The pressure to be unlike people we despise

Can "them" liking chocolate ice cream make us like it less?

In October of 2024, I talked to social psychologist Randy Stein for my podcast, mostly about the badness of the Myers Briggs personality test, but also a little bit about his polarization-related research. In a 2016 paper titled ‘Trumping’ conformity: Urges towards conformity to ingroups and nonconformity to morally opposed outgroups, Randy described his findings on how group-aimed animosity can shape our preferences. Basically, we can have a tendency to be unlike a disliked person or group. This seems to me an important aspect of how group conflict works, in driving belief/stance alignment and making groups more homogeneous (and therefore more stereotypical from their opponents’ perspective). It can be seen as one of the many aspects of our social psychology that lead to self-reinforcing toxic conflict dynamics.

Here’s the relevant part of the transcript from that episode:

Zach Elwood: I did happen to notice after I looked at your work on personality tests, I happened to notice that you’d also worked on some political polarization-related things that interested me because I’ve worked on that myself. I’ve actually been working on that kind of thing full-time over the last year. But yeah, you had a paper that talked about the tendency for people to resist the opinions of groups that they morally oppose or dislike. The thing that interested me there as somebody who thinks a lot about polarization and how we come to these divergent opposed narratives is, and I talk about this in my polarization books, about how we can be drawn to being unlike people that we dislike, the groups that we dislike, which kind of has this polarizing force for all of these issues and beliefs that get aligned on either side. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your research there and how you view that kind of pressure to not be like them or something.

Randy Stein: Yeah. The finding there was basically we have this instinctive, automatic, I guess you could say almost repulsion to the views of people that we morally dislike. Even for things that don’t matter, like if we hear what their favorite ice cream flavor is.

Zach Elwood: Minor things. Yeah.

Randy Stein: Yeah. To go into it a little bit more, the prevailing opinion in social psychology at the time was people are intuitively cooperative. For evolutionary reasons, we tend to go along with one another and that’s kind of helped us with teamwork and helped us help the species survive. When you put people under time pressure and when people are playing games where they can either cooperate or compete with one another, if you put them under time pressure, they tend to be more cooperative rather than more competitive. So I thought okay, maybe. But what if it’s people who you morally despise? Will that intuitive cooperation still be there? So basically I did a couple of studies where I trained people to understand their automatic reactions. In psychology, there’s this thing called the Stroop test where you see a word on the screen and you have to say the color that the ink is printed in. So if it’s the word red printed in red, it’s really easy. If it’s the word red printed in green, and you have to say green, that takes you like a second because you have to suppress the urge to say red. So basically I put people on the Stroop test and said, “Do you feel that? It’s you fighting your instincts.” Then this other thing where I gave people a bunch of preferences, like, “Hey, what’s your favorite ice cream, chocolate or vanilla?” That kind of a thing. And I said, “Oh, by the way, this was before the 2016 election. Oh, by the way, Trump supporters prefer chocolate.” Right? And then I asked people, “Tell me what your favorite is again.”

And it turned out that when you morally disagreed with the group—so if I tell you Trump supporters prefer chocolate and this is 2016, you’re a Hillary supporter, basically, people feel the automatic urge to now say the opposite, even though I’m just asking them to say their own thing again. That was kind of the point there. People, maybe in general, are intuitively cooperative. But if it’s a group that we don’t like, it’s intuitively the opposite. We feel that automatic pressure to distance ourselves, like you said, even for things that don’t really matter.

Zach Elwood: That’s a great one. I mean, it’s actually really interesting because I had been looking for research like this. I’d seen some other ones, but not as direct as yours. And I was actually trying to... I put some things like that in my book, but it’s funny that I just happened to contact you from the Myers-Briggs thing and you’ve worked on something that I was actually looking for in that research and I couldn’t find it before.

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Listen to more polarization-related episodes from my podcast.