Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as members.

—Groucho Marx, in a telegram to the Friars Club of Beverly Hills (Groucho and Me, 1959, p. 321)

It is pretty obvious that people don’t want to become members of all groups. First, most people are happy to be members of the culture in which they were raised, as opposed to the many other cultures out there. Second, in modern, large cultures, there are thousands of groups one could conceivably join. Who could keep up with that? Third, many groups aren’t that appealing to most people. We’d venture to guess that our average reader doesn’t have much interest in joining the Ku Klux Klan.

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Although people leave groups for many specific reasons, they often do so because the group no longer successfully serves one or more of those four basic psychological needs. So the desire to meet those needs drives them away from, rather than toward, the group. Let’s examine this possibility further.

Every year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of boys and girls as young as 12 years old join gangs (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). But although the gang expects them to join for life, about two thirds of new initiates leave the gang after one or two years. Contrary to popular myth, those who wish to leave do not face the threat of death from fellow gang members (although they may be severely beaten). However, leaving often means facing the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, their fellow gang members reject them. On the other, because of their past criminal activities as gang members, they struggle to find legitimate employment and to be accepted by mainstream social institutions (Decker & Lauritsen, 2002). So why do they leave?

In interviews with former gang members in cities such as Rochester, Denver, and St. Louis, researchers found that the most often cited reason for their decision to leave the gang is fear of injury and death after being injured or after witnessing fellow gang members fall prey to violence (Decker & Van Winkle, 1996; Thornberry et al., 2004). Former gang members often said things such as, “Well after I got shot….You know how your life just flash? It like did that so I stopped selling dope, got a job, stayed in school, just stopped hanging around cause one day I know some other gang member catch me and probably kill me” (Decker & Van Winkle, 1996, p. 269).

This is surprising because we said earlier that group members become more committed to the group when they face a common threat; we would expect, then, that the threat of violence would strengthen solidarity among gang members. This is indeed the case when there is a threat of violence. But when individuals experience violence themselves or observe their own friends and family being harmed, they think twice about staying in the group. Thus, young boys and girls join the gang in order to seek safety from harm, but if they realize that belonging to the gang poses risks to their lives rather than protecting them, they often leave (Decker & Van Winkle, 1996; Peterson et al., 2004). The need to survive has the power both to draw people toward groups and to push them to leave.

Uncertainty-identity theory, discussed earlier in this chapter, posits that people join and identify with groups to reduce negative feelings of uncertainty. Does that mean that leaving groups always increases uncertainty about the world, the self, and other people?

No. Sometimes leaving is exactly what the person or subgroup needs to do to maintain certainty in their worldview. For example, when the individual perceives that the group has changed or has acted in a way that violates an important value or norm, the group is no longer useful in validating that individual’s worldview. In fact, in this situation, belonging to the group may itself be a source of uncertainty. The individual may therefore disidentify with the group or leave it altogether in order to uphold the norm.

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This can result in what are called schisms, which occur when a subgroup of people break away from the larger parent group and form their own group or join a different parent group. These schisms happen because the subgroup feels that the parent group has forgotten or violated its own core values (Sani & Todman, 2002). For example, in 2010, a substantial number of people left the Republican party because they felt that it was ignoring its own principle of fighting against big government. They formed the conservative tea party movement, which places more explicit emphasis on that principle. In these cases, people sacrifice the certainty of being in a group for the certainty of maintaining their values.

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed how people join and identify with groups to bolster their self-esteem. But what happens when a person feels incapable of living up to the group’s standards of value? Under such circumstances, the person may seek alternative groups whose worldviews seem to provide more attainable sources of self-worth. This happens when people convert to new religions or join cults. Cults generally target poor people struggling economically and young people struggling for a positive identity and sense of purpose. People who join cults and experience religious conversions are generally under stress and have shaky self-esteem. After joining these new groups, they experience increases in self-esteem and purpose in life, as well as a reduced fear of death (e.g., Levine, 1981; Paloutzian, 1981; Ullman, 1982).

What happens when members cannot view the group positively, perhaps because a rival group is more successful? In these situations, belonging to a group threatens to decrease self-esteem. Do group members stick with their group through the rough times? Or do they distance themselves from the group? People are willing to disidentify with a group to protect their own self-esteem. In one study (Snyder et al., 1986), participants led to believe that their group failed a task were less interested in continuing to work with their group. They were less willing to wear a badge indicating that they were part of the group than were participants whose group succeeded on the same task or who were not given feedback on their group’s performance.

People will occasionally disidentify with their group as a whole even if just one other group member does something negative (Eidelman & Biernat, 2003). Why? People assume that members of the group are similar. They share the same beliefs and engage in the same types of behaviors. Thus, when a member of your own group does something stupid or immoral, you may be afraid that you will be found guilty by association, simply because you are in the same group as that person (Cooper & Jones, 1969). When the group identity is very important, however, and the behavior is seen as being out of character for the group, another strategy is to oust the perpetrator psychologically from the group. Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers, the two men believed to be responsible for the bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon, described them as “losers” and said that they brought shame on their family and their Chechen ethnic group. In this way, he clearly distanced not only himself, but also the rest of the family and Chechens in general, from them and their alleged misdeeds.

As we noted earlier, reminding people of their mortality generally increases their identification with the groups to which they belong. From the perspective of terror management theory, this happens because these groups help validate people’s meaningful view of their world, their self-worth, and the sense that they are part of something larger that will continue after their death. However, when a given group identification no longer serves one of these functions, reminders of death lead people to jump ship and shift their identification to other groups that are better at providing these psychological resources.

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For example, when Latinos or women are reminded of their mortality and led to think of negative aspects of the group membership (for Latinos the stereotype that Latinos tend to be drug dealers; for women, the stereotype that women are not good in math), they respond by distancing themselves from their ethnic or gender identification (Arndt et al., 2002). Latino participants, for example, disliked artwork that was attributed to Latino artists. Female participants emphasized how they were in fact different from other women.

Whether people defend or distance themselves from their group when mortality is salient depends on how permanent they consider group identity to be. When Dutch students were exposed to criticism of their university, and they were led to think that university affiliation was a permanent identification, mortality salience led them to reject that criticism as unfounded. However, if students were led to think that university affiliation was temporary and were reminded of death, they instead responded to the criticism by reducing their identification with the university (Dechesne et al., 2000).

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