Tribalism

What I Am Learning from the NFL Playoffs

1.

What’s fair? For whom do you root? The Boston Celtics? Denmark? Democrats? J.D. Vance? Originalists? Bernie Sanders? Do you like Justice Alito? Do you admire Justice Kagan?

How intensely do you root? With whom do you identify? Who’s right, on issues that divide people? How are these questions related?

2.

Yesterday the Buffalo Bills played against the Denver Broncos, and even though I like the New England Patriots (with enthusiasm too for the Chicago Bears), I decided to watch.

To enjoy the game, I knew, or felt, that I had to choose a team for which to root. Since I don’t know much about the Bills or the Broncos, or follow them closely, the choice was not at all obvious. But I admire and like Josh Allen, and Buffalo is smaller than Denver, and has fewer professional teams, so I decided to root for the Bills. (Was it a decision? It felt more automatic than that - System 1, in Daniel Kahneman’s terms, rather than System 2.)

Here is what happened. Almost immediately, I rooted for the Bills very intensely, as if they had long been my favorite team. (Isn’t Josh Allen amazing? Isn’t James Cook terrific?) And all of the tough calls, it seemed to me, went against the Bills! (Don’t you agree?)

Were the referees biased? Were they not even looking? Were they not very good at their jobs? (See https://www.si.com/nfl/bills/onsi/tre-white-blames-refs-for-critical-bad-judgement-call-in-bills-loss-to-broncos-divisional-round)

As the Bills mounted their amazing late comeback, it was as if the sun came out, and the birds were singing, and the whole world was smiling. Into overtime we go, and in Josh Allen we trust.

But as the overtime went horribly, it felt as if we were all in the midst of a horror movie. See this highly emotional, dignified, gracious, moving interview of Josh Allen:

After the Bills lost, I felt sad and angry, and maybe a bit humiliated, as if I had myself failed at some important task.

All this was, of course, absurd. It occurred to me, even in the midst of the (terrific) game, that the sudden intensity of my devotion to the Bills did not make a lot of sense.

Three minutes before the game started, I did not care who won. Three minutes after the game started, my day, or so it felt, depended in large part on whether the beloved Bills could emerge victorious.

3.

There is a lesson in this tiny tale, I think, about tribalism, and about how easy it is to trigger it, and how intense it can be. In a classic paper, written by George Loewenstein and a small all-star team, it was shown that undergraduates and law students, randomly assigned to the role of either plaintiff or defendant, made self-serving judgments about fairness. https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/selfServAssessFairness.pdf

Asked what they considered to be a fair outcome, and asked what they considered to be a likely outcome, they were greatly affected by their assigned role. They adopted a rooting interest, and engaged in motivated reasoning. The biasing effect occurred very quickly.

So: “[W]e see strong evidence for self-serving interpretations of fairness. Plaintiffs’ predictions of the judge’s award, on average, were $14,527 higher than defendants’. Mean plaintiffs’ fair-settlement values were $17,709 higher than defendants’.” Another classic paper by the same team fortifies the central conclusions. https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/BiasedJudFairBargain.pdf

With respect to climate change, my coauthors and I find “asymmetrical updating”: Those who believe that climate change is a serious problem find alarming information (suggesting that the problem is more severe than previously thought) to be more credible than comforting information (suggesting that the problem is less severe than previously thought); those who do not believe that climate change is a serious problem find comforting information more credible than alarming information. See https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol102/iss6/1/

This evidence is consistent with what we might call climate change tribalism, and may well reflect motivated reasoning.

4

Occasionally I receive emails from academic friends and acquaintances, saying, “as a conservative, I think x or y or z,” or “as a progressive, I think a or b or c” — even though the merits of x or y or z, or a or b or c, are not determined by whether you are a conservative or a progressive.

It isn’t hard to be a conservative who is really concerned about climate change, or who believes in animal welfare. It isn’t hard to be a progressive who doesn’t like rent control, or who is pro-life.

Here is one problem with tribalism: It makes people sort themselves into friends and enemies, or Bills and Broncos. Here is another problem with tribalism: It tends to shut down thought. Here is one more problem with tribalism: It can be triggered in an instant, and put the whole world in a distorting mirror.

(Still: Tom Brady is the GOAT, and wasn’t Gino Cappelletti amazing?)