Why a media bias guide needs a chapter on tribes
Media bias is usually framed as an outlet problem. This chapter is about the audience problem: humans process facts as members, not as individuals. Two findings anchor it. In 1906 a Yale sociologist named the tribal scoring system. In the 1950s a psychologist measured what a unanimous group does to a person's eyesight.
1906: Sumner names the home team
William Graham Sumner needed vocabulary for something he found in every society he studied, so he coined it. Two of his coinages now run your feed:
Primary source 01 / 13
Thus a differentiation arises between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups, out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a relation of peace, order, law, government, and industry, to each other. Their relation to all outsiders, or others-groups, is one of war and plunder, except so far as agreements have modified it.
Primary source 02 / 13
Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.
Scaled and rated with reference to it. Swap groups for outlets and that is a working theory of partisan media consumption, published when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Sumner noticed the package deal too, the part that makes tribal bias feel like virtue:
Primary source 03 / 13
Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without,--all grow together, common products of the same situation.
Primary source 04 / 13
When Caribs were asked whence they came, they answered, "We alone are people."
And he named the political variant directly, with a prescription attached:
Primary source 05 / 13
The patriotic bias is a recognized perversion of thought and judgment against which our education should guard us.
1955: Asch measures the pressure
Solomon Asch wanted to know how much a unanimous group could bend a plain fact. His setup was brutal in its simplicity: show a person lines on cards and ask which two match, an eyesight task people get right more than 99 percent of the time alone. Then seat them with seven confederates who all confidently give the same wrong answer.
Primary source 06 / 13
He is placed in a position in which, while he is actually giving the correct answers, he finds himself unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed by a unanimous and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact. Upon him we have brought to bear two opposed forces: the evidence of his senses and the unanimous opinion of a group of his peers.
Primary source 07 / 13
Whereas in ordinary circumstances individuals matching the lines will make mistakes less than 1 per cent of the time, under group pressure the minority subjects swung to acceptance of the misleading majority's wrong judgments in 36.8 per cent of the selections.
A third of the answers, surrendered on a fact the eye could plainly see. Two details matter more than the headline number. First, the conformers could not see themselves doing it:
Primary source 08 / 13
All the yielding subjects underestimated the frequency with which they conformed.
Second, the spell has a cheap antidote. One dissenting voice, even a wrong one, collapsed most of the effect:
Primary source 09 / 13
The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its power. Its pressure on the dissenting individual was reduced to one fourth: that is, subjects answered incorrectly only one fourth as often as under the pressure of a unanimous majority.
Hold that finding next to a media diet made of one outlet, one feed, one group chat. Unanimity is the active ingredient. Diversity of voices is not a nicety; it is the documented off-switch. Asch's own conclusion:
Primary source 10 / 13
That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.
The stress test: what tribes do to words
When group loyalty fully takes over a society, the corruption reaches into language itself. Thucydides documented it during the civil war at Corcyra, in a passage that reads like a description of any modern platform on a bad day:
Primary source 11 / 13
Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.
Primary source 12 / 13
Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected.
Ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. That accusation is 2,400 years old, and it is still the standard insult thrown at anyone who reads the other side. Consider this page's whole act a long answer to it. Asch left the right closing note, so we will too:
Primary source 13 / 13
Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight. When consensus comes under the dominance of conformity, the social process is polluted and the individual at the same time surrenders the powers on which his functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends.