An important thing to remember here is that Trump’s persona is basically a professional wrestler persona. Professional wrestling is a kind of morality play that pits a positively caricatured in-group versus a negatively caricatured “weird” out-group, for the amusement of an audience that identifies with the in-group. Over time, the out-group always loses. He knows that if he gets put into the weird out-group, he’ll lose at Wrestlemania…unless he cheats, which is what weird out-group always does.
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong, but in social psychology the in-group is contingent on the viewer identifying with others. Like if I see a person in a foreign country wearing a shirt with the logo of my hometown baseball team on it, I will ascribe positive characteristics to that stranger as he is in-group for me. Thats in-group bias.
Out-group is anyone who I see as belonging to a categorization of people I don’t belong to, say a woman if I’m a man, a tall person if I’m short, a middle class worker if I’m generationally wealthy etc. etc. The most common thinking error is out-group homogeneity, that people in the out-group are all the same. Rugby fans are like this, waiters are like that.
The description of your heel/face wrestler metaphor presumes all viewers will see themselves as “good guys” and would believe they share characteristics with the baby face wrestlers, and thus identify the faces as the in-group and the heels as the out-group.
In-group doesn’t mean the accepted in society and out-group are the social rejects. It’s entirely subjective to the observer. Like if you go to a sporting event where every fan supports one side or the other, everyone has an in- and out-group observable to them. A neutral observer would see only two out-groups. It’s not a hero/villain split like pro wrestling.
In old-school professional wrestling, the heel personas were often exploiting xenophobic prejudices that are largely absent from the contemporary shows. Today there is more ambiguity regarding who is the face and who is the heel and it’s up to the subjective preferences of the audience.
I offer this video (I could only find the version with French commentary) as an example.
I just see a lot of commonality between Trump’s shtick and these old-school wrasslin’ narratives.
yeah I get all that.
I don’t think you’re wrong- trump is a WWE candidate… I grew up with Iron Sheik and Nikoli Volkoff … back then, though, Ted Debiasi (the million dollar man) was a rich guy archetype and was cast as a heel haha
My little soap box about in-group out-group was only that specifically in psychology, in-group and out-group isn’t good guy/bad guy, its just whether the viewer feels they identify someone else as being familiar or foreign
An important thing to remember here is that Trump’s persona is basically a professional wrestler persona. Professional wrestling is a kind of morality play that pits a positively caricatured in-group versus a negatively caricatured “weird” out-group, for the amusement of an audience that identifies with the in-group. Over time, the out-group always loses. He knows that if he gets put into the weird out-group, he’ll lose at Wrestlemania…unless he cheats, which is what weird out-group always does.
tl;dr: Trump is weird.
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong, but in social psychology the in-group is contingent on the viewer identifying with others. Like if I see a person in a foreign country wearing a shirt with the logo of my hometown baseball team on it, I will ascribe positive characteristics to that stranger as he is in-group for me. Thats in-group bias.
Out-group is anyone who I see as belonging to a categorization of people I don’t belong to, say a woman if I’m a man, a tall person if I’m short, a middle class worker if I’m generationally wealthy etc. etc. The most common thinking error is out-group homogeneity, that people in the out-group are all the same. Rugby fans are like this, waiters are like that.
The description of your heel/face wrestler metaphor presumes all viewers will see themselves as “good guys” and would believe they share characteristics with the baby face wrestlers, and thus identify the faces as the in-group and the heels as the out-group.
In-group doesn’t mean the accepted in society and out-group are the social rejects. It’s entirely subjective to the observer. Like if you go to a sporting event where every fan supports one side or the other, everyone has an in- and out-group observable to them. A neutral observer would see only two out-groups. It’s not a hero/villain split like pro wrestling.
In old-school professional wrestling, the heel personas were often exploiting xenophobic prejudices that are largely absent from the contemporary shows. Today there is more ambiguity regarding who is the face and who is the heel and it’s up to the subjective preferences of the audience.
I offer this video (I could only find the version with French commentary) as an example.
I just see a lot of commonality between Trump’s shtick and these old-school wrasslin’ narratives.
yeah I get all that. I don’t think you’re wrong- trump is a WWE candidate… I grew up with Iron Sheik and Nikoli Volkoff … back then, though, Ted Debiasi (the million dollar man) was a rich guy archetype and was cast as a heel haha
My little soap box about in-group out-group was only that specifically in psychology, in-group and out-group isn’t good guy/bad guy, its just whether the viewer feels they identify someone else as being familiar or foreign
So you’re saying that Sheik Abdul Mohammed in the early 80’s was pretending?
I can’t read persona anymore without having a jrpg battle music in my head