Belief and belonging with Michael Pasek: Why can’t we all get along?

Welcome to This is UIC, the official podcast of the University of Illinois Chicago. I’m Grace Khachaturian, and with each episode, we delve into the stories that drive us to unpack our most compelling questions. As Chicago’s only public research university, UIC is leading the way to create and inspire a better world. This is UIC. 

Today we’re joined by social psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago, Mikey Pasek. Mikey’s work dives into how religion shapes the way we see and treat people. He brings a unique blend of personal experience and global research to big questions that may just leave us reflecting on our own understanding of belief and belonging. Mikey, so glad to have you on the podcast today. 

Mikey Pasek 00:48 

Thanks for having me.  

Grace Khachaturian  00:50 

Awesome. So today we are diving into something that I think is so fascinating. We’re diving into this curiosity with belief and belonging. Why can’t we all get along? But before we dive into that curiosity, I would love to first kind of put your story in context, your why. Tell us a little bit about your why.  

Mikey Pasek  01:09 

Sure. Well, thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure to get to talk with you and share more about my work and just be in conversation about important topics.  

I’m going to date myself here, but I was in middle school when the September 11 attacks happened. That was a really formative period. If you ask a developmental psychologist, they’ll tell you that being a middle school age is a really formative part of our lives. And for me, it was, in part because I saw all these processes playing out, both nationally and internationally.  

One of the things that I saw was prejudice start mounting against members of a minority group in the United States and worldwide as well. I had friends who are Muslim. I identify as Jewish, and I saw, well, I’m a religious minority. I don’t see prejudice mounting towards me, but I do see it mounting towards my friends. That caused me to ask a lot of questions: How do we understand our identities? How do we understand what divides us and what unites us? Why is it that sometimes our beliefs serve as a source of division that lead others to dislike us or even hate us?  

And those types of questions still motivate a lot of my work today. So I kind of trace my lineage back from a child or adolescent watching the world and thinking about my place in it. And I’ve started to morph from the active to the scholar. How do we understand these processes and the way they play out? And that’s really what motivated me to pursue a degree in social psychology and motivates my research, which really focuses on the intersections between our identities and our beliefs and how they shape intergroup and political processes. How do we think about our relationship with each other in the world and our ability to get along? 

Grace Khachaturian  02:46 

Yeah, it is amazing, the impact something like 9-11 and you could see how it would pose questions like this, that are very clearly in line with your work today. Let’s dive in. Tell us about that relationship between belief and belonging. 

Mikey Pasek  03:06 

Yes, so in my work, I largely, but not exclusively, focus on religion. And I think about religion as this really interesting thing. So to give you a little context, 80% of people around the world identify as religious. It’s not entirely clear what that means. So when you ask somebody, are you a religious person? They might tell you they belong to a religious group, but they might also be telling you that they hold religious beliefs. And one of the craziest things is those two are not necessarily the same.  

So our groups that we belong to, our identities, they shape our beliefs. But we also have beliefs ourselves, beliefs that guide how we see the world. They’reformed by so many different factors. And beliefs and belonging often coalign because we belong to social groups and we conform to the norms of those groups, and we also choose to affiliate with people who share our beliefs. Obviously, it’s nice to be around people who see the world the way that we see it.  

And what’s interesting – and we’ll talk more as well – is, in my work, I try to disentangle these two forces. Sometimes we assume that beliefs and belonging exert the same influences, but in fact, they do really different things at a psychological level. 

Grace Khachaturian  04:18 

Can you define what you would say it means for someone to belong?  

Mikey Pasek  04:22 

That’s a great question. In social psychology, we measure belonging with scales. So you can think about asking people questions like, do you feel like you fit in? Do you feel accepted? Do you feel at home? These types of questions. That’s one way to operationalize belonging. Another way is just, do you identify as a member of this group? So I identify as American. I identify as Jewish. I identify as white, right? These are categories that I know that I belong to. So we can think about it both at that kind of binary level, but also at a more nuanced level. Sometimes I might say, yeah, I’m white, but I feel distance from certain aspects of an identity. Or I’m Jewish, but look, I’m not super Jewish. How do we think about that continuum? So there’s a lot of nuance and granularitythere. 

Grace Khachaturian  05:11 

Let’s go to the belief side of it. I’ve heard it said the phrase of belief determines behavior, or behavior determines belief. But do you think that carries any truth? 

Mikey Pasek  05:22 

I think it’s definitely both. There’s a classic social-psychological phenomenon that we call cognitive dissonance theory, which is that when we engage in behaviors, we actually adjust our beliefs to be in line with the behaviors. Because why would we do something that we don’t believe in? So we have some strong evidence that that process occurs. But of course, we know that our beliefs also drive our behaviors. People who hold really strong moral convictions are going to be more likely to act to push those moral convictions out in the world. If you hold strong religious beliefs, you’re going to be more likely to act upon them. Political belief is going to be the same thing. So it really does go both ways, and they operate in this web, right, where we’re trying to figure out who we are, how we work in the world, and we’re always working back and forth between what we do and what we think. 

Grace Khachaturian  06:11Can you tell us a little bit about the research that you’ve done most recently at UIC that kind of ties to this? 

Mikey Pasek  6:16 

So what my colleagues and I have been doing now for the past five or six years is we’ve been conducting social-psychological studies and experiments where we try to experimentally tease apart how religious identities and religious beliefs shape our ability to cooperate with one another across group lines. I’ll give you an example of what that looks like. We’ve been conducting research in the United States, in Israel, in Palestine and in Fiji. And Fiji, I’m guessing people are a little bit less familiar with. So it’s a former British colony that was, when it was colonized, the indigenous iTaukei population was converted to Christianity. The British also brought over a lot of indentured servants from India, primarily Hindu. And there’s a lot of ethno-religious tension in Fiji that’s still very much at play in current Fijian society.  

So what we do is we run some experiments. As one example, we gave people a starting amount of money, and we said, you can keep as much money as you want, or you can give this money away, your choice. People were paired either with a member of their own ethno-religious in group or somebody of their out group. In the U.S., I might be a Christian paired with a Christian, or a Christian paired with a Muslim.  

So first we measure, do people give equally to in-group members and out-group members? And this level of operationalization is really focusing on group identity, right? Do we discriminate against others based on who belongs or doesn’t belong to our in group? And what we tend to find, which is very consistent with decades of research and social psychology, is that our group identities do breed bias. We tend to be kinder to people who share our identities and less kind to people who don’t share our identities. We see that religion operates as an identity, just like other identities, like our race, our nationality, sexual orientation. We see biases along all of these ways.  

But what about belief? So what we do here is we focus on one specific aspect of belief, which is belief in God. So we say, now, let’s do that same task again. We’re going to pair you with a new person. We’re going to give you money to decide whether or not to give that money away or to keep it. But this time, when you make your decision, think about God. What would God want you to do?  In fact, what we find in our work is that when we ask people to think about God, they’re kinder, not only to people of their own group, but also to people of other groups. We find that in studies where we look at pro-social behavior, like charity, but we find it also when we look at attitudes. For example, just the act of thinking about God, we find, leads Christian Americans to be more likely to see out-group members as more human, as opposed to less human. So we really can counteract some of those biases.  

So what does that tell us at a macro level? Well, it suggests that religion as an identity and religion as a belief don’t necessarily do the same thing. And rather than stigmatizing religious belief, which is something that much of the literature, does, it suggests that religious belief might be a powerful force that can actually promote more tolerance or acceptance or kind behavior across group lines. And that’s something that I hope my work can help to see. 

 It’s helped to affirm my appreciation that people are complex and that a lot of the beliefs that people hold, they don’t hold for the reasons that we might hear about in the news. And we should see people in all that complexity and give people the benefit of the doubt. 

Grace Khachaturian  09:56 

It’s interesting from that study that when we ask people to think of God when making a decision, despite how someone views or perceives God or even which god that is to them, it still influences the way that they behave. That is wild. 

Mikey Pasek  10:13 

Yeah, and, and I’ll tell you, like one other thing that’s really cool about this work is we, we ask not only how people see their own god, but how they see the god that other people believe in.  

So in some of our studies, for example, we asked Muslim Palestinians and Jewish Israelis to perspective take. Imagine that somebody from the other group is thinking about God as they understand God to be. Do you think they’re going to be kinder to you? And even there we find that people attribute positive attitudes towards the other. And we ran more experiments. We ran studies in Fiji, in the U.S. and in Israel, where we find that when we tell people that other people are going to think about God, people from the out group, they actually trust them more. And as a result, we can increase cooperation. Because people say, look, this person is moral. They’re thinking about God. I think that their god is going to lead them to treat me kindly, so I can trust them and treat them kindly. And it, and it’s really quite cool, because it just runs counter to a lot of the prevailing theory that’s out there. 

Grace Khachaturian  11:14So I want to answer kind of our curiosity for this conversation. Why can’t we all get along? With that religious-belief, belonging perspective in mind. 

Mikey Pasek  11:27 

Yeah. So, so obviously, religious belief doesn’t always do good, and we need to be clear about that. You know, our work suggests that it can, but we see examples out in the world where people are deeply divided. People think that the beliefs of others are so extreme and so counter to their morals that there’sno possible way that we can coexist. We can think about those as religious convictions or strong moral convictions, fundamental beliefs that people hold. By fundamental, it’s black and white. There’s no room for nuance.  

And when people hold those really fundamental beliefs, we find that that tends to be highly correlated with more hostility, less of an ability to accept others.And that’s a problem. When I think about religion and religious conflict, one of the things that comes to mind is that, yeah, religion operates like other identities, but it is also unique, right? Our sense of salvation, our sense of what it means to be human, it’s tied up in these beliefs that are supposed to give us a sense of meaning and help make sense of the world and our place in it. Those stakes are high.  

And some work by a political scientist, Lilliana Mason, says that we, we actually see this thing called identity sorting happening. So religion is becoming morphed with race. It’s becoming morphed with party politics. It’s becoming morphed with nation. And so when all of these things align and we add this moralization component, that creates some real opportunities for risk. And I think we see a lot of that risk in our society today, where we’re not looking at people as just others who happen to disagree. We look at others and think, oh, my God, we can’t possibly be in the same country or community. Can we even be in a democracy together? What does it mean if you win and I lose, if we view the world in a zero-sum game? And I think religion is susceptible to many of those same forces. 

Grace Khachaturian  13:27 

How does something like social media play into all of this and influence our sense of belonging and belief? 

Mikey Pasek  13:35 

Social media, and media in general, is a really powerful force. I’m not a media scholar. There are amazing people at UIC who are, and we have colleagues who are studying these types of questions. What we know is that media can create distortions. It can change how we understand what the norms in society are.  

Media tends to be driven by algorithms and profit motives. What gets clicks? So a researcher at New York University, Jay Van Bavel, shows that moral outrage gets more clicks. Well, that means that if you’re a content creator, or if you run a media platform, you want to get people outraged. That’s going to bring in advertising dollars. Well, how are you going to do that? You’re going to share extreme views. You’re going to talk about how other people are evil. They’re a threat to your existence. That’s the type of stuff that’s going to drive people to engage.  

And then we have to out-compete. Well, if somebody else is getting clicks, I have to get more clicks. And you can imagine how this creates a spiral, right, an escalating sense of moral condemnation, moral outrage. That’s really dangerous. And what that can do is it can distort our understanding of what most people actually think. And instead of talking to our neighbor or talking to a colleague at work, as we’re getting more and more segregated and our only chance of hearing what other people think is online, right? We’re not in the community, but we’re on our phones, then we don’t have an accurate read. And that is really, really dangerous for society.  

Grace Khachaturian  15:09 

Do you think it’s possible for those with strong opposing beliefs to find genuine common ground? 

Mikey Pasek  15:15 

I absolutely think it is. I think that we have lots of examples of people who disagree about fundamental things but agree on some fundamental things. And that’s really important. Some of my own work has shown, for example, that if you survey Democrats and Republicans, a lot of people say that we really care about democracy. How that plays out in practice, I don’t know, right? We see these things tearing at the seams in our society. But there are areas of agreement. I think the question then is, what are the types of disagreements that we have in society? Where can we find common ground, and where is it OK to disagree?  

We’re not really good at drawing that line about what type of disagreement is legitimate disagreement, the type of disagreement that’s actually healthy for society. That’s what we call pluralism. I want to live in a pluralistic democracy. I want to live in a society where people can hold different beliefs, where my beliefs don’t always win. But I also want to make sure that people don’t force their beliefs on others. And that’s a really, really important distinction to make. I think so long as we’re in a healthy debate: How do we accomplish things? We might disagree about how, but we share common goals. That’s where we’regoing to be thriving. When we start to have different goals and they conflict, and all of a sudden my winning means your losing, that’s where I think thingsget a little testier. Unfortunately, I think that’s where we see ourselves in the United States today. 

Grace Khachaturian 16:39 

Yeah, I can definitely see that. And sometimes we have to take it back to the basics in order to find that common ground but then build our way back up. And we might be surprised with just how much we have in common. 

Mikey Pasek  16:51 

And how much do we value those things we have in common, right? We make choices, and the media guides our choices. What’s the most important thing to us? Is it our local community, or is it our national politics, or is it our religion? And some really cool work shows that when you get down to the local, all of a sudden a lot of this tension disappears. When people actually sit together and talk, that commonality takes precedence. We don’t happen to live in the local anymore in the same way that we used to. So much of our world is really at a high level. It’s a national level. We’re consuming information, but we’renot talking to each other. And when we really focus on those things that we have in common, when we talk with other people, when we respect other people, we have a lot more ground for collaboration and positive pluralism.  

Grace Khachaturian  17:34 

So as someone who maybe entered this space initially, or at least the interest by it was sparked by something like 9-11, what gives you the most hope that we can all learn to get along, even across deep differences? 

Mikey Pasek  17:50 

If you just watch the news, you don’t see this, but we know that there are amazing people operating in local communities all across the country and all across the world who really do get along across lines of difference.  

Let me give you an example from my work in Fiji. Fiji is a country that’s had a lot of tension. In the past 30 years, there have been multiple violent military coups. You might think this is a level of extremism that just means nobody can get along. And yet, when I talk to people that I work with, if there’s a funeral, people from different ethnic and religious groups are going to be at that funeral. They’re going to be together because they have basic respect for each other. So sometimes that division that we see really high up, it’s just not mirrored at the local level. And I have a lot of hope that on the ground level, people respect each other, they know their neighbors, they want to get along. But I also recognize that we can’t be kumbaya. Like, there is real tension. And we as a society have to figure out how do we empower that type of positive as opposed to the negative. 

Grace Khachaturian  18:41 

Today’s episode has been one of such depth as we unravel the complex curiosity around belief and belonging; why can’t we all get along. I’m grateful for the research you’ve shared and the impact even thinking about God can have on the way we live and act. And ultimately, there’s still hope for understanding across deep differences. 

Mikey, we love to end these episodes on kind of a lighter note, but can carry great meaning. So if you were to pick a song that you think best representsyour story, what song would it be? 

Mikey Pasek  19:15 

I think I would go with “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family.  

[Music: Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone.] 

Mikey Pasek  19:32 

I think that that song really is a story of pluralism, the idea that different people can have different beliefs. We can belong to different groups; we can live our lives in different ways. And that’s not a problem. That’s actually what makes America rich. We are strong in our diversity, and the more that we can interact with other people and respect other people, that creates opportunities. And I think that’s something that we sometimes miss in this country, and it’ssomething that makes me proud to be an American. I think that’s why my ancestors chose to immigrate here and set up a country I want to live in. And I think that song really neatly encapsulates that ideal of what it means to be a pluralistic society. 

Grace Khachaturian  20:11 

Yeah, that’s awesome. All right. Well, Mikey, thank you so much for your time here on the podcast today. So appreciate it. 

Mikey Pasek  20:19 

Thank you. 

Grace Khachaturian  20:20 

Learn more about Mikey Pasek and his research in the show notes at today.uic.edu. 

Thanks for listening to this is UIC, the official podcast of the University of Illinois, Chicago, Chicago’s only public research university. Until next time, visit today.uic.edu to uncover how UIC is inspiring a better world.