Group Think

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. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society, a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world. He had spent a lifetime fighting the racist apartheid regime, including more than a quarter century in prison.

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

This is psychologist Jay Van Bavel. As president of a 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.

Play continues. Offside by New Zealand. 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 cap and 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.

The president to the captain. 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. He said, good luck, boys, and he 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 South Africa that day. 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.

There it is. Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela is cheering. Cheering along with the whole of the stadium.

A sea of flags. 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful Powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, Curiosity shape your skill set and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. 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 J. 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.

Thanks for having me.

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?

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.

Uh-huh.

Canada is 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, you know, 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's that I'd seen in probably a week. And I wandered in, and I'm in line, you know, 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 seeing that we shared this in common.

Uh-huh.

And if I was anywhere in Canada, I doubt she would have come up 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.

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 have been utterly unremarkable. But in Venice, that portion of your identity stood out.

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, you know, in a foreign land. That thing that might otherwise be really mundane becomes really significant to you.

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 than a source of connection. They tell us what we should care about.

I ran this study in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, in collaboration with a colleague who was a professor at Carleton University. Mm-hmm. And he set up a table in the ByWard Market, which is kind of 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.

Mm-hmm.

Half of the people were primed to think about their personal identity, so they talked about, like, 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.

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.

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. 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 he just goes on this rant about what it means to be Canadian, and in particular how it's different from an American. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American, and I pronounce it about. 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 part of their culture, And Canadians often don't have a very strong sense of identity, and this ad captured it. And this ad, you know, won a number of awards because it said 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.

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.

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, you know, manipulate people's social identity, and then they had them Smell this stinky shirt, which, you know, they had had a research assistant wear this shirt for like a week, you know, sweating in it, exercising in it, not taking it off. And then they put it in this like 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 of 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 outgroup member's shirt, they thought it was much more disgusting, much more putrid and odorous than 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.

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.

Yeah, I mean, what we're trying to argue and what the growing body of research suggests is that these identities are a lens that shape 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.

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?

So this might be one of the most famous and controversial games of all time. In the dying minutes of the match, the jubilant English supporters' nerves were strained to breaking point. The World Cup was within England's reach. It was tied and it went to, you know, 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 up. Goal claimed England. No goal, protested the Germans. And all the English players celebrated. They thought this was the, you know, World Cup-winning goal. The referee consulted the linesman who'd been in line with the posts. And goal it was! 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, like, watching old videos in slow motion and pausing them to see if the goal actually crossed the line. I looked up a 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 have won anyways.

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.

Yeah, and sports fans often think the referees are, you know, 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 3 refs were biased and blind. And so this turns out that this is like a really deeply rooted problem for people. They're so used to filtering it through their own lens, they get very upset at officials.

The passion that we feel for our favorite sports teams can quickly lead to feelings of us versus them, whether the them we're talking about are referees or fans of a rival team. 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 2 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.

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 2 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.

The volunteers in the Klee and Kandinsky camps were then told to divvy up money among people in the different groups.

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 in-group and less money to the out-group, 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 in-group and out-group.

So they'll actually give in-group members less if it means giving out-group members 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 in-group tribe.

Yes, and this is something, you know, that it's— you might be skeptical when you hear these results. And I was too, and then I ran studies like this, you know, in Canada and the US at many universities and online, and I've seen this same pattern over and over again.

Hmm.

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 wanna 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— they're members of their own in-group, 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 than 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.

Hmm.

And so what it suggests is what is referred to in the literature as basking in reflected glory, is that When your in-group does 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.

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?

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 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. You know, 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.

Groups offer us a sense of belonging, and they can bring out the best in us. But the flip side of most in-groups— there's an out-group. 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've seen how groups can pull us together, give us shared cultural touchpoints, and become an enduring source of resilience and comfort. In our evolutionary 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 psychologists J. 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 2 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?

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 Rudolf'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 warplanes 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 2 brothers. They ended up breaking up their company and creating 2 shoe companies in the same town. And that might have been the end of it, right? 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 Rudy. 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, the shoes from the other company, you wouldn't date them, you wouldn't be able to go in those stores, marriage was discouraged with people with the wrong shoes. In fact, this feud went right to the grave, so these 2 brothers are literally buried at opposite ends of the town cemetery. And, you know, this might seem like this is a small story, it's just a little town in Germany, but these companies, the 2 shoe companies that were launched by them, are now known as Adidas, which was founded by Adi, and Puma, which was founded by Rudi. These are 2 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.

So, you know, 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, you know, to me, it seems absurd. You know, 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?

The Dastler 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.

So many Americans increasingly believe 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, you know, where are we on the spectrum between What I've noticed is there's an increasing trend towards polarization that's linked to out-group hate more than in-group 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 on the in-group are good, but the out-group really is evil. And so, you know, And you'll do anything you can to stop them. You'll even support an in-group 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 out-group take control. And so this is now a driving factor behind many people in their decisions to vote, volunteer, donate money.

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, you know, like Thanksgiving?

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, you know, don't stick around for dessert, basically. It's affected dating. So I ran a study with a radio station in New York City at Trump's inauguration, and we found The biggest form of discrimination we observed is simply that people refused to date somebody who voted for the other party. And so now there's in fact dating websites dedicated specifically to your political preferences.

Are you serious? There's Blue Tinder and Red Tinder now?

I don't know if it's called that. There's one that's like a— if you're for Trump fans only and stuff like this, yeah.

So we talked earlier about how our group loyalties and identities 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, their enemies, the Red Sox?

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 distorting 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 gotta get ready to act, and seeing it as closer can sometimes trigger that reaction. But we see it with groups as well.

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.

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.

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 protesters and police have assumed that the body cameras being worn by police officers, these can provide an objective answer As to who's in the right. What are these protesters and the police officials getting wrong, Jay?

Well, the body cams have operated under the assumption that if we just capture it all in the cameras, that it's going to dramatically, you know, 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, you know, 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.

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 rates and infection rates are rising primarily among the unvaccinated. And I think the response of many public health officials is to say, you know, 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're saying about group identities and the ways in which conversations about the pandemic have become politicized, I think I'm starting to see why it is that rational rational, fact-based approach often is ineffective.

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 we've— what we've seen since the very beginning, since January of 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 die and 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, where 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.

I mean, the other way to sort of 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.

Yeah, group identities don't seem that important when you're talking about, you know, 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 coworkers, 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.

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.

The important thing to understand about social media is that nearly 4 billion people are on social media now, and the average social media user scrolls through 300 feet of newsfeed a day. So that means if you have a 6-inch iPhone or Android, that means you're scrolling down 600 times. It's the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Wow.

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 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 in-group. 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 out-group, 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.

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

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 kind of 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.

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 well-being of the planet. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with Priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. 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 psychologists J. 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 officemate, 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.

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.

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

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, you know, 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, it was 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. Oh my God. 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, you know, 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 kind of like, you know, made the universal choking signature, and then I twisted into him with my back and but he didn't really know what was going on and 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 on me or I would die. And he looked, like, white, like he had seen a ghost. But eventually he got in the position. I kind of, like, started moving his hands towards my diaphragm, and he gave me the Heimlich. It came out. And I remember at the end of this, you know, there was professors coming in to use the washroom and out, and they're looking at us like, what are you guys doing in here? But it bonded us together. This weird near-death experience, almost 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.

That's a remarkable story, and I'm glad that both you and he had the presence of mind to sort of 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 kind of situations, this cauldron, if you will, And out of that cauldron comes sort of this very intense bond.

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 through— 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 it first started creating like subgroups of people depending on what passport they had and what their nationality was. And eventually they all started to bond and, you know, 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.

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 is how they reacted as Mo scored goals.

Oh, la la la la la la la la la la!

If he scored enough for you, he scored enough for me.

He scored enough for the kids.

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

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 a 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 Moussa 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.

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 Moussa, 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?

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—

Different faiths.

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.

Hmm.

And it's hard to imagine a more divisive situation to walk into other than religious differences after a period of religious terrorism and, 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.

Now, I suppose you could say that, you know, people cheering a soccer star or people cheering fellow members of the team, you know, that's a cheap form of group identity. It's not as real as as religion or something that is much more longstanding. 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.

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 often professional sports teams that are completely racially integrated and work together as brothers or sisters towards achieving common goals together.

Yeah. 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? Group identity to the team now supersedes all of those other previous group identities.

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 superordinate 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. It's not just that we form groups in conflict, but that we can form even broader groups that are more inclusive.

We talked 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 sort of 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? 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 increasing the diversity of police officers made a significant difference in police behavior. And so Black and Hispanic officers in particular made fewer stops and arrests and used force far less often than white officers. And this was especially true when they interacted with, with Black civilians. And so this is one of the reasons why representation, you know, having a diverse group of people who are in charge of whether it's policing or running other organizations, is incredibly essential.

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, you know, from the science of group identity, to overcome some of the partisan divisions we are seeing in the United States, but also in many other countries?

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, like, the space race. 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. 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, like, 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, you know, trolling one another online or in other forms of media.

You know, 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 our 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.

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

Psychologists J. 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.

Thanks for having me.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Autumn Barnes, Ryan Katz, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. And I'm Shankar Vedantam. I'm 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 enjoyed today's show and you like our work, If you appreciate 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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