Understanding Collective Pride and Group Identity

New directions in emotion theory, research and practice

Gavin Brent Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317664178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Collective and group-based pride is currently covered across a number of disciplines including nationalism studies, sociology and social psychology, with little communication between fields. This multidisciplinary collection encourages interdisciplinary research and provides a unique insight into the subject, stemming from a psychological perspective. The collection builds upon insights from collective emotion research to consider the relations between collective pride, shame and guilt as well as emotions of anger, empowerment and defiance. Collective pride is examined in contexts that vary from small groups in relatively peaceful competition to protest movements and large groups in divisive conflicts. In the book collective pride is a complex and positive emotional experience evident in the behaviour of groups, that can lead to negative forms of collective hubris in which other groups are devalued or dominated.

Emotions of Collective Pride and Group Identity brings together international contributors to discuss the theory, research and practice surrounding collective pride in relation to other emotions and collective, cultural and national identity. Divided into two parts, part one explores the philosophy and theory behind collective pride and its extremes. Part two draws upon the latest quantitative and qualitative empirical research to focus on specific issues, for example, happiness, national pride and the 2010 World Cup. Topics covered include:

- cultural and national pride and identity
- positive feelings of unity and solidarity
- dynamic relationships between collective pride, guilt and shame
- theories of emotions in ritual, symbolic and affective practices
- collective pride and collective hubris in organizations
- perspectives on national events from young people.

This book will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience in the area of affect studies and emotion research including social psychologists, sociologists, historians and anthropologists.

Part I Philosophical, conceptual and theoretical issues

DOI: 10.4324/9781315767680-2

Chapter 1 The rational appropriateness of collective emotions

Mikko Salmela

DOI: 10.4324/9781315767680-3

How to evaluate collective emotions?

Collective emotions have several functions in the emergence and maintenance of social groups and their identities (e.g. Salmela 2013). Accordingly, collective emotions can be evaluated for their adaptiveness in relation to those functions. For instance, negative collective emotions such as guilt, shame and disappointment are often maladaptive for the group because they weaken social cohesion and alienate members from the group, provided that dissociation from the group is possible (e.g. Lawler 2001; Kessler and Hollbach 2005; Smith et al. 2007). Anger towards out-groups is an exception: a common enemy increases social cohesion. Yet the adaptiveness of an emotion is not the same thing as its appropriateness. Collective guilt, for instance, is a maladaptive emotion insofar as it has negative implications to the social identity of the group members and contributes to the disintegration of the group. Still, guilt is an appropriate collective emotion if the group has violated against some other group (Gilbert 2002; Konzelmann Ziv 2007). In general, a collective emotion is rationally appropriate if it is a fitting response to its eliciting situation from the groups epistemic perspective, whereas adaptiveness is a consequential standard of warrant that refers to the beneficiality of an emotion from the groups practical perspective. Therefore, it is a contingent matter to what extent the appropriateness and adaptiveness of a collective emotion coincide.

In spite of intuitive examples of appropriate and inappropriate collective emotions, there is no previous theorizing on the rational appropriateness of collective emotions. One reason for this lamentable state of affairs is historical: collective emotions were branded as a prime source of human irrationality in the crowd theories of Le Bon (1896), McDougall (1921) and Freud (1922) that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand, this view emerged from crowd theorists distrust of emotions as motives of collective behaviour (McClelland 1989). Yet, on the other hand, crowds in the sense of loose, random and temporary associations of individuals are not the kind of social groups whose participants emotions we can plausibly evaluate in terms of rational appropriateness in the first place. The reason is that crowds do not have an epistemic perspective with shared intentional attitudes and rational practices of forming and revising those attitudes in light of new evidence. Yet this kind of epistemic group agency is a precondition without which discussion on the rational appropriateness of collective emotions does not make much sense. This means that my account of the rational appropriateness of collective emotions is somewhat idealized. However, I believe that many actual social groups, such as research and sports teams, workgroups, religious sects, theatre ensembles, bands and orchestras, can meet these criteria. To other, more loosely organized social groups, such as fan groups or social and political movements, the proposed account will apply with reservations.

The question of rational appropriateness is particularly interesting in the context of collective pride, because it relates to another distinction between authentic and hubristic pride, introduced by Tracy and Robins (2007) in the research of individual pride. The notions ‘authentic’ and ‘hubristic’ suggest a dichotomy between appropriate and inappropriate pride, even if Tracy and Robins do not make this equation. Instead, they distinguish authentic and hubristic pride from each other on the basis of dissimilar attributions of success and behavioural consequences. Both types of pride are felt in accomplishments and achievements, but whereas authentic pride attributes these outcomes to unstable and controllable aspects of the self, such as ones efforts, hubristic pride attributes success to stable and global aspects of the self, such as one’s identity or abilities. In behaviour, authentic pride associates with joy of achievements and prosocial behaviour, whereas hubristic pride associates with narcissistic self-aggrandizement and aggressive behaviour that are defences against excessive shame.

The problem with applying authentic and hubristic pride at the group level in a straightforward manner is that many innocent and seemingly appropriate instances of collective pride appear to come out as hubristic. I mean such phenomena as the collective pride of sports fans in the success of their favourite team with which the fans identify themselves by virtue of some stable and global aspect of their social identity, such as nationality or academic affiliation. The idea of basking in the reflected glory of other people and bragging about their accomplishments to the fans of other teams seems hubristic. Worse still, a similar conclusion appears to apply to gay pride parades for any homosexual person who takes pride in a stable and global aspect of their identity, their sexual orientation, that they may have been ashamed of earlier in their lives. If these cases of collective pride qualify as hubristic, we must ask if the distinction is useful in the study of collective pride at all.

I believe it is, but with caution, as Sullivan (2014) suggests, and supplemented with the distinction between rationally appropriate and inappropriate collective pride.

What are collective emotions?

Discussion of the rational appropriateness of collective pride must begin from a general understanding of collective emotions. Even if social scientists since Durkheim and Le Bon have been fascinated by collective affective phenomena, the research of collective emotions has not been part of the ‘emotional turn’ in the sciences and humanities until recently. Consequently, there is no consensus on the nature of collective emotions, but only divergent research programmes with their more or less tentative definitions. Therefore, I introduce my own approach that views the collectivity of emotions as a matter of sharing them with others. This applies to both main dimensions of emotion: intentionality and embodiment. I first describe how individuals can share the intentional content of an emotion and then explain the sharing of embodied experiences (for more detailed accounts, see Salmela 2012, 2013).

There is a wide interdisciplinary agreement among emotion researchers that emotions could not exist without underlying concerns. Therefore, when a group of people experiences a collective emotion, it is plausible to assume that they have some shared desires or goals or norms or values — representations with the world-to-mind direction of fit that I henceforth, following Roberts (2003), call ‘concerns’ for brevity’s sake. Sharing the intentional content of emotion is therefore a matter of appraising the particular object of emotion similarly with other people on the basis of shared concerns. The appraisal process need not be collective, even if it in some cases can be, such as when an emotional appraisal is formed as a result of public discussion (see Halperin 2014). However, emotional appraisals are often so fast and modular that it is impossible to make, let alone commit oneself, to them collectively, even if Margaret Gilbert (2002) has defended such a position. Instead, I have proposed that we can commit ourselves to the underlying shared concerns of collective emotions in importantly dissimilar ways.¹

A commitment to a shared concern is in an I-mode when it is made privately, believing that others in the group have the same concern, and also believing this is mutually believed in the group. In contrast, a commitment is in a we-mode when it is made collectively, either explicitly or implicitly, with other group members, with a mutual belief that the group members share the same concern. Empirical researchers of ‘group-based emotions’ (e.g. Smith et al. 2007) do not distinguish between these two types of commitment when they talk about emotions that individuals experience by virtue of identifying themselves with groups. However, philosophers have emphasized normative differences between private and collective commitment. The main difference is that a private commitment may be revised or renounced for private reasons alone, whereas a collective commitment may be revised or renounced only for reasons that are acceptable from the group’s point of view (Tuomela 2007).

Shared concerns provide both psychological causes and rational reasons for the emergence of collective emotions. However, they do not suffice to explain the kind of non-reflective absorption in shared emotional experience that sometimes takes the form of a phenomenological fusion of feelings into ‘our’ feeling that Hans Bernhard Schmid (2009) highlights as the core of collective emotions. I do not believe that a phenomenological fusion of feelings alone indicates strong collectivity because it seems possible to experience such fusion in the context of otherwise dissimilar emotions. The emotion felt as ours must also have underlying shared concerns to qualify as robustly collective. Still, the experience of phenomenological fusion is an outcome of the synchronization of individual emotional responses — physiological changes, facial expressions, action tendencies and subjective feelings — in the manner proposed by ritualistic theories of emotion (e.g. Durkheim 2001; Collins 2004). Causal mechanisms that contribute to the synchronization of emotional responses include attentional deployment (Collins 2004), emotional contagion (Hatfield et al. 1994), facial mimicry (Bourgois and Hess 2008), motor mimicry and imitation (Chartrand and Bargh 1999), and neural mirroring (Decety and Meyer 2008).²

The appropriateness of collective emotions

With this background, we can return to the question of the rational appropriateness of collective emotions. I suggest that the standards of appropriateness for collective emotions are twofold. First, the emotion must be warranted by group reasons that derive from the group members’ shared concerns. And, second, the group ethos of which those concerns are part must be rational. Accordingly, I propose that a collective emotion is appropriate if it is felt for a group reason that emerges from an internally coherent group ethos whose aspects have not been adopted or maintained by ignoring counterevidence that is available to the group members. Below, I elaborate the two aspects of this proposal, group reasons and the rationality of a group ethos.

Group reasons

Shared concerns provide psychological causes and rational reasons for the emergence of collective emotions in situations in which the group members’ shared concerns are affected favourably or adversely in particular ways. Thus, Parkinson et al. (2005: 97) point out that:

anger will be experienced to the extent that group goals are unjustly thwarted or threatened, sadness will be experienced to the extent that the group’s loses something that is important to its goals, pride will be experienced to the extent that the groups goals are achieved as a result of group members’ own efforts, shame will be experienced to the extent that respect for the group is diminished as a result of group members’ actions, and so on.

Here, Parkinson et al. identify ‘core relational themes’ (Lazarus 1991) or ‘formal objects’ (Kenny 1963) that provide standards for the appropriateness of several collective emotions. Thus, when the group members’ shared concerns are affected in the manner specified by formal objects, the corresponding collective emotions are appropriate for the members. For instance, when a group goal is in danger, the group members have group reasons to fear, or when the group members have reached their goal by their own efforts, they have group reasons to be proud of themselves. In this way, core relational themes and formal objects define the first dimension of emotional appropriateness, the shape of emotion (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000). The other dimension of emotional appropriateness is size. An emotion is appropriate in terms of size when the emotional response to the particular object is neither too strong nor too mild but of proper intensity, both in feeling and display.

Yet group reasons provide only a necessary condition of the rational appropriateness collective emotions. To see why, consider, for instance, a racist group’s disdain of immigrants. This emotion is warranted by group reasons that emerge from the group’s ethos: its racist beliefs and values. Yet this emotion is inappropriate since the group’s ethos is maintained by ignoring counterevidence to racist beliefs and values that is available to the group members. To remove this problem, we must require that the group ethos is rational itself. Yet it is not obvious what this means.

The rationality of a group ethos

There is little research on the rationality of collective attitudes. A possible reason for this neglect is the view that standards of rationality are held to be the same for all subjects, both individual and collective. Thus, Pettit (2007: 496–7) proposes the following three standards of rationality for all agents:

Attitude-to-evidence standards will require, among other things, that the system’s beliefs be responsive to evidence. Attitude-to-attitude standards will require that, even as they adjust to evidential inputs, its beliefs and desires do not assume such an incoherent form that they support inconsistent options. And attitude-to-action standards will require that the system tend to act, and to form intentions to act, on the lines that its beliefs and desires support.

A rational agent is capable of satisfying these criteria by means of forming meta-propositional attitudes about its first-order propositions and their relations, and the activity of doing so counts as reasoning. Agents that engage in rea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Philosophical, conceptual and theoretical issues
• Part II Multidisciplinary perspectives on collective pride and related emotions
• Summary: new directions in theory, research and practice
• Index