Why We Judge Groups Worse Than People
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We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. Have you ever caught yourself saying, people are the worst? You mean society in general is selfish, rude, morally bankrupt, yet the individual humans that you meet all seem perfectly decent. Why do groups of people look awful while individuals get the benefit of the doubt? Well, there's a psychological reason for that, and we're going to dig in here with social psychologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, Andre Vash, who has done a study on this. Andre, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. There seems to be like a headline here that your research suggests people think, I'm great, this person seems great, but groups in general are all kind of terrible.
Why does our brain kind of like downgrade humanity the second it turns into a group?
Why do we judge groups more harshly than individuals?
That's an excellent question. To be sure, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure, actually, if it's that people downgrade others or if it's just individuals themselves that are kind of raised above the default cynicism. So, I mean, even before mentioning my own specific research, I can tell there's already some research over the last few years that Kind of looks at, yeah, different reasons. And of course, I think one, to me, interesting, maybe less so for lay people is just that when people are making judgments about others, they tend to think about, you know, like the constraints that they consider when they're predicting the behavior of others. And they adjust these constraints differently, depending if it's, you know, an individual or a group.
So, you know, when you think of groups, you think, ah, what's the group norm here? And when you think of individuals, you think, you know, what does the moral conscience of an individual do? And just this alone already kind of makes judgments be different. But, you know, I'd say on top of this, there's also a functional argument that we interact with individuals, right? I mean, of course, now it's social media. Maybe this changes a little bit, but generally we don't interact with groups. We interact with individuals. And so I would say we too have some particular motivation or kind of an interest in well, not thinking that the individuals we interact with are jerks because we have to interact with them.
And so, you know, even if we're very cynical about people in general, it's always like people in general, right?
What psychological reasons contribute to our perceptions of groups?
And then if you go, okay, but what about this guy? I know this guy seems all right, right? And of course, there's research that shows, you know, even just the expectation that you're going to interact with a certain individual already makes you judge this individual, you know, a bit more positively, right? Or I think there's even some cool studies that show that people, you know, when playing certain games, they estimate that their partners in the games are less trustworthy than their partners actually are, but then they trust those partners more than they should given their own lack of confidence in the partners' trustworthiness, right? So there really seems to be something here to be told about, you know, how people look at individuals that really...
motivates them to think positively of individuals, even if you have cynical opinions about society.
I've heard of this better than average effect that we all think we're a little bit nicer, fairer, smarter, more moral than everybody else. Does it extend to the immediate people we interact with?
Definitely, definitely. So there's some more I want to say, cold reasons for that. So, of course, you know, we judge ourselves better than average in part because we know ourselves, right? So if I make a mistake, I know that I had good intentions and I don't know that about others. And so, of course, you know, if you have information about others, if it's a friend, you know your friend has good intentions, so you're also going to judge your friend as better than average, you know, more moral, etc.,
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