DIRE Warnings, Part 3: DIRE Tribalmakers and the Law
How Diversity, Inclusion, Representation, and Equity are supposed to work and where they go wrong.
This article is Part 3 in a series. Part 1 summarized what the series will demonstrate. Part 2 addressed the definitions of equity, diversity, and inclusion including misconceptions.
DIRE Laws
Part 2 of DIRE Warnings highlighted two nearly opposite definitions of diversity. The Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) defined diversity as being about the individual and the unique dimensions, qualities, and characteristics that we each possess. It includes personality dimensions which are core to our identity (Layer 1), immutable traits that we have little to no control over such as race, ethnicity, and gender (Layer 2), more controllable characteristics such as parental status and education (Layer 3), and organizational dimensions such as seniority and job title (Layer 4).
Hiring, promoting, including, and valuing people because they bring diverse characteristics to the table as individuals are all consistent with all relevant federal and provincial legislation in Canada. Adding people to teams because of their different personality traits, life experiences, cultural experiences, fields of study, and job functions are likewise consistent with all relevant legislation.
The same is not true for the misconceived definition of diversity identified in the same article. Misconceived diversity is defined around the concept between multiple people having “differences in race, colour, place of origin, religion, immigrant and newcomer status, ethnic origin, ability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and age”.
Hiring, promoting, and valuing people based on their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, age, and other traits all fall under multiple laws. In Canada these laws include, but are not limited to, the Canadian Human Rights Act, provincial human rights acts, the Canadian Employment Equity Act, and privacy laws such as the federal Privacy Act, and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) where collecting and disseminating such information is regulated. Layer 2 immutable traits also fall under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Section 15, and are components of human rights policies such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Other countries have similar laws.
The CCDI training course, Diversity and Inclusion Fundamentals, notes the importance of compliance with such legislation (Figure 1). It also notes that inclusive accommodation of individual needs is legislated under the Canadian Human Rights Act and that individuals must be treated free from discrimination. Under the Canadian Human Rights Act this means “the principle that all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have and to have their needs accommodated … without being hindered in or prevented from doing so by discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.”
For Canadian government employees, such discrimination is also prohibited by the Code of Conduct within each Canadian government organization along with the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector, which includes both non-partisanship and “never using their official roles to inappropriately obtain an advantage for themselves or to advantage or disadvantage others”1. These components of the Codes are important both with respect to Layer 2 traits and avoiding tribalizing public servants along social categories or political leanings.
The Misconceived EDI definition of diversity is essentially just the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and Codes of Conduct, not a list of things to value when we speak of valuing diversity, particularly in employment and business. The legislation is fully aligned with the CCDI definitions of diversity and inclusion to value people based on the multiple dimensions they bring and the importance (and obligation) of organizations to be flexible and accommodate needs of individuals.
While large organizations, including government agencies, will have professionally trained HR managers and legal counsel who should know the legal boundaries, many of the hiring managers, employees, teams, and programs within the organization may not. This means managers and those involved in hiring and promoting could inadvertently and quite easily step over the lines of the law if they are using the Misconceived EDI definitions instead of the CCDI definitions.
Most small businesses will not have professionally trained HR managers or legal counsel for employment and will not know the legal landscape. If they use the Misconceived EDI definitions they are at much higher risk of running afoul of the law, and lack the resources to defend against litigation should they get caught. This makes it all the more critical that such small businesses be aware of the correct EDI definition.
Government programs for small businesses that apply EDI in their delivery also run the risk of putting their small business clients at legal risk by influencing them to use the Misconceived EDI definitions. The CCDI definitions, along with the research literature, do not have these same risks.
The Tribe has Spoken on Misconceived EDI
Another potentially serious issue with Misconceived EDI definitions is the risk of evoking ingroup-outgroup psychology, also known as tribal psychology, which is perhaps one of the most well-established features of human psychology2:
“It's a well-known principle in social psychology that people define themselves in terms of social groupings and are quick to denigrate others who don't fit into those groups. Others who share our particular qualities are our ‘ingroup,’ and those who do not are the ‘outgroup.’”
There are many well-known demonstrations and research works into this phenomenon, including Jane Elliott’s 1968 classroom experiment using students grouped by eye-colour [2], Muzafer Sherif’s Realistic Conflict Theory3 4 5 6, and Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory (SIT)7. SIT adds the following novelty8:
“Competition and hostility between groups is thus not only a matter of competing for resources (like in Sherif’s Robbers Cave) like jobs but also the result of competing identities.”
John Turner’s Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) also warns against the consequences of perceiving collections of people as a group9 10. SIT and SCT are collectively known as the Social Identity Approach11, and both recognize the conditions in which we partake in social categorizing as well as the dangers12:
“First, engaging in social categorization reduces the cognitive demands placed upon the perceiver. It is relatively taxing to interpret each person encountered as an individual rather than a member of one or more social categories. Such individuation does happen. It, however, requires one to be motivated and able to engage in such effortful processing. A second reason that we engage in categorization is to try to reduce uncertainty regarding our place in the social world. Specifically, through reliance upon social categorization, a substantial amount of information can be ascertained about others, which in turn can inform our expectations for any future interactions.”
“A principle common to social identity theory and self-categorization theory is that individuals interpret the social groups they are a part of positively, and they do so in order to promote a sense of self-worth. In a related manner, individuals are generally attracted to others with whom they share membership in a given category and repelled by those with whom they do not share category membership.”
This psychological phenomenon is the crux of what is meant by ingroup-outgroup psychology. When people are encouraged to treat others based on single-category traits, or fail to treat them as individuals, the tendency is toward ingroup preference, outgroup disadvantaging, and stereotyping (information “ascertained” about others simply based on category). In the case of Realistic Conflict Theory, this tendency rapidly accelerates from disagreement, to insults, to vitriol, to hatred, to violence by evoking people to view others as being in conflict or competition based on their grouping, and social identity approaches note that the negative effects can result even when conflict is not the driving force and intentions are good.
The traits used in such groupings can be arbitrary and random, including random assignments in teams (Robbers Cave Experiment), eye colour (Jane Elliott’s demonstration), and even preference for abstract paintings13. More familiar in history are group conflicts between religions, sects, nations, races, ethnicities, political parties, gangs, and even “friendly” competitions gone too far such as sports team alliances14 15. All that is needed to create such conflict is to make it clear to people which group they are in and continually reinforce the idea that they are in serious conflict at the group level, and tribal psychology does the rest.
An often under-appreciated component of Realistic Group Conflict Theory is the rapid divergence of group cultures. In the Robbers Cave Experiment, the participants were intentionally chosen to be as identical as possible and randomly assigned to different groups. In Phase 1 each group was unaware of the other group and ingroup team-building exercises were untaken. In Phase 2 the groups were introduced and set into competition for rewards or punishments.
The teams named themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers. At a sports event, one of the Eagles noted several of the Rattlers had been swearing and the Eagles rapidly defined themselves to be non-swearing, polite, dignified, and high class. They quickly took to policing each other regarding swearing. The Rattlers defined themselves as “rough-and-tumble”, street-wise, and good at getting things done. They defined the Eagles as being snobby, fake, suck-ups.
Note that they did not disagree about their cultures; they did not seek to the same narratives about themselves. The Rattlers did not try to define themselves as polite and high class in competition with the Eagles trying to define themselves the same way. Instead, they both accepted the cultural concepts but rather differed in the moral interpretation of the value of those cultural concepts.
It’s important to remember that all of them had very similar backgrounds and they were randomly assigned. These cultures did not pre-exist; they are not an act of fate but randomness in an environment of ingroup-outgroup evoked group identifications. Had a Rattler noted the Eagles swearing, they may have developed the exactly reversed cultures. The psychological goal in tribal psychology is to differentiate, not some form of intrinsic authenticity.
In simplest terms, such group-based social psychology can be approximated by analogy to the roll-up functions in spreadsheet software. Imagine each row represents a different person and across the columns are traits about that individual: name, age, height, education, race, gender, sexual orientation, personality traits, habits, interests, and so on. In a spreadsheet you can sort rows to group people based on a single trait, and then create a roll-up that hides all of the rows of that group and replaces them with a single row where the columns are a statistical representation of the “members” of that grouping such as the mean, median, or mode entry of the “member” population for the characteristics in each column.
This is approximately what group psychology does to people’s views of others; when evoked to organize and treat others by a single trait, people tend toward seeing only a single representative value for the whole group and anthropomorphize the group summary (“roll-up”) as a single person with traits as laid out across the columns. Even when they think of individuals in that group, they will tend to copy and paste the roll-up value into each entry in that group, overwriting the differences between individuals.
This error in reasoning is easy to see when the absurdity of the statement is obvious. The group-based heuristic statement (stereotype) that “men are taller than women” has statistical truth in that the average height of men is about 5 inches taller than the average height of women. It does not mean that all men are tall and all women or short, nor does it mean every man is taller than every woman, nor that being tall or short is an essential component of being a man or woman. But, these distinctions are not explicitly clear from the language of “men are taller than women”. When tribal psychology is evoked on a trait, the nuances in meaning are lost and the metric of value (height) gets replaced by the correlated trait (gender), so even a 5 foot height man becomes treated as being tall and a 6 foot woman is treated as short, and being male or female becomes equated within being tall or short.
Equating correlated metrics with the identity trait is common when tribal psychology is evoked, but this replacement error is typically not as obvious in speech or concept as in the height example. Tribal psychology is not interested in reasoning; it is interested in differentiators. “Tall” and “short” make for easy tribal differentiation. The irrationality of applying it to short men and tall women becomes unimportant.
The tribal psychology circuit also tends to evoke an intuitive belief that members of each roll-up group act in unison, often to serve the interests of that group much in the way that individuals often act in their own interests. Note that this does not necessarily mean selfishly; individuals are typically friendly with each other and often act altruistically, and groups can be allies. It is more about a tendency toward a perception that the whole group acts toward a singular purpose, and that it is fundamentally distinct from another group. In reality, of course, there are more differences within such artificially defined groups than between them.
When applied to biological traits (Layer 2) this psychology tendency falls prey to biological essentialism, which equates all people having the specific biological trait as having some other characteristic such as fixed behavior, belief, blame, or common interest. This is largely where this psychological tendency gets its metaphorical name of tribalism because it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective where ingroups and outgroups literally were tribes (or troops when applied to other primates who share a similar behaviour), and every member of a tribe would gain or lose based on conflict between groups such as food, territory, or other resources [14][15] 16.
Such an intuition is not true for most traits that nowadays evoke tribal psychology, but our psychological modules did not evolve under modern conditions. When a popular musician has a hit song, the average income of musicians (an arbitrary “tribe”) increases. But only one musician has benefited; the statistical increase of the artificially defined tribe is trivial and does not carry over to any other “members”. In fact, the same trivial statistic is true for all “tribes” that can be created by “sorting the rows” by a given characteristic of that same musician. The average income has increased if grouping by people with the musician’s same eye colour, handedness, race, gender, or favorite sports team. Despite the statistical fallacy, the intuitive belief in this form of error is almost universal when tribal psychology is evoked because it allows for differentiation and moral evaluation via statistical stereotyping.
EDI Tribalmakers
The relevance of the tribal psychology phenomenon to EDI is the dangers of the Misconceived EDI definition of diversity based on a single dimension, specifically on Layer 2 social categories, and organizations valuing “diversity” based on these traits. This situation is almost textbook for evoking tribal psychology within the employees of an organization. If the organization adds the feature of doing head-counting within org charts, and the value of “diversity” is set up as an implicit competition between socially categorized groups, some level of evoked tribal psychology is inevitable. Even when not competing, it evokes employees to value each other based on these traits rather than as multi-dimensional, diverse individuals and still evokes stereotypes even with the best of intentions.
Valuing and focusing on one-dimensional social categories is the opposite of the CCDI and research directives as far as defining and valuing diversity, as well as the relevant legislation, and the resulting behavior is the opposite of the intent of EDI to stop valuing and including or excluding people based on one dimension. This is why the research literature in Part 2 of DIRE Warnings warns against focusing on Layer 2 immutable traits rather than informational traits; the empirical evidence shows that it creates more interpersonal conflict and significantly reduces the performance of teams.
This problem is made even more difficult to address when group psychology is evoked with good intentions and a positive bias. This makes it harder for individuals to realize that their tribal psychology circuit has been activated because they know they have good intentions and positive feelings. The issues are having those feelings based on grouping people by immutable traits combined with the lack the same feeling for people in other complementary groupings, and the fact the feelings are evoked by the trait rather than the individual.
Wanting to help people is fundamentally altruistic but if tribal psychology replaces the metric of individual need with a metric that correlates based on a social category trait then it results in potentially helping people who don’t need it, but have the trait, and ignoring those who do need it because they lack that trait. This situation results from an intention to do good but instead results in stereotypes and discrimination, often creating toxic work environments and spreading the very behaviour proper EDI aims to eliminate. There are many examples of this tendency in recent years resulting from applying Misconceived EDI principles17 18 19 20 21 22. Organizations that promote the Misconceived EDI definition of diversity will predictably tend toward evoking tribal psychology and creating and spreading this sort of bad behaviour, and ultimately failing to achieve the value of diversity and inclusion as outlined in the research literature and CCDI training.
Part 4 of DIRE Warnings will address the concept of representation, its intended use, and misuse of the concept that inevitable results in one of several possible modes of failure.
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