How Does the Social Group Shape the ‘frame of Reference’ Through Which Individuals Understand the World?

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Throughout the whole of human history, groups are trying to categorise, classify and distinct people from one another on the basis of ethnic, religious and racial prejudice to achieve certain goals. Therefore, another social situation that enables a group to shape individuals’ ‘frames of reference’ arises from an intergroup competition for scarce resources and as Ross, Nisbett and Gladwell (2011) added: “from other real or perceived conflicts of interest.” Sherif and Campbell (1988) ran a summer camp with the purpose of demonstrating how intergroup competition or cooperation could affect people’s beliefs and attitudes. They successfully established that intergroup competition for scarce resources could reduce antagonistic attitudes within those groups. Hence, the group can shape individuals’ ‘frames of reference’ by stressing how important cooperation is for the group as a whole, which puts pressure on the individual to conform, as they don’t want to be categorised as an outsider. I will try to justify my argument by considering Posner’s (2004) natural experiment and see why in Zambia Chewas and Tumbukas are allies, but rivals in Malawi. After surveying Chewas and Tumbukas in both Zambia in Malawi, Posner (2004) discovered that 55.2% of people in Malawi responded with negative attitudes towards Chewas and Tumbukas intergroup marriage compare to only 23.8% with similar responses in Zambia and also that 14% of people in Malawi responded with a negative statement about the other group when asked what the difference is compare to only 2.4% of similar responses in Zambia. Clearly, mere cultural diversity isn’t sufficient enough to cause this social strife. Posner indicated that in Malawi politicians of Chewas and Tumbukas stressed about their cultural cleavage as each party had a chance of winning the elections, but in Zambia they had to cooperate so cultural cleavage remained politically irrelevant. For that reason, representatives of those cultures might be fully aware of their differences, but some of them will only view a tiny fraction of those differences as appropriate bases of social identification. This is because their ‘frames of reference’ have been shaped by the political situation they live in. For example, in Zambia political situation suggests that if both Chewas and Tumbukas cooperate in winning the elections they have a better chance in acquiring more scarce resources and that’s why it is easier for the politicians to shape people’s ‘frames of reference’ in the way that people mobilize appropriate knowledge chunks and beliefs, which makes the cultural cleavage quite irrelevant.

Conclusion

After the final analysis, it is clear that social groups exploit certain situational forces in their favor to shape individuals’ ‘frames of reference’. It has been shown, therefore, how particular, even relatively subtle situational forces can induce individuals to deny obvious evidences of their common sense subsequently adjusting their attitudes and beliefs to the ones of the group. These forces create specific circumstances under which individuals conclude for themselves that in order to achieve their goals it’s better and safer for them to go with the group and adapt its values and attitudes, which is especially true in crisis situations. Moreover, people are subjects to cognitive biases, which could make them poor processors of information, and hence more vulnerable to various group influences. During my research for this essay I realised that even the most cleverly composed rhetorical appeals don’t have the same power to change social and political attitudes as the power of social situation. It caused me to look a bit differently at the way politics is organised on both global and national levels realising how the power of the situation can be used to in order to manipulate people.

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