Chapter 1: How do our group identities shape our sense of self?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994, he had big dreams for his bitterly divided country. We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society, a rainbow nation, at peace with itself and the world. He had spent a lifetime fighting the racist apartheid regime, including more than a quarter century in prison.
He was a heroic figure already by that time. But to many white South Africans, they saw him as a criminal and a terrorist.
This is psychologist J. Van Bevel. As president of a united South Africa, Nelson Mandela, or Madiba as he was known to his supporters, needed to find a way for the people in his rainbow nation to see themselves as South Africans first. Other politicians might have turned to speeches and policies. Madiba turned to sports.
Play continues. Offside by New Zealand. He used the Rugby World Cup, which was being hosted in South Africa.
Chapter 2: What role does sports play in uniting divided communities?
And during the apartheid era, South Africa had been banned from competition. And the South African team was known as the Springboks. And they were beloved by the white South Africans and despised by the black population.
But what Mandela did was he went out onto the podium, not just as the president, but as a fan, he had the green Springboks cap and jersey, and he used it as a way to make a statement that we're one team, we're one country now, and he took a symbol of oppression and used it as a symbol of togetherness. The president to the captain.
The Springboks team captain, Francois Pienaar, remembers the moment Madiba walked into the team's locker room. It was before the finals against New Zealand. He said, good luck boys, and he turned around. And my number was on his back and that was me. I couldn't sing the anthem because I knew I would cry. I was just so proud to be a South Africa that day. The match was a nail-biter.
It went into overtime. South Africa ended up winning 15 to 12. Across the country, black and white South Africans cheered together in triumph.
Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela is cheering along with the whole of the stadium.
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Chapter 3: How do group identities influence our preferences and choices?
Nelson Mandela knew that getting enemies to cheer for the same sports team was only a start. Much work remained to heal the wounds of apartheid. But his intervention revealed how a psychologically astute leader can find ways to create connections among people, even better enemies.
This week on Hidden Brain, how the groups we belong to can bring us together, tear us apart, and transform our understanding of the world. When we think about what we do and why we do it, we often assume we are acting intentionally and autonomously. I do something because I want to do it. I choose to do it. In recent years, social scientists have shown that this is often untrue.
Our actions, our preferences, the very way we see the world is filtered through the prism of our group identities. This idea has fascinated J. Van Bevel for a long time. He's a psychologist at New York University.
He has studied how our group loyalties pull us together, how they tear us apart, and how we can apply what we have learned about the science of group identity to build better lives and better communities. J. Van Bevel, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thanks for having me.
I want to start by talking about some of the ways in which our group identities can draw us together with other people, Jay.
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Chapter 4: What surprising effects do scary movies have on our emotions?
You grew up in Canada, and I understand your parents told you to sew the Canadian national flag onto your backpack. Did you ever find yourself bonding with other Canadians when you traveled overseas?
Yeah, so this is a great piece of advice you learn if you're ever going to travel in Canada. Your family, your friends will tell you to sew a Canadian flag on your backpack so that it serves as a signal to other people in other parts of the world who you are and where you're from.
Canada is a reasonably well-liked and respected country, but it does something even better, which is it allows you to connect with people. So I was actually on my first ever international trip in high school, and we were in Venice, you know, one of the most beautiful, interesting cities in the world, some of the best food in the world.
And I was a Canadian teenager, so I found the first McDonald's that I could. that I had seen in probably a week. And I wandered in and I'm in line to get some chicken nuggets. And this young teenage girl comes up and just starts talking to me in English. And it quickly dawned on me that she saw that I had a Canadian maple leaf on a sweater that I was wearing.
And so it was her way of seeing that we shared this in common. And if I was anywhere in Canada, I doubt she would have come up and started talking to me. But since we were all the way around the world, that identity was something that bonded us in an unfamiliar situation.
Yeah, so that's fascinating because, of course, as you just pointed out, if you were both in Toronto or Ottawa, the fact that you were both Canadians would have been utterly unremarkable.
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Chapter 5: How does morbid curiosity benefit our psychological resilience?
But in Venice, that portion of your identity stood out.
Yeah, so it turns out that one of the most powerful ways to trigger an identity is to be a minority in a situation. When you're all surrounded by fellow Canadians, you're not thinking about yourself for the most part in terms of being a Canadian. But it's really powerful when you're both, you know, in a foreign land.
That thing that might otherwise be really mundane becomes really significant to you.
We've all had experiences like this. We know what it's like to be part of a group, to belong to a club. As a psychologist, Jay has discovered that our group identities are more than a source of connection. They tell us what we should care about.
I ran this study in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, in collaboration with a colleague who was a professor at Carleton University. And he set up a table in the Byward Market, which is kind of a famous old market in Ottawa. And he pulled people who were walking by and offered them a choice between a taste test ā they were able to sample honey ā or maple syrup.
And then we randomly flipped a coin and assigned people to one of two conditions. Half of the people were primed to think about their personal identity.
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Chapter 6: What are the psychological effects of experiencing fear in a controlled environment?
So they talked about like books they liked as an individual. 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.
So companies that are smart about group identity can sometimes use this to spur sales. Tell me what Molson Breweries did in their I Am Canadian ad.
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.
Hey, I'm not a lumberjack or a fur trader.
And I don't live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled.
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Chapter 7: How can group identities be harnessed to overcome divisions?
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.
My name is Joe, and I am Canadian!
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.
Group identities can influence the beer we drink, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear. But they can also do something even more significant. They can shape our basic perceptions, what we see, hear, even smell. I asked Jay about a study out of the University of Sussex involving a very stinky T-shirt.
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.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from the stories of individuals affected by group dynamics?
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.
much more putrid and odorous than when they thought the exact same smelling shirt was from a member of their own in-group. And so it suggests that what we find disgusting is determined also by our identity and who we define as an in-group and out-group.
So this is a remarkable study because in some ways I think it's uncontroversial and unsurprising to say that people are loyal to their groups. But I think the surprising insight from this kind of research is that groups don't just tell us what kind of foods to like or which politicians to support. They actually shape the very way we see the world.
Yeah, I mean, what we're trying to argue and what the growing body of research suggests is that these identities are a lens that shape all kinds of our senses. They shape how we're smelling and interpreting smells, what we're seeing, maybe what we're hearing. And so they help provide a way of interpreting information as it comes in through all our senses.
One last example I want to look at about the power of groups to shape how we see and what we see, Jay. You tell the story of the 1966 World Cup soccer finals between England and Germany. What happened during the finals?
So this might be one of the most famous and controversial games of all time. In the dying minutes of the match, the jubilant English supporters' nerves were strained to breaking point. The World Cup was within England's reach. It was tied and it went to, you know, extra minutes.
And there was a shot by this English player and it went off the crossbar and it came down and landed very close to the goal line and then bounced out. Goal claimed England. No goal protested the Germans. And all the English players celebrated. They thought this was the, you know, World Cup winning goal. The referee consulted the linesman who'd been in line with the posts and goal it was.
And there's huge debate over whether that goal actually crossed the line. And so to this day, there's still controversy about whether this crossed the line. And so what seemed to happen here is that those players wanted to interpret this ball as going over the line and being the winning goal. The German players did not.
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