The Cost of Cognitive Clustering

Among humankind’s less admirable innovations, cognitive clustering may be the most insidious and destructive.

Cognitive clustering – the formation of social groups by people who all think the same way – is the foundation of many human institutions: religions, political parties, ethnic solidarities. Whatever virtues might be extracted from such collectives, their evils and exigencies are far greater.

When people who all think the same way, society has a whole suffers. Losses in key social resources are experienced, and begin to spiral outward.

Within a cognitive cluster, people no longer need to test their thoughts and ideas against those of others, because everyone assumes they are in agreement to begin with. The ability to self-evaluate begins to atrophy, leading to an individual decline in quality of judgment that spreads like a virus through the cluster.

Within a cognitive cluster, the constant mirroring of knowledge – whether real or contrived – supplants both the need and desire to learn; the satisfaction humans naturally derive from taking on new information is replaced by the emotional boost of agreement. Learning fades away as knowledge becomes a thing handed down from cluster authorities.

Within a cognitive cluster, cooperation becomes concentrated within. The members of the cluster become rapidly convinced that all their needs, intellectual and emotional, are fulfilled within the cluster. The need to cooperate with those beyond the cluster is truncated; cooperation itself is walled off, and competition with other groups ensues.

And as cooperation ceases, so does trust of those beyond the cluster. They do not share the cluster’s intellectual and emotional assumptions, which makes them Other; interacting with them requires skills that have declined within the members of the cluster - negotiation, objective evaluation, defense of old ideas, uptake of new ones – and thus does not occur.

Worst of all, the loss of trust leads to a sharp decline of empathy within the cluster’s constituents – they no longer see those beyond their group as being of their kind, and so their human identification with them dissipates; the realization that we all experience the same joys, hopes, pains and fears slowly evaporates. In its place, disdain and hatred take root.

The cost of cognitive clustering to society, then, is dishearteningly clear: such groups achieve little that is worthy and much that is toxic. Reason enough to never be part of one, certainly – but also reason enough to march with resolve in the other direction.