Team Thinking: When Loyalty Goes Bad

If you’re an American, it’s almost guaranteed that you know someone who cares a lot about football. (Maybe that someone is you!) Imagine watching that person watch their favorite team play their biggest rival. The quarterback makes a pass, both a receiver and a defender jump up toward the ball, their bodies collide, and the ball falls to the ground. Is it pass interference? You know for sure what your friend’s answer is going to be even before they inevitably yell it at the top of their lungs—if the defender’s on their rival’s team, then obviously it’s pass interference, and if the defender’s on their team, then obviously it’s perfectly fine.

Now, clearly this is irrational. Just because a defender is on your favorite team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him to commit pass interference, and just because a defender is on your rival team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him not to commit pass interference. But the irrationality isn’t a big deal. We do lots of really dogmatic and irrational things when it comes to sports, and it’s fun and exciting and not a big problem, because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t actually matter who wins a football game (sorry).

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But now instead of a football game, imagine a political debate. You’re watching a friend’s reactions to what they see on the screen, and you realize they’re going to emphatically agree with everything that comes out of their party’s candidate’s mouth—no matter what it is—and emphatically disagree with everything that comes out of the other party’s candidate’s mouth—no matter what it is. They feel the same kind of loyalty toward their candidate, their party, or their “side” that football fans feel toward their team. Dr. Ian Church, a college mentor of mine, calls this phenomenon “team thinking.” And it is deadly.

Just like there’s no football team that has never committed pass interference, there’s no political team (or philosophical team or religious team) that never gets anything wrong. And there’s no team that never gets anything right, either. Every single person on the planet and every single group of people on the planet has some true beliefs and some false beliefs. So if you’re pro-life and whenever you listen to a pro-life speaker you feel like you have to side with them on everything because they’re pro-life, you’re inevitably going to end up agreeing with some false things. And likewise, if whenever you listen to a pro-choice speaker you feel like you have to side against them on everything because they’re pro-choice, you’re inevitably going to end up rejecting some true things. Same thing goes the other way if you’re pro-choice, and same thing goes for the “other side” of literally any issue you care about.

I think we all feel the pull of this kind of team loyalty to some degree. And it makes sense—the reason that we care about the issues we care about is that they matter. A lot. This applies to every side of every issue, but I’m going to use my view on abortion as an example. There were over one million abortions in the US last year. One million. So if my pro-life view is right, last year one million powerless, valuable, vulnerable people were violently killed, and their killings were legal and socially accepted. That’s horrific. And it can be really tempting to feel like my passion for stopping it should override every other consideration. So what if I end up uncritically swallowing a few false views, or uncritically dismissing some true ones? BABIES ARE BEING KILLED. Nothing else matters when I’m fighting that! Right?

No. Emphatically no. Having a good, important end doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to think carefully and pursue it with good means—good, important ends have been used to justify horrific means many, many times. In 1941, Japan’s military executed a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It killed over two thousand US service members, and terrified the country. Can you imagine if, today, a nation that didn’t like the US’s support for Ukraine or Israel bombed a military base in a US state with no warning and killed thousands of people? The US wanted to keep anything like that from happening again, and to protect its citizens and residents. Those are good, important goals. And it was the position of the US government that they were good enough and important enough to justify imprisoning over 100,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese descent in internment camps for months to years, based solely on their ethnicity. The US was wildly wrong, and it did unspeakable harm. Means matter, even when the ends are extremely good and important.

Hang on, you might think—that’s comparing breezes to tornados. Your uncritically accepting a few false beliefs because of your loyalty to the pro-life movement (or any other movement) isn’t the same as imprisoning 100,000 innocent people because of their ethnicity. The latter is a huge deal. The former isn’t—after all, we all have some false beliefs. But here’s the thing. I don’t care that you have some false beliefs. I care if the false beliefs you have are uncorrectable. To whatever degree your belief in some proposition P is based on feeling like you have to believe P to be loyal to your team or cause, it’s not based on evidence or truth. And to whatever degree your belief in P is based on something other than evidence and truth, it will be resistant to counterevidence. Having some false beliefs, on its own, isn’t a big deal. But having an approach that makes your false beliefs uncorrectable is a huge deal. It’s bad for your own mind and soul, it’s bad for your relationships and dialogues, and it compounds on itself in a way that pulls you into more and more significant (and still uncorrectable!) errors.

The other thing about team thinking is that it doesn’t actually help your cause—in fact, it hurts it. Truth can’t be incompatible with other truth. So if the pro-life view (or any other view) is true, other truths aren’t a threat to it—including that truth that sometimes pro-life people get stuff wrong. In fact, acknowledging the things that pro-life people get wrong will make you more persuasive, and therefore more effective at saving lives.

If your loyalty toward any human, any human institution, or any cause pressures you away from carefully discerning the truth—including the truth that your side sometimes gets stuff wrong—then it is a false loyalty, and you’re not doing your team or your cause any favors.

So, think of the person whose views you are most likely to reflexively align with, remind yourself that even they get some things wrong, and actively look for what those things are. Think of the person whose views you are most likely to reject out of hand, remind yourself that even they get some things right, and actively look for what those things are. Especially in an election year, your mind, your relationships, and your soul will be better for it.

 

The post Team Thinking: When Loyalty Goes Bad originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

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Rebecca Carlson is the Director of Scholarship at Equal Rights Institute. Currently, she is a PhD student and teaching assistant in philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation is in metaethics; her other areas of research include philosophy of law, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. She expects to receive her PhD in May 2025.

Rebecca’s favorite part of her work at USC is teaching her students how to cultivate mutual, respectful dialogues with people they disagree with. She has also spoken on that topic for both academic and popular audiences. That work has led her to the strong conviction that if we can teach one side of an issue how to approach dialogues well, people on the other side will very often follow suit, so that we really can radically transform the state of public discourse on abortion just by helping the pro-life side to have a better approach: we can create a culture where people on both sides value each other more and perceive the truth more clearly, and ultimately we can change more minds and save more lives. She’s excited to continue and expand that work at ERI through academic research, speaking, writing, and coaching pro-life clubs.

“You can’t fix a dialogue single-handedly—it takes two good-faith interlocutors to make a good-faith dialogue. But what you can do is make the first move. You can clearly communicate and demonstrate your care for the other person, your genuine desire to understand where they’re coming from, and your openness to considering their point of view, even while they’re not doing the same for you. It takes a little bit of work and a lot of charity, but if you do that, far more often than not the other person will meet you halfway—even people you think of as crazy extremists.”

Rebecca holds a Bachelor of Science degree in philosophy, summa cum laude, from Hillsdale College, with minors in theatre and mathematics and a concentration in Latin.

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