David Hume wrote, “The chief obstacle … to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms.” True, but certain terms can be useful because of their vagueness. Hence, any piece of English writing will likely employ the word “group” in a myriad of ways – even to refer, as Pietraszewski says, to people “waiting around for a bus.” Although Pietraszewski's ideas intrigue, my concern is, first, with the author's assertion that such a commonplace term (one psychologists have no alternative to using in all sorts of contexts) can be redefined to narrowly serve an academic purpose. What this means is that the groups described by Pietraszewski need a moniker of their own; I propose calling them Pietraszewski groups or socially aligned groups (SAGs).
Another difficulty for Pietraszewski's usage gaining traction except among a few specialists is that a succinct way of expressing what he has in mind seems hard to come by: He doesn't distill a definition of SAGs in the abstract, where one might be expected, but rather buries the lede by only laying it out in an extended passage that begins 3,000 words into his discussion.
My chief argument with Pietraszewski's article, however, is that the word “group” is equated with cooperation (and then in the context of conflict). He's writing from a prevalent perspective that sees human sociality in terms of coalitions and strategic alliances; for example, a society is defined as a “group organized in a cooperative fashion,” in the classic Sociobiology by my mentor Wilson (Reference Wilson1975). The evolution of cooperation is an important research field, yet I've argued (Moffett, Reference Moffett2013) that for territory-controlling societies – that is, groups of well-defined memberships that remain stable over generations, which in one form or another have always been a fixture of human life (Moffett, Reference Moffett2020) – too much emphasis can be placed on cooperation.
Thinking of sociality in this way comes easy for evolutionary psychologists given how central cooperation is to human survival. The difficulty with seeing societies as based on cooperation, though, is that only their positive attributes are thus recognized; their equally significant discord is overlooked. Simmel (Reference Simmel1908), one of the founders of sociology, recognized cooperation and conflict as inextricable “forms of sociation,” each inconceivable without the other. Societies contain shifting tapestries of positive and negative interactions that fluctuate widely, depending on current social stresses and such factors as familiarity among the members and their relative social status. Instead of neatly defining, and separating, the societies themselves, SAGs exist in numerous forms both within and between societies and may change fluidly even while society borders remain stable.
Like it or not, our worst enemies are probably members of that group we call our nation, which we are nevertheless willing to fight for, even sometimes die for, while a hermit who contributes nothing has as much claim to a passport as community-minded citizens. Furthermore, individual citizens can decline to fight on behalf of their country; a nation's political adversaries can retreat from any hint of collaboration; states such as Venezuela can descend into social chaos yet have citizens that remain patriotic; and, at the same time, distinct societies can band together should trade between them be beneficial (Moffett, Reference Moffett2019, Ch. 1). In short, society memberships generally track poorly with Pietraszewski's “group-constitutive roles.”
I see social identity as the foundational feature of societies and the primary basis for distinguishing one society from the next (and in modern societies, formed from centuries of conquests and assimilations, one ethnicity or race from the next). As I've written elsewhere (Moffett, Reference Moffett2019, p. 27), “a society is [best] conceived not as an assembly of cooperators, but as a certain kind of group in which everyone has a clear sense of membership brought about by a lasting shared identity. Membership in societies of humans and other species is a yes/no matter, with ambiguity [e.g., the status of recent immigrants] rare. The prospects for alliances, whether from friendship, family ties, or social obligations, may rank among the paramount adaptive gains of having societies in many species, yet aren't necessary to the equation.” Indeed, the advantages of collaboration may be purely accidental (“proto-cooperation”: Allee, Reference Allee1931; Herbert-Read et al., Reference Herbert-Read, Romanczuk, Krause, Strömbom, Couillaud and Domenici2016). Societies are obligatory across the portion of the evolutionary tree (clade) humans share with chimpanzees and bonobos, which live in “communities” that primatologists recognize as well-defined over the long haul (despite females emigrating upon reaching adulthood: Wrangham, Reference Wrangham and Peterson1996). These essential groups would have been universal among our ancestors long before intricate SAGs.
The evidence from psychology suggests that “the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy” (Liberman, Woodward, & Kinzler, Reference Liberman, Woodward and Kinzler2017). The purely perceptual recognition of such categories as native-language speakers (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, Reference Kinzler, Dupoux and Spelke2007) underlies the later-developing (e.g., Pauker, Xu, Williams, & Biddle, Reference Pauker, Xu, Williams and Biddle2016) conceptual understanding of those groups as socially relevant (Charlesworth & Banaji, Reference Charlesworth, Banaji, Carlston, Johnson and Hugenbergin press). One imagines that these categories, largely arising through exposure to identifying “markers,” serve as frequent reference points to which humans apply their observations of cooperative and antagonistic interactions (Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2019) relevant to the emergence of SAGs. Indeed, one hypothesis is that, even as children (Meyer, Roberts, Jayaratne, & Gelman, Reference Meyer, Roberts, Jayaratne and Gelman2020), we rapidly and automatically (e.g., Ito & Senholzi, Reference Ito and Senholzi2013) categorize what we see as essentialized human groups, in much the way we distinguish other species (Gil-White, Reference Gil-White2001). In instances where group borders are fuzzy, our minds draw from a variety of cues to tidy them up and thereby reduce the ambiguities of what would otherwise be a confusing world (MacLin & MacLin, Reference MacLin, MacLin, Adams, Ambady, Nakayama and Shimojo2011; Timeo, Farroni, & Maass, Reference Timeo, Farroni and Maass2017).
Pietraszewski asks “what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group,” but for certain groups this representation needn't be built on anything more complex, at its core, than how we distinguish tiger from panda, with our fear of the other developing, with time and experience, toward the former; whether our minds represent any collection of things as a group – humans included – isn't necessarily determined by calculations around whether, and how, they might cooperate.
David Hume wrote, “The chief obstacle … to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms.” True, but certain terms can be useful because of their vagueness. Hence, any piece of English writing will likely employ the word “group” in a myriad of ways – even to refer, as Pietraszewski says, to people “waiting around for a bus.” Although Pietraszewski's ideas intrigue, my concern is, first, with the author's assertion that such a commonplace term (one psychologists have no alternative to using in all sorts of contexts) can be redefined to narrowly serve an academic purpose. What this means is that the groups described by Pietraszewski need a moniker of their own; I propose calling them Pietraszewski groups or socially aligned groups (SAGs).
Another difficulty for Pietraszewski's usage gaining traction except among a few specialists is that a succinct way of expressing what he has in mind seems hard to come by: He doesn't distill a definition of SAGs in the abstract, where one might be expected, but rather buries the lede by only laying it out in an extended passage that begins 3,000 words into his discussion.
My chief argument with Pietraszewski's article, however, is that the word “group” is equated with cooperation (and then in the context of conflict). He's writing from a prevalent perspective that sees human sociality in terms of coalitions and strategic alliances; for example, a society is defined as a “group organized in a cooperative fashion,” in the classic Sociobiology by my mentor Wilson (Reference Wilson1975). The evolution of cooperation is an important research field, yet I've argued (Moffett, Reference Moffett2013) that for territory-controlling societies – that is, groups of well-defined memberships that remain stable over generations, which in one form or another have always been a fixture of human life (Moffett, Reference Moffett2020) – too much emphasis can be placed on cooperation.
Thinking of sociality in this way comes easy for evolutionary psychologists given how central cooperation is to human survival. The difficulty with seeing societies as based on cooperation, though, is that only their positive attributes are thus recognized; their equally significant discord is overlooked. Simmel (Reference Simmel1908), one of the founders of sociology, recognized cooperation and conflict as inextricable “forms of sociation,” each inconceivable without the other. Societies contain shifting tapestries of positive and negative interactions that fluctuate widely, depending on current social stresses and such factors as familiarity among the members and their relative social status. Instead of neatly defining, and separating, the societies themselves, SAGs exist in numerous forms both within and between societies and may change fluidly even while society borders remain stable.
Like it or not, our worst enemies are probably members of that group we call our nation, which we are nevertheless willing to fight for, even sometimes die for, while a hermit who contributes nothing has as much claim to a passport as community-minded citizens. Furthermore, individual citizens can decline to fight on behalf of their country; a nation's political adversaries can retreat from any hint of collaboration; states such as Venezuela can descend into social chaos yet have citizens that remain patriotic; and, at the same time, distinct societies can band together should trade between them be beneficial (Moffett, Reference Moffett2019, Ch. 1). In short, society memberships generally track poorly with Pietraszewski's “group-constitutive roles.”
I see social identity as the foundational feature of societies and the primary basis for distinguishing one society from the next (and in modern societies, formed from centuries of conquests and assimilations, one ethnicity or race from the next). As I've written elsewhere (Moffett, Reference Moffett2019, p. 27), “a society is [best] conceived not as an assembly of cooperators, but as a certain kind of group in which everyone has a clear sense of membership brought about by a lasting shared identity. Membership in societies of humans and other species is a yes/no matter, with ambiguity [e.g., the status of recent immigrants] rare. The prospects for alliances, whether from friendship, family ties, or social obligations, may rank among the paramount adaptive gains of having societies in many species, yet aren't necessary to the equation.” Indeed, the advantages of collaboration may be purely accidental (“proto-cooperation”: Allee, Reference Allee1931; Herbert-Read et al., Reference Herbert-Read, Romanczuk, Krause, Strömbom, Couillaud and Domenici2016). Societies are obligatory across the portion of the evolutionary tree (clade) humans share with chimpanzees and bonobos, which live in “communities” that primatologists recognize as well-defined over the long haul (despite females emigrating upon reaching adulthood: Wrangham, Reference Wrangham and Peterson1996). These essential groups would have been universal among our ancestors long before intricate SAGs.
The evidence from psychology suggests that “the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy” (Liberman, Woodward, & Kinzler, Reference Liberman, Woodward and Kinzler2017). The purely perceptual recognition of such categories as native-language speakers (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, Reference Kinzler, Dupoux and Spelke2007) underlies the later-developing (e.g., Pauker, Xu, Williams, & Biddle, Reference Pauker, Xu, Williams and Biddle2016) conceptual understanding of those groups as socially relevant (Charlesworth & Banaji, Reference Charlesworth, Banaji, Carlston, Johnson and Hugenbergin press). One imagines that these categories, largely arising through exposure to identifying “markers,” serve as frequent reference points to which humans apply their observations of cooperative and antagonistic interactions (Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2019) relevant to the emergence of SAGs. Indeed, one hypothesis is that, even as children (Meyer, Roberts, Jayaratne, & Gelman, Reference Meyer, Roberts, Jayaratne and Gelman2020), we rapidly and automatically (e.g., Ito & Senholzi, Reference Ito and Senholzi2013) categorize what we see as essentialized human groups, in much the way we distinguish other species (Gil-White, Reference Gil-White2001). In instances where group borders are fuzzy, our minds draw from a variety of cues to tidy them up and thereby reduce the ambiguities of what would otherwise be a confusing world (MacLin & MacLin, Reference MacLin, MacLin, Adams, Ambady, Nakayama and Shimojo2011; Timeo, Farroni, & Maass, Reference Timeo, Farroni and Maass2017).
Pietraszewski asks “what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group,” but for certain groups this representation needn't be built on anything more complex, at its core, than how we distinguish tiger from panda, with our fear of the other developing, with time and experience, toward the former; whether our minds represent any collection of things as a group – humans included – isn't necessarily determined by calculations around whether, and how, they might cooperate.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Conflict of interest
None.