The end of the second season of The Mandalorian has finally arrived, on Disney +, and we take advantage of all the emotions that this last chapter has aroused in us to analyze one of the guiding themes of the season (calm, this article is spoiler free).
The subject of gloss is none other than tribalism and that we tend to have (and defend) a worldview, a set of beliefs and values, depending on where we were born. And that our loyalty to this group to which we belong is beyond the moral considerations of the acts themselves .
Dark Side and tribalism
Four recent studies have suggested the existence of a social norm according to which two competing groups or teams cannot be supported simultaneously. You can only be loyal to one group . That is, we are binary, and Manichean, when it comes to defining the world: there are the good guys and the bad guys, the Dark Side and the Light Side. Naturally, we always believe that we are on the right side.
Any individual who expresses mixed loyalties may be viewed as a potential threat, not a true member of the group, and may be rejected or excluded. It is something that happens, for example, with the character of Migs Mayfield they infiltrate an empire base of operations to get the exact location of Moff Gideon’s star destroyer in order to rescue Grogu (in the chapter The believer, the penultimate of season two ").
His loyalties are flexible, and that has allowed him to reflect from the bar and realize that we are all, in part, based on where we were born. That we are all bad or good depending on who describes us.
That reflection is what will also push Din Djarin, commonly known as "the Mandalorian" or "Mando", to remove his helmet and break his code . At the end of the day, your code is just one more discretion imposed by the group to which it belongs in order to differentiate itself from enemy or opposing groups.
Breaking loyalty to your group can not only condemn you to social exclusion, but it is burdensome in every way, as suggested by another study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that states that the moral value of loyalty is above the moral value of honesty . Therefore, people who lied to benefit their loyal groups judged their deception as ethical, even though their actions harmed others .
Consequently, people who are dishonest out of loyalty feel that they are acting ethically and morally. But outsiders disagree and see such actions as immoral and bad, unless they themselves lie out of loyalty.
The researchers were interested in what happens when loyalty rubs against values like honesty and fairness, and to demonstrate this they worked with nearly 1,400 participants over the course of four different studies .
Ultimately, the researchers found that when people were called to be loyal, their moral views on deception and honesty changed.
For that reason, in politics, the true psychological basis of the vote is not beliefs but group identity , that is, endogroup bias and tribalism. Feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. That others accept us. That we wear the colors, the flags, the chants or a beskar helmet , and that we merge with them in a kind of social dance that basically produces dopamine. That happens here and also in the Star Wars galaxy. Because, to our knowledge, Jedi have brains like ours. And also the Mandalorians.
If your level of freakiness is high, you can delve into these and other philosophical questions of the penultimate and last chapters of the second season of The Mandalorian in the following viewing (this time with spoilers):