Shankar Vedantam

And what we learned by reading this and going through back to 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 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.

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.

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.

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.