Social Identities Make Fragile Tipping Points

• In Event: Unpacking Social and Political Identities

Abstract

The need for widespread social change along intersecting dimensions is increasingly apparent. Despite this growing recognition and pressure for change on many fronts, policymakers and politicians have made little progress on many urgent societal issues in part because of legislative gridlock, bureaucratic hurdles, and misaligned incentives, as well as powerful constituencies that resist change. The failure of formal institutions to substantively respond to these and other pressing social issues has brought increased attention to the potential for small “bottom-up” changes to trigger tipping points, spurring rapid shifts in social norms and collective action. This also suggests that circumscribed policy initiatives may be able to spark sweeping beneficial changes in behavior. Hypothetically, however, social identities and polarization might undermine tipping in ways policy makers do not anticipate. To examine this, we implemented an experiment around the 2020 U.S. elections. Participants played coordination games in homogeneous political groups. Repeated play allowed groups to develop local coordination norms. Once a group had established a norm, we exposed a subset of group members to an intervention designed to promote beneficial changes in behavior. Our control treatment had neutral labels associated with choices, while our identity treatment had partisan political images associated with the choices. This simple payoff-irrelevant relabelling of the choice options generated extreme differences. Whereas control groups were relatively slow to coordinate before the intervention, they quickly transitioned to coordinating on the new socially beneficial norm after the intervention. In comparison, the identity groups were relatively fast to develop traditions before the intervention, but persisted in a state of chronic disagreement following the intervention, resulting in large welfare losses. Tipping was powerful but fragile. It supported striking cultural changes when choices and identity were unlinked, but even a trivial link destroyed tipping entirely.

Authors

• Sara Constantino, Northeastern University

• Soenke Ehret, University of Lausanne