Individual vs Group: Why do people change when they belong to a group?

Why do individuals change our personality when we are part of a group?

When an individual relates to a group of people, he/she often feels that he/she is part of a collective that exceeds him/her, and this feeling can lead him/her to detach himself/herself from his/her ethical values. this sensation can lead to detachment from their ethical values and to direct his decisions and actions in a direction that he would never have imagined as an independent individual.

This is what many historical events have shown over the centuries.

Individual and group: investigating the influence of the collective on the subject

Recently, a research carried out by Carnegie Mellon University was published, which has delved into this phenomenon of social psychology in an attempt to unravel how it is possible that people with moral values can be influenced by the collective. how it is possible that people with moral values can come to commit perverse acts. when they are protected or legitimized by a group, ignoring their ethical principles.

The researchers compared the brain functioning of people when they were unaccompanied and when they were in the company of a group of people.

The study was inspired by an experience during a soccer game that inspired one of the principal investigators. Her husband went to a soccer match wearing the cap of one of the teams playing, but had the misfortune of sitting in a seat surrounded by supporters of the opposing team, which meant that he was on the receiving end of countless insults and insults. The researcher, who was accompanying her husband on the field in the next seat, thought that if she wore the cap, the fans would moderate their insults (or even stop) out of respect for a woman.

However, that was not what ended up happening. At that moment, psychologist wondered if there might be some neurological reason for this group behavior. for this group behavior.

When enmities move from interindividual to intergroup

Essentially, there are two basic reasons why individuals change their behavior when they form (or feel they are part of) a group. These reasons are:

Essentially, there are two fundamental reasons why people behave differently when they are part of a group. when they are part of a group, these are:

1. Perception of anonymity

2. Perception of less risk of being punished for their misbehavior.

However, in this research, the intention was to inquire about ethical conflict. ethical conflict that occurs to individuals when they are part of a group, and to see to what extent the group could have an inhibiting effect on individual moral principles.

In the experiment, participants were asked to answer a number of questions that showed an insight about their ethical principles. In this way, the researchers modeled some individualized statements, such as: "I have stolen food from a common refrigerator", or "I always ask for forgiveness when I bump into someone".

Subjects were then invited to participate in a game in which they had to reflect on some of the above-mentioned statements, and while they played, their brains were scanned. In order to discriminate the neurological effects, some participants played alone, while others played as part of a group.

Results

People who played without any company and therefore reflected alone on their moral judgments, showed an increase in brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex region, which is the area where thinking about oneself operates. People identified completely with the sentences they were exposed to, so it was not surprising to find these results.

Less expected was that when the group-playing subjects reflected on these ethical statements, their response was of a lower intensity. This suggests that the level of identification of the statements was weaker to their own moral beliefs..

The diffusion of self

The scholars concluded that our judgments about ethics become more flexible when we are part of a communityThe researchers concluded that our judgments about ethics become more flexible when we are part of a community, because we feel that the group has a value that tends to attenuate our personality and beliefs. In the context of belonging to a group, we become anonymous subjects as our priorities and beliefs mutate from the "I" identity to the "we" identity.

Consequently, we tend to reconfigure our beliefs and we tend to reconfigure our beliefs and values to those of the group, which is detectable even in the context of group membership.This is detectable even at the brain level. This metamorphosis can exert a perverse effect, since if we cease to recognize and identify with certain moral values, we are more prone not to experience rejection or remorse before certain actions or attitudes, and thus become benevolent before spurious, violent or perverse behaviors.

Bibliographical references:

• Cikara, M. et. al. (2014) Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup competition predicts competitor harm. NeuroImage; 96(1): 36-43.