The Dark Psychology of Social Identity under Uncertainty
This is the third in a multi-part series exploring the role of identity in the explore-exploit trade-off. If you’d like to start from the beginning, the first piece can be found here, on the psychology of exploration and exploitation.
The successes of the Norse were unique for their mercantile expertise, ruthless exploration, and their incredible persistence through the most challenging conditions. In their failures, however, they bear an eerie familiarity. Identity is our sense of cultural belonging; it’s who we are at a deep, psychological level.
Research finds that in difficult or unstable times, under high uncertainty, people cling even tighter to these identities, like clinging to a tree during a storm. We see this, for example, in the minimal group paradigm, whereby social identities can form from almost nothing. Students, for example, who are randomly assigned to groups based on trivial criteria - like whether they supposedly prefer paintings by Klee or Kandinsky, or even just being told they’re in “Group A” versus “Group B” - will quickly begin favoring their own group members. They allocate more resources to ingroup members, rate them more positively, and show clear bias against the outgroup, despite these categories being completely meaningless and the group members being strangers.
When we feel a sense of uncertainty, this ratchets up. What research finds is that when participants are made to feel uncertain - attempting to describe, for example, an intentionally ambiguous picture - they are even more likely to cling to these arbitrary social identities, and shockingly, were more likely to discriminate against members in other groups. Uncertainty takes away our sense of stability. Identities provide stability.
The Psychology of Social Identity under Uncertainty
In unstable times, people cling harder to identities that feel stable and definitive. And when professional roles collapse, people do not float free; they grasp for anchors. As the philosopher John Dewey remarked, “[I]n the absence of actual certainty in the midst of a precarious and hazardous world, men cultivate all sorts of things that would give them the feeling of certainty”
Sometimes these anchors are positive, other times, disastrous in that they lead to a mindset which is narrow, rigid, and binary. The Norse exemplified both of these - facing immense challenges on Greenland, and this strong sense of identity was an immensely helpful, stabilizing force. This same stability, however, rendered them unadaptable when they needed to think more flexibly.
Identity can be a key stumbling block in thinking flexibly and adaptably. In his book, Think Again, Wharton Professor Adam Grant points to the case of the Mann Gulch Wildfire, where firefighters needed to quickly change course and run up a steep hill to avoid the rampaging fire, chasing their heels. Tragically, twelve of the firemen didn’t make it. According to investigators, one of the key reasons they weren’t able to outrun the fire was that they failed to put down their tools.
Had they done so, according to the U.S. Forest Service, “the firefighters would have reached the top of the ridge before the fire”. So why didn’t they just drop their tools? You guessed it: Identity. As Grant describes, “If you’re a firefighter, dropping your tools doesn’t just require you to un-learn habits and disregard instinct.. It means admitting failure and shedding part of your identity”. He cites the organizational psychologist Karl Weick who distills it powerfully: “Without my tools, who am I?”.
A firm, unwavering sense of identity is, in most scenarios, a major asset. But when it comes to overcoming challenges, it can be a stumbling block. Resilience in the face of adversity requires us to be adaptable, and to reach for novel approaches and solutions - and often, this means flexibility with respect to self.
Whether for the Vikings, firefighter, or the modern business mind, being able to explore, while maintaining an open-mind, resisting ossification, is crucial. Exploring, by definition, means facing uncertainty. How can we resist the natural impulse to cling to our existing identities - and the ways of thinking they inculcate - when we stare uncertainty in the face.
The Challenge of Social Identity
The challenge we’re dealing with here goes deeper than thinking. It’s a challenge of social identity. As we’ve seen, our social identity can ossify our thinking, locking us into patterns that once served us brilliantly but which, under changed circumstances, become a kind of prison. The Norse didn’t fail to think clearly about seals and fish. They saw the Inuit hunting them. They knew these food sources were there. But eating seals and fish meant becoming something other than
Norse dairy farmers, and that was a step they couldn’t bring themselves to take. The firefighters at Mann Gulch understood, on some level, that their tools were slowing them down. But dropping those tools meant confronting a terrifying question - “without my tools, who am I?” - and in the heat of that moment, clinging to a familiar identity won out over survival.
As the executive coach Marshall Goldsmith has written, “One of the greatest challenges that we face, when we try to improve ourselves - as leaders, partners, friends or family members - is the challenge of changing the way we define ourselves.” The better options were right there. The problem was that reaching for them required becoming someone unfamiliar.
Contending with The Dark Psychology of Social Identity
So what do we do with this? We can’t simply discard our identities. Nor should we want to. As we’ve seen, identity is enormously useful - it provides social cohesion, psychological stability, and the motivational grit to persist through difficulty. The Norse survived 450 years in one of the harshest environments on earth precisely because of their fierce commitment to who they were.
Their identity carried them through centuries of brutal winters, isolation, and scarcity. Identity, in this sense, is a tremendous asset. Where it becomes dangerous is in a singular, inflexible attachment to one identity, to the exclusion of all others, especially when the world around you has shifted.
The good news is that we are not, and have never been, limited to a single identity. We are, all of us, members of multiple groups, holders of multiple roles, inhabitants of multiple selves. You are, at once, a professional, a parent, a friend, a citizen, a novice at some things and an expert at others.
The question, then, is whether we can add another identity to the repertoire - one specifically designed for those moments when our existing identities start to narrow our thinking and close us down to better alternatives. Adam Grant distills it well in Think Again: “A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.”
The answer need not lie in a complete rejection of our existing identity. After all, we’re all members of multiple identities already. Instead, we can adopt another one to the mix, one to ideally employ under these instances. This identity? The beginner’s mindset.
This is where we turn next..
Photo by shahin khalaji via UnSplash
This is the third in a multi-part series exploring the role of identity in the explore-exploit trade-off. Be the first to receive the next piece by signing up to the The Newsletter (for free)
References for The Dark Psychology of Social Identity Under Uncertainty
Diamond, J. (2011). Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed: revised edition. Penguin.
Diehl, M. (1990). The minimal group paradigm: Theoretical explanations and empirical findings. European review of social psychology, 1(1), 263-292.
Dewey, J. (1929/2005) The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
Gao, W., Liu, S., & Huang, L. (2012). A global best artificial bee colony algorithm for global optimization. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 236(11), 2741-2753.
Goldsmith, M. (April, 2025) Creating a New Identity, Marshall Goldsmith Blog
Grant, Adam. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know (p. 12). (Function). Kindle Edition
Hogg, M. A., & Mullin, B. A. (1999). Joining groups to reduce uncertainty: Subjective uncertainty reduction and group identification.
Grieve, P. G., & Hogg, M. A. (1999). Subjective uncertainty and intergroup discrimination in the minimal group situation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 926-940.
Kembro, J. M., Lihoreau, M., Garriga, J., Raposo, E. P., & Bartumeus, F. (2019). Bumblebees learn foraging routes through exploitation–exploration cycles. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 16(156), 20190103.
