Evidence

The case against sworn allegiance does not rest on temperament. Seventy years of experiments show what group identity does to perception and reasoning, and the membership rolls of the world’s parties, churches, and unions show what people everywhere have begun to conclude on their own. The numbers below are cited in full in the Sources.

Part one: what joining does to a mind

The pull of the unanimous room

In 1951, the psychologist Solomon Asch sat volunteers in a room with seven confederates and asked the group to match the length of a line — a task so easy that, alone, people erred less than one percent of the time. Then the confederates began, unanimously, to give the wrong answer. Under that pressure, subjects went along with the visibly false verdict on 32 percent of trials, and three in four caved at least once.¹ The finding has been replicated across seventeen countries; the pull is human, not American, and it is stronger where the culture prizes the group more.²

Two details matter most. First, many subjects did not report yielding reluctantly; some came to see the lines wrongly — the room reached in and adjusted the eye. Second, the spell had a cheap antidote: when a single confederate broke ranks and told the truth, conformity collapsed from 32 percent to about 5.¹ The unanimous room is fragile. It takes one unjoined voice.

Teams from a coin toss

Perhaps people defer to groups that matter — faiths, nations, old loyalties with real content? In 1970, Henri Tajfel removed the content. He sorted schoolboys into “groups” by trivia — ostensibly their taste for one abstract painter over another, effectively at random — with no meetings, no leaders, no history, no stakes. Members then divided money between anonymous others. They favored their meaningless in-group at once; more striking, they often preferred maximizing the gap between the groups to maximizing what their own side actually received.³ Group identity, at its bare minimum, was already enough to bend fairness — before a single belief, grievance, or anthem had been attached. Everything a real allegiance adds is added on top of that reflex.

Smart is no defense

The comforting theory is that education inoculates: sharpen the reasoning and the tribe loses its grip. Dan Kahan and colleagues tested it directly. Given a tricky statistical problem about a skin cream, the most numerate subjects did best, as expected. Given the identical numbers relabeled as a gun-control study, the most numerate partisans did worst of all — their skill now deployed to protect the team’s answer, so that ability widened the partisan gap instead of closing it.⁴ Intelligence, joined, becomes the tribe’s lawyer. Related work on deliberation shows the group setting itself radicalizes: people who talk mainly with their own side drift toward more extreme versions of the side’s view than most members held going in.⁵

The mirage across the valley

What the joined mind does to its rivals has now been measured at scale. In a large United States study, partisans on each side imagined roughly twice as many people with “extreme” views on the other side as surveys actually find there. The distortion grows with devotion: the most politically engaged hold the most inaccurate pictures of their opponents, while the politically disengaged are about three times more accurate. Heavy news consumers carry nearly three times the distortion of occasional readers, and frequent political posters carry more than the silent.⁶ Meanwhile the temperature keeps rising: the share of American partisans holding a very unfavorable view of the other party climbed from under a quarter in 1994 to a majority of both parties by 2022, with large majorities of each side calling the other immoral and dishonest.⁷ Hostility toward a mirage, in other words, increases with exposure to the machinery that projects it. Eric Hoffer saw the engine seventy years ago: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”⁸

The pattern across all four findings is a single mechanism seen from four angles. Allegiance does not merely bias conclusions; it re-tasks perception, fairness, intellect, and imagination to the group’s defense. The price of the badge is paid in eyesight.

Part two: the quiet exodus

None of this has escaped notice. Without a slogan or a leader — fittingly — people around the world have been walking away from formal allegiance for two generations. The warning is old; George Washington used his farewell to caution “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” which “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms” and “kindles the animosity of one part against another.”⁹ What is new is that the walking away is now visible in almost every ledger of membership that exists.

Politics. In the United States, a record 45 percent of adults now call themselves political independents — up from 33 percent in 1988, and 18 points clear of either party, each of which is left with 27 percent.¹⁰ Nearly half of independents say they often wish they had more parties to choose from.⁷ Across Europe, the story is starker because the baseline was higher: political parties have lost roughly half their absolute membership since 1980; in Britain, France, and Italy the losses run to a million or more members each; and on average, party members now amount to under 5 percent of national electorates.¹¹

Faith. Worldwide, the religiously unaffiliated grew by 270 million people between 2010 and 2020, reaching 1.9 billion — 24.2 percent of humanity — driven not by birthrates (the unaffiliated have few children) but by adults switching out of the faiths they were raised in.¹² In the United States, the unaffiliated have risen from 16 percent of adults in 2007 to 29 percent today,¹³ and formal congregation membership — a distinct, stricter measure of joining — fell below half the population in 2020 for the first time in the eight decades it has been tracked, from 70 percent as recently as 1999 to 47 percent.¹⁴

Labor and civic life. American union membership has fallen to 10 percent of workers, half its level of 1983.¹⁵ The civic ledger tells the same story at every line: attendance at any public meeting on town or school affairs down from 22 percent to 13 percent in two decades; League of Women Voters membership off 42 percent; Red Cross volunteers off 61 percent — while league bowling fell 40 percent even as the number of bowlers rose 10 percent. People kept bowling. They stopped enrolling.¹⁶

What the exodus does not prove

Honesty requires two concessions, and this page makes them rather than hiding them. First, the scholars who assembled the civic numbers — Robert Putnam above all — read them as a loss, and in one sense they are right: the leagues and lodges carried friendship, trust, and mutual aid, and nothing has fully replaced them. The unjoining is a fact, not automatically a triumph; solitude is not the goal, and an unjoined life still requires company, commitment, and contribution — the Objections page takes this seriously, and the Practice page acts on it. Second, exits have their own herds: leaving a church because one’s new tribe sneers at churches is just a change of uniform. The numbers above show that hundreds of millions have found allegiance dispensable. They do not show that all of them found judgment. That part cannot be measured, because it only happens one person at a time.