COLLECTIVE EMOTIONS AND UNCLE WALTER’S TRAUMA
IN THE SUMMER OF 1933, ONLY A FEW MONTHS AFTER ADOLF HITLER became dictator of Germany, Walter Lazar happened to walk straight into a large Nazi rally in the city center of Königsberg, in what was then Prussia, an eastern province of Germany. Walter, my grandmother Jenny’s brother, was exactly the sort of liberal, cosmopolitan Jew that the Nazi regime regarded as the very embodiment of evil. Seeing the rally forming in front of his eyes, his first instinct was to flee the area as fast as humanly possible. But curiosity got the better of him. Instead of running away, he slowly worked his way into the heart of the rally. His Aryan appearance belied his Jewish ethnicity, and the people around him accepted his presence as natural.
Eventually, Hitler himself appeared on stage to deliver one of his characteristically fiery speeches, gesticulating wildly with his arms and screaming himself hoarse to whip the crowd into a frenzy. His sentences were frequently punctuated by chants of “Sieg Heil!” uttered by the thick throng, followed by total silence as the crowd eagerly awaited the Führer’s next words. At first Walter took in what was happening around him with stunned disbelief. But then a strange feeling slowly took hold of him. When the rally sang the Nazi Party anthem, Walter joined in, mumbling the words to the song. Not long after that he suddenly noticed that he was actually getting swept up in the ecstatic crowd’s powerful emotions. Along with everyone around him, he was also shouting “Sieg Heil” and applauding Hitler’s every word!
Coming to his senses, he covered his face in shame and fled to his sister’s home, not far away. My father, little Hans, Grandmother Jenny’s son, was age twelve at the time. He recalled Uncle Walter’s appearance that day for the rest of his life. Opening the front door, Hans noticed his uncle was as white as a sheet, drenched in sweat. Jenny was so alarmed that she took hold of the telephone to call a doctor, but Walter persuaded her that was not needed. He collapsed onto a sofa, crying bitterly. “It was like witchcraft. How could I have joined in singing the Nazi anthem and hailing Hitler?”
Walter’s story, in fact, is not especially unusual. It is a historical fact that within several months of Hitler’s takeover of Germany, many formerly committed members of the social democratic and communist political parties participated in massive Nazi Party rallies with great enthusiasm. An ecstatic group of people acting in unison like a single organism can have a powerful emotional influence on us, at an almost suggestive level. This stems largely from an ancient need we all have to belong to a group.
The evolutionary advantage that comes with belonging to a group is very clear. Being a member of a group gives an individual much greater security in the face of threats from dangers and enemies, along with better access to vital resources.
Several psychology experiments have shown that the human need to belong to a group is so significant that it exists even in abstract and context-free situations. Subjects who were divided into two color-coded groups (blues and greens) and played the trust game described in a previous chapter tended to be more generous to members of their own color group than with members of the “other” group, despite the fact that the color assignments had nothing to do with the game itself. The mechanism that creates and preserves group cohesion is at root an emotional mechanism eliciting collective emotions.
Scientific, technological, and artistic developments are primarily cognitive and emotional phenomena operating at the level of individuals. But the social history of humanity has been dictated mainly by collective emotions. Wars and treaties, along with great revolutions and sweeping political and economic changes, are largely driven by such emotions.
My late colleague and friend Gary Bornstein devoted many of his research efforts to studying the way that tensions between groups strengthen cooperation within groups. In two of those research studies in which I participated, we had subjects play slight variations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.1,2 The game was played with two pairs of players, instead of a simple one-on-one match. Each pair of players separately played the one-on-one Prisoner’s Dilemma and received the resulting payoff, but if one of the pairs ended up with a joint payoff greater than the joint payoff of the other pair, we gave each member of the “winning” pair a small extra bonus.
In contrast to individual emotions, which formed the subject of previous chapters, collective emotions enable some individuals to correlate their mental states. Correlated mental states can be expressed, for example, in a desire to out-compete rival groups. This explains why even in cases in which the winning payoff to each individual is small and may appear to be insufficient to justify cooperation, correlated mental states can motivate a great deal of group cooperation.
The extent of cooperation that was revealed in our color-coded group experiments was astounding, far more than the cooperation usually seen in straightforward one-on-one versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (without groups). This cooperation came from a strong desire to out-compete the other group, even though the individual payoffs for cooperation were identical to those in the usual Prisoner’s Dilemma. The cooperation that group identification prompted, however, enabled the subjects in these experiments to gain much higher payoffs than if they had played the usual Prisoner’s Dilemma.
This simple simulation indicates how collective emotions enable individuals to improve their material conditions, bolstering their chances of survival. This clearly translates into an evolutionary advantage at the individual level. In the above example, correlated and committed collective emotions were elicited between only two cooperating partners in each color-coded group. But imagine a situation in which rival gangs are facing off against each other, ready for violent action. That is a classic example of collective emotions being generated. Each gang member is filled with empathy for his own gang mates, to the point of willingness to risk his life to save one of them or avenge the gang’s honor. In parallel to all this, hatred for the members of the rival gang boils within him. These collective emotions have effects both in feelings gang members have toward each other and toward the members of the other gang. They generate internal commitments to fight for the group and to threaten the group’s rivals. A group that can fire up these collective emotions among its members gains an advantage over other groups. This increases the group’s chances of survival.
The human ability to coordinate emotions and turn them into a powerful force apparently has ancient evolutionary roots. Whoever failed to join in with the collective, either of his or her own choice or due to banishment, suffered significantly diminished chances of survival relative to those who were committed to the group. In fact, collective emotions can be identified in many mammals and birds; they are not limited to human beings alone.
The interested reader can watch an astounding video on YouTube titled “Battle at Kruger.” The video was filmed by a group of tourists at Kruger National Park in South Africa. In its initial moments, a herd of buffalo is shown calmly meandering along a pastoral path on a river bank. Suddenly, a pride of lions seeking easy prey appear out of nowhere, focusing their attention on a young buffalo calf toddling between the legs of its mother.
After a brief but chilling chase, the lions manage to scatter the frightened herd. The poor calf, unable to keep up with the herd on its weak legs, is increasingly isolated, just as the lions intended. Alone in the open, the calf is readily trapped in the jaws of one of the lions, and is being dragged toward the river, seemingly doomed to be drowned and then eaten.
But even a baby buffalo is too big to be taken down easily to its death. The calf exhibits remarkable tenacity, fighting stubbornly for its life. As if this weren’t enough, in the middle of this mighty struggle on the banks of the river a crocodile abruptly emerges from the waters, grabbing one of the calf’s legs between its powerful teeth. The surprised lions do not give up, now attempting to pull the ailing calf away from the river while the crocodile just as doggedly pulls in the opposite direction, toward the waters.
The lions, who as a group are stronger than the crocodile, win the tug-of-war. Now the calf is gripped tightly in the jaws of three lions, its sad fate all but sealed. But then the most astonishing thing happens. The buffalo herd that had previously fled in the face of the lions comes storming back in a determined and angry march. Within seconds a large group of buffalo surrounds the lions clutching the calf, while another group of buffalo threateningly charges the rest of the lions to chase them away.
The ring around the three remaining lions closes in on them menacingly, until the frightened lions let go of their intended prey and flee for their lives. The buffalo calf, left injured on the ground by the lions, calmly rises to its feet as if nothing had happened and rejoins the herd.
This incredible Battle at Kruger shows how herbivorous buffalo can defeat a pride of lions, the most fearsome carnivores in the safari reserve, by harnessing the numerical power and cooperation inherent in a coordinated herd. The tourists who filmed the battle could not contain themselves. Their emotions overcame them, and they can be heard encouraging and cheering on the thundering buffalo herd in the video. The situation looked like such a human drama that the people seeing it unfold before their eyes could not help but be swept away themselves in a powerful collective emotion of identification. I believe that every person watching the video feels that same surge of collective emotion. It can be seen at:
I previously noted that collective emotions can sometimes be stronger than individual emotions. One reason is that in many social situations these two types of emotions become involved in a feedback mechanism with each other. In many religions, the devout congregate together for prayers in churches, mosques, synagogues, and so forth, not for the sake of the gathering itself but to create an environment in which the emotional power of prayer is magnified. Fans at football games become energized again and again by the other fans around them, with their energy then further feeding into the excitement of those around them, in a feedback loop. Teenage girls who physically swoon in the presence of a musical idol such as Justin Bieber almost always do so only when they are together in a group. In a one-on-one meeting with the same idol, they are more likely to react in a more composed manner.
There have been times in many societies in which political and ideological passions have been known to rend apart families, with spouses or children and parents refusing to speak to each other because of the contrasting opinions they hold with regard to divisive issues. When the passions cool after some time has passed, those involved often say they don’t understand what came over them. How could they have reacted so extremely to a question that in retrospect seems minor? Those reactions, however, did not arise due to differing intellectual analyses of political questions alone. They were accompanied by collective emotions that included group identification, in this case identification with one ideological group in contrast to another.
Collective emotions often require the existence of an opposing group playing the role of a competitor or a source of threat. Preserving our collective “we” requires a collective “they.” The greater the conflict between “us” and “them,” the greater our collective identification with each other, making it easier for us to act as a group.
This is a familiar pattern of behavior for many of us. Under emergency conditions, such as when a hurricane is approaching, you will see people pitching in together for the protection of the collective. They will often be very generous toward each other. If the storm blows back to sea and the threat evaporates, people go back to concentrating mainly on their own personal lives. Patriotism and flag-waving are most prominent when there is a perceived enemy threatening the country. We may be very critical of our government, but then in the presence of a foreigner suddenly find ourselves passionately defending it and what it represents.
This is not restricted to Western nations and cultures alone. My friend Yoshi Seijo Matsuoka is the scion of a famous Japanese samurai family. One of his ancestors was the samurai warlord of the city of Osaka in its war in the seventeenth century against Edo (as Tokyo was then called). Tokyo is today the capital of Japan largely due to the outcome of that war.
After a devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck Japan in 2011, I called Yoshi to check that he and his family were safe. We talked at length, not having seen each other for a long time. At a certain point I asked Yoshi about the criticism that many Japanese citizens were expressing against their government, accusing it of not organizing sufficiently quickly to care for the survivors of the catastrophe. Yoshi briefly replied to my question, but then almost angrily accused the Israeli government of acting in a “cowardly and ungrateful” manner when it hastily evacuated embassy employees in Tokyo instead of exhibiting solidarity with the Japanese nation.
I didn’t remain silent in the face of this accusation, immediately retorting that I was certain that for each Israeli embassy employee evacuated out of Japan, at least two Israeli physicians and rescue workers were generously flown into Japan as part of an emergency aid mission. I continued and stressed that there are very few countries in the world that are more willing to send emergency rescue teams anywhere in the world on short notice than Israel. This went on for several minutes, each of us passionately defending his own country until we both came to our senses and burst out laughing.
Group identification can be a temporary phenomenon. People do move from one job to another, one city to another, and sometimes they immigrate to another country altogether. But collective emotions for previous collectives can often persist even after we are no longer part of the group with which we are identifying. This is because the advantages that groups and the individuals of which they are composed obtain from collective rational emotions are to a certain extent magnified if they are unconditional and unchangeable. Without those characteristics the threat that the collective can project against rival groups will be far less effective. Think for example about immigrants who stubbornly cling to their previous national identifications. This phenomenon is exhibited even more dramatically if the group to which we currently belong is in conflict with our previous group.
This subject brings to mind a very perturbing story I heard from my father, who worked as a bank clerk during the Second World War. One of the bank’s customers, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, punctually arrived at the bank once a month on the same day and at the same time to transfer one-third of his monthly salary to a mysterious address in Germany. One day my father asked him about the purpose of these money transfers. The bank customer stretched himself up as straight as he could, like a soldier standing “at attention,” and proudly proclaimed: “I may not have the right to participate directly in the war for the defense of the German homeland, but I still regard myself as having an obligation at least to support the German war effort financially.”
Particularly strong evidence for the evolutionary roots of collective emotions is the fact that we seek to create collective emotions again and again, even when identification with a particular group does not serve any vital interest. An example of this is fan identification with a sports club.
The sports entertainment business is mainly focused on creating collective emotions that function as anchors. Sports fan clubs serve no real goals (in contrast to labor unions, for example, which protect their members from exploitation by employers; or nation-states, which protect their citizens from external threats). The common goal of sports fans is entirely virtual-victory on the part of the team that they support. But sports teams are not really ends in themselves. They exist to create collective emotions in society. The depth and strength of such emotions can only be appreciated by going into a throng of fans in a packed stadium, fans who are on their feet and roaring at the top of their lungs celebrating a goal that has just been scored.
To what extent do these emotions influence the games themselves? An interesting study published in 2005 by researchers at the University of Chicago and Brown University looked into the decisions taken by referees in a large sample of soccer games. The study focused particularly on time extensions at the end of regulation time, decisions that are solely in the purview of the referees and for which there are no definite regulations in the rules books.
The researchers discovered that referees tended to give time extensions favoring the home side. Teams with a lead late in a game prefer brief extra time periods, while teams that are behind want longer time extensions (the more time they are given, the greater the chances that they can score). According to the study’s findings, when the home team had a late lead, extra time periods were short, but if the visitors held the lead, the referees exhibited much more generosity in adding extra time. Since fans of the home team tend to outnumber fans of the visiting team in most stadiums, it is reasonable to postulate that this home team bias on the part of referees is due to the powerful collective emotions “radiated” by the home team fans to the referees.
Why do women exhibit relatively little interest in following sports teams? As noted earlier in this chapter, the primal source of human collective emotions comes from a need for the assistance of a group in obtaining vital resources, especially in the context of a group hunt. Since hunting is primarily a male pursuit, the need for collective emotions is often greater in men than in women. This might explain why men tend to follow sports more than women, and why men tend to be more nationalistic than women.
The collective emotions we have dealt with so far include rage, empathy, and collective admiration, but there is at least one more collective emotion: insult. Collective insult can sting more than personal insult.
Imagine, for example, applying for a job and receiving the following response:
Dear Mr. John Doe
Thank you very much for your interest in our company.
Unfortunately we cannot offer you a job because, frankly, you have low scores on standardized tests. Whether for permanent or temporary employment, our company has a policy of hiring only candidates with higher scores.
We wish you the best of luck in your pursuit of a job commensurate with your skills.
This is a painful, embarrassing, even outrageous letter. But imagine getting this letter instead:
Dear Mr. John Doe
Thank you very much for your interest in our company.
Unfortunately we cannot offer you a job because you are black. Whether for permanent or temporary employment, our company has a policy of not hiring African-Americans.
We wish you the best of luck in your pursuit of a job commensurate with your skills.
Most of us would regard this letter as much more outrageous than the previous letter, even though both are highly insulting. Both letters say more about the company than the applicant, but the second letter says nothing about the personal qualities of the applicant, rejecting him solely on the basis of collective identification. Why do we regard the latter as more insulting? Why would a black person feel more offended by the second letter? One possible answer is that the first letter contains what could be considered a rational reason for rejecting the applicant, while the second is bereft of any rational justification. But this is insufficient alone as an explanation. Imagine that the second letter included the following text:
In the past we have noted that African American employees steal 20 percent more office equipment than white employees.
This seemingly offers a rational justification for rejecting the applicant, but it is just as outrageous, if not more so, than the letter without this addition. That is because rejecting an applicant based on his race engenders collective insult. It insults not only the individual, but his collective identification. This is another example of the way that collective emotions can be more powerful than individual emotions.
Are collective emotions rational at the individual level? Very often they aren’t. Uncle Walter didn’t gain much from his temporary enthusiasm at the Nazi rally, and a rational self-interested employee would care more about personal criticism than about criticism based on racism. But collective emotions are rational in a different sense. They are collectively rational. When viewing the group as a unit, this unit will do better when its elements experience collective emotions. Evolutionary forces operating on groups (rather than genes) can shape collective emotions. We will be discussing this form of evolution in our next chapter.