumatic brain injury in politicians due to the candidate's many gaffes and apparent hypocrisy (paying for an abortion while claiming to want to support a general ban). The other, the incumbent and a local church pastor, comes from the nominally left-wing party and thus is the target of right-wing propaganda despite representing a lot of the values the median right-wing voter likes. Sports-in-politics are weird and no one is happy from it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ceejayoz• 4 years ago

Democrats would argue Walker is a terrible candidate boosted by outside influence. Republicans would argue Warnock is a terrible candidate boosted by outside influence. Not sure I've seen many argue a 50/50 split.

valeg• 4 years ago

yeah, "beat your friends, so your enemies will be scared of you" proverb

datavirtue• 4 years ago

That's going on my wall at work.

paradoxyl• 4 years ago

Explains the globalist-technocrat Western leader trash response to the Multipolar world. Hate on China and Russia, abuse your own citizens.

TOMDM• 4 years ago

Yeah man anyone upset with Russia at the moment are just haters

emmelaich• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that the harm to the in-group is actually known to be a harm. It could be a sincere but erroneous belief that (what we perceive as harm) is not perceived as a net harm by that group.

mindv0rtex• 4 years ago

Explains Putin's approach to ruling over Russia rather well.

ilyt4• 4 years ago

That's a deeper problem. Rule by fear and you will be surrounded by yes-men that only say the good stuff. Allow corruption and everyone, including your closest, will indulge as it becomes a way of life, and at worst, ingrained in culture (from my experience post-socialist Poland also had a lot of that sentiment that you have to pay up if you want to get things actually done, as it was rampant before).

Do both and you have what is happening, "surprise" after "surprise" when what you thought you had in equipment turns out to be actually bricks in someone's villa.

mcdonje• 4 years ago

Interesting study with relevant findings. I'd like to see it replicated in Asian and African countries to see how much of it is universal vs cultural. If it turns out to not be universal, that would raise more questions to study.

brodouevencode6• 4 years ago

The key word here is "opposing", not "another", "separate", or "sovereign". Meaning their values are at odds with yours.

So the response should be "duh".

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

It's even more of a "duh" when you remember that for most of our species history, "opposing" meant "trying to kill you". Denying that people power is an obvious choice.

The real problem is how the public is directed into defining "opposition" nowadays.

flanked-evergl5• 4 years ago

An actual great example of this is sanctions, and EU, at detriment to their themselves economically, is cutting their ties with Russia.

booleandilemma• 4 years ago

Is that true for student loans? I don't have the numbers, but I'd bet the group of people who have paid off their loans are against bailing out the group who hasn't.

ballenf• 4 years ago

The article's conclusions depend entirely on the definition of harm and seems to ignore the particular group's perception of it.

For example one citation used in support of the conclusion is conservative's opposition to getting the COVID vaccine. That group perceived harm in getting the vaccine (whether right or wrong). The article claims the group opposed the vaccine merely as a reaction to the vaccine push from outside the group.

So maybe the conclusion would be stronger if stated as "groups have a hard time making rational calculations of harm when facing a perceived threat from an outside group".

Doesn't really change it too much, but it seems quite unsupported in its assumption that these groups actually perceived themselves to be harming themselves.

rapht• 4 years ago

Exactly. Also related is the definition of "net negative outcome": is that relative to a prior situation (i.e. could be a very good situation becoming a little less good) or to a value framework common to both groups allowing for an absolute interpretation?

nasir• 4 years ago

One international example of this is when there was the nuclear negotiations going on between Iran and the other superpowers a few years ago. While the negotiating team was working hard to come to a compromise and finalise the deal, there was severe lobbying and backstabbing going on within the country to undermine those efforts. This went as far as discrediting the negotiators and even making up criminal cases for them even though they were instructed by the top authorities to finalised the deal.

lettuce0• 4 years ago

Makes sense. The impact to the in-group of helping the opposing group is more difficult for them to control or predict over harming one of their own. Fear of the unknown.

Rickasaurus• 4 years ago

It seems to me if they modeled it as an infinite series of games instead of a single game they might find it's about denying your opponents resources for the next round. You also should consider things proportionally in terms of the resources of each group, one may be willing to take a bigger total loss that is smaller proportionally to disarm another group.

(I admit I only read through the abstract though)

ohCh6zos• 4 years ago

That was my thought. If I thought my opponent could only survive a few turns I might be willing to take losses to prevent them from surviving more turns.

nerdponx2• 4 years ago

This is the same strategy as a company operating at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.

I think a lot of people will be tempted to say "that's obvious, you dummy!" but that's what good social science research does: it gives us a systematic explanation and principles of understanding for how people behave in groups.

FeepingCreature• 4 years ago

Not having read the article, the headline makes sense to me. Harming your ingroup is easier to predict. Who knows what advantage helping the outgroup will give it?

vcryan• 4 years ago

On an individual level, this is a caution to not identify or over-identify with a particular group because it clouds judgement.

x86_64Ubuntu4• 4 years ago

In much of the real world, you don't get a chance to choose identifying/over-identifying with a particular group. People will do it for you.

smeej• 4 years ago

If you see aiding the other group as a moral evil, of course you'd rather incur costs yourself or to your group rather than participate, even in a small way, in supporting something you believe to be evil.

I don't want to distract from the generic point with a specific example, but it's easy for me to think of causes I would spend 10x of my own or my group's resources to prevent that other cause from receiving a benefit.

V__• 4 years ago

A lot of comments look at this from a political/party point of view, which is understandable. But could this also be looked at from a group survival point of view?

Let's look at Ukraine right now. In the short-term a deal with Russia might ease the pain of Ukrainians which are troubled by the harsh winter, but by "harming" themselves right now, they might survive better in the long run?

Edit: I didn't want to start a political discussion about the war, just ask whether this behaviour might be evolutionary beneficially from a group survival point of view. Since war has been part of human history.

umvi2• 4 years ago

Like settling with a patent troll vs. fighting an expensive and lengthy legal battle. Sometimes people "self harm" on principle...

rank06• 4 years ago

That one is a tough calculation imo. My worthless opinion is that Ukraine and the west should’ve negotiated right at the beginning by guaranteeing no NATO membership. Even if Ukraine wins in the end, the country has become a smoldering pile of rubble.

There was even such a deal on the table in the early stages that the west pretty much killed…

At this point though idk what diplomatic solution exists. Deescalation should be everyone’s #1 goal atm.

ilyt4• 4 years ago

There is no honest negotiation with Russia. They have proven it over and over again.

Their assumption was that world would just let them do what they want as they did with Crimea, and that previous mistake is direct reason for current situation.

nerdponx2• 4 years ago

Another commenter made a similar suggestion, that this outcome makes sense when analyzed in a game theory framework where participants play the game repeatedly and seek to maximize their long-run expected value: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33830734

This "repeated games" scenario is very common in social science and economics.

aritmo• 4 years ago

It took me some time to understand the title.

Better summary: Individuals that are dissatisfied with their own group, prefer to harm it directly than join some other opposing group.

LaundroMat• 4 years ago

This reminds me of a study a teacher once referred to. MBA students were asked to choose between two strategies. These strategies basically came down to either hurt the competition but hurt themselves in the process too or hurt no-one and generate more profits for their own company.

Most students chose to hurt the competition and inflict damage to themselves.

leculette• 4 years ago

relative utility is a vice

gumby• 4 years ago

I used to think that "zero sum" thinking was the worst possible, but now I see that some people really have a "negative sum" mentality. Crikey!

pontifier• 4 years ago

Explains a lot of counterintuitive behavior that just defies all of my prior attempts to understand.

WTF is wrong with people.

Individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than help an opposing group

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