Shankar Vedantam

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 could.

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 seeing that we shared this in common.

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 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.

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 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.

Half of the people were primed to think about their personal identity.

So they talked about like books they liked as an individual.