If the world were a professional kitchen, Gordon Ramsay would be shouting at the escuelerie to clean up the mess on the geopolitical stove top, even as Ukraine and Gaza spatter the splashback with sauce. Unfortunately, Pakistan and India are about to bubble over as well.
What a mess. And that’s not even counting the missteps of the junior chef in charge of the global economic station.
How did we get here? This is a question that social and political psychology has been asking since, well, social and political psychology became things.
You may be surprised to hear we actually know quite a bit about how we get to these points. We’re just not great at fixing things, or perhaps not very good at getting the executive chefs to listen.
Take Ukraine. You could accept what I think is a load of tosh about Vladimir Putin wanting to push back Nazism, but it looks like a land grab ‒ rebuilding the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, etc.
This smacks of realistic group conflict, a core motivation for intergroup conflict, and an idea that’s been around since at least the 1950s. The textbook classic on this is Muzafer Sherif’s Robber’s Cave experiment in which he showed he could effectively cause boys to fight with each other by separating them into groups and getting them to compete for resources.
It’s also really hard to fix this once you’ve caused it. The first group of boys had to head home on separate buses, the antipathy was so strong. You’ll be pleased to hear the second study did manage to fix things, by getting the two groups to work together so each could get things like food and water to the camp.
But not all conflicts involve borders or minerals. They’re about identity and it doesn’t even have to be a “real” identity. The classic work here is by Henri Tajfel, a Polish scholar who, in the 1970s, used a minimal groups paradigm to get people to self-identify with a meaningless group. (“Which painting do you like more? Great, you’re now a member of the group of people who like that painting.”) Tajfel showed people would discriminate against people in the other meaningless group, those they’d never actually seen, by allocating them fewer meaningless points. The rather depressing conclusion here is that just thinking someone might belong to a different group to yours is enough to lay the foundation for derogating them.
Of course, some antipathies reflect moments in time. For example, we heard anecdotes of anti-Asian sentiment as Covid-19 gripped the world amid questions about how it started.
Which brings me to local research, the work of just-examined PhD candidate JohnMark Kempthorne and others from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study syndicate. Because the NZAVS is a massive longitudinal survey study, they have pots of data on people over the past 15 years, including the Covid years.
Using a swanky statistical analysis, Kempthorne shows New Zealanders felt a little less warm towards “Chinese” people than before the pandemic. But they also felt less positive about “immigrants”, “refugees”, “Asians”, “Indians”, “people with mental illness” and “Muslims”.
People felt just the same about Māori and Pasifika. There are theoretical reasons to think that this is because the pandemic made us more unconsciously concerned about folk who are different from us, who might be sources of “contagion”.
This behavioural immune system also explains why folk worried, though less, about people with mental illness.
By the way, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Ukraine’s first Jewish president.
