Seven Seconds to Survive

 I want to talk about cliques. As a youth pastor, I deal with them regularly, but cliques are not unique to students. Cliques show up in adult spaces just as frequently, and if we're talking about building community in new spaces, it would be worth our time to talk about it.   

Let us start at the brain. Your brain has an unconscious prioritization system that is active during the thousands of choices you make every moment of every day. 

And it goes like this...

Will I survive?

Am I Safe?

What will give me the greatest satisfaction? (Either by increasing pleasure or decreasing pain)

That second question, "Am I Safe," is where cliques live. Cliques are, first and foremost, a tool of safety; I hang out with these people because they protect me from getting killed and eaten by other people.   This group is my tribe because I feel safe with them. Cliques equal tribes. Do you remember back in the day when we used to build walls around our cities to keep us safe from outside invaders? Have you seen how government policy throughout history can shift and change depending on what people group is being affected? So when you tell students that you can't have cliques, when you have to say to an adult small group that they need to split into two groups, or even when you introduce another person into a group, you are fundamentally threatening the safety of the group. Here is the kicker, it is all happening unconsciously.  

We discourage labeling people, but we fail to realize that our brain's primary defensive strategy is to label every person we see as quickly as possible. According to ongoing research, Dr. Rachel Gordon of the University of Illinois at Chicago found that high school students can identify cliques in seven seconds. Seven seconds to survey a room full of people, label them, and determine if they are safe or not.    

Btw This skill also extends into digital spaces where you can quickly label a person based on a profile picture. 

Frankly, it gets worse for adults because the older you are, the more evidence you have that people are hurtful, and thus your defenses are strengthened with a perimeter of experience and memory.

But all is not lost; there is hope.

Like the One Ring and dirty laundry, Cliques cannot be destroyed, solved, banished, or ignored. But cliques can be flexible. A person or group can narrow or widen the specifications for inclusion. With awareness and effort, the atmosphere of a group can change.   We can look to Gen Z as an excellent example of inclusion; they are by far the most inclusive generation to date. Oddly enough, Social Media plays a significant role (but more on that later). 

Suppose we, the Church, the body of Christ, are to take seriously the belief that all people can find redemption in our Spirit-empowered community. In that case, we must spend time to consider our cliques and what a person can learn about us within seven seconds of walking into a church.