Educating the Public on Evidence-based methods for improving inter-group civility.

Superordinate Goals unite Koch Industries and the Center for American Progress

The best evidence-based recommendations for improving inter-group relations arise when academic research and real-world case studies echo each other.  There has been ample evidence of how shared (superordinate) goals can reduce inter-group tensions in the psychology literature, and this research has spawned events and programs designed to put this research into practice.  We can have even more confidence in this recommendation when we see shared goals uniting people across moral divisions, without any influence from the research community.  Recently, the New York Times wrote about one such case, where the conservative Koch Industries and the liberal Center for American Progress are working together toward a common goal: reforming the nation’s criminal justice system.

From the article:

Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative Koch brothers, and the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based liberal issues group, are coming together to back a new organization called the Coalition for Public Safety. The coalition plans a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of emerging proposals to reduce prison populations, overhaul sentencing, reduce recidivism and take on similar initiatives. Other groups from both the left and right — theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks — are also part of the coalition, reflecting its unusually bipartisan approach.

Organizers of the advocacy campaign, which is to be announced on Thursday, consider it to be the largest national effort focused on the strained prison and justice system. They also view the coalition as a way to show lawmakers in gridlocked Washington that factions with widely divergent views can find ways to work together and arrive at consensus policy solutions.

Officials at the Center for American Progress said that they did not make the decision to join the partnership lightly given the organization’s clashes and deep differences with both Koch Industries and many of the conservative groups.

“We have in the past and will in the future have criticism of the policy agenda of the Koch brother companies, but where we can find common ground on issues, we will go forward,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the center. “I think it speaks to the importance of the issue.”

In the face of important issues, people who were previously divided are indeed capable of putting aside previous differences.  For example, political scientists have clearly documented how war brings out nation together in support of our president, across party lines.  These shared goals are actually more common than one might think.  We all have an interest in reducing poverty, increasing employment, improving education, and improving public safety.  It is often simply a matter of focusing more on the policies that can help us achieve our shared goals versus the elections where only one side can win.

– Ravi Iyer

ps. If you’re interested in having a conversation about the issue of criminal justice reform across party lines, I’d encourage you to check out the work of Living Room Conversations, whose work we have previously featured here.

 

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Ukrainians Illustrate how Super-Ordinate Goals Unite Groups

A relatively mature area of social psychology shows how competition breeds contempt and cooperation breeds liking.  This is a rather intuitive and simplistic finding, yet there are likely things that competing groups can do to foster cooperation that they may not be considering.  Just as brothers may fight, but unite against outsiders to their family, so too may competitors unite in the face of some super-ordinate goal.  Sometimes such a goal just needs to be made salient.

Vladimir Putin is making such a goal salient in the Ukraine.  From this New York Times article:

“Yanukovych freed Ukraine and Putin is uniting it,” said Iegor Soboliev, a 37-year-old ethnic Russian who heads a government commission to vet officials of the former regime. “Ukraine is functioning not through its government but through the self-organization of its people and their sense of human decency.”

Mr. Soboliev is a former investigative journalist who grew frustrated that carefully documented revelations of government misbehavior — which he says “wasn’t merely corruption, it was marauding” — were having no impact. He and a few friends formed Volya, a movement dedicated to creating a country of “responsible citizens” and a “state worthy of their trust.”

“People in Odessa, Mykolaiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk are coming out to defend their country,” Mr. Soboliev said. “They have never liked the western Ukrainian, Galician point of view. But they are showing themselves to be equally patriotic. They are defending their country from foreign aggression. Fantastical things are happening.”

Just as in American history, where people rally around the flag in the face of external threats, so too are Ukrainians uniting at a time which could be marked by competition to fill a power vacuum.  This is one area where ecologically valid examples mirror lab studies of the importance of super-ordinate goals in uniting groups.  People who want to unite groups that may otherwise be prone to less productive competitive behavior may want to consider following Putin’s lead and introducing super-ordinate goals amongst would-be enemies.

– Ravi Iyer

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Our goal is to educate the public about social science research on improving inter-group relations across moral divides.