The power of groups
Leadership, Evidence based policy, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Emergency response
Dr Robert Lowe says the threat from COVID-19 may be universal, so the social experience has the potential to unite us in new social norms
Images of the Covid-19 pandemic tell a familiar tale of the psychology of groups. Media photographs of empty supermarket shelves and busy public parks have sparked stories of the madness and irrationality of crowds. In these stories the rational individual becomes overwhelmed by mob mentality; they race to buy toilet paper or cram together on recreational walks. According to the standard narrative, otherwise sensible people lose their individual self-control as they dive into the collective scrum.
Social psychology offers another way to consider the group, one that places it central to the solution of the current crisis. The psychological study of social identity has challenged the ‘myth of the mob’ and highlighted the potentially positive and transformational power of group psychology.
Social psychologists have shown that people change their cognitions and behaviour depending on whether they are thinking about themselves as isolated individuals or alternatively as members of ‘groups’. Groups may be organised (e.g., political parties), contained to a few people (e.g., a book group) or may be more amorphous concepts (e.g., ‘the nation’ or ‘people resisting a virus’). Each group brings with it prototypical ways of thinking and behaving (‘norms’).
Sometimes there is a contradiction within a single person’s possible identities and norms. For example, as an individual I might think that COVID-19 poses no personal threat to me and so I will continue behaviours such as travelling or hosting a gathering. However, as a Mancunian I might feel it in my interest to protect all Mancunians. I may therefore act against my individual interest in order to satisfy my group interest and limit my social encounters. Recognising this contradiction can be the first step in mobilising social identities as a force for good.
During the COVID-19 pandemic we must develop and maintain social cohesion and cooperation. However, we are used to the promotion of individual and social competition. The maintenance of cohesion is a challenge of leadership, with successful leaders acting as ‘identity entrepreneurs’. Social psychological research has shown that leadership is not just about the personal qualities of our leadership, but on our leaders’ abilities to be seen as representing the group interest and promoting behaviours that are consummate with group identity. This does not mean simply following pre-existing norms, but working to articulate a positive way forward for the group.
For a long time we have been told that the people around us are our competitors (for jobs and other resources) and success is measured by personal reward, in the further past the very idea of society has been questioned. Such leadership will not serve us well in the current time; COVID-19 requires the nurturing of norms of governmental, community and communal responsibility, not individualism. Already there are many bottom-up examples of this – neighbours linking by WhatsApp to help one another, or mass appreciations of NHS workers – but there are also threats. The unwitting or malign identity entrepreneur may foster maladapted norms that can lead to group-appropriate behaviours that are unhelpful (e.g., the ‘Blitz spirit’ of not letting the threat change your daily routine) and attempts to create scapegoat outgroups (e.g., through the use of derogatory terms such as ‘the Chinese virus’) must be stamped out or we risk driving wedges between communities, and so weakening our ability to resist the virus.
Our leaders have a responsibility to harness the transformational power of the group to create and support positive group identities and develop norms around that. Recent research has demonstrated the many implications of group identity for healthy behaviours and responding to health threats. Indeed, simply being in a group has been shown to increase beneficial health outcomes. The effects are so striking they have been dubbed the ‘social cure’.
But at this time, positive group behaviour requires institutional support. Whilst the famous slogan of recent times ‘We’re all in this together’ captures the risks that we all have of catching COVID-19, it does not hide inequalities that are laid bare by this crisis. At a point when group cohesiveness is essential, discrepancies between people are rapidly being made visible and will exacerbate over the following weeks. The still employed and the newly unemployed, the stay-at-home and the homeless (or precarious renter), the isolated and the key worker continuing to travel are all at risk of the virus, but they will be experiencing this period in very different ways. Discourses about who has or has not been able to receive a test are already threatening the unanimous spirit, these will only grow if disparities are allowed unchecked. We need top-down support and positive leadership to both emphasise the idea of a collective with a shared destiny, and to back those words with clear examples of this in practice.
A final note of hope, but also a warning. In the next few weeks, as people go about their daily essential travel or exercise they will come into near proximity to others. Those others can either be seen as ingroup members (people sharing the struggle against the virus) or outgroup members (threatening carriers of the virus). UK social media seems to be noting an increasing in social behaviour, people smiling at and saying hello to others, albeit at a distance. It is essential that this increased sociality is actively supported, we need the strength of a collective identification not the suspicion, fear or envy of strangers.
Dr Robert Lowe is a senior lecturer in social psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has conducted research into the implications of identity for health and behaviour and also into the role of social identity in societies shaped by conflict (especially Northern Ireland).