The Common Enemy

The need to create a common enemy is essential to any group or organization. Human beings instinctively organize their definitions of people into groups known as Us and Them. failure by leaders to create these groups clearly and persuasively, will result in people creating their own groups of US and Them- which may or may not damage the group as a whole. This is how cliques form, this is where gossip comes from. A group needs to create unity, by aiming negative attention at another group.

This sounds negative, and I can hear people howling that humans 'should' not encourage this. We are this way. Period. Full stop. To pretend that we are not this way is to encourage exactly the kind of malicious petty cliquing and factioning that such howlers would bemoan later. How we are is not in question. Whether we accept how we are does not affect how we are in the slightest. If we are to create positive results, we must accept the conditions on the ground as they are and work with them.

There is was interesting experiment in honesty that was set up by Dan Ariely. A classroom full of college students are asked to do a test for financial remuneration (they will receive money for every question answered correctly). The answer key to the test is on the student's desk and the students are supposed to mark their own tests once they finish. Obviously the set up, makes cheating incredibly easy. Now a variable is introduced. A student (who is part of the experiment) stands up less than a minute after the test starts and announces that he is done, and then asks what he should do. He is told to go hand in his test and receive his remuneration.

Now the interesting question, is how this affects the honesty of the rest of the students- who cannot help but know that this students has blatantly cheated. The interesting answer, is that the students' reactions depend upon what the cheater is wearing. If the cheater is wearing their school sweater, the students will cheat in significantly greater numbers. If the cheater is wearing a rival school's sweater, the students WILL NOT CHEAT AT ALL!

By wearing the sweater of a rival school, the cheater provoked a strong response. The students said collectively, maybe THEY cheat like that, but WE DON'T! Conversely, when the cheater wore their sweater, he gave them tacit permission to cheat as well- he was a leader and a trendsetter. The students didn't make this decision consciously, they likely weren't even aware that they were cheating more or less. But they were.

We cannot help this. We evolved as a social, troupe based- then tribal based, creature. Like wolves, we are intensely social animals. Our need to belong is nearly all consuming. We lack natural weapons like the great cats, and so if we fail to belong- we risk death alone in the wilderness.

If we fail to accept this and account for this, we will not create the results that we want to create.