Shankar Vedantam

So they'll actually give in-group members less,

If it means giving out group members even way less.

Yes.

And this is something, you know, that you might be skeptical when you hear these results.

And I was too.

And then I ran studies like this, you know, in Canada and the U.S.

at many universities and online.

And I've seen this same pattern over and over again.

The moment that people are assigned to a team or a group, even though they often can know it's a coin flip that's determining this, means that they like those people more.

They want to be friends with them.

It shapes their automatic evaluations of those individuals.

And we ran a study where NYU students thought they were interacting in economic decisions with members of NYU, which is members of their own in-group, or Columbia, which is a high-status school across New York City.

And what they did was they would give more money to NYU students and Columbia students.

But what was even more interesting is when they saw NYU students win money, they actually had a brain response that suggested that they were feeling as if they had won the money.

And so what it suggests is what is referred to in the literature as basking in reflected glory is that when your in-group does well, it makes you feel good.

You have a response in your brain as if you won or something good happened to you.

And the same thing I think happens to sports fans.

You can be sitting at home watching the TV all alone and running around and jumping and cheering as if you've accomplished something when your team wins.

And this is what we found in the lab.

There's a couple of key factors that determine why we're so attracted to groups.