No. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 122. 22. In the 1970s, in the 1970s, a psychologist named Henri Tagefell

developed something called Social Identity Theory, which basically said that when we define ourselves,

we do so in large part by asserting our loyalty to the groups to which we belong.

Tashfeld developed this theory when in his research he discovered it didn't take very

much for humans to organize themselves into groups and once they did they immediately began to act like

assholes to people who were in groups that they were not.

Tage-Fill's experiments showed that humans can enter into us versus them thinking in

seconds and they will do so over just about anything. a number of experiments and decades of research what he eventually discovered was that first of all the more

Intense a conflict is the more you think of your competitor as an outgroup member, not as an individual.

That's political scientist Lilliana Mason.

I am Lilliana Mason.

I am a political scientist in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park

and I specialize in political psychology and American political behavior.

Ah well you must be very busy then. Yeah, yeah, no, someone recently, people keep saying,

isn't this an exciting time for you?

It must be such an exciting time for you.

And someone recently used the analogy.

It's sort of like, you know know when there's an Ebola outbreak and

people ask medical doctors isn't this a really exciting time for you?

Wow, oh my God. As Mason mentioned, T Taj Fell's social identity theory posits that not only do people form groups very easily,

but once they do, once their individual identity is tied up to their group membership, they tend to see people

who aren't in those groups as lesser than in some way.

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