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GROUP THINK

How do the groups you identify with shape your sense of self? Do they influence
the beer you buy? The way you vote? Psychologist Jay Van Bavel says our group
loyalties affect us more than we realize, and can even shape our basic senses of
sight, taste and smell. 

If you like our work, please consider supporting it! See how you can help at
support.hiddenbrain.org. And to learn more about human behavior and ideas that
can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org.


ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Book: 

The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance,
Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony, Jay Van Bavel and Dominic
Packer, 2021.

Research:

Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in
post-ISIS Iraq, Salma Mousa, Science, 2020.

Can exposure to celebrities reduce prejudice? The effect of Mohamed Salah on
islamophobic behaviors and attitudes, Salma Mousa, American Political Science
Review, 2019.

From groups to grits: Social identity shapes evaluations of food pleasantness,
Leor Hackel, Géraldine Coppin, Michael Wohl, Jay Van Bavel, Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 2018.

Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief
and dissemination of true and false news, Andrea Pereira, Elizabeth Harris and
Jay Van Bavel, PsyArXiv, 2018.

Social identity shapes social valuation: Evidence from prosocial behavior and
vicarious reward, Leor Hackel, Jamil Zaki, and Jay Van Bavel, Social Cognitive
and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.

Core disgust is attenuated by ingroup relations, Stephen Reicher, Anne
Templeton, Fergus Neville, Lucienne Ferrari, and John Drury, PNAS, 2016.

See your friends close and your enemies closer, Yi Jenny Xiao and Jay Van Bavel,
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012.

Minority influence, divergent thinking and detection of correct solutions,
Charlan Jeanne Nemeth and Julianne Kwan, Journal of Applied Social Psychology,
2006.

Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies, Robert Cialdini,
Richard Borden, Avril Thorne, Marcus Randall walker, Stephen Freeman, and Lloyd
Sloan, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976.

Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous
majority, Solomon Asch, American Psychological Association, 1956.

Videos:

Jay Van Bavel: Do Politics Make Us Irrational? TED Ed Talk, 2020.


Jay Van Bavel: The Dangers of the Partisan Brain, TEDxSkoll, 2017.

Transcript



The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our
transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate
slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Nelson
Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994, he had big dreams
for his bitterly divided country.

Nelson Mandela: We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society, a
rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Shankar Vedantam: He had spent a lifetime fighting the racist apartheid regime,
including more than a quarter century in prison.

Jay Van Bavel: He was a heroic figure already by that time. But to many white
South Africans, they saw him as a criminal and a terrorist.

Shankar Vedantam: This is psychologist Jay Van Bavel. As president of the United
South Africa, Nelson Mandela or Madiba as he was known to his supporters, needed
to find a way for the people in his "rainbow nation" to see themselves as South
Africans first. Other politicians might have turned to speeches and policies,
Madiba turned to sports.

Jay Van Bavel: He used the rugby world cup, which was being hosted in South
Africa. And during the apartheid era, South Africa had been banned from
competition. And the South African team was known as the Springboks and they
were beloved by the white South Africans and despised by the black population.
But what Mandela did was he went out onto the podium, not just as the president,
but as a fan, he had the green Springboks captain jersey, and he used it as a
way to make a statement that we're one team, we're one country now. And he took
a symbol of oppression and used it as a symbol of togetherness.

Shankar Vedantam: The Springboks' team captain, Francois Pienaar, remembers the
moment Madiba walked into the team's locker room. It was before the finals
against New Zealand.

Francois Pienaar: He said good luck boys and they turned around. And my number
was on his back and that was me. I couldn't sing the anthem because I knew I
would cry. I was just so proud to be a South Africa that day

Shankar Vedantam: The match was a nail biter. It went into overtime. South
Africa ended up winning 15 to 12. Across the country, black and white South
Africans cheered together in triumph. Nelson Mandela knew that getting enemies
to cheer for the same sports team was only a start. Much work remained to heal
the wounds of apartheid. But his intervention revealed how a psychologically
astute leader can find ways to create connections among people, even bitter
enemies. This week on Hidden Brain, how group identities bring us together, tear
us apart, and transform our understanding of the world.

Shankar Vedantam: When we think about what we do and why we do it, we often
assume we are acting intentionally and autonomously. I do something because I
want to do it. I choose to do it. In recent years, social scientists have shown
that this is often untrue. Our actions, our preferences, the very way we see the
world is filtered through the prism of our group identities. This idea has
fascinated Jay Van Bavel for a long time. He's a psychologist at New York
University. He has studied how our group loyalties pull us together, how they
tear us apart and how we can apply what we have learned about the science of
group identity to build better lives and better communities. Jay Van Bavel,
welcome to Hidden Brain.

Jay Van Bavel: Thanks for having me.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to start by talking about some of the ways in which our
group identities can draw us together with other people, Jay. You grew up in
Canada and I understand your parents told you to sew the Canadian national flag
onto your backpack. Did you ever find yourself bonding with other Canadians when
you traveled overseas?

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. So this is a great piece of advice you learn if you're ever
going to travel in Canada. Your family, your friends will tell you to sew a
Canadian flag on your backpack so that it serves as a signal to other people in
other parts of the world who you are and where you're from. Canada's a
reasonably well liked and respected country, but it does something even better,
which is it allows you to connect with people. So I was actually on my first
ever international trip in high school and we were in Venice, one of the most
beautiful, interesting cities in the world, some of the best food in the world.
And I was a Canadian teenager. So I found the first McDonald that I had seen in
probably a week. And I wandered in and I'm in line to get some chicken nuggets.
And this young teenage girl comes up and just starts talking to me in English.
And it quickly dawned on me that she saw that I had a Canadian maple leaf on a
sweater that I was wearing. And so it was her way of saying that we shared this
in common and if I was anywhere in Canada, I doubt she would've come and started
talking to me. But since we were all the way around the world, that identity was
something that bonded us in an unfamiliar situation.

Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. So that's fascinating because of course, as you just
pointed out, if you were both in Toronto or Ottawa, the fact that you were both
Canadians would've been utterly unremarkable, but in Venice, that portion of
your identity stood out.

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. So it turns out that one of the most powerful ways to
trigger an identity is to be a minority in a situation. When you're all
surrounded by fellow Canadians, you're not thinking about yourself for the most
part in terms of being a Canadian. But it's really powerful when you're both in
a foreign land. That thing that might otherwise be really mundane becomes really
significant to you.

Shankar Vedantam: We've all had experiences like this. We know what it's like to
be part of a group, to belong to a club. As a psychologist, Jay has discovered
that our group identities are more a source of connection. They tell us what we
should care about.

Jay Van Bavel: I ran this study in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, in
collaboration with a colleague who was a professor at Carleton University. And
he set up a table in the ByWard Market, which is a famous old market in Ottawa.
And he pulled people who were walking by and offered them a choice between a
taste test. They were able to sample honey or maple syrup. And then we randomly
flipped a coin and assigned people to one of two conditions. Half of the people
were primed to think about their personal identity. So they talked about books
they liked as an individual. The other half of the people were primed to think
about their Canadian identity. And what we found is that when they were primed
with their individual identity, they tended to like the taste of honey and maple
syrup roughly the same, but when they were primed with their Canadian identity,
they liked the maple syrup more than the honey. And so what it suggests is that
when your identity is salient, it makes you prefer things that are associated
with that identity. And for Canada, maple syrup is one of the big ones. We
literally have the maple leaf on our national flag. We have a strategic national
reserve of maple syrup. So Canada takes maple syrup pretty seriously.

Shankar Vedantam: So companies that are smart about group identity can sometimes
use this to spur sales. Tell me what Molson Breweries did in their "I am
Canadian" ad.

Jay Van Bavel: When I was a teenager, Molson Breweries, which is one of the
biggest beer breweries in the entire country, came up with this really
incredible ad. And it's just, this guy walks on stage...

Audio from Molson Brewery Ad: Hey, I'm not a lumberjack or a fur trader and I
don't live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled and I don't...

Jay Van Bavel: And he just goes on this rant about what it means to be Canadian,
and in particular, how it's different from an American.

Shankar Vedantam: I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and
French, not American....

Jay Van Bavel: It had a Canadian flag flying in the background. It talked about
hockey being the national sport. So all these things that Canadians really
cherish as part of who they are and their culture and Canadians often don't have
a very strong sense of identity and this ad captured it. And this ad won a
number of awards because it signaled to Canadians something really important
like who am I? But at the same time, it also increased sales very dramatically
for Molson Brewery because it resonated with people's national identity.

Shankar Vedantam: Group identities can influence the beer we drink, the cars we
drive, the clothes we wear. But they can also do something even more
significant. They can shape our basic perceptions. What we see, hear, even
smell. I asked Jay about a study out of the University of Sussex involving a
very stinky t-shirt.

Jay Van Bavel: This has to be one of my favorite studies. Yeah, so this was run
in the UK and they wanted to see how identity might shape our smell. And so they
used a very clever trick to manipulate people's social identity. And then they
had them smell this stinky shirt, which they had had a research assistant wear
this shirt for a week, sweating in it, exercising in it, not taking it off and
then they put it in this sealed bin and they had participants come in and smell
this shirt. And what they did was they manipulated the shirt so it either had a
logo from the rival university, which was the University of Brighton or the
other half the students got to see this with a Sussex, University of Sussex
logo. And so what they found is that when people were primed to think that this
was an out group member shirt, they thought it was much more disgusting, a much
more putrid and odorous. Then when they thought the exact same smelling shirt
was from a member of their own ingroup. And so it suggests that what we find
disgusting is determined also by our identity and who we define as an ingroup
and outgroup.

Shankar Vedantam: So this is a remarkable study because in some ways I think
it's uncontroversial and unsurprising to say that people are loyal to their
groups. But I think the surprising insight from this kind of research is that
groups don't just tell us what kind of foods to like, or which politicians to
support, they actually shape the very way we see the world.

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. I mean, what we are trying to argue and what the growing
body of research suggests is that these identities are a lens that shapes all
kinds of our senses. They shape how we're smelling and interpreting smells, what
we're seeing, maybe what we're hearing and so they help provide a way of
interpreting information as it comes in through all our senses.

Shankar Vedantam: One last example, I want to look at about the power of groups
to shape how we see and what we see. Jay, you tell the story of the 1966 World
Cup soccer finals between England and Germany. What happened during the finals?

Jay Van Bavel: So this might be one of the most famous and controversial games
of all time. It was tied and it went to extra minutes. And there was a shot by
this English player and it went off the crossbar and it came down and landed
very close to the goal line and then bounced out. And all the English players
celebrated. They thought this was the World Cup winning goal. And there's huge
debate over whether that goal actually crossed the line. And so to this day,
there's still controversy about whether this crossed the line. And so what
seemed to happen here is that those players wanted to interpret this ball as
going over the line and being the winning goal. The German players did not. And
so I spent an entire day watching old videos in slow motion and pausing them to
see if the goal actually crossed the line. I looked up the study from Oxford
University saying it didn't cross the line and so I do not think he scored. It
looked like it came down right on the goal line and bounced out. However, the
same player scored later in overtime and so England would've won anyways.

Shankar Vedantam: We see the same things in all kinds of sports all over the
world, Jay. Fans of different teams will see different things happen on the
field and each of them is completely sure that what they saw in fact is
objective reality.

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. And sports fans often think the referees are unfair to them
because they're seeing everything through their own lens. In fact, in Canada,
there's one song that's banned from all the hockey arenas and it's called Three
Blind Mice, which people used to play. The home teams used to play when they
didn't like a call to imply that the three ref were biased and blind. And so
this turns out that this is a really deeply rooted problem for people they're so
used to filtering it through their own lens. They get very upset at officials.

Shankar Vedantam: The passion that we feel for our favorite sports teams can
quickly lead to feelings of us versus them, whether the them we are talking
about are referees or fans of rival teams. It makes sense that when we care
deeply about something, we'll feel a sense of kinship with the people who share
our views and a lack of connection with people who disagree with us. But it
turns out a shared passion isn't needed to trigger the psychological effects of
group identity. One study published in the 1970s, randomly assigned volunteers
to one of two groups. The members of the first group were supposed to like the
artist, Paul Klee. Members of the second group were supposed to like the artist,
Wassily Kandinsky.

Jay Van Bavel: This I think is one of the most important studies in the history
of psychology, maybe in the history of the social sciences. So this was a study
run by Henri Tajfel and his colleagues. He ran this study where he basically
just randomly assigned youths to one of two groups and he did it on just trivial
information. So what type of abstract art they liked. And these young people
didn't know these artists at all and in fact, it didn't matter who they actually
liked. He just flipped a coin and gave them false feedback anyways.

Shankar Vedantam: The volunteers in the Clay and Kandinsky camps were then told
to divvy up money among people in the different groups.

Jay Van Bavel: And what he found is that the moment that you're part of a team
or part of a group, you will give more money to members of your ingroup and less
money to the outgroup, even if you never interact or meet those people, even if
you never expect that they'll meet you. And the thing he also found is that what
people really care about is maximizing the difference in money they give to the
ingroup and outgroup. So they'll actually give ingroup members less, if it means
giving outgroup members even way less.

Shankar Vedantam: What's remarkable about the study of course is that people are
forming these loyalties to groups that they've been assigned for really no very
good reason and yet within a few minutes almost, they're behaving as if these
are long lost brothers and they're treating them as if they're members of an
ingroup tribe.

Jay Van Bavel: Yes. And this is something that you might be skeptical when you
hear these results, and I was too. And then I ran studies like this, in Canada
and the US, and many universities and online, and I've seen this same pattern
over and over again. The moment that people are assigned to a team or a group,
even though they often can know it's a coin flip that's determining this, means
that they like those people more. They want to be friends with them. It shapes
their automatic evaluations of those individuals. And we ran a study where NYU
students thought they were interacting in economic decisions with members of
NYU, which is their members of their own ingroup or Columbia, which is a high
status school across New York City. And what they did was they would give more
money to NYU students and Columbia students. But what was even more interesting
is when they saw NYU students win money, they actually had a brain response that
suggested that they were feeling as if they had won the money. And so what it
suggests is what is referred to in the literature as "basking in reflected
glory" is that when your ingroup as well, it makes you feel good. You have a
response in your brain as if you won or something good happened to you. And the
same thing I think happens to sports fans. You can be sitting at home, watching
the TV all alone and running around and jumping and cheering as if you've
accomplished something when your team wins. And this is what we found in the
lab.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you think explains this enormous gravitational force
that groups exert on us, Jay. Why is it that our minds are so attuned to the
needs of our groups even when those groups are completely arbitrary?

Jay Van Bavel: There's a couple key factors that determine why we're so
attracted to groups. I think the deepest one is it's something in our biology.
So humans evolved for almost the entirety of human in history in these small
tribal communities. And we're pretty flimsy creatures. We don't have sharp teeth
or poison or wings to fly away if a predator comes. And so we survive by
cooperating in groups and coalitions within those groups. And so we have those
same tendencies. And then what you have in a modern environment that matters is
that groups fill our need to belong. They help us gain status if we're part of a
successful group. And they also give us a sense of distinctiveness if our group
is different from others. It tells us a little bit in the world about who we
are.

Shankar Vedantam: Groups offer us a sense of belonging, and they can bring out
the best in us. But the flip side of most ingroups, there's an outgroup. When we
come back, how our group identities divide us and what we can do to harness the
power of groups to build a better world. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm
Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've seen how
groups can pull us together, give us shared cultural touch points and become an
enduring source of resilience and comfort. In our revolutionary past, our group
identities were an important source of protection. You would think that a force
this powerful would also have downsides. Throughout human history, we've seen
numerous examples of how group loyalties can spill over into tribalism and
xenophobia and lead to war and genocide. In their new book, The Power of Us, the
psychologist, Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer, explore how group identities
pull us together and how they tear us apart. They also look at how we can apply
what we have learned about the science of group identity to build a better
world. Jay, you tell a remarkable story of two brothers in Southern Germany.
They were cobblers and together ran the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory around the
time of the Second World War. The brothers had a falling out, what happened
next?

Jay Van Bavel: So these brothers, it was World War II, 1943, and the one brother
Adi, he and his wife climbed into the same shelter as his brother Rudolph's
family. And Adi said, according to legend, "The dirty bastards are back again."
And we don't know if Adi was referring to the allied war planes who were coming
to bomb them but Rudi apparently interpreted this as an insult intended for
himself and his family. And so it triggered this decades long feud between these
two brothers. They ended up breaking up their company and creating two shoe
companies in the same town. And that might have been the end of it, but what
happened is it infected the psychology of all the townspeople. And so people on
one side of the river of the town identified with Adi and the other side
identified with the shoe company run by Rudi. And it became known as the town of
bent necks because people would walk around town, looking down at the ground to
see what shoes people were wearing. And if you were wearing the shoes from the
other company, you wouldn't date them, you wouldn't be able to go in their
stores, marriage was discouraged with people with the wrong shoes. In fact, this
feud went right to the grave. So these two brothers are literally buried at
opposite ends of the town cemetery. And this might seem like this is a small
story, it's just a little town in Germany, but these companies, the two shoe
companies that were launched by them are now known as Adidas, which was founded
by Adi and Puma, which is founded by Rudi. These are two of the biggest
companies in the world. And this feud affected the psychology of everybody
because these shoes became a signal about group membership and led to
discrimination.

Shankar Vedantam: So, when I look out at the United States or other countries, I
feel there are endless examples of how our group loyalties divide us. The
conflict between the Dassler brothers, to me, it seems absurd. They're both
German, they're both cobblers, they both make sports shoes for heaven's sake.
Surely they have so much in common. But of course, when we find ourselves in the
grip of deep divisions, they don't seem absurd. What explains this gap?

Jay Van Bavel: The Dassler brothers demonstrate something really deep about
human nature, how easily we form groups and coalitions. And this has been
observed in every culture on earth that's ever been studied. And to these people
in this town, this doesn't seem absurd. This seems deeply important and central
to their life and who they are. And I think that's the thing psychologically is
whatever conflicts are driving your own life seem real and the conflicts of
other people halfway around the world might seem absurd, but it's very much the
same psychology that seems to be at play in all of these types of situations.

Shankar Vedantam: So, many Americans increasingly believe that they don't just
disagree with people on the other side, but that people on the other side are
inherently evil or untrustworthy. As a social scientist who studies group
identity, where are we on the spectrum between healthy disagreement and civil
war?

Jay Van Bavel: What I've noticed is there's an increasing trend towards
polarization that's linked to outgroup hate more than ingroup love. And this is
where politics in the US and many places around the world looks much more like
sectarianism because it's connected to our morality. And what happens then is
people in the ingroup are good, but the outgroup really is evil. And you'll do
anything you can to stop them. You'll even support an ingroup member or vote for
a leader who you don't like or don't respect or don't trust, simply because you
can't let this evil outgroup take control. And so this is now a driving factor,
behind many people in their decisions to vote, volunteer, donate money.

Shankar Vedantam: You've conducted studies into how these group level
disagreements spill over into our personal lives. How do these political
loyalties divide families at holiday gatherings like Thanksgiving?

Jay Van Bavel: Research suggests that our Thanksgiving dinners are getting
shorter by roughly half an hour over time. If you're interacting with family
members in a place where there's going to be disagreement, politically, it
becomes intolerable and people just don't stick around for dessert, basically.
It's affected dating. So I ran a study with radio station in New York City at
Trump's inauguration and we found the biggest form of discrimination we observed
to simply that people refuse to date somebody who voted for the other party. And
so now there's in fact, dating websites dedicated specifically to your political
preferences.

Shankar Vedantam: Are you serious? There's blue Tinder and red Tinder now?

Jay Van Bavel: I don't know if it's called that. There's one that's if you're
for Trump fans only and stuff like this. Yeah.

Shankar Vedantam: So we talked earlier about how our group loyalties and
identity shape our very perceptions of reality. I want to talk about this idea
in the context of group conflicts. You've conducted some interesting studies.
Looking at Yankees fans, what do you find in terms of their perceptions when it
comes to their enemies, the Red Sox?

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. So one of the greatest sports rivalries in the country is
between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. And we've been able to run
some studies up at Yankee Stadium with Red Sox and Yankees fans and what we
found is that Yankees fans had distorted judgments of how close Fenway Park in
Boston was. So we gave them a map and asked them to draw where they thought
Boston was, and they thought it was much closer to New York than it actually
was. If you asked non-fans, they were pretty accurate in estimating how far away
Fenway Park was, but they're not threatened by this group in the same way that
Yankees fans are. And so they're not ordering their perceptions in the same way.
And so this is something that is adaptive to people, is if there's a threat in
the environment, you got to get ready to act and seeing it as closer can
sometimes trigger that reaction, but we see it with groups as well.

Shankar Vedantam: I understand there's also been similar work finding that
people who perceive immigrants to be a greater threat can sometimes perceive
them to be physically closer or perceive their home countries to be physically
closer than they actually are.

Jay Van Bavel: We've run a number of studies in New York and around the rest of
the country. And what we find is that people who are threatened by illegal
immigration from Mexico, see Mexico City as much closer to the border than it
is, but also how many people they think are coming over the border. They tend to
overestimate the size of the group.

Shankar Vedantam: So the idea that group identity is like a lens through which
we see the world, I think this might explain why some things that we feel should
provide objective answers to complex social problems, sometimes fail to do so.
There's been controversy in recent years about police shootings of civilians,
and both protestors and police have assumed that the body cameras being worn by
police officers can provide an objective answer as to who's in the right. What
are these protestors and the police officials getting wrong, Jay?

Jay Van Bavel: Well, the body cams have operated under the assumption that if we
just captured all in the cameras. That it's going to dramatically reduce police
violence because it's going to keep people honest. And the problem with that is
that people when they look at these videos in a court, the jury for example, is
biased in how they interpret them. So there's research from NYU showing that if
you identify with the police and you watch one of these videos of a conflict
between a police officer and a suspect, you see the suspect at fault. And you're
looking more at the suspect and therefore you're getting the information,
they're doing something wrong. If you actually don't identify with the police,
you are looking at the police officer to see what they're doing wrong and coming
to a very different conclusion. So simply having the video is not going to be
enough to solve these problems and necessarily reduce conflict with the police.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to ask you what all this means for the COVID 19
pandemic. At the time you and I are having this conversation, Jay, a significant
number of Americans are resistant to getting vaccinated against COVID 19. And
the data seems to suggest that the death rate rates and infection rates are
rising primarily among the unvaccinated. And I think the response of many public
health officials is to say, let's present people with the data, but of course,
that doesn't seem to change people's mind. And as I'm hearing what you are
saying about group identities and the ways in which conversations about the
pandemic have become politicized, I think I'm starting to see that a rational
fact based approach often is ineffective.

Jay Van Bavel: If there was ever a moment where we would want to test a
hypothesis about whether facts and risks actually make people rational, we have
tested it during the pandemic. And what we've seen since the very beginning,
since January 2020 in the US, is that Republicans have seen the pandemic
unfolding very differently than Democrats. And the leaders of the Republicans,
this was Donald Trump, have downplayed it. And this affected people's judgments
of risk. It affected willingness to engage in spatial and social distancing. And
we've studied that in my own lab and found that over time, the partisan gap
between Democrats and Republicans in their willingness to engage in distancing
actually increased as the pandemic spread. You might expect the opposite, which
is that as people learn more about the risks, as people dying get in the
hospital in your local state or city, you would actually follow the guidelines
more. You wouldn't be guided by partisanship. If anything, we found the exact
opposite. And now you're seeing that with vaccines. The big single biggest
predictor of vaccine hesitancy continues to be identification with the
Republican party. 32% of Republicans don't plan to get the vaccine while only 3%
of Democrats don't plan to. So that's 10 times as many people are vaccine
hesitant on that side of the political aisle.

Shankar Vedantam: I mean, the other way to describe what you just said is that
our commitment to our groups and our group identities in some ways can be
stronger than our commitments to our own safety.

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. Group identities don't seem that important when you're
talking about a baseball game, but they matter a great deal in a pandemic. And
if they are stronger than our commitment to reality and preserving the safety of
not only ourselves, but our family, our friends, our co-workers, that tells you
precisely how powerful these things are. And if you're willing to continue to
tune into TV stations or social media that's affirming your identity, it can
lead you to have a very bad misunderstanding of the risks that are presented to
you in the world around.

Shankar Vedantam: Jay and his colleagues have looked at how social media in
particular, exacerbates tribal loyalties and group divisions. We explored some
of this research in an earlier episode. It was titled Screaming Into the Void.

Jay Van Bavel: The important thing to understand about social media is that
nearly four billion people are on social media now and the average social media
user scrolls through 300 feet of news feed a day.

Shankar Vedantam: Wow.

Jay Van Bavel: So it means if you have a six inch iPhone or Android, that means
you're scrolling down 600 times. It's the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Shankar Vedantam: Wow.

Jay Van Bavel: That's how much you're reading each day. And so you're not
reading things very deeply, you're just kind of scrolling through and seeing
what catches your attention. That's why they call it "the attention economy."
We've run a number of studies with hundreds of thousands of people and we've
found that the language people are using seems to break through in this
attention economy. So when people use powerful, moral, emotional language around
political topics, it seems to go more viral, people are 15% to 20% more likely
to share it. But what happens is who's sharing it. It's people who are part of
your own political ingroup. It doesn't cross over to the other side when you use
that language. And we have a new study out where we found that the biggest
single predictor of making something go viral is dunking on the outgroup, saying
something negative about the other side. And that's 67% more likely to get
shared. And so people learn this by getting reinforced and they realize this is
the language that wins on social media.

Shankar Vedantam: You've also conducted a study, looking at the effectiveness of
fact checking, partisan beliefs. What do you find, Jay?

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah, we've been trying to study what works in terms of fact
checking. There is some evidence that if you give people nudges to focus on
accuracy, they'll pause and reflect and be more accurate and be less likely to
believe or share misinformation. We have new data suggesting that that doesn't
really work for people at the political extremes. Their identity is overpowering
these nudges for accuracy. So we're going to have to think about addressing
those people in different ways if we're going to want to reduce misinformation.

Shankar Vedantam: Across so many dimensions of our lives, our group identities
shape our perceptions, our choices, and our behavior. They can cause us to act
with cruelty and aggression. They can also prompt us to show compassion and
generosity toward others. When we come back, how we can harness and redirect the
power of groups to improve our health, our communities and the wellbeing of the
planet. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Our social worlds
shape what we see. They offer us comfort in the face of threat. They give us a
sense of camaraderie. They're also the prism through which we see and understand
the world. In their book, "The Power of Us," the psychologist, Jay Van Bavel and
Dominic Packer, explore how we can harness our group identities to solve
important challenges in our lives. Jay, one of the themes that has surfaced
repeatedly in this conversation is that our group identities change the way we
see the world. Now, most of the time, the forces that create group identities
are random or accidental, but understanding how group identities are created can
give us clues to how to reinvent those identities to change the outcomes we'd
like to see in the world. I'd like to start with a personal story. When you were
in grad school, you were assigned an office mate, Dominic Packer. He would of
course go on to become your collaborator and your co-author on this book. But
you had something of a rocky start when you first met and it had to do with some
smelly gym clothes that you brought to your shared office?

Jay Van Bavel: And I was a big hockey player. And I picked a desk in the
sub-basement of our building in the same room as Dominic who had been there for
a year and I had such a small apartment that I had no room for my hockey
equipment. So I brought it in and I said, I'm just going to store this here. And
this basically chilled our relationship. For the next several months, Dominic
barely turned around to talk to me. He was pretty burned about the idea of me
storing my stinky hockey equipment in our shared office.

Shankar Vedantam: So tell me the story of how the bond between the two of you
got established. I understand a cube of cheese was involved.

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. So one of the rituals of being a graduate student at most
universities is they bring in guest speakers. As a grad student, you're at the
bottom of the pecking order, but you get to meet the speakers, take them for
lunch, and then they often have a nice wine and cheese reception. And so at the
wine and cheese reception, I was a poor student, I was eating as much cheese as
I could, drinking as much free beer as I could. And I wasn't paying attention to
what I was eating and I dropped this cheese cube , about the size of a dice,
into my throat, and it got plugged in my throat and I started choking. And I
tried to rinse it down with some beer, but that just made the situation worse.
At that point I had zero oxygen going to my brain. And I thought back to the
times I used to work in the oil field of Alberta. I had to watch all these
safety videos. And the first thing I learned was that if you're choking, most
people can save you as long as you don't leave the room, but it's so
embarrassing to choke that most people who die do so because they just want to
be alone and not have other people see them. So I went to the bartender and I
couldn't speak, but I made the universal choking signature and then I twisted
back into him with my back but he didn't really know what was going on and it
didn't help me that much. So I grabbed Dominic's hand and pulled him into the
men's room and he didn't know what was going on either at that point. But I
communicated to him that I need him to do the Heimlich look on me, or I would
die. And he looked white, like he had seen a ghost. But eventually he got in the
position I kind of like started moving his, his hands towards my diaphragm. And
he gave me the Heimlich, it came out. And I remember at the end of this, there
were professors coming in to use the washroom and out, and they were looking at
us like, "What are you guys doing in here?" But it bonded us together. This
weird near death experience, me almost dying at the wine and cheese and him
having to save my life created a bridge. And from that point on, we became close
friends and then we became collaborators and now we're still working together.

Shankar Vedantam: It's a remarkable story and I'm glad that both you and he had
the presence of mind to solve the problem. But talk about this idea a little
more, Jay. Stressful situations and dramatic situations have a capacity to bond
people together. I'm reminded of those studies involving dating couples. And
when the couples are having a date on a rickety bridge where they feel like
their lives might be in danger, they feel more drawn to one another. They feel
like they have a bigger bond than if they're having a very safe date. And there
have been stories about airplane hijackings where passengers feel like they're
thrown in together in the same situations, this cauldron, if you will. And out
of that cauldron comes this very intense bond.

Jay Van Bavel: One of the most interesting studies I've ever read was written by
a woman in the '70s who was part of a hijacking by a terrorist group. She
survived the ordeal and wrote this paper about what it was like psychologically
among the passengers as they were held hostage for several days in this hijacked
plane in the middle of the desert. And what we learned by reading this and going
back through the story was that when you're all in this crisis together, it
creates a sense of shared purpose. And so what happened over the course of these
days was this first started creating subgroups of people, depending on what
passport they had and what their nationality was. And eventually they all
started to bond and ration food and work together to support one another and
people who had small children. And so it became a shared identity as people
going through this crisis together. And this is often what crises can do if we
handle them well, that it allows humans to form a sense of solidarity with
complete strangers.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to look at one last example of how our behavior can be
modified when our group identities change. When Mohamed Salah or Mo Salah, as
he's known, joined the Liverpool football club in Britain, he often celebrated
goals by dropping to the pitch and touching his forehead to the grass. Mo is
Muslim and this was his way of giving thanks. Now, Liverpool fans have the same
anti-Muslim biases seen in many Western countries, but here's how they reacted
as Mo scored goals.

Fans Singing: Mo Salah la-la-la la-ahh, If he’s good enough for you, he’s good
enough for me. If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too. If he’s good
enough for you, he’s good enough for me. Sitting in the mosque, that’s where I
wanna be! Mo Salah-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la-la.

Shankar Vedantam: Jay, what do you hear when you hear these fans singing about
wanting to become Muslims themselves?

Jay Van Bavel: This is a really powerful demonstration of the way that we
rethink our identities when someone is part of us. And so even though there's a
lot of anti-Muslim attitudes in the UK, having a representative of this
religious group on your team and especially real superstar, made them feel a
connection to him and in this case it sounds like even their religion. And so
there was this great study by Salma Mousa and her colleagues and they found that
among these Liverpool fans, they observed that hate crimes in that area dropped
by 16% and that even public expressions on Twitter, so anti-Muslim tweets,
dropped by nearly half among Liverpool fans compared to fans from other groups.
And so this was a really powerful way of changing the norms of a group to be
more inclusive and tolerant and embracing of people who were normally considered
outsiders.

Shankar Vedantam: Now, of course, Liverpool didn't recruit Mo Salah because he
was a Muslim, they were doing it because he's a great athlete who was going to
score a lot of goals for them. But Mo's effect on the attitudes of Liverpool
fans raises the question of whether we can deliberately create group identities
that override prejudice and tribalism. You just cited the researcher Salma
Mousa, who's tested this idea, I understand, by trying to get Christians and
Muslims to play on the same soccer teams in Northern Iraq. Can you tell me about
this idea of the soccer cure?

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah, she did this amazing study, really mind blowing in how she
pulled it off. She did this study in Northern Iraq and it was at a period of
time where ISIS had caused chaos. People had been forced to flee their homes and
live in refugee camps. And eventually they were liberated in 2016. And she went
into these neighborhoods and created a summer soccer league. And she got a
sample of Muslims and Christians, and she had them play on these summer soccer
teams. And they generated a sense of connection with people from these other
religions who were on their teams. Even though they didn't want to play with
people from other religions, having them on their team increased their
connection with them and she measured all of these positive outcomes as a
consequence of this. And it's hard to imagine a more divisive situation to walk
into other than religious differences after a period of religious terrorism and
people being forced to go to refugee camps. But what this showed is that being
part of the same team, working towards a common shared goal, and especially I
think what she found was also that teams that won, that were successful at doing
this, had even tighter bonds. That shows how sports and just any type of
connection, we can build with people working towards common purpose can bridge
gaps that we might have thought were completely unbridgeable.

Shankar Vedantam: Now, I suppose you could say that people cheering a soccer
star or people cheering fellow members of the team, that's a cheap form of group
identity. It's not as real as religion or something that is much more long
standing, but in a way, all of our group loyalties are probably shaped by
similar forces, small accidental events that over time become the pillars of our
lives.

Jay Van Bavel: Yes. When we think of identities, it's probably best to just
start small. Find any common ground you can with somebody, and then you need to
build on that, by having them work together for something bigger and maybe
competing against other groups in a way that's not harmful or dangerous, or at
least having a common sense of purpose. If you want to see the most racially
harmonious environments in our society, they're in professional sports teams
that are completely racially integrated and work together as brothers or sisters
towards achieving common goals together.

Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. And I've seen this at sports games as well. When your
team wins people are not paying attention at this point, am I hugging somebody
who's black or am I hugging someone who's white or someone who's older or from a
different religion. The group identity to the team now supersedes all of those
other previous group identities.

Jay Van Bavel: Yeah. This is one of the most important things for people to
know. You can create division between groups, but those same groups who are at
each other's throats, if you create a subordinate goal that they're working
towards something together, whether it's in sports or at work, that can pull
people together and get people committed and making sacrifices and building
friendships among all members of their group in a way that can overcome those
animosities. And so this seems to be something deep about human nature is not
just that we form groups and conflict, but that we can form even broader groups
that are more inclusive.

Shankar Vedantam: We talk earlier in the conversation, Jay, about some of the
conflicts that police were having with civilian communities especially when it
came to concerns about racial profiling. There have been studies looking at how
diversifying the police force in some ways can have the effect of reducing some
of these biases. Can you talk about some of that work, the idea that in some
ways by reshaping the groups you're reshaping group identities, and you're also
then reshaping perception and behavior.

Jay Van Bavel: Yes. So there's fascinating research in Chicago where they've
tried to understand what you can do to improve policing. And one of the most
impressive studies on this, it was a massive large-scale study, they found that
increasingly the diversity of police officers made a significant difference in
police behavior. And so Black and Hispanic officers in particular made fewer
stops in arrest and used force far less often than white officers. And this was
especially true when they interacted with Black civilians. And so this is one of
the reasons why representation, having a diverse group of people who are in
charge of whether it's policing or her running other organizations, is
incredibly essential.

Shankar Vedantam: So many Americans, I think, remember the days after the 9/11
attacks when obviously the country was going through a very somber period, but
one of the things that happened is that many of the partisan divisions in the
country melted away for a few weeks. People thought of themselves as Americans
first, not as Republicans or Democrats. So I think that's another example of
how, in some ways, a crisis or some kind of a threat can cause people to look
beyond a narrow group identity to something larger. What ideas would you have to
essentially, from the science of group identity, to overcome some of the
partisan divisions we're seeing in the United States, but also in many other
countries.

Jay Van Bavel: Some really, truly great leaders are capable of rallying people
around a common identity. And so this can happen in the face of threat from
other countries but can also happen when you have a shared purpose about
something that's bigger than everybody. And so this is part of the space race.

John F. Kennedy: The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it
or not. And it is one of the great adventures of all time.

Jay Van Bavel: And that was during the cold war, but what Kennedy tried to do
was get people around a common, visionary purpose. Can we put somebody on the
moon? And that generated an enormous amount of excitement. And so this is
something that is often missing from the way that our politics normally unfolds,
which is really about partisan gain. We really need to think about what is going
to animate and excite and motivate people to feel a common sense of purpose, to
make sacrifices and help one another and move away from trolling one another
online or in other forms of media.

Shankar Vedantam: You mentioned the space race a second ago. The astronaut
William Anders took a famous photograph in 1968. It's called Earthrise, and it
shows a delicate blue planet suspended in the vast blackness of space. Here's
how William Anders described what it felt like to see the earth over the horizon
of the moon. "Coming upon the lunar horizon, I was immediately almost overcome
with this thought. Here we came all this way to the moon, and yet the most
significant thing we're seeing is our own home planet, the earth." Jay, what do
you think this astronaut's experience tells us about the potential? We have to
rethink our group identities to overcome problems, not just at the local level
or the national level, but global problems like the threat of climate change?

Jay Van Bavel: To address a problem like climate change, we need a level of
international cooperation we've never seen before. And the experience of these
astronauts suggest it's possible. Many interviews with astronauts who've ever
seen the earth from above, have this experience of awe and connectedness with
all of humanity, and many say they're changed by it permanently.

Bill Anders: We are now blocking the lunar sunrise. And for all the people back
on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send you. In
the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without
form...

Jay Van Bavel: It's not feasible for us to get everybody up to the moon, but
what it suggests is that if we can get people to see themselves as connected to
all of humanity, we might be able to change the way they think about themselves.
They suddenly see themselves as part of something bigger, part of something
bigger than their nation. And it might be the trigger that we need to motivate
people to work towards common purpose, to fight off the threats that are going
to affect all of us and the biggest one on the horizon. The moment we're done
with the pandemic, the biggest threat is climate change. It's going to be a
tsunami. We're already seeing the effects of it. And so it really does require a
sense of common purpose among everyone, among every country because if we lose
this earth, we don't have anywhere to go.

Shankar Vedantam: Psychologists, Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer are the
authors of "The Power of Us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve
performance, increase cooperation and promote social harmony." Jay, thank you so
much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Jay Van Bavel: Thanks for having me.

Frank Borman: And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with goodnight, good luck
and merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.

Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production
team includes Brigid McCarthy, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Autumn Barnes, Ryan
Katz, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I am Hidden
Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Anna Nguyen. Anna works at
Apple and over the past few months, she's helped us with all kinds of things,
from technical questions about the Apple podcast app to ideas about how to
connect better with new listeners. Thank you, Anna, for all your help and for
your dedication and endless patience. If you enjoy today's show and you like our
work, please consider supporting us. You can do so by going to
support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar
Vedantam, see you soon.


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