Group Norms Quotes

I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.

Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.

I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.

All social interactions require some loss of freedom.

When you assume the goodness in one group is an exception but believe the goodness in your group is the norm, you're probably being prejudiced.

Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm.

The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it. Dehumanize the group, and you have quarantined them from the masses you choose to elevate and have programmed everyone, even some of the targets of dehumanization, to no longer believe what their eyes can see, to no longer trust their own thoughts. Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy. A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable.

The fundamental human need to belong comes from the desire to associate with others, to cooperate, to accept group norms. However, the SPE shows that the need to belong can also be perverted into excessive conformity, compliance, and in-group versus out-group hostility. The need for autonomy and control, the central forces toward self-direction and planning, can be perverted into an excessive exercise of power to dominate others or into learned helplessness.

Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it's no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there's no room for deviation from the norm. It's important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don't fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you've ever known is being part of the group.

you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristics taken away from you.

I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics'. You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics', right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behaviour norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something. What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs -- especially today -- is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go fuck", or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" -- but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song. When they get into drooling about love as a 'romantic concept' -- especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types -- that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health. Fortunately, lyrics over the last five or six years have gotten to be less and less important, with 'art rock groups' and new wavers specializing in 'nonjudgemental' or 'purposely inconsequential' lyrics. People have stopped listening to the lyrics -- they are now only 'pitched mouth noises'.

Some compelling proof that women are indeed not born any more capable of empathy or connection than men comes from psychologist Niobe Way. In 2013 Way published a book called Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which explores the friendships of young straight men. Way followed a group of boys from childhood through adolescence and found that when they were little, boys’ friendships with other boys were just as intimate and emotional as friendships between girls; it wasn’t until the norms of masculinity sank in that the boys ceased to confide in or express vulnerable feelings for one another. By the age of eighteen, society’s “no homo” creed had become so entrenched that they felt like the only people they could look to for emotional support were women, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature

All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.

The righteous anger of women and other subordinated groups, which violates dominant norms of compliant and willing submission, is always particularly threatening

Thus we use laughter to gauge and calibrate social boundaries—both behavioral boundaries (norms) and group membership boundaries (who deserves how much of our empathy). But this calibration is a delicate act.

Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is "the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful". Janeway call this the "ordered use of the power to disbelieve". She explains: It is true that one may not have a coherent self-definition to set against the status assigned by the established social mythology, and that is not necessary for dissent. By disbelieving, one will be led toward doubting prescribed codes of behaviour, and as one begins to act in ways that can deviate from the norm in any degree, it becomes clear that in fact there is not just one right way to handle or understand events. Women need to know that they can reject the powerful's definition of their reality --- that they can do so even if they are poor, exploited, or trapped in oppressive circumstances. They need to know that the exercise of this basic personal power is an act of resistance and strength. Many poor and exploited women, especially non-white women, would have been unable to develop positive self-concepts if they had not exercised their power to reject the powerful's definition of their reality. Much feminist thought reflects women's acceptance of the definition of femaleness put forth by the powerful. Even though women organizing and participating in feminist movement were in no way passive, unassertive, or unable to make decisions, they perpetuated the idea that these characteristics were typical female traits, a perspective that mirrored male supremacist interpretation of women's reality. They did not distinguish between the passive role many women assume in relation to male peers and/or male authority figures, and the assertive, even domineering, roles they assume in relation to one another, to children, or to those individuals, female or male, who have lower social status, who they see as inferiors, This is only one example of the way in which feminist activists did not break with the simplistic view of women's reality s it was defined by powerful me. If they had exercised the power to disbelieve, they would have insisted upon pointing out the complex nature of women's experience, deconstructing the notion that women are necessarily passive or unassertive.

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.

We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married.” She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn’t enough—institutional support is also necessary. “Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media—they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another.

Groups must balance the need to enforce norms with the need to adapt. If the group is unable to enforce social norms, then there will be too much cheating, and cooperation will break down. However, if the group is too rigid in its social norms, then it will fail to adapt to new circumstances.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

Where once witchcraft accusations were the norm, bullying has taken its place. And just as during the Trials, it's not always the usual suspects who get bullied; it can happen to anyone for any reason. But the only way it happens is if the community supports it. Group agreement and group silence are equally as deadly. The moment someone speaks up, it's possible to stop that cycle. It's not the easiest thing to do, but greatness is never without risk. And there is nothing greater in the whole world than kindness - kindness to someone being bullied, kindness to a stranger, kindness to an inured animal. Every act counts.

For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved. The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called “self-domestication.” Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selectively breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them.

The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

New studies conducted by psychology researcher Joseph Forgas show that mild sadness can actually have a number of benefits that could reflect its value. In his experiments, people who were in a sad mood had better judgment and memory, and were more motivated, more sensitive to social norms, and more generous than the happier control group.

Shame, as an emotion, has a core meaning, in relating individuals to wider social groups and norms -- real or imagined.

At the same time, whenever a group of people comes together, there are issues of social standing, popularity, norms and identity on which they will inevitably not agree. Fandom is no exception.

However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people. White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centered societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created.

People also often face prejudice as a result of other characteristics, such as age, class and religious belief. The principle of intersectionality is actually pretty simple: if all these different kinds of prejudice stem from the same root, then it is arbitrary and ineffective to attempt to eradicate one of them without acknowledging its intersection with others and trying to work together to tackle all forms of inequality. Or, from a feminist perspective, if we are to tackle the fact that women have been historically oppressed because of characteristics that are seen to be ‘different’ from the male norm, how can we protest such treatment while simultaneously excluding from our own movement the needs and agendas of those with other stigmatized characteristics? (This is particularly true in the case of our trans sisters, who some feminists believe should be excluded from some areas of the movement by virtue of not fulfilling required ‘characteristics’ of womanhood – a deep irony for a group fighting for equality regardless of sex.) And on

All of these arenas of American life are facets of the same widely discussed phenomenon: the decline of what is termed “social capital.” As defined by political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, “… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’” It’s the trust, friendships, group affiliations, helping, and expectation of being helped built up by actively participating in and being a member of all sorts of groups, ranging from book clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, and parent-teacher associations to political organizations, professional societies, rotary clubs, town meetings, unions, veterans associations, and others.

Have you ever been the only person of your own colour or ethnicity in a large group or gathering? It has been said that there are two kinds of white people: those who have never found themselves in a situation where the majority of people around them are not white, and those who have been the only white person in the room. At that moment, for the first time perhaps, they discover what it is really like for the other people in their society, and, metaphorically, for the rest of the world outside the west: to be from a minority, to live as the person who is always in the margins, to be the person who never qualifies as the norm, the person who is not authorized to speak.

The existence of a different value system among these persons is evinced by the communality of behavior which occurs when illiterates interact among themselves. Not only do they change from unexpressive and confused individuals, as they frequently appear in larger society, to expressive and understanding persons within their own group, but moreover they express themselves in institutional terms. Among themselves they have a universe of response. They form and recognize symbols of prestige and disgrace; evaluate relevant situations in terms of their own norms and in their own idiom: and in their interrelations with one another, the mask of accommodative adjustment drops.

When it comes to transformation or deformation, organizational cultures are rarely neutral. For the most part cultural norms will support and catalyze or work against the process of spiritual transformation. Cultivating a culture

We are also greatly influenced by consumption norms within the relevant group. A light eater eats much more in a group of heavy eaters. A heavy eater will show more restraint in a light-eating group. The group average thus exerts a significant influence. But there are gender differences as well. Women often eat less on dates; men tend to eat a lot more, apparently with the belief that women are impressed by a lot of manly eating. (Note to men: they aren’t.) So

In fact, researchers who exploit African Americans were the norm for much of our nation’s history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research. This book explores the many reasons that blacks are so vulnerable, but ultimately it is because American medical researchers remain a racially homogeneous group, and I show how the racial homogeneity of American medical researchers lies at the very heart of the problem.

Statistically, there is an irrefutable, globally intransigent heterosexual norm that pervades across ethnicity, colour and class. There is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.

There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it. Be wary of relying on anything else. Unfortunately, numerous tests by psychologists show that the majority of people follow the lower-level path most of the time, which leads to inferior decisions without their realizing it. As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” It’s even more important that decision making be evidence-based and logical when groups of people are working together. If it’s not, the process will inevitably be dominated by the most powerful rather than the most insightful participants, which is not only unfair but suboptimal. Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.

The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action, The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. This origin is what really needs explanation.

A truly multicultural nation ruled by multiculturalists would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion. It would not have suits as its standard professional attire. English would not be its standard language or be assessed by standardized tests. Ethnic Studies would not be looked upon as superfluous to educational curricula. Afrocentric scholars and other multicultural theorists, lecturing on multiple cultural perspectives, would not be looked upon as controversial. No cultural group would be directly and indirectly asked to learn and conform to any other group’s cultural norms in public in order to get ahead. A nation of different-looking people is not automatically multicultural or diverse if most of them practice or are learning to practice the same culture.

Why should I be? Nothing I have seen here in New Eden or on Earth suggests to me that humanity is capable of achieving harmony in its relationship with itself, much less with any other living creatures. Occasionally there is an individual, or even a group, that is able to transcend the basic genetic and environmental drawbacks of the species . . . But these people are miracles, certainly not the norm.

Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work—or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise’s culture toward accuracy—we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

Superusers …   1. Check in frequently and consistently—not just once a year for an intense engagement.   2. Create content that others can access.   3. “Police” the community and ensure that cultural norms that strengthen the group are enforced.   4. Have a two-way relationship with the organization itself—providing feedback and suggestions.   5. Demonstrate genuine desire to help other members.   6. Attract new members.   7. Aid in the onboarding of new members.

Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm. Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots.

The more often we get angry, the more defended our child becomes, and therefore the less likely to show that it bothers her. Anger pushes children of all ages away from us. It practically guarantees that they’ll have an “attitude” by the time they’re ten, and that yelling fights will be the norm during their teen years. The unfortunate result of yelling is a child who is less likely to want to please you and is more open to the influences of the peer group and the larger culture.

systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color. Those effects show up as inequalities in power, opportunities, laws, and every other metric of how individuals and groups are treated. Which is to say: systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm.

Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain. Some polarization is healthy - even necessary - for democracy. And indeed, the historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us that norms can be sustained even where parties are separated by considerable ideological differences. But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy's rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.

If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.

The most notorious story is the Trovan antibiotic study conducted by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningitis epidemic. An experimental new antibiotic was compared, in a randomised trial, with a low dose of a competing antibiotic that was known to be effective. Eleven children died, roughly the same number from each group. Crucially, the participants were apparently not informed about the experimental nature of the treatments, and moreover, they were not informed that a treatment known to be effective was available, immediately, from Médecins sans Frontières next door at the very same facility. Pfizer argued in court – successfully – that there was no international norm requiring it to get informed consent for a trial involving experimental drugs in Africa, so the cases relating to the trial should be heard in Nigeria only. That’s a chilling thing to hear a company claim about experimental drug trials, and it was knocked back in 2006 when the Nigerian Ministry of Health released its report on the trial. This stated that Pfizer had violated Nigerian law, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Declaration of Helsinki.

So the lie remains, tolerated, admitted. But only that… just tolerated and admitted, and only under certain conditions. The exception is war: then, and then only, the lie becomes a just instrument. But what if war, an abnormal, episodic, transient condition, should come to be permanent and taken for granted? The lie, once an emergency measure, now becomes the norm: for a social group that sees itself hemmed in by enemies will not hesitate for one moment to utilize any weapon against them. The truth among themselves, the lie for outsiders—this rule of conduct would become deeply embedded in their mores.

However, resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage. That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.

Symbolic interactionists stress that to understand poverty we must focus on what poverty means to people. When people evaluate where they are in life, they compare themselves with others. In some rural areas, simple marginal living is the norm, and people living in these circumstances don’t feel poor. But in Leslie’s cosmopolitan circle, people can feel deprived if they cannot afford the latest upscale designer clothing from their favorite boutique. The meaning of poverty, then, is relative: What poverty is differs from group to group within the same society, as well as from culture to culture and from one era to the next.

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent “long-range” vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It’s easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion.

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders." If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.

It would be a mistake to view human responsiveness to social norms as somehow separate from our evolved psychology. We are a rule-following species. A core part of our evolved psychology is to decipher social consensus, conform to group opinion, and adhere to social imperatives. Throughout human evolutionary history, people lived and died by their social reputations. Violating social rules, and especially sexual rules, brought shame to violators and sometimes reputational damage to their entire families. We care deeply about how we are perceived by others. As the evolutionary economist Robert Frank notes, “We come into this world with a nervous system that worries about rank.”15

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

There is a consensus among psychologists who study such subjects that people develop their concept of who they are, and of what they want to achieve in life, according to a sequence of steps. Each man or woman starts with a need to preserve the self, to keep the body and its basic goals from disintegrating. At this point the meaning of life is simple; it is tantamount to survival, comfort, and pleasure. When the safety of the physical self is no longer in doubt, the person may expand the horizon of his or her meaning system to embrace the values of a community—the family, the neighborhood, a religious or ethnic group. This step leads to a greater complexity of the self, even though it usually implies conformity to conventional norms and standards. The next step in development involves reflective individualism. The person again turns inward, finding new grounds for authority and value within the self. He or she is no longer blindly conforming, but develops an autonomous conscience. At this point the main goal in life becomes the desire for growth, improvement, the actualization of potential. The fourth step, which builds on all the previous ones, is a final turning away from the self, back toward an integration with other people and with universal values. In this final stage the extremely individualized person—like Siddhartha letting the river take control of his boat—willingly merges his interests with those of a larger whole. In

However, as we strive to become free, unique individuals, we still feel the need for unity with others, and in trying to balance these needs we may seek out the comfort of conforming to a group or an authority. This is a misguided approach, says Fromm; it is imperative to discover one’s own independent sense of self, and one’s own personal views and value systems, rather than adhering to conventional or authoritarian norms. If we try to hand responsibility for our choices to other people or institutions we become alienated from ourselves, when the very purpose of our lives is to define ourselves through embracing our personal uniqueness, discovering our own ideas and abilities, and embracing that which differentiates each of us from other people.

You may note the irony. In the context of the cab problem, the neglect of base-rate information is a cognitive flaw, a failure of Bayesian reasoning, and the reliance on causal base rates is desirable. Stereotyping the Green drivers improves the accuracy of judgment. In other contexts, however, such as hiring or profiling, there is a strong social norm against stereotyping, which is also embedded in the law. This is as it should be. In sensitive social contexts, we do not want to draw possibly erroneous conclusions about the individual from the statistics of the group. We consider it morally desirable for base rates to be treated as statistical facts about the group rather than as presumptive facts about individuals. In other words, we reject causal base rates.

At the same time, however, the collective behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has deeply disturbing implications. There are many societies afflicted by traditions of racism and caught in the siege mentality of war or threat of war. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

It seems paradoxical that an organization responsible for enforcing the law would frequently rely on illegal practices. The police resolve this tension between nominally lawful ends and illegal means by substituting their own occupational and organizational norms for the legal duties assigned to them. Westley suggests: This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police, are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion. From the officers’ perspective, the center of authority is shifted and the relationship between the state and its agents is reversed. The police become a law unto themselves.

In contemporary parlance, the term Salafi has come to acquire many different connotations. It has been used to refer to some groups who consider it obligatory to take up arms against all those - non-Muslims and Muslims - who are deemed to challenge or contravene the dictates of the Islamic foundational texts, the Qur'an and the normative example of the Prophet Muhammad (the sunna). At the other end of spectrum, it refers to a politically quietist trend, typified by the Saudi religious establishment, that rejects all beliefs and practices seen as compromising the oneness of God (tawhid) while leaving politics largely to the rulling elite. But the term Salafi is also used for, and by, those who reject the authority of the medieval schools of law and insist on an unmediated access to the foundational texts as the source of all norms.

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children.

Predominantly inattentive type Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher. Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now." The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment. Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed. Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll. Issues

The politics of time was clarified in my women's liberation group in the 1970's when one of us, a mother of small children, found herself single. Parenting and providing seemed irreconcilable. Within a generation it had become the norm. By 2010 single parents comprised 25 per cent of all families and 60 per cent had a paid job. The agenda this implies is obvious: not the trick of work-life balance that assigns responsibility to women but a political economy that has at its heart not a breadwinner who is an unencumbered, cared-for man but a mother. Women's appeal to men to share parenting has, of course, been answered by millions of men. They attend the birth of their babies, they fall in love with them and then soon, too soon, before they have even got acquainted, they leave the babies and the mother's from morning till night and go back to their paid jobs. Nowhere have men reciprocated women's paid work and unpaid care by initiating mass movements for men's equal parental leave or working time that synchronizes with children and women; nowhere have men en masse shared the costs—in time and money—of childhood.

In the last chapter I suggested that humans are, like our primate ancestors, innately equipped to live in dominance hierarchies that can be quite brutal. But if that’s true, then how come nomadic hunter-gatherers are always egalitarian? There’s no hierarchy (at least among the adult males), there’s no chief, and the norms of the group actively encourage sharing resources, particularly meat.26 The archaeological evidence supports this view, indicating that our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands of mobile hunter-gatherers.27 Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary. These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes. They also put an end to equality. The best land and a share of everything people produce typically get dominated by a chief, leader, or elite class (who take some of their wealth with them to the grave for easy interpretation by later archaeologists). So were our minds “structured in advance of experience” for hierarchy or for equality? For hierarchy,

I accepted the different explanations of what had caused this or that, how the international community had warned about such-and-such decision, how the Balkans had long had an explosive history—how one must factor in the ethnic and religious divisions that pervaded that corner of the world, and the legacy of socialism too. I accepted the story I heard on foreign media: that the Albanian Civil War could be explained not by the collapse of a flawed financial system but by the long-standing animosities between different ethnic groups, the Ghegs in the north and the Tosks in the south. I accepted it despite its absurdity, despite the fact that I didn’t know what I counted as, whether both or neither. I accepted it although my mother was a Gheg and my father a Tosk, and throughout their married life only their political and class divisions had ever mattered, never the accents with which they spoke. I accepted it, as we all did, as we accepted the liberal road map we had followed like a religious calling, as we accepted that its plan could be disrupted only by outside factors—like the backwardness of our own community norms—and never be beset by its own contradictions.

For the same reason , the American government has invented a completely new juridical category , that of 'illegal enemy combatants'. In general, the perpetrators of violence against the population clearly fall into two groups which, once they have been arrested, come under different jurisdictions, but still possess certain rights. In times of peace, they are criminals, protected in every state of law by habeas corpus, defended by lawyers, and judged in accord with the law. In times of war, they are enemy soldiers who, if captured, must be treated in accord with international Conventions. In what category are we to classify the terrorist of Al-Qaeda? Since they do not belong to the regular of a country that has signed the conventions of Geneva, they cannot claim the protection of those conventions. So do they fall under ordinary legislation? It is here that the formula' war on terror' shows how useful it is: since there is a 'war' going on, the laws of peacetime do not apply; but since this war is not being waged on anther country, international conventions do not come into it either! And since this 'war' can never end, the government that declares it is placing itself for an indefinite period above national laws, as well as above international norms.

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. Despite these refutations, the Nurture Assumption developed a stranglehold on professional opinion, and mothers have been advised to turn themselves into round-the-clock parenting machines, charged with stimulating, socializing, and developing the characters of the little blank slates in their care.

For all they may talk about the people as a coherent group, demagogues are actually devoted to pitting the people against each other. Demagogues rarely create new prejudices; they amplify those that already exist, giving people permission to say things that had previously been unpopular or taboo. Much as demagogues work to weaken the rule of law, they try to weaken the social norms that enforce civic friendship, opening old wounds and encouraging the eruption of anger and hatred that have been kept below the surface by a thin but crucially important layer of civility and civic decency. The final point is especially important. Demagogues don't simply flatter the populace. They flatter a portion of the people by attacking and demonizing everyone else. Those who stand with the demagogue become 'the people.' Everybody else becomes effectively subhuman: 'animals,' 'vermin,' 'criminals,' 'enemies of the state,' In this way, demagogues ensure that a portion of the people will always side with them against their common enemy. At the same time, they create the perception of emergency to justify their destruction of the constitutional safeguards that would otherwise check their power. A demagogue needs division the way that a fire needs oxygen. They succeed only because they are able to fan the flames.

As the literary fairy tale spread in France to every age group and every social class, it began to serve different functions, depending on the writer's interests. It represented the glory and ideology of the French aristocracy. It provided a symbolic critique, with utopian connotations, of the aristocratic hierarchy, largely within the aristocracy itself and from the female viewpoint. It introduced the norms and values of the bourgeois civilizing process as more reasonable and egalitarian than the feudal code. As a divertissement for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the fairy tale diverted the attention of listeners/readers from the serious sociopolitical problems of the times, compensating for the deprivations that the upper classes perceived themselves to be suffering. There was also an element of self-parody, revealing the ridiculous notions in previous fairy tales and representing another aspect of court society to itself; such parodies can be seen in Jacques Cazotte's "A Thousand and One Follies" (1746), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Queen Fantasque" (1758), and Voltaire's "The White Bull" (1774). Finally, fairy tales with clear didactic and moral lessons were approved as reading matter to serve as a subtle, more pleasurable means of initiating children into the class rituals and customs that reinforced the status quo.

This book festival...grew to attract thousands of visitors every year. Now they felt like they needed a new purpose. The festival’s continuing existence felt assured. What was it for? What could it do? How could it make itself count? The festival’s leadership reached out to me for advice on these questions. What kind of purpose could be their next great animating force? Someone had the idea that the festival’s purpose could be about stitching together the community. Books were, of course, the medium. But couldn’t an ambitious festival set itself the challenge of making the city more connected? Couldn’t it help turn strong readers into good citizens? That seemed to me a promising direction—a specific, unique, disputable lodestar for a book festival that could guide its construction...We began to brainstorm. I proposed an idea: Instead of starting each session with the books and authors themselves, why not kick things off with a two-minute exercise in which audience members can meaningfully, if briefly, connect with one another? The host could ask three city- or book-related questions, and then ask each member of the audience to turn to a stranger to discuss one of them. What brought you to this city—whether birth or circumstance? What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city? Starting a session with these questions would help the audience become aware of one another. It would also break the norm of not speaking to a stranger, and perhaps encourage this kind of behavior to continue as people left the session. And it would activate a group identity—the city’s book lovers—that, in the absence of such questions, tends to stay dormant. As soon as this idea was mentioned, someone in the group sounded a worry. “But I wouldn’t want to take away time from the authors,” the person said. There it was—the real, if unspoken, purpose rousing from its slumber and insisting on its continued primacy. Everyone liked the idea of “book festival as community glue” in theory. But at the first sign of needing to compromise on another thing in order to honor this new something, alarm bells rang. The group wasn’t ready to make the purpose of the book festival the stitching of community if it meant changing the structure of the sessions, or taking time away from something else. Their purpose, whether or not they admitted it, was the promotion of books and reading and the honoring of authors. It bothered them to make an author wait two minutes for citizens to bond. The book festival was doing what many of us do: shaping a gathering according to various unstated motivations, and making half-hearted gestures toward loftier goals.

Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household ot immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others' behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto fo the early American general Christopher Gadsden: "Don't tread on me." Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren't our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt different norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment. This "cultural flexibility" also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

The reality [of what life was like for the whole of our species for at least 90 percent of its history] was very different to the traditional Western image of such people as uncultured 'savages', living hard and miserable lives in 'a state of nature', with a bitter and bloody struggle to wrest a livelihood matched by a 'war of all against all', which made life 'nasty, brutish and short'. People lived in loose-knit groups of 30 or 40 which might periodically get together with other groups in bigger gatherings of up to 200. But life in such 'band societies' was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more 'civilised' agricultural or industrial societies. One eminent anthropologist has even called them 'the original affluent society'. ...An early Jesuit missionary noted of another hunter-gathering people, the Montagnais of Canada, 'The two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans do not reign in their great forests--I mean ambition and avarice...not one of them has given himself to the devil to acquire wealth'. ...Richard Lee is quite right to insist: "It is the long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past. Despite our seeming adaptation to life in hierarchical societies, and despite the rather dismal track record of human rights in many parts of the world, there are signs that humankind retains a deep-rooted sense of egalitarianism, a deep-rooted commitment to the norm of reciprocity, a deep-rooted...sense of community.

What is ADHD, anyway? For those still wondering what ADHD is, here’s the briefest summary I can muster: ADHD shows up in two areas of our brain function: working memory and executive functioning.[7] Working memory allows us to hold more than one thing in our brains at once. If you’ve ever run up the stairs, only to find yourself standing in your bedroom wondering what you came for, you’ve experienced a failure of working memory. Again, everyone experiences this from time to time. People with ADHD experience it nonstop, to the point where it impairs our ability to function normally. Working memory holds onto information until we’re able to use it.[8] In addition to forgetting why we opened the refrigerator, having a leaky working memory means we lose information before our brains can move it to long-term storage. We forget a lot of things before we have a chance to act on them or write them down. Our executive functions, on the other hand, give us the power to delay gratification, strategize, plan ahead, and identify and respond to others’ feelings.[9] That’s some list, isn’t it? In the same way a diabetic’s body cannot effectively regulate insulin, imagine your brain being unable to control these behaviors. This explains why ADHDers’ behavior so often defies norms and expectations for their age group — and this persists throughout their lifespan, not just grade school. ADHD isn’t a gift. It isn’t a sign of creativity or intelligence, nor is it a simple character flaw. And it’s more than eccentric distractibility, forgetfulness, and impulsivity. ADHD is a far-reaching disorder that touches every aspect of our lives. If we leave it unchecked, it will generate chaos at home, at work, and everywhere in between.

Just as I have named authenticity and attachment as two basic needs, so Bruce has identified people's "vital need for social belonging with their equally vital needs for individual autonomy and achievement" and calls the marriage of the two psychosocial integration. A sane culture, Bruce and I agree, would have psychosocial integration as both an aim and a norm. Authenticity and attachment would cease to be in conflict: there would be no fundamental tension between belonging and being oneself. Dislocation, in Bruce's formulation, describes a loss of connection to self, to others, and to a sense of meaning and purpose — all of which appear on the roster of essential needs. Lest the word "dislocation" conjure something hazy like "being lost," he is quick with a graphic metaphor. "Think of a dislocated shoulder," he said, "a shoulder disarticulated, out of joint. You didn't cut off the arm, but it's just hanging there and not working anymore. Useless. That's how dislocated people experience themselves. It's excruciatingly painful." More than an individual experience, the same intense pain often occurs at the social level when large groups of people find themselves cut off from autonomy, relatedness, trust, and meaning. This is social dislocation, which, along with personal trauma, is a potent source of mental dysfunction, despair, addictions, and physical illness. Abnormal from the perspective of human needs, such dislocation is now an entrenched fact of "normality" in our culture. Dislocation spares no class of people, even if it shows up differently in different strata of society. Societal privilege may insulate some of us from being outwardly wrecked by dislocation's gale-force winds , but it cannot exempt us from the inner impacts of having our needs for interconnection, purpose, and genuine self-esteem denied. Neither achievements nor attributes nor external evaluations of our worth can possibly compensate us for such a lack.

The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.

Even if the press were dying to report on the Hmong gang-rape spree, the police won’t tell them about it. A year before the Hmong gang rape that reminded the Times of a rape in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the police in St. Paul issued a warning about gang rapists using telephone chat lines to lure girls out of their homes. Although the warning was issued only in Hmong, St. Paul’s police department refused to confirm to the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the suspects were Hmong, finally coughing up only the information that they were “Asian.”20 And the gang rapes continue. The Star Tribune counted nearly one hundred Hmong males charged with rape or forced prostitution from 2000 to June 30, 2005. More than 80 percent of the victims were fifteen or younger. A quarter of their victims were not Hmong.21 The police say many more Hmong rapists have gone unpunished—they have no idea how many—because Hmong refuse to report rape. Reporters aren’t inclined to push the issue. The only rapes that interest the media are apocryphal gang rapes committed by white men. Was America short on Hmong? These backward hill people began pouring into the United States in the seventies as a reward for their help during the ill-fated Vietnam War. That war ended forty years ago! But the United States is still taking in thousands of Hmong “refugees” every year, so taxpayers can spend millions of dollars on English-language and cultural-assimilation classes, public housing, food stamps, healthcare, prosecutors, and prisons to accommodate all the child rapists.22 By now, there are an estimated 273,000 Hmong in the United States.23 Canada only has about eight hundred.24 Did America lose a bet? In the last few decades, America has taken in more Hmong than Czechs, Danes, French, Luxembourgers, New Zealanders, Norwegians, or Swiss. We have no room for them. We needed to make room for a culture where child rape is the norm.25 A foreign gang-rape culture that blames twelve-year-old girls for their own rapes may not be a good fit with American culture, especially now that political correctness prevents us from criticizing any “minority” group. At least when white males commit a gang rape the media never shut up about it. The Glen Ridge gang rape occurred more than a quarter century ago, and the Times still thinks the case hasn’t been adequately covered.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

We wouldn’t be able to achieve such great feats without working together as a team. But too often we think about goals as individual activities, pursued in isolation from other people, despite the fact that in most areas of our working life, working in groups is the norm.

Social norms are the values, actions and expectations of a particular society or group, and they offer guides to our behaviour

To a great extent, violence is a part of our culture. It amazes me that violence is readily accepted as the norm. We can see that, when movie producers don’t hesitate to show extreme bloodletting and the horrible way some of us treat our fellow human beings. As a result, we are not shocked when we hear about the slaughter of innocent people on the streets or in our schools. We protect our right to carry firearms never considering that our perception of what the second amendment says has been molded by special interest groups, who are ready to fight for any issue they are paid to promote. Lately I’ve had to wonder just how civilized we really are. Consider the issues we face every day and ask if we really have “Liberty & Justice for all?” Are we all equal under the law or are some of us more equal than others? Do we really live in a democracy or is it just an allusion and finally what would our founding fathers expect of us?

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups … with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain … confidence, and indeed a certain kind of power. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

Signs of Stage Four. Teams are the norm, focused around shared values and a common purpose. Information moves freely throughout the group. People’s relationships are built on shared values. They tend to ask, “what’s the next right thing to do?” and to build ad hoc partnerships to accomplish what’s important at the moment. Their language focuses on “we,” not “me.” If two people get in a squabble, a third will step in and repair the relationship rather than create a personal following for himself. Unlike Stage Two, the group is composed of people who have played the Stage Three game and won—and are ready for genuine partnerships. Your first job is to make sure each person is stable at Stage Four, as most groups at this level crash down to Stage Three when under stress. Go to Chapter 7 and read to the end of the book.

Signs of Stage Five. Your tribes hardly ever refer to the competition, except to note how remarkable their own culture is by comparison, and how far their results outstrip industry norms. The theme of communication is limitless potential, bounded only by imagination and group commitment. People in this culture can find a way to work with almost anyone, provided their commitment to values is at the same intensity as their own. (Unlike Stage Four, the focus isn’t on “our values” but on resonant values.) There is almost no fear, stress, or workplace conflict. People talk as though the world is watching them, which may well be the case, as their results are making history. Your job is to make sure the infrastructure to maintain these leaps to Stage Five is in place. Go to Chapter 9 and read to the end of the book.

In modern societies we need no reminders about how immigrants are the first to face blame, rejection or attack, especially at times of economic stress or austerity. Nor that people who suffer discrimination are often ‘different’ in their sexual orientation, religious allegiance and disability, or because they contravene cultural norms: teetotallers, vegetarians, transgender people or supporters of the wrong football team.

Courage is the one who lives the life that he or she wants to live, regardless of what everyone else is doing. A coward is one who lives life, never stepping away from the group or challenging the norms of society.

What is the ideal number of children for a family to have?” The answer in almost all the countries was close to two. The average was 2.2, which was also the Brazilian average. The answer didn’t vary by any of the key demographic groups—gender, age, income, or education level. This shows that the norm hasn’t just been adopted by the affluent, better-educated, and younger population. It has become a new standard for nearly everyone, almost everywhere.

Julia’s study group at Yale, for instance, felt draining because the norms—the tussles over leadership, the pressure to constantly demonstrate expertise, the tendency to critique—had put her on guard. In contrast, the norms of her case competition team—enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, withholding criticisms, encouraging people to take a leadership role or hang back as they wanted—allowed everyone to be friendly and unconstrained. Coordination was easy.

We’ll show that human beings evolved in intimate groups where almost everything was shared—food, shelter, protection, child care, even sexual pleasure. We don’t argue that humans are natural-born Marxist hippies. Nor do we hold that romantic love was unknown or unimportant in prehistoric communities. But we’ll demonstrate that contemporary culture misrepresents the link between love and sex. With and without love, a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors.

We believe that the human capacity to live in larger scale forms of tribal social organization evolved through a coevolutionary ratchet generated by the interaction of genes and culture. Rudimentary cooperative institutions favored genotypes that were better able to live in more cooperative groups. Those individuals best able to avoid punishment and acquire the locally-relevant norms were more likely to survive. At first, such populations would have been only slightly more cooperative than typical nonhuman primates. However, genetic changes, leading to moral emotions like shame, and a capacity to learn and internalize local practices, would allow the cultural evolution of more sophisticated institutions that in turn enlarged the scale of cooperation. These successive rounds of coevolutionary change continued until eventually people were equipped with capacities for cooperation with distantly related people, emotional attachments to symbolically marked groups, and a willingness to punish others for transgression of group rules.

Zimbardo could not see the brutality himself because he was already too deep into his chosen role of Warden and lost his exterior view of his sociological “experiment”. He could not see clearly what was happening. More recently, Zimbardo has acted as a consultant to one of the arrested soldiers in the recent Abu Ghraib prison torture. He never denied the culpability of the individuals involved but was certain to bring up the lack of oversight and structure. In his recent book he states “Aberrant, illegal or immoral behavior by individuals in service professions, such as policemen, corrections officers, and soldiers, are typically labeled the misdeeds of “a few bad apples”. The implication is that they are a rare exception and must be set on one side of the impermeable line between evil and good, with the majority of good apples set on the other side. But who is making the distinction? Usually it is the guardians of the system, who want to isolate the problem in order to deflect attention and blame away from those at the top who may be responsible for creating untenable working conditions or for a lack of oversight or supervision. Again the bad-apple dispositional view ignores the apple barrel and its potentially corrupting situational impact on those within it. “A systems analysis focuses on the barrel makers, on those with the power to design the barrel.” Zimbardo isolated 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. I found myself in all of these seven steps, to a greater or lesser degree. They are: 1) Mindlessly taking the first step. 2) Dehumanization of others. 3) De-individualization of self (anonymity). 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility. 5) Blind obedience to authority. 6) Uncritical conformity to the group’s norms. 7) Passive tolerance of evil, through inaction, or indifference. In hindsight, I can see each one of these points were present in the apple barrel of Scientology that I lived through.   Acknowledgments                     There are numerous people I would like to acknowledge for their support and encouragement during the very difficult task of going back to some dark places in my past to get this book written. They do no want their names used, but they know who they are, and my appreciation is deep and well known to them. I would like to thank Jeferson Hawkins for both his Cover designs and other help along this road. I want to acknowledge Bernice Mennis, Ben Bashore for their personal help over the years. There is much I can say about Vermont College, but the simplest is that they gave me the environment, freedom and courage to study what I needed to write

As evil has attempted to take control, political correctness has become a higher value in the USA than righteousness and truth. Right and wrong are consistently being redefined to cater to certain special interest groups. Companies today will pay a huge price if they go against the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) agenda, including possible crippling legal fees if they choose to stand on biblical standards. As I alluded to earlier, disagreeing with the new norms of our society has now been labeled “hate.” No longer are you allowed to debate the leading moral issues of our day without being called a hater (or being ridiculed on social media)—complete with potential lawsuits under hate-crime legislation. Am I out of touch with reality, or have we not entered into the days when men are calling good evil and evil good?

Over time and under the right circumstances, the norms and values of the group to which we belong become our own. We internalize them. We carry them with us. The way we do things around here and why eventually becomes The way I do things and why.

To be free in the republican sense, people must have adequate resources enabling them to make reasonable choices, whatever the preferences and opinions of others. And full freedom requires that others are aware of this freedom and thus cannot look down on someone in pity or contempt. Freedom must mean neutrality towards individual decision making, not a carefully constructed, devious, non-transparent edifice of devices to induce norm-driven behaviour, however benevolent the intention. This clearly justifies a basic income, and combats the pernicious notion of the beggar, a ‘stigmatized petitioner’. Part of the republican tradition, associated with Hannah Arendt as well as Aristotle, also embraces the idea of ‘associational freedom’ – the ability and opportunity to act in concert as a group. Associational freedom has been under relentless attack by the neo-liberal state, for the simple reason that ‘associations’ can be portrayed as opposed to market forces and as distorting them. A republic is conceivable only if everybody is in the company of equally self-confident people free of existential fear. This

stereotype threat theory argues that people tend to underperform when faced with situations that might confirm negative stereotypes about their social group. Here, highly capable students become so worried about performing poorly that they often end up making careless errors, they underachieve, or they stop caring about performing well. Rather than show their very real concern about failing, these pupils act coolly disinterested in school or its rules, become class clowns, study in secret, or avoid potentially threatening situations. Not caring about school sometimes becomes the group’s norm.

But norms serve a different function for people who are higher and lower in conscientiousness. For more conscientious people, norms distinguish members of one’s own group from members of other groups, helping to keep insiders safe by keeping outsiders out. For people who are low in conscientiousness, by contrast, norms are designed in part to protect outsiders, to be more inclusive than exclusive.

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.