Shankar Vedantam

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.

Yeah, so this was run in the UK, and they wanted to see how identity might shape our smell.

And so they used a very clever trick to manipulate people's social identity.

And then they had them smell this stinky shirt, which, you know, they had a research assistant wear this shirt for like a week, you know, sweating in it, exercising in it, not taking it off.

And then they put it in this like sealed bin and they had participants come in and smell this shirt.

And what they did was they manipulated the shirt so it either had a logo from the rival university, which was the University of Brighton, or the other half of the students got to see this with a Sussex, University of Sussex logo.

And so what they found is that when people were primed to think that this was an out-group member shirt, they thought it was much more disgusting.