TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.

716 PAGE 1

Human Group Instincts: Hidden in Plain Sight

Thomas G. Parsons

To suspect that group formation and group-related behaviours are instinctive

in humans requires no new data - just a fresh look at the extensive body of knowledge
gathered by anthropologists, social psychologists, and sociologists.

In his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
(Diamond, 1992, p161) notes,

"Humans have always formed competing groups whose survival is essential

if the individuals in that group are to pass on their genes. Human history largely
consists of the details of groups killing, enslaving, or expelling other groups. The
winner takes the loser's land, sometimes also the loser's women, and thus the loser's
opportunity to perpetuate genes."

Although the phenomenon of group selection was seriously attacked in the

1960s, renowned naturalist and biologist E O Wilson insisted in 1980 that

"Selection can be said to operate at the group level, and deserves to be

called group selection, when it affects two or more members of a lineage group
as a unit" (Wilson, 1980, p50).

In his recent book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond shows how individual
survival can depend on group status and inter-group relations in a society that most
likely resembles that of our ancestors.

"If a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean

while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long
discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and
hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other."(Diamond,
1998)
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 2

Travel beyond a radius of a few miles was tantamount to suicide, as a local

contact explained to Diamond

"Of course the Fayus will kill any trespasser; you surely do not think
they are so stupid that they would admit strangers to their territory? Strangers
would just hunt their game animals, molest their women, introduce diseases, and
reconnoitre the terrain to stage a raid later"(Diamond, 1992).

Diamond notes that the isolation resulting from this inability to travel has
produced numerous different languages, each typically spoken by at most a few
thousand people living within a ten mile radius. Such isolation was sufficient to
produce local diseases, local genetic mutations, and radically different local customs,
yet all local groups were still just that: groups, which had to function effectively or die
out. Their common features must be a showcase of the fundamental essentials of
human group life. It was under such conditions that our ancestors lived for most of the
life of our species.

A New Zealand reader will have noticed some similarity with Maori protocol
for arrival at a marae, developed independently thousands of miles from New Guinea.
The visitor acknowledges the potential enmity of his prospective hosts, and their
power over him. He identifies himself not by his given personal name and IRD
number, but by his group affiliations and geographical origin, in an attempt to
establish a basis for non-lethal interaction.

An American passport contains essentially two messages. One identifies the

person who was issued the passport. The other is a request from the individual's
group: "The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests
all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States
named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all
lawful aid and protection". A New Zealand passport contains the same request from
"the Governor-General in the Realm of New Zealand . . .in the Name of Her Majesty
The Queen". The technology has changed since the neolithic, but the message is
remarkably similar.
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 3

Wouldn't it be surprising if natural selection had not produced humans who

are especially predisposed to form groups, and to function optimally in a group
environment? Should we not also presume that many millennia of selection among
groups has produced groups that are designed for optimum function in a world
resembling that of highland New Guinea or pre-1800 New Zealand in its limited
technology and small group size? Subsequent history has unfortunately not been long
enough for us to evolve effective and instinctive ways of participating in large groups
since discovering the technology that made large groups essential.

The isolated human is an anomaly, and always was.

The few solitary humans ever reported have displayed noteworthy

psychopathology (Singh & Zingg, 1928). Furthermore, the prevalence of groups is
nothing new in our time, or even in the lifetime of our species: "The most striking
feature of our primate heritage is life in social groups, and that such groups may
have been a feature of our ancestors' lives for the past 30 million years, long
predating even the genus homo " (Lancaster, 1975, p12).
Aronson begins his book "The Social Animal" (Aronson, 1988) with a quote
from Aristotle: "Man is by nature a social animal . . . Society is something in
nature that precedes the individual".

Before language was, social groups were.

Before any human was, social groups were.

Before the conscious individual was, social groups were.

Anthropologists tell us of different levels of human group organisation:

families, bands, tribes, and clans. However, the individual is not studied by
anthropologists, because they do not find individuals to study – only groups. In
contrast, psychology, does study individuals, having been founded by therapists
whose goal was to provide treatment for the troubled (Rosenhan & Seligman, 1995).
Thus psychologists may have a predisposition to examine the world through
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 4

individual-coloured glasses, even when dealing with acknowledged group

phenomena. For example, Zimbardo's development of the term "de-individuation" to
describe one type of group phenomenon both implicitly and explicitly asserts that the
individual is the norm, or default condition of humanity, and group action an
aberration, or a temporary cloak that hides the individual (cited in Vaughan & Hogg,
1988)
Before proceeding farther along this road, we should establish what we mean
by "group".

Groups? What groups?

Vaughn & Hogg (Vaughan & Hogg, 1998) note that "there are almost as
many definitions of the social group as there are social psychologists who
research social groups". These authors define a group thus: "Two or more people
who share a common definition and evaluation of themselves and behave in
accordance with such a definition." They then go on to discuss a number of other
definitions, each with its own virtues and shortcomings.
Following this tradition, I will here propose my own definition: A group is a
set of people whose members would under some circumstances identify
themselves as members of said group by agreeing with the statement "I am a
[group name]", even if only in the privacy of their own minds, or who would be
identified by others, perhaps including non-members, as members of said group.
All definitions appear to agree that one basic essential of a group is a person's
emotional orientation, or feeling that he (or another) is identified with the group. An
emotion is thus fundamental to group membership and identity. Identification with an
otherwise unpopulated group or even a principle or creed is sufficient; no second
living person is required. One may be, for instance, the last Jedi Knight. Furthermore,
no time duration is specified; a group may last for moments or millennia.

Evolution of group instincts?

Such distant relatives of humanity as capuchin monkeys display a familiar

range of group behaviour that includes payment for work done, which may imply a
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 5

sense of social obligation (deWaal & Berger, 2000). These monkeys also show such
group-optimising activities as conflict management and coalition building (Boehm,
2000), food sharing (deWaal, 1997), reconciliation, consolation, conflict intervention,
and mediation (Flack & deWaal, 2000).

Our closest relative, the common chimpanzee, like us and like capuchins, also
forms hierarchical groups which exhibit familiar behaviour, including moderated
intra-group competition, coalition formation, perimeter defense, and inter-group
conflict that can end in genocide (Boehm, 2000; Goodall, 1986).

Have these primate species (and many more) independently developed these
social behaviours and chosen to practice them? Unlikely in the extreme. Have they
evolved them and passed them along as learned cultural traditions? Few would find
this an acceptable explanation. What other explanation is left? Only the explanation
that the behaviours are favoured, perhaps strongly, by an inheritance coded in the
DNA. In other words, that group behaviour has been positively selected for, and is
instinctive.

To dismiss group instincts in the same way that group selection was dismissed
in the 1960s would be a mistake. First, reports of the death of group selection have
been greatly exaggerated (Sober & Wilson, 1998; Wilson, 1980). The logic that shows
individual selection invariably dominating and eliminating group selection can be
used to show that social insects did not evolve, a patent absurdity that demonstrates
the fallacy of the argument. Second, we do not need to demonstrate group selection
per se, but need only note that there could be selection for individuals who have traits
that make them likely to form groups, and to function and respond in certain ways in
relation to those groups. Whether the inheritance of such traits involves specific
physiological mechanisms that predispose us to certain responses, or whether we have
been selected to be especially receptive to training and cultural inheritance that
favours the formation of groups is a question that can be addressed separately.

Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology (which has recently been

reincarnated as evolutionary psychology) was quite explicit: "According to
evolutionary theory, desirability [of a goal or reward] is measured in units of
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 6

genetic fitness, and the emotive centers have been programmed accordingly"
(Wilson, 1980, p275). It is precisely at the level of emotions that we find some of the
strongest empirical evidence for group instincts.

Disproportionate response

One way to distinguish an inborn from a trained response might be the

demonstration of a disproportionate magnitude or type of response to a key stimulus.
Just as the kick that is elicited by a small tap on the patellar tendon tells us that a
reflex is operating, other responses that exceed anything likely to have been produced
by applied stimuli may tell us that an instinct is operating. At least our training as
scientists should make us look for some explanation of the disproportionate response.

Many such disproportionate responses to a mild stimulus for group formation

are known. The following four examples suggest that a complex and powerful set of
group-related behaviours and emotions can be elicited by relatively small stimuli.

1. Sherif's studies of young boys in summer camps in the US demonstrated

that even a short-term and arbitrary division of the boys into groups set the stage for
many typical group behaviours such as ethnocentrism, strong inter-group competition,
and even inter-group hostility. These responses were so intense and potentially so
harmful that the studies were terminated (Sherif, 1966, cited in Vaughan & Hogg).

2. Zimbardo also had to call a halt to an experiment involving prisoner/guard

role-playing by university students, because the "dramatic changes in virtually every
aspect of their behavior, thinking, and feeling" were "frightening" (quoted in Aronson,
p10). The original report of the study states that "The extreme pathological reactions
which emerged in both groups of subjects testify to the power of the social forces
operating" (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973).

3. Teacher Ron Jones also found the children in his school frighteningly
susceptible to the lure of a group that he created almost casually, without advance
planning (Jones, 1980). He too, had to terminate his "Third Wave" group quickly to
avoid serious consequences, as the Third Wave disrupted the school, ballooning
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 7

within a week to a membership of 200, from the original 30 students in his class.
Certain characteristic group phenomena emerged spontaneously, such as a
"bodyguard" for the leader. Jones also found that regular school work was performed
better during the time of the Third Wave, suggesting a facilitating effect of group
membership that should be investigated further.

4. Dawes et al. (cited in Aronson, p379) found that some participants in an

experiment involving social dilemmas were seriously stressed by "defection" from
groups. These groups comprised only the otherwise unrelated strangers who happened
to participate, and were intended to exist only for the period of the experiment.
However, traumatic stress was evident in at least one subject who played the part of a
defector, and felt such guilt that he lost sleep and wanted to make amends to the
'group' the next day. Another participant failed to profit by defection, and felt so
victimised by those who had done so that she declared her view of herself and
humanity to have been altered. Although Aronson describes the experimental scenario
as "seemingly benign", and "innocuous", in actuality "the experiments had a
powerful effect on subjects that could not have been easily anticipated" [emphasis
in the original].

Aren't such surprising and disproportionate effects exactly what every

scientist hopes to find? Such surprises point to the flaws in our theoretical framework,
indicating the most productive areas of investigation. They are the essence of what is
ostensibly sought but seldom desired: falsification of the schema under investigation.
In this case, the magnitude and complexity of responses to group/individual
interactions seem to shout aloud for more attention. Here there be mysteries. Have we
failed to understand individuals? Groups? The individual-group interaction? All of
these?

Psychologists in denial?

We tend to regard drives such as those that favor personal survival and
reproduction as the strongest and most fundamental. Maslow's hierarchy, for example,
ranks physiological needs and physical security as more fundamental than
"belonging". Somehow we lose sight of the fact that familiar groups such as cults and
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 8

armies routinely cause people to ignore the supposedly most fundamental drives and
act counter to the demands of personal survival and reproduction. How, then, can
those drives be regarded as fundamental? Is Maslow entirely wrong? His views are
still taught in undergraduate psychology classes without refutation, and an internet
search finds many professionals who earn their livelihoods offering services based on
his hierarchy. Why do we not consider the possibility that cults and armies can
command individuals to sacrifice their "most basic" needs because they are calling on
instincts even more basic than those they countermand?

When Aronson writes of group influences on the individual, he treats groups

as collections of individuals. Haney et al. wrote of "powerful social forces", but never
mentioned instinct, or the possibility that group identity occupies a special place in
our psyche. Personally, I suspect that the group can usefully be viewed as an entity in
its own right: a coherent set of memes that has shaped us by selection to be good hosts
(Blackmore, 1999; Lynch, 1996). I suspect that the study of the structure and function,
or to put it more tendentiously the anatomy and physiology of these entities, would be
quite productive. However, even without entertaining such radical hypotheses it is
clear that there is more to groups than the interaction of individuals uninfluenced by
anything beyond culture or training.

Perhaps the competition among rival explanatory schemes has produced in

psychologists a sensation of belonging to a group that is perpetually in territorial
combat with others in the explanatory landscape. Is it unreasonable to wonder
whether "powerful social forces" was a deliberately vague phrase designed to avoid a
usage that might sound like social identity theory, or some other explanation
belonging to a competing group?

Flippen (Flippen, 1999), for instance, analyses the concept of "groupthink"

(introduced by Janis in 1972) in terms of the self-regulation model. Groupthink can be
defined as the premature arrival at consensus by a group that has failed to adequately
consider all relevant factors when deciding on a course of action.

Flippen's discussion of this group phenomenon improves when she goes

beyond the jargon of self-regulation and status characteristic theory. When she
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 9

explains the details of the process by which a group can reach a very poor decision,
the phenomenon is clearly understandable without reference to special theories or
specialist vocabulary.

Unfortunately, Flippen stops short of examining groupthink with evolutionary

psychology, which would have related the phenomenon to the larger picture of
hominid group behaviour. Her discussion thus ignores the natural selection that (in
less complicated times) might have favoured a speedy consensus and swift action at
the command of a leader. Her suggested remedies for groupthink include the
replacement of physical meetings with teleconferenced "virtual meetings", making
group members individually accountable for outcomes, and removing the power of
the group leader to reward or punish group members. However, this amounts to a
dismantling of group structure rather than a reform of group decision making.

Several years ago, Cherry wrote both an article and a book on a "socialization
instinct" that drives the formation of social bonds (Cherry, 1992; Cherry, 1994). He
rated his model as more useful than conventional ones, since it was based on
biological, as well as psychological and sociological aspects of human nature.
However, although the Social Science Citation Index shows that Cherry's studies of
troubled youth have been cited repeatedly by other writers, his works on the social
bond instinct appear not to have been cited at all. Cherry's use of a
psychosocial/biological approach to explore the influence of instinct on human groups
has apparently found no audience in the profession.

Does it matter? Apparently, it does.

A recent review in American Psychologist indicates that practising

professionals who routinely use groups in therapy nonetheless continue to
underestimate the power of groups (Dishion, McCord, & Poulin, 1999). When
teenagers with similar behaviour problems were grouped together for treatment, their
behaviour problems were exacerbated. Dishion formulates an explanation in the
vocabulary of conventional and individual psychology, speaking of peer
reinforcement, social attention and emerging norms. However, it seems more
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 10

parsimonious simply to say that in both studies that were reviewed, troubled teenagers
rejected the therapist's leadership and formed their own group, using their own values.
Their group responses were more powerful than any techniques that the professionals
could bring to bear, even when nominally in control of the situation.

It appears that psychologists as a group resist the idea that the group is as
fundamental a phenomenon as the individual psyche. Why might this be?

In their Primer on Evolutionary Psychology, Cosmides and Tooby (Cosmides

& Tooby, 1999) suggest that we suffer from "instinct blindness", which has caused
psychologists to neglect some of the most interesting machinery in the human mind.

Group structure and function – clans, cults, and rugby clubs.

The emotional importance of group membership, even in stylised artificial

combat, is illustrated by the recent prominence of geneological arguments in the
debate over allowable membership on a rugby team. New Zealander Shane Howarth
will apparently be required to prove that at least one of his grandfathers was Welsh, or
be ruled off a team.(Fowler, 2000)

Cosmides and Tooby, following E. O. Wilson, suggest that emotions evolved

as the motivators of instinctive response. That is, a beaver will feel pleasure, or a
sensation of "this is the right thing to do" when it fells a tree to improve its dam.

Consistent with the instinct hypothesis, abundant evidence indicates that

people experience just such emotions when they join and participate in groups.
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 11

Buford experiences group emotions

Consider Bill Buford's experience as a soccer hooligan, recounted in his book

Among the Thugs (Buford, 1991):
I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the
moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence. . . . Violence
is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those
capable of giving themselves over to it, it is one of the most
intense pleasures. There on the streets of Fulham, I felt that I had
literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater
than it. . . .I realized later that I was on a druggy high, in a state
of adrenaline euphoria. And for the first time I am able to
understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence
was their drug. What was it like for me? An experience of
absolute completeness. (Buford, p205)

To appreciate his commentary, it helps to know that Buford was neither

British nor a soccer fan nor a thug, but an American academic, the editor of a literary
magazine, who set out to investigate the soccer hooligan phenomenon from the inside.
His description of this particular experience as simply adrenaline euphoria should be
tempered by consideration of the absence of euphoria that accompanies an adrenaline
rush in a dentist's chair, or upon missing one's footing on a stairway. Clearly,
adrenaline alone does not explain the pleasure. Those of us with more scientific than
literary training might think first of endorphins, our own endogenous opioids.

Whatever the neurochemistry, surely Buford has given an account that

suggests how it might feel to experience the working of an instinct – an unlearned
behaviour that operates with consciousness minimised, giving pleasure and a feeling
of rightness or completion when exercised.

Elsewhere Buford expands on this theme, describing events that clearly had
an emotional significance that he had not anticipated when he began his research into
crowd violence:
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 12

"I was surprised by what I found; moreover, because I came

away with a knowledge I had not possessed before, I was also
grateful, and surprised by that as well. I had not expected the
violence to be so pleasurable. I would have assumed, if I had
thought to think about it, that the violence would be exciting –
in the way that a traffic accident is exciting – but the pure
elemental pleasure was of an intensity that was unlike anything
I had foreseen or experienced before. But it was not just any
violence. It wasn't random violence or Saturday night violence
or fights in the pub; it was crowd violence – that was what
mattered: the very particular workings of the violence of
numbers." (Buford p217)

Buford was convinced that the emotion was like a drug high "generated by the
body itself". He was concerned because he could identify none of the classical reasons
for crowd violence. He saw no political or economic cause, no grievance or injustice
or feeling of social frustration.

I couldn't get away from the starkness of the conclusion I kept

reaching: that there was no cause for the violence; no "reason" for it
at all. If anything there were "unreasons": rather than economic
hardship or political frustration, there was economic plenty and an
untroubled, even complacent faith in a free market and nationalistic
politics that was proud of both its comforts and its selfishness.

No novice to the scene, at that point, Buford had been "going around with
violent people for around four years."(Buford, p218)

Besides suggesting the operation of an instinct, Buford's experience might

well be regarded as falsifying some of social psychology's explanations of group
violence. Certainly he found no support for relative deprivation theory, even though
he was expecting it and looked for it. Instead he found pleasure that was unrelated to
anything beyond simple membership in a group that did battle with non-members or
another group, exactly what one might expect from the operation of an instinct.
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 13

In his discussion of genocide as a typical human trait, Diamond (1992)

recounts a similar pleasure in a native of New Guinea, although in this case it was
associated with a recognised inter-group casus belli. A "gentle" man whom Diamond
had worked with for years, whom he liked and respected, told him of participating in
the near-total eradication of a neighbouring village as part of an ongoing feud.
Diamond recalls "Since that evening I have often found myself shuddering as I
recalled the details of it – the glow in Kariniga's eyes as he told me of the dawn
massacre; those intensely satisfying moments when he finally drove his spear into
some of his people's murderers" (Diamond, p276). Note that this was a happy
memory of a pleasant emotion, in contrast to the feeling of distaste for a nasty but
necessary job that we might feel when exterminating a pest or punishing a criminal.

How can we distinguish between explanations based the operation of group

instincts and those based on the current view: conformity, peer pressure, etc ? Are
these not just the names we have already assigned to the individual drives anyway?
Am I proposing a distinction without a useful difference? Even a simple experiment
hints otherwise.

When presented with a pattern consisting of an irregular cluster of X's

(approximately 3x6 cm) and a lone X that was 6 cm away from the cluster (Appendix
1), 8 of 11 responding class members interpreted the pattern as a group of people
standing in some social relationship to a single person. Typical comments were "a
person isolated from a group", "a group of people with one person excluded",
"leader", "social ostracism". Three responders said they saw only some X's on a piece
of paper, despite the request to "interpret" what they saw. Their responses are thus not
compliant with instructions, and can be interpreted as attempts to play "Mr Spock"
and defeat the purpose of the experiment. [The test page was neither handed out nor
collected by me, but by another student not associated in anyone's mind with concerns
about groups.]

I suggest that this response indicates a predisposition to interpret ambiguous

information as representing a group, and displaying common group phenomena. This
may be similar to our inborn tendency to interpret as a face any random collection of
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 14

features that can be seen as eyes and mouth, which is responsible for the Man in the
Moon, the face on Mars, and the utility of Mr Yuck (the poison warning face).

Granted, the responders were students in a social psychology class and may
have had a mindset favouring group interpretations. Such a test might well get
different responses among different highly selected groups. Still, that other research
remains to be done. Until contradicted by better-controlled studies, this one stands as a
demonstration of our predisposition to see groups as a likely default interpretation of
the world, which seems consistent with the operation of group instincts.

Criteria for acceptance of group instincts

Any justification for such a new way of regarding and organising well-known
facts must lie in at least one of three areas:
(a) experts in the field may come to agree that the instinct hypothesis is a
superior explanatory framework, providing the most parsimonious unifying principle
to simplify the explanation of disparate phenomena, or
(b) the hypothesis must suggest new experiments that are productive and new
phenomena that might not have been noted or discovered except for the inspiration of
the instinct hypothesis, or
(c) experiments or observations must be capable of falsifying the instinct
hypothesis itself and fail to do so, or must falsify competing viewpoints.
I believe that at least some of these criteria can be met for the group instinct
hypothesis.

So what?

If human behaviour in fact reflects the operation of group instincts, not only
the science of psychology, but all of society needs urgently to know more about those
instincts. Despite repeated and well-publicised tragedies, cults flourish, continuing to
claim headlines and victims. Genocide is a continuing threat in several areas of the
world. Gangs are a major social problem in industrialised society, as are tribes in
Africa and Asia.
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 15

I suggest that cults, as examples of the strongest type of group, would make a
good starting point for study. Experts have already determined that cults have certain
organisational and psychological features in common, such as a charismatic leader,
initiation rites, claims to possess a special truth or status, strict control of their
boundaries (informational, physical, membership), strong social controls on members'
behaviour, and a strong sense of isolation from (and persecution by) the rest of the
world (Galanter, 1989; Lofland, 1977; Lynch, 1996; Singer, 1995; Sparks, 1977).

Different cults (and gangs) display different levels of intensity in the function
of these structures, and different levels of power over their members. I suggest that a
study of the entire set of all such organisational and structural features that can be
found in any cult (or gang) will yield an image of the set of group instincts that they
use to gain such remarkable control over initially independent minds. Then those
instincts can be systematically studied in individuals, and groups themselves will be a
legitimate area of study for psychology (not just sociology) as a projection into the
environment of a basic component of the human mind.

Once we have a structural diagram of key features, groups as diverse as cults

and chess clubs can be classified just as Linnaeus classified animals and plants,
according to their structural features and the ways that their mechanisms operate. For
example, group recognition signs are almost universal, but may be intended for
outsiders or for members only. A group may use any or all of: flags, uniforms or other
special clothing, gestures, hairstyles, secret handshakes, lapel pins, tattoos, jewellery,
or special jargon.

Such understanding of group technology should permit the design of socially

constructive groups that could compete successfully with troublesome ones such as
gangs and cults, depriving them of members and influence while helping to build
safer communities. As preventive medicine, such constructive groups could be
introduced into the schools to immunise children against the predatory groups.

For too long the best group technologists have not been practising
professional psychologists – they have been the Hitlers and the L Ron Hubbards, the
Reverend Moons and the Reverend Joneses. Not until the professionals can routinely
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 16

influence people as profoundly as can amateurs such as David Koresh1 or Marshall

Applewhite2 can they claim to understand group phenomena well enough to dismiss
alternative explanations such as the instinct hypothesis.

References

Aronson, E. (1988). The Social Animal. (Fifth ed.). New York: W H Freeman and
Company.
Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boehm, C. (2000). Conflict and the evolution of social control. Journal od
Consciousness Studies, 7(1/2).
Buford, B. (1991). Among theThugs. New York: Random House.
Cherry, A. L. (1992). The Socialization Instinct: Individual, family, and social bonds.
Journal of Applied Social Sciences, 17(1), 125-139.
Cherry, A. L. (1994). The socializing Instincts: Individual, family and social bonds.
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publications/Greenwood Publishing Group.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1999). Evolutionary Psychology, A Primer. .
deWaal, F. B. M. (1997). Food transfer through mesh in brown capuchins. Journal of
Comparative Psychology, 111(4), 370-78.
deWaal, F. B. M., & Berger, M. L. (2000). Payment for Labor in Monkeys. Nature,
404, 563.
Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New
York: W W Norton & Company.
Diamond, J. (1992). The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. London: Random
House.
Dishion, T. J., McCord, J., & Poulin, F. (1999). When Interventions Harm: Peer
Groups and Problem Behavior. American Psychologist, 54(9).
Flack, J. C., & deWaal, F. B. M. (2000). 'Any Animal Whatever': Darwinian Building
Blocks of Morality n Monkeys and Apes. Journal of Cognitive Science, 7(1/2).
Flippen, A. R. (1999). Understanding Groupthink from a Self-Regulatory Perspective.
Small Group Research, 30(2), 139-165.

1
Branch Davidians, Waco
2
Heaven's Gate, San Diego
TOM PARSONS GROUP INSTINCT 461.716 PAGE 17

Fowler, P. (2000, 19 March, 2000). Welsh or Maori. Yahoo! Australia & NZ News.
Galanter, M. (1989). Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Goodall, J. (1986). The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). A Study of Prisoners andGuards in a
Simulated Prison. Naval Research Review(September, 1973).
Jones, R. (1980). The Third Wave. Whole Earth Review, The Next Whole Earth
Catalog (Summer, 1980).
Lancaster, J. B. (1975). Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, United States of America.
Lofland, J. (1977). Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and
Maintenance of Faith. (Enlarged Edition ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Lynch, A. (1996). Thought Contagion. New York: Basic Books, HarperCollins
Publishers, Inc.
Rosenhan, D. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1995). Abnormal Psychology. New York: W
W Norton & Co.
Singer, M. T. (1995). Cults in Our Midst. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.
Singh, J. A. L., & Zingg, R. M. (1928). Wolf Children and Feral Man. New York:
Harper & Brothers Publishers.
Sober, E., & Wilson, D. S. (1998). Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of
Unselfish Behavior. Journal of Consciousness Studies, to appear.
Sparks, J. (1977). The Mind Benders: A Look at Current Cults. Nashville, Tennessee:
Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Vaughan, G., & Hogg, M. A. (1998). Introduction to Social Psychology. (Second ed.).
Sydney: Prentice-Hall.
Wilson, E. O. (1980). Sociobiology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.