Shankar Vedantam

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.

When I was a teenager, Molson Breweries, which is one of the biggest beer brewery in the entire country, came up with this really incredible ad.

And it's just this guy walks on stage.

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 support.

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 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.

This has to be one of my favorite studies.