Shankar Vedantam

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 matters.

can bridge gaps that we might have thought were completely unbridgeable.

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, you know, by having them work together for something bigger and, you know, maybe competing against other groups in a way that's not harmful or dangerous, or at least having a common sense of purpose.

You know, 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, you know, as brothers or sisters towards achieving common goals together.

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.

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 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.

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.