Self-Othering
Why do people signal that they belong to an out-group?
In my last article, I wrote about changes in language due to the high value of the social signal of empathy for the marginalized. If signaling empathy for the marginalized is valuable in certain social environments, then claiming to be part of that marginalized group should be even more valuable in those environments.
Being a part of some out-group, being “othered,” becomes a privileged identity by dint of its very disadvantages. Of course, when one is actually othered by society there is a real marginalization that is not desirable. But if someone can claim the social benefits that come with the marginalized identity without actually suffering, then they’re in the sweet spot. And so in recent years we have seen more people other themselves in order to gain such privilege.
You’ve probably seen someone on Twitter brandish a laundry list of disadvantaged identities in order to make some sort of moral argument. The above poster is invoking race, gender, sexuality, and four different medical conditions in order to bolster their claim that jokes about “solo poly hijabi amputees” are insensitive.
It’s reasonable to look to people with lived experience to speak on issues that affect their identity. But too often, we mistake the loudest voices for the most representative ones. The people most eager to claim authority on these issues are often those who have the most social incentive to do so, not necessarily those who best reflect the experiences of the group. Additionally, the perspectives that are able to best pierce through social media algorithms are those that make brash, polarizing claims and denigrate others. As a result, identity can become a rhetorical weapon, used to silence disagreement rather than foster understanding.
Too often the voices we do hear are from people who take on identities due to these social pressures. I simply don’t believe that, if there was no incentive to be disabled within the circles that user @afrodykee inhabits, they would claim to have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome,1 autism, ADHD, and multiple other chronic illnesses. I don’t see why it would be that, as they allege, “certain conditions and rare disease in general tend to roam in packs.” To me it feels far more likely that the same social mechanism is operating to lead the same person to claim most if not all of these conditions and diseases.
Medical conditions are an interesting manifestation of the phenomenon of self-othering. There’s an emerging body of research on Munchausen’s by internet,2 whereby psychosomatic symptoms are acquired by watching illness-related content online. Social media algorithms cultivate these rabbit-hole communities, and push viewers towards self-diagnosis so that they can have something in common with everyone else in the comment section.
Claiming something like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome gives an adolescent a community to be a part of. It gives them the moral high ground in arguments. And it also allows them to abdicate personal responsibility for certain actions.
A medical student I know recently told me that some patients claim that some medical disorder (say, BPD) causes one behavior while an additional disorder (say, autism) causes another. Often, neither condition has been diagnosed, nor do they seek a diagnosis. In these cases, a person no longer considers their behavior their responsibility, as self-diagnosed conditions provide a way to excuse one’s actions and protect the ego from criticism. All of these benefits combine to make a compelling pitch, and so we see many people center disabled identity in their social presentation.
The disabled community also has an out-group. Anyone can search X for the term “ableds” to see that some people view all those who are not disabled as their out-group and even as their oppressor.
Going out of your way to other yourself is not unique to medical conditions, as it can even extend to race. Elizabeth Warren, who was at most 1/64 Native American by genetic ancestry, certainly experienced the world as a white woman. And yet she described herself as Native American while a professor at Harvard Law; in 1998 she was even described in the Harvard Crimson as the “the first woman with a minority background to be tenured,” a status that likely carried professional and social advantages. In another example, former civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal famously presented herself as a Black woman despite having no Black ancestry at all; claiming to be Black helped her become president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Shifts in racial self-perception can also be seen on a broader scale. The number of Americans who claimed Native American heritage nearly doubled from 2010 to 2020. This is, on its face, strange; Native Americans have just about the lowest fertility rate of any racial group and the change clearly isn’t fueled by immigration. So why would the population of Native Americans skyrocket like this in just 10 years?
Well, the increase was concentrated almost entirely in those who claim to be Native American and also another race. Reporting from the Washington Post helps us to understand why so many more people were listed as multiracial and part Native American. There are two reasons: a change in framing from the Census Bureau and a shift in how people perceive their own identity. If the social value of being part Native American goes up, then we would expect more people to claim to be part Native American.
What are the consequences of people choosing to take on additional marginalized identities to mark themselves as belonging to an out-group? It drives down social cohesion. In a society where people are eager to differentiate themselves by claiming a marginalized identity, it’s harder for us to find commonality with our peers. To investigate the question of social cohesion as it relates to various group identities, we can look to the study of intergroup relations.
Psychologist Gordon Allport gave us a theoretical framework for understanding prejudice between groups. His contact hypothesis posited that, under certain conditions, contact between different groups actually reduces prejudice, which would foster social cohesion. This requires that groups recognize some shared authority, have relatively equal status, and can work towards common goals. These conditions are not always met, and more recently others have suggested that negative interactions between groups can reinforce prejudice more than positive interactions can reduce it.
So, do the groups discussed in this article interact positively with others? Unfortunately, claiming a marginalized identity often comes with the expectation of moral authority in relevant discussions. When this moral high ground is invoked, it creates a moral hierarchy in the interaction, placing those outside the group in a lower position. Being on the lower end of that hierarchy can be frustrating, leading to resentment and reinforcing division rather than promoting mutual understanding. As a result, these asymmetrical, often negative interactions may deepen prejudice instead of reducing it.
Also, when people deliberately set themselves apart as "other," it leads to increasingly specific group categorizations. The more granular these categories become, the more they encourage competition between groups even over trivial distinctions.
Social psychologist Henri Tajfel investigated the question of competition between minimal groups. In his experiments participants who randomly assigned to arbitrary groups consistently favored their own group not just by maximizing its gains but by widening the gap between their in-group and their out-group. This was not zero-sum behavior; instead of seeking the best possible outcome for themselves, participants were willing to reduce their own group's reward if it meant pulling the other group down even further. This pattern held true even when they were explicitly told that the group divisions were meaningless, underscoring how categorization alone can drive division at a cost to everyone involved.
Thus, when more people try to identify themselves with an out-group we see more competition and that competition is harmful. However, the simple framing of contact between an in-group and an out-group is reductive here. Many of the people we’re discussing who take on these identities exist in spaces where their identities actually do not mark them as the out-group at all. Scott Alexander’s excellent 2014 essay “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” deals with this issue.
Alexander adapts a parable from Zen Buddhism to make his point:
The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.
Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
Belonging to the nominal out-group of those who claim a marginalized identity actually marks you as part of the in-group within liberal circles in America. And, as the parable demonstrates, being tolerant of those who are within your in-group requires no willpower at all.
Alexander calls these liberal circles the “Blue Tribe.” Within the Blue Tribe, the out-group is actually anyone on the other side of the aisle: the “Red Tribe,” which per Alexander is “typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage… and listening to country music.”
To demonstrate the enmity between members of these two hostile tribes, Alexander points to implicit-association tests that seek to quantify prejudice towards others. These tests ask subjects to rapidly link various items (like Black people’s faces and negative emotions) in order to gauge implicit bias. Implicit-association tests that look at race are frequently cited as proving that white people have a racist implicit bias against black people.
But then a couple researchers decided to run implicit-association tests that gauged the implicit bias as it relates to political party, and found that the bias was 50% larger for political party compared to race. The relatively larger effect of political party bias held up across two other types of experiments. The researchers found that people are more likely to discriminate against those with different beliefs as opposed to those with different superficial identities.
This tracks with my lived experience. Growing up firmly ensconced in a liberal, coastal Blue Tribe environment, I have plenty of experience with and fondness towards every marginalized group mentioned by the Emperor in Alexander’s parable. I do not have much experience with people who are red-blooded Red Tribe. I know some Republicans; I do not know creationists.
When members of the Blue Tribe want to call out the Red Tribe, they often invoke a constellation of what we can call default privileged identities instead of being explicit in who they are targeting. The list of such default privileged identities includes but is not limited to cis, straight, white, male, and American. This framework results in liberal white commentators doing things like writing an entire series of columns with the title “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.”
In such an environment, it’s no surprise that people look for ways to other themselves in order to maximize their social capital within the Blue Tribe.
These behaviors from the Blue Tribe alienate those who believe that America should not be a bad word, those who are themselves straight or white or men, and those who just find the self-flagellation ridiculous. And, internal to the Blue Tribe, these patterns establish a repressive dynamic in which members bend over backwards to appease their Blue Tribe brethren, which only makes the Blue Tribe’s tent smaller.
It’s hard to see an easy way to remedy this. As with the euphemism treadmill, the answer is that cultural changes are necessary that divorce moral authority from identity, which would reduce the social incentive to signal out-group membership. Our discourse should prioritize rigor and results, not signaling.
Many thanks to Seth Williams for providing very helpful feedback on this and most of my other articles written to date.
When I’m skeptical about a medical diagnosis, I tend to go to the subreddit r/medicine to learn the consensus among practicing medical professionals, or at least the medical professionals who use Reddit. Medical and scientific organizations are reluctant to publish anything that would imply that many diagnoses given out to patients are untrue, so it’s hard to find reliable information outside of anonymous forums. If Reddit is any indication, doctors are very doubtful that the recent uptick in Ehlers-Danlos cases corresponds to a real increase in the disease’s prevalence and would attribute much of it to TikTok.
Munchausen’s by internet is one way that the broader Munchausen syndrome can manifest. Munchausen, also known as factitious disorder imposed on self, is when an individual feigns symptoms in order to draw attention and sympathy. Munchausen was first described in 1951, so it certainly predates the 21st-century social phenomena discussed in this article. This is a sign that taking on marginalized medical identities has had social benefits for many decades if not longer.