Jonathan Haidt describes humans as “90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee (2013, p.255)”, selfish and ‘groupish’.  This can have positive consequences:

We love to join teams, clubs, leagues, and fraternities.  We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers so enthusiastically that it seems our minds were designed for teamwork….  We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players (Ibid., p.221).”

Under the right conditions, we can “transcend self-interest and lose ourselves… in something larger than ourselves (Ibid., p,.258)”: activating “pride, loyalty and enthusiasm” affects motivation and behaviour (Ibid., p.275).  We assume that our group is right: telling people what their political party believes about an issue encourages them to take the same position, even when researchers select the party’s ‘stance’ for or against an issue randomly (Busby, Flynn and Druckman, 2018).  Relatedness is motivating, and makes us happier: “belongingness and connectedness with others” is “centrally important” if people are to adopt rules and habits they are not intrinsically motivated to pursue (Ryan and Deci, 2000, p.73).  We can encourage feelings of connectedness, belonging and community through:

  • Emphasising similarity between individuals: we like those who seem like us (Cialdini, 2007; Haidt, 2013)
  • Reciprocity, which demands that one kindness must be repaid with another (Cialdini, 2007)
  • Coordinated activity, which strengthens feelings of shared purpose: think of the Haka (Haidt, 2013, pp.278)
  • Helping people see that they are a valued part of a group
  • Competition between our team and others: 9/11 increased patriotism dramatically across all sections of American society (Ross, 2005)

How do these ideas apply in the classroom?

1) Connecting students and teachers

We can help students connect with their teachers by highlighting similarities between them.  One study asked teachers and students to complete questionnaires about themselves, then highlighted similarities.  Teachers and students saw themselves as more similar, teachers liked students more (although not vice versa) and students’ grades increased.  The effect was particularly powerful for African-American and Latino students, with whom teachers reported interacting more (Gehlbach et al., 2015).  Simply highlighting interests or experiences which we have in common with students may improve our relationships with them.

We may be able to make feedback seem more reciprocal and less confrontational.  Students often see it as criticism: we can avoid this if students recognise that our feedback reflects our high standards and belief students can meet them.  Yeager and his colleagues (2014) tested this by asking teachers to mark normally, and to write post-its which read either:

  • “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them,” or;
  • “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper (p.809).”

Researchers stuck the notes on randomly-selected students’ work, alongside teachers’ normal comments.  In a series of studies, minority students:

  • Were more likely to edit and resubmit papers
  • Were more likely to improve the quality of their papers (when resubmission was made compulsory)
  • Gained higher grades
  • Expressed higher trust in the school

We can help students feel better connected to us if we highlight similarities, high expectations and belief in students.

2) Connecting students

We can help students feel connected to their peers.  Diversity is enriching, but community develops when people “feel like a family”; when we emphasise similarities, shared values and common identity, not differences (Haidt, 2013, p.277).  An icebreaking activity asked National Citizen Service teenagers to discuss similarities: this brief exercise led participants to report “significantly higher levels of social trust four weeks later (Behavioural Insights Team, 2017, p.31).”  Asking a new class or group who don’t know one another well to play this as a game may help them begin to connect with one another.

Where differences between groups or stereotypes are more entrenched, perspective-taking can help students connect with others.  In perspective-taking activities, participants are introduced to members of a different group, directly or through written or video case studies, then invited to take their perspective or imagine their feelings.  These exercises consistently lead participants to view others more positively and decrease their belief in stereotypes; it also leads them to behave more positively towards others, immediately and in the long term.  This has been tested successfully among groups such as Israeli and Palestinian teenagers (Todd and Galinsky, 2014): it may work with our students who are at odds with one another too.

3) Connecting a community, creating an identity

We may want students to feel part of something much bigger than themselves: that they belong to a form, year group, house or school, and owe it something.  Here competition and contrast helps highlight what a group has in common.  Dan Ariely (2013) tested students’ willingness to cheat: seeing a peer cheat increased cheating, but seeing someone wearing the shirt of a rival university cheat reduced cheating.  Collective activity fosters these identities: music and movement lead individuals to see themselves as a part of a larger group (Haidt, 2013): activities such as form singing competitions or dances may prove powerful, whether between forms, schools or subjects.

We also need to show individuals they belong in the group.  Social belonging interventions can help students feel at home in unfamiliar environments.  In one, students wrote short pieces at the start of their first year in secondary school, about either:

  • Values which were personally important to them; or,
  • Values which were not important to them but might matter to others

This intervention had powerful effects: African-American students who had written about values which mattered to them gained much higher grades, this was strongest among low-performing students (Cohen et al., 2006).  The effect of emphasising to students that they belong – that their values have a place in a new, unfamiliar environment – is powerful, particularly when the intervention is targeted when they start a new year or school and initiates a virtuous cycle (for more on timing interventions, see here).

Conclusion

Advocating common identities or collective singing may seem to verge on cultish; the organisations which have perfected this are those which rely most on collective spirit and action: the armed forces, for example, drill, compete and emphasise a common identity so that members work well together under pressure.  But evidence that this works does not mean we should reject it in schools: we want students to feel the motivation and belonging which being part of something confers.  Equally, a person’s desire for a group identity is matched by their need for individuality: a person needs to be a “member of a winning team and to be a star in his own right (Peters and Waterman, 2015, p.xxxii)”; the most effective companies reaffirm “the heroic dimension (satisfying the individual’s need to be a part of something great)” and “concern for individual self-expression (the need to stick out (Ibid., p.xxxiv).”  We want students to belong to groups and feel connected to others – as themselves.  Achieving this can improve their relations with peers, generate motivation and improve their results.

This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning.  It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.

If you found this post interesting, you may want to:

Read the overall framework for behavioural change I’m working within, here.

Learn more about social-belonging interventions, here.

References

Ariely, D. (2013). The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves. Harper Perennial.

Behavioural Insights Team (2017). The Behavioural Insights Team Update Report 2016-17.

Busby, E., Flynn, D. J., & Druckman, J. N. (2018). Studying framing effects on political preferences: Existing research and lingering questions. In P. D’Angelo (Ed.), Doing News Framing Analysis II (pp. 67-90). New York: Routledge.

Cialdini, R. (2007) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. HarperBusiness.

Cohen, G., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., and Master, A. (2006). Reducing the racial achievement: A Social-Psychological Intervention. Science 313, pp.1307-1310.

Gehlbach, H., Brinkworth, M., King, A., Hus, L., McIntyre, J., Rogers, T. (2015). Creating Birds of Similar Feathers. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series.

Haidt, J. (2013). The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. London: Penguin.

Peters, T. and Waterman, R. (2015). In search of excellence: lessons from America’s best-run companies. London: Profile.

Ross, M. (2005). Poll: U.S. Patriotism continues to soar. MSNBC.com 

Yeager, D., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W., Williams, M. and Cohen, G. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), pp.804-824.