Leading or lagging

Do you lead the band or fall in step behind?

SOMEONE said: “The talented guys play guitar and drums. The crappy guitar player winds up on bass.”

As a guy who’s learning how to play bass guitar, this stung a little bit. I immediately fired up a video of Paul McCartney playing Silly Love Songs live. He is not a crappy guitar player.

It doesn’t matter that regardless, I’m still a crappy guitar player (bass or otherwise). The point is, the bassist for the greatest rock band of all time is pretty talented, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.

If you think about it, this doesn’t really make sense. But it’s a demonstration of something called “ingroup favouritism” – and everybody’s guilty of it at some point.

The formal study of how people respond to being part of an ingroup (i.e. they identify as belonging “in” a group) began decades ago. In a seminal experiment by Henri Tajfel, some students were made to take a test and then assigned them to two different groups. What they weren’t told was that they were in fact assigned at random.

They were then informed they would decide how much money people in the experiment would get. They had to choose from a list, each choice giving one amount to one random person, and another amount to another random person.

What the results showed was that when the two random people were from the same group, the subjects would try to be fair and give them the same amount each. But if one was from their group and the other from the other, they would give those in their group much more.

Thus the idea of “ingroup favouritism” was born. This is a root of explanation of why people voted for Trump, why “antivaxxers” are so hard to turn, and why my friend, the Liverpool fan, could never bring himself to openly criticise Luis Suarez’s dietary preference for human shoulders and ears.

The bias is remarkable in its breadth and scope. People rate their ingroups as having more positive characteristics and remember more positive than negative information about ingroups. They are also more critical of outgroup members than ingroup members.

Finally, after all this, people also believe their own ingroups are less prejudiced than outgroups. So, not only is your group better than others, it is also fairer!

I think every politician deep down realises that you need a good “wedge issue” to get voters to your “ingroup”.

Over the last five years, there have several examples. They may have not started as political issues, but they have gradually grown to fit that purpose. The ones that come most to mind are religion, and corruption (those fighting corruption against those allowing it to happen).

These are important issues that should be discussed and debated. But how much of it is parroting the party line, and how much is original thought?

Those who have read this column in 2012 know that I advocate voting for the person and not the party. My argument is that a good MP will work for everyone whatever their affiliation. And you need to know when to toe the party line, and when to make an exception.

So a candidate who is “wholehearted loyal” to his party may be more likely to serve the bias of his party. This isn’t to say that they truly and wholeheartedly believe in it, but they do so unaware of their deep-rooted bias.

I say, look for candidates who are less susceptible to this phenomenon.

One indicator is that his sense of self-esteem is strongly tied up with the group’s. There is something called the Collective Self-Esteem Scale which uses statements like “I am a worthy member of the groups I belong to” and “Others respect the groups I belong to” to measure how conflated the sense of the group is with self-identity. Those that score highly on this scale are more likely to show ingroup favouritism.

Another indicator is one’s preference for Authoritarinism: A preference for simple, traditional values at the expense of complex, novel ones. This feeds easily into the thinking “my group good, other groups bad”.

Finally, a preference to connect with others different from you and understand them obviously means they are less likely to show ingroup favouritism.

So, consider candidates whose sense of self comes not from the party they represent but their own ideas. Those who understand nuance and have shown they are willing to reach across the aisle to find solutions.

The down side is that candidates like these are probably divisive within their own party. Another study showed that people are more attracted to individuals who demonstrate strong ingroup favouritism over more egalitarian sentiments.

So the truth is that voters like candidates who identify strongly with their party values. However, the right candidate you want is somebody who can and will speak their own mind and lead his party in the right direction, rather than lag and follow in its wake.

Ironically, the bass player in a band is probably the one guy who needs to always toe the line. He must “lock-in” with the drummer and not overshadow the singer or the lead guitar. But a really good bass player knows that they can use their individuality to be the core of the band and make everybody else around them look good.

Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.