Why are we so afraid to be different?

Henri Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. His interests took him to study in France, a decision that saved his life. As it turns out, being captured as a prisoner of war (he volunteered in the French Army) was a safer path than being Jewish in Poland in the 20th century. He survived the war. The rest of his family was lost to the brutality of the Holocaust.

Henri Tajfel wanted to know why. He dedicated his life to the study of the way groups relate to each other and the prejudice that develops therein.

Among the litany of discoveries Tajfel made, in his research he found that simply dividing people into arbitrary groups triggered the ingroup favoritism effect. If you’ve ever been in a class where the students were asked to number themselves and you called out, “One!” while the students to either side of you declared, “TWO!” you’ve felt that seemingly natural inclination to mutter, “The twos SUCK!” underneath your breath. (I say seemingly natural because I don’t know if this is truly natural or a nurtured condition in a war-torn world, but nevertheless here we are.)

We don’t need a reason to dislike each other; we just need to know who’s different.

Yesterday I wrote about persecution specific to religious differences, and today we’re zooming out a bit on the concept of persecuting outsiders of all kinds of groups. Now, I realize I’m framing this phenomenon as a decidedly negative occurrence, but within a group, the ingroup favoritism effect can have powerful benefits. Think of the groups to which you belong and of which you are most proud. Maybe it’s a music group or a baseball team or even a social media platform or one of its innumerable subsets. Maybe, for some reason, you’re over the moon to be a part of a group chat. The sense of belonging that comes from these groups—the pride and the safety and the strength and the security—it’s all very positive and affirming. Until it’s not.

The negativity of groups tends to show its face most fiercely when someone who is definitely not included comes into view. That unwelcome blip on the radar is a problem. The person not wearing pink on a Wednesday is a problem. The person who says “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is a big problem. All those benefit we get from being in a group feel like scarce resources in the light of an outsider’s existence. The strength we feel as part of a group suddenly feels like much-needed fortification when we spot the “others” assembling across the way, wearing different uniforms, speaking different languages, and espousing different groupthink.

That person is going to try to take our stuff. Those people are going to want to change our status quo and quite possibly attack us.

What really stands out among the threats of the different is the standing out. When we’re united by what we have in common, anyone whose defining trait is their difference looks like they’re defying the group, threatening to disband the group, or attempting to start their own group. Different is very, very bad.

But one of the more private, vulnerable things about noticing someone different is the realization that, although being different is a very bad and evil thing worthy of being attacked, an outsider makes me feel different. And I can’t be different. Different sucks, and I don’t want to get the crap beaten out of me, so . . . vive la difference my ass. United (and uniform) we stand!

There used to be so many things that united us in America. There were basically three TV networks that may as well have been carbon copies of each other, and EVERYBODY watched television at the same time. It was a time when the vast majority of the country if by no other force was united by a shared media experience.

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It’s a completely different landscape now. Media is so segmented, isolated, and personalized now. While there are definitely common messaging threads and themes, we’re all able to cultivate a unique experience in this world even if we’re immersed in massively popular media.

The thing is, we don’t seem to like it. When the Muskian takeover of Twitter caused a mass exodus to fledgling microblogging copycats, the new nest I landed in was Post.news. It boasted the opportunity for writers and creators and lovers of discussion to unite along the commonality of civility and respect, a grand departure from the partisan bickering for which Twitter had become the prototype. The result? It’s nice and all, but it’s pretty much a destination resort for one-sided bickering. There’s not a lot of opportunity for or interest in discussion. Everyone wants the familiar tension without anyone pulling on the other side of the tug-of-war rope. Kinda boring, honestly.

It just seems like the only thing that unites us as a society is the need to belong to the right side in a binary battle.

I don’t want to live like this. I thought we were The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Feeling compelled to be like everyone or to have the comfort of knowing we’re on the right side of history, as if history is a coin and not a Dungeons & Dragons die, is . . . lame. But it’s what we’re doing for some reason.

Maybe we could do more than embrace our differences (or ignore them if that’s your thing). Maybe we could embrace the very dangerous art of being different and look kindly on those whose only resemblance to us is their uniqueness.