Jay Van Bavel
speaker
271 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Jay Van Bavel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The best way of thinking about it is that
Our groups are part of our identity that we think of ourselves sometimes as individuals, but much of the time we think of ourselves as part of a group, as part of a fan of a sports team, or in terms of our national identity, or even in terms of the role we have at our work.
And once we think about ourselves through that lens, it changes how we interpret everything in our environment, from the people around us to our goals, to the food that we taste.
Yeah.
And this can be good.
It can help you build an affinity and solidarity with other men.
It can also be bad if it leads to discrimination against women.
The reason is because it's fundamentally who we are.
I like to think of it as something that's baked into our DNA.
Humans evolved in small groups.
And the only way that we were able to survive and spread around the earth is by cooperating with one another.
And the individuals in those groups who got kicked out of the group didn't survive and didn't pass on our genes.
We are the descendants of people who managed to fit in.
And after generation and generation of generation of people who manage to do that, we are groupish creatures.
Yes.
We've run studies where we find that
For example, if you go into Switzerland, where chocolate is a big part of their national identity and a source of national pride, if you make them think about themselves in terms of their Swiss identity, they smell chocolate as more intense than when they're just thinking about themselves through a different identity.
Yeah, I think that 75 years of research on this topic has taught us one thing.
It's that when people have a goal that pulls them together where they all have to contribute is one of the most powerful ways of binding people together.
And it can pull together people who are normally in groups in conflict.
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