Group Think

How do the groups you identify with shape your sense of self? Do they influence the beer you buy? The way you vote? In this favorite episode from 2021, psychologist Jay Van Bavel explains how our group loyalties affect us more than we realize, and can even shape our basic senses of sight, taste and smell. Then, look out! There's a g-g-g-ghost! Psychologist Coltan Scrivner answers listener questions about the surprising benefits of scary entertainment.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society, a rainbow nation, at peace with itself and the world.

• 0:22Shankar Vedantam?

  He had spent a lifetime fighting the racist apartheid regime, including more than a quarter century in prison.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  He was a heroic figure already by that time. But to many white South Africans, they saw him as a criminal and a terrorist.

• 0:36Shankar Vedantam?

  This is psychologist Jay 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.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Play continues. Offside by New Zealand.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  He used the Rugby World Cup, which was being hosted in South Africa. 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.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  The president to the captain.

• 1:40Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  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 African that day.

• 2:02Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  There it is. Francois Pina and Nelson Mandela is cheering along with the whole of the stadium.

• 2:23Shankar Vedantam?

  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 bitter 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.

• 3:04Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:27Speaker 05

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• 3:57Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:31Shankar Vedantam?

  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 Jay 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. Jay Van Bevel, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:19Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to start by talking about some of the ways in which our group identities can draw us together with other people, Jay. 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?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  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'd 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

• 6:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, so that's fascinating because of course, as you just pointed out, if you are both in Toronto or Ottawa, the fact that you are both Canadians would have been utterly unremarkable. But in Venice, that portion of your identity stood out.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:16Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  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 taste tests. They were able to sample honey 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. 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

• 8:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:38Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And he just goes on this rant about what it means to be Canadian and in particular, how it's different from an American.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American, and I pronounce it about.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  The field is a coach and it is pronounced Zed, not Z-Zed. Canada is the second largest landmass, the first nation of hockey and the best part of North America. My name is Joe and I am Canadian.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  And this ad, you know, 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.

• 10:10Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 10:26Shankar Vedantam?

  I asked Jay about a study out of the University of Sussex involving a very stinky t-shirt.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  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 they had had a research assistant wear this shirt for like a week, sweating in it, exercising in it, not taking it off. And then they put it in this 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 the students got to see this with a Sussex, University of Sussex logo.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 11:38Shankar Vedantam?

  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.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:19Shankar Vedantam?

  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?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  So this might be one of the most famous and controversial games of all time.

• 12:36Speaker 07

  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.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  It was tied and it went to 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 up.

• 12:55Speaker 07

  Goal claimed England. No goal protested the Germans.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  And all the English players celebrated. They thought this was the World Cup-winning goal.

• 13:03Speaker 07

  The referee consulted the linesman, who'd been in line with the posts, and goal it was.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  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. And so I spent an entire day like watching old videos in slow motion and pausing them to see if the goal actually crossed the line. I looked up a study from Oxford University saying it didn't cross the line. And so I do not think he scored. It looked like it came down right on the goal line and bounced out. However, the same player scored later in overtime and so England would have won anyways.

• 13:51Shankar Vedantam?

  We see the same things in all kinds of sports all over the world, Jay. Fans of different teams will see different things happen on the field and each of them is completely sure that what they saw in fact is objective reality.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and sports fans often think the referees are unfair to them because they're seeing everything through their own lens. In fact, in Canada, there's one song that's banned from all the hockey arenas and it's called Three Blind Mice, which people used to play, the home teams used to play when they didn't like a call to imply that the three refs were biased and blind.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  And so this turns out that this is like a really deeply rooted problem for people. They're so used to filtering it through their own lens, they get very upset at officials.

• 14:35Shankar Vedantam?

  The passion that we feel for our favorite sports teams can quickly lead to feelings of us versus them, whether the them we're talking about are referees or fans of a rival team. It makes sense that when we care deeply about something, we'll feel a sense of kinship with the people who share our views and a lack of connection with people who disagree with us. But it turns out, a shared passion isn't needed to trigger the psychological effects of group identity. One study published in the 1970s randomly assigned volunteers to one of two groups. The members of the first group were supposed to like the artist Paul Klee. Members of the second group were supposed to like the artist Wasili Kandinsky.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  This, I think, is one of the most important studies in the history of psychology, maybe in the history of the social sciences. So this was a study run by Henri Tashval and his colleagues. He ran this study where he basically just randomly assigned youths to one of two groups, and he did it on just trivial information. So what type of abstract art they liked. And these young people didn't know these artists at all. And in fact, it didn't matter who they actually liked. He just flipped a coin and gave them false feedback anyways.

• 15:48Shankar Vedantam?

  The volunteers in the Klee and Kandinsky camps were then told to divvy up money among people in the different groups.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  And what he found is that the moment that you're part of a team or part of a group, you will give more money to members of your in-group and less money to the out-group, even if you never interact or meet those people, even if you never expect that they'll meet you. And the thing he also found is that what people really care about is maximizing the difference in money they give to the in-group and out-group. So they'll actually give in-group members less if it means giving out-group members even way less.

• 16:26Shankar Vedantam?

  What's remarkable about the study, of course, is that people are forming these loyalties to groups that they've been assigned for really no very good reason. And yet, within a few minutes, almost, they are behaving as if these are long-lost brothers, and they're treating them as if they're members of an in-group tribe.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yes, and this is something, you know, that it's, 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 US 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 their 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.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:03Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think explains this enormous gravitational force that groups exert on us, Jay? Why is it that our minds are so attuned to the needs of our groups, even when those groups are completely arbitrary?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  There's a couple of key factors that determine why we're so attracted to groups. I think the deepest one is it's something in our biology. So humans evolved for almost the entirety of human history in these small tribal communities. And we're pretty flimsy creatures. We don't have sharp teeth or poison or wings to fly away if a predator comes. And so we survive by cooperating in groups and coalitions within those groups. And so we have those same tendencies.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  And then what you have in a modern environment that matters is that groups fill our need to belong. You know, they help us gain status if we're part of a successful group. And they also give us a sense of distinctiveness. If our group is different from others, it tells us a little bit in the world about who we are.

• 19:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Groups offer us a sense of belonging, and they can bring out the best in us. But the flip side of most in-groups, there's an out-group.

• 19:16Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how our group identities divide us and what we can do to harness the power of groups to build a better world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 19:35Shankar Vedantam?

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• 20:16Shankar Vedantam?

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• 21:03Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 21:07Shankar Vedantam?

  We've seen how groups can pull us together, give us shared cultural touchpoints, and become an enduring source of resilience and comfort. In our evolutionary past, our group identities were an important source of protection. You would think that a force this powerful would also have downsides. Throughout human history, we've seen numerous examples of how group loyalties can spill over into tribalism and xenophobia and lead to war and genocide.

• 21:38Shankar Vedantam?

  In their new book, The Power of Us, the psychologists J. Van Bavel and Dominic Packer explore how group identities pull us together and how they tear us apart. They also look at how we can apply what we have learned about the science of group identity to build a better world.

• 21:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Jay, you tell a remarkable story of two brothers in southern Germany. They were cobblers and together ran the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory around the time of the Second World War. The brothers had a falling out. What happened next?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  So these brothers, it was World War II, 1943. And the one brother, Addy, he and his wife climbed into the same shelter as his brother Rudolph's family. And Addy said, according to legend, "The dirty bastards are back again." And we don't know if Addy was referring to the Allied warplanes who were coming to bomb them, but Rudy apparently interpreted this as an insult intended for himself and his family. And so it triggered this decades-long feud between these two brothers. You know, they ended up breaking up their company and creating two shoe companies in the same town. And that might have been the end of it, right? But what happened is it infected the psychology of all the townspeople.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And so people on one side of the river of the town identified with, you know, Addy, and the other side identified with the shoe company run by Rudy. And it became known as the Town of Bent Necks because people would walk around town looking down at the ground to see what shoes people were wearing. And if you were wearing a shoes, the shoes from the other company, you wouldn't date them, you wouldn't be able to go in those stores, marriage was discouraged with people for the wrong shoes. In fact, this feud went right to the grave. So these two brothers are literally buried at opposite ends of the town cemetery. And, you know, this might seem like this is a small story, it's just a little town in Germany, but these companies, the two shoe companies that were launched by them

• 23:35Speaker 02

  are now known as Adidas, which was founded by Addy, and Puma, which was founded by Rudy. These are two of the biggest companies in the world. And this feud affected the psychology of everybody because these shoes became a signal about group membership and led to discrimination.

• 23:53Shankar Vedantam?

  So when I look out at the United States or other countries, I feel there are endless examples of how our group loyalties divide us. The conflict between the Dassler brothers, to me, it seems absurd. They're both German, they're both cobblers, they both make sports shoes, for heaven's sake. Surely, they have so much in common. But of course, when we find ourselves in the grip of deep divisions, they don't seem absurd. What explains this gap?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  The Dassler brothers demonstrate something really deep about human nature, how easily we form groups and coalitions. And this has been observed in every culture on earth that's ever been studied. And to these people in this town, this doesn't seem absurd. This seems deeply important and central to their life and who they are. And I think that's the thing psychologically, is whatever conflicts are driving your own life seem real. And the conflicts of other people halfway around the world might seem absurd, but it's very much the same psychology that seems to be at play in all of these types of situations.

• 24:57Shankar Vedantam?

  So many Americans increasingly believe they don't just disagree with people on the other side, but that people on the other side are inherently evil or untrustworthy. As a social scientist who studies group identity, where are we on the spectrum between healthy disagreement and civil war?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  What I've noticed is there's an increasing trend towards polarization that's linked to out-group hate more than in-group love.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And this is where politics in the US and many places around the world looks much more like sectarianism, because it's connected to our morality. And what happens then is, people on the in-group are good, but the out-group really is evil. And you'll do anything you can to stop them. You'll even support an in-group member or vote for a leader who you don't like or don't respect or don't trust, simply because you can't let this evil out-group take control. And so this is now a driving factor behind many people and their decisions to vote, volunteer, donate money.

• 25:57Shankar Vedantam?

  You've conducted studies into how these group-level disagreements spill over into our personal lives. How do these political loyalties divide families at holiday gatherings, you know, like Thanksgiving?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Research suggests that our Thanksgiving dinners are getting shorter by roughly half an hour over time. If you're interacting with family members in a place where there's going to be disagreement politically, it becomes intolerable and people just, you know, don't stick around for dessert, basically. It's affected dating. So I ran a study with a radio station in New York City at Trump's inauguration and we found the biggest form of discrimination we observed is simply that people refused to date somebody who voted for the other party. And so now there's, in fact, dating websites dedicated specifically to your political preferences.

• 26:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Are you serious? There's Blue Tinder and Red Tinder now?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's called that. There's one that's like a, if you're for Trump fans only and stuff like this, yeah.

• 26:55Shankar Vedantam?

  So we talked earlier about how our group loyalties and identities shape our very perceptions of reality. I want to talk about this idea in the context of group conflicts. You've conducted some interesting studies looking at Yankees fans. What do you find in terms of their perceptions when it comes to their enemies, the Red Sox?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one of the greatest sports rivalries in the country is between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. And we've been able to run some studies up at Yankee Stadium with Red Sox and Yankees fans. And what we found is that Yankees fans had distorted judgments of how close Fenway Park in Boston was. So we gave them a map and asked them to draw where they thought Boston was, and they thought it was much closer to New York than it actually was. If you asked non-fans, they were pretty accurate in estimating how far away Fenway Park was. But they're not threatened by this group in the same way that Yankees fans are, and so they're not distorting their perceptions in the same way. And so this is something that is adaptive to people is if there's a threatened environment,

• 27:58Speaker 02

  you got to get ready to act and seeing it as closer can sometimes trigger that reaction. But we see it with groups as well.

• 28:05Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand there's also been similar work finding that people who perceive immigrants to be a greater threat can sometimes perceive them to be physically closer or perceive their home countries to be physically closer than they actually are.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  We've run a number of studies in New York and around the rest of the country. And what we find is that people who are threatened by illegal immigration from Mexico see Mexico City as much closer to the border than it is. But also how many people they think are coming over the border. They tend to overestimate the size of the group.

• 28:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. So the idea that group identity is like a lens through which we see the world, I think this might explain why some things that we feel should provide objective answers to complex social problems sometimes fail to do so. There's been controversy in recent years about police shootings of civilians, and both protesters and police have assumed that the body cameras being worn by police officers, these can provide an objective answer as to who's in the right. What are these protesters and the police officials getting wrong, Jay?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  The body cams have operated under the assumption that if we just captured all in the cameras, that it's going to dramatically, you know, reduce police violence because it's going to keep people honest. And the problem with that is that people, when they look at these videos in a court, you know, the jury, for example, is biased in how they interpret them. So there's research from NYU showing that if you identify with the police and you watch one of these videos of a conflict between a police officer and a suspect, you see the suspect at fault. And you're looking more at the suspect and therefore you're getting the information they're doing something wrong. If you actually don't identify with the police, you are looking at the police officer to see what they're doing wrong and coming to a very different conclusion. So simply having the video is not going to be enough to solve these problems and necessarily reduce conflict with the police.

• 29:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Jay and his colleagues have looked at how social media in particular exacerbates tribal loyalties and group divisions. We explored some of this research in an earlier episode. It was titled Screaming Into the Void.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  The important thing to understand about social media, the average social media user scrolls through 300 feet of newsfeed a day. So that means if you have a six inch iPhone or Android, that means you're scrolling down 600 times. It's the height of the Statue of Liberty. That's how much you're reading each day. And so you're not reading things very deeply. You're just kind of scrolling through and seeing what catches your attention. That's why they call it attention economy. We've run a number of studies with hundreds of thousands of people. And we found that the language people are using seems to break through in this attention economy. So when people use powerful moral, emotional language around political topics, it seems to go more viral. People are 15 to 20% more likely to share it. But what happens is who's sharing it? It's people who are part of your own political in-group.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  It doesn't cross over to the other side when you use that language. And we have a new study out where we found that the biggest single predictor of making something go viral is dunking on the out-group, saying something negative about the other side. And that's 67% more likely to get shared. And so people learn this by getting reinforced. And they realize this is the language that wins on social media.

• 31:20Shankar Vedantam?

  You've also conducted a study looking at the effectiveness of fact-checking partisan beliefs. What do you find, Jay?

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've been trying to study what works in terms of fact-checking. There is some evidence that if you give people nudges to focus on accuracy, they'll kind of pause and reflect and be more accurate and be less likely to believe or share misinformation. We have new data suggesting that that doesn't really work for people at the political extremes. Their identity is overpowering these nudges for accuracy. So we're going to have to think about addressing those people in different ways if we're going to want to reduce misinformation.

• 31:58Shankar Vedantam?

  Across so many dimensions of our lives, our group identities shape our perceptions, our choices, and our behavior. They can cause us to act with cruelty and aggression. They can also prompt us to show compassion and generosity toward others. When we come back, how we can harness and redirect the power of groups to improve our health, our communities, and the well-being of the planet. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 32:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. Hiring Pro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com/HB. Terms and conditions apply.

• 33:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Do you have a story about how a group identity has shaped your life, or that of a friend or family member? Do you have a question or comment about the ideas we've been talking about in today's episode? If you'd be willing to share your question or story with a Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Then email the file to us at [email protected] using the subject line "Groups." Again, that email address is [email protected].

• 33:49Shankar Vedantam?

  In their book, The Power of Us, the psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer explore how we can harness our group identities to solve important challenges in our lives.

• 34:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Jay, one of the themes that has surfaced repeatedly in this conversation is that our group identities change the way we see the world. Now, most of the time, the forces that create group identities are random or accidental. But understanding how group identities are created can give us clues to how to reinvent those identities and then change the outcomes we'd like to see in the world. I'd like to start with a personal story. When you were in grad school, you were assigned an office mate, Dominic Packer. He would, of course, go on to become your collaborator and your co-author on this book. But you had something of a rocky start when you first met him, and it had to do with some smelly gym clothes that you brought into your shared office?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  I was a big hockey player. And I picked a desk in the sub-basement of our building, in the same room as Dominic, who had been there for a year. And I had such a small apartment that I had no room for my hockey equipment. So I brought it in and I said, I'm just gonna store this here. And this basically chilled our relationship. For the next several months, Dominic barely turned around to talk to me. He was pretty burned about the idea of me storing my stinky hockey equipment in our shared office.

• 35:11Shankar Vedantam?

  So tell me the story of how the bond between the two of you got established. I understand a cube of cheese was involved.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one of the rituals of being a graduate student at most universities is they bring in guest speakers. As a grad student, you're at the bottom of the pecking order. But you get to meet the speakers, take them for lunch, and then they often have a nice wine and cheese reception. And so at the wine and cheese reception, you know, I was a poor student. I was eating as much cheese as I could, drinking as much free beer as I could. And I wasn't paying attention to what I was eating. And I dropped this cheese cube, it was about the size of a dice, into my throat and it got plugged in my throat and I started choking. And I tried to rinse it down with some beer, but that just made the situation worse. At that point, I had zero oxygen going to my brain. And I thought back to the times I used to work in the oil field of Alberta. I had to watch all these safety videos.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  And the first thing I, you know, learned was that if you're choking, most people can save you as long as you don't leave the room. But it's so embarrassing to choke that most people who die do so because they just wanna be alone and not have other people see them. So I went to the bartender and I couldn't speak, but I kind of like, you know, made the universal choking signature. And then I twisted into him with my back and, but he didn't really know what was going on and didn't help me that much. So I grabbed Dominic's hand and pulled him into the men's room. And he didn't know what was going on either at that point. But I communicated to him that I need him to do the Heimlich on me or I would die. And, and he looked like white, like he had seen a ghost. But eventually he got in the position, I kind of like started moving his hands towards my diaphragm and he gave me the Heimlich. It came out.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  And I remember at the end of this, you know, there was professors coming in to use the washroom and out and they're looking at us like, what are you guys doing in here? But it bonded us together. This weird near-death experience, almost me almost dying at the wine and cheese and him having to save my life, created a bridge. And from that point on, we became close friends and then we became collaborators. And now we're still working together.

• 37:09Shankar Vedantam?

  It's a remarkable story, and I'm glad that both you and he had the presence of mind to sort of solve the problem. But talk about this idea a little more, Jay. Stressful situations and dramatic situations have a capacity to bond people together. I'm reminded of those studies involving dating couples. And when the couples are having a date on a rickety bridge where they feel like their lives might be in danger, they feel more drawn to one another. They feel like they have a bigger bond than if they're having a very safe date. And there have been stories about airplane hijackings where passengers feel like they're thrown in together in the same kind of situations, this cauldron, if you will. And out of that cauldron comes this very intense bond.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  One of the most interesting studies I've ever read was written by a woman in the 70s who was part of a hijacking by a terrorist group. She survived the ordeal and wrote this paper about what it was like psychologically among the passengers as they were held hostage for several days in this hijacked plane in the middle of the desert. And what we learned by reading this and going back through 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 rationed food and worked together to support one another

• 38:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:58Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to look at one last example of how our behavior can be modified when our group identities change. When Mohamed Salah, or Mo Salah as he's known, joined the Liverpool Football Club in Britain, he often celebrated goals by dropping to the pitch and touching his forehead to the grass. Mo is Muslim, and this was his way of giving thanks. Now, Liverpool fans have the same anti-Muslim bias as seen in many Western countries, but here is how they reacted as Mo scored goals.

• 39:29Speaker 07

  Jay, what do you hear when you hear these fans singing about wanting to become Muslims themselves?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, of course, Liverpool didn't recruit Mo Salah because he was a Muslim. They were doing it because he's a great athlete who was going to score a lot of goals for them. But Mo's effect on the attitudes of Liverpool fans raises the question of whether we can deliberately create group identities that override prejudice and tribalism. You just cited the researcher Salma Moussa, who's tested this idea, I understand, by trying to get Christians and Muslims to play on the same soccer teams in northern Iraq. Can you tell me about this idea of the soccer cure?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  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. 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

• 42:33Speaker 02

  towards a common purpose can bridge gaps that we might have thought were completely unbridgeable.

• 42:42Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, I suppose you could say that, you know, people cheering a soccer star or people cheering fellow members of the team, you know, that's a cheap form of group identity. It's not as real as religion or something that is much more longstanding. But in a way, you know, all of our group loyalties are probably shaped by similar forces, you know, small accidental events that, over time, you know, become, you know, the pillars of our lives.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  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, there are often professional sports teams that are completely racially integrated and work together, you know, as brothers or sisters towards achieving common goals together.

• 43:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, and I've seen this at sports games as well. You know, when your team wins, people are not paying attention at this point, you know, am I hugging somebody who's black, or am I hugging someone who's white, or someone who's older or from a different religion? The group identity to the team now supersedes all of those other previous group identities.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:28Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked earlier in the conversation, Jay, about some of the conflicts that police were having with civilian communities, especially when it came to concerns about racial profiling. There have been studies sort of looking at how diversifying the police force in some ways can have the effect of reducing some of these biases. Can you talk about some of that work? The idea that in some ways, by reshaping the groups, you're reshaping group identities and you're also then reshaping perception and behavior?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  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 increasingly 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.

• 45:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Again, a reminder, if you have a story about how a group identity has shaped your life or a question or comment about the ideas we've been talking about today, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Email the file to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Groups."

• 46:03Shankar Vedantam?

  So Jay, Americans, I think, remember the days after the 9/11 attacks, when obviously the country was going through a very somber period. But one of the things that happened is that many of the partisan divisions in the country melted away for a few weeks. People thought of themselves as Americans first, not as Republicans or Democrats. So I think that's another example of how, in some ways, a crisis or some kind of threat can cause people to look beyond a narrow group identity to something larger. I'm wondering what ideas you have to essentially use the science of group identity to overcome some of the partisan divisions we are seeing in the United States today.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  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. And so this is part of the space race. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not. And it is one of the great adventures of all time. And that was during the Cold War. But what Kennedy tried to do was get people around a common visionary purpose. Can we put somebody on the moon? And that generated enormous amount of excitement. And so this is something that is often missing from the way that our politics normally unfolds, which is really about partisan gain. We really need to think about what is going to animate

• 47:27Speaker 02

  and excite and motivate people to feel a common sense of purpose, to make sacrifices and help one another, move away from trolling one another online or in other forms of media.

• 47:38Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, you mentioned the space race a second ago. The astronaut William Anders took a famous photograph in 1968. It's called Earthrise, and it shows a delicate, blue planet suspended in the vast blackness of space. Here's how William Anders described what it felt like to see the Earth over the horizon of the moon. Coming upon the lunar horizon, I was immediately almost overcome with this thought. Here we came all this way to the moon, and yet the most significant thing we're seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.

• 48:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Jay, ¿qué crees que esta experiencia de astronautas nos dice sobre el potencial que tenemos para reencontrar nuestras identidades grupales, para lidiar con problemas no solo a nivel local o nacional, sino también con problemas globales como el peligro del cambio climático?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Para abordar un problema como el cambio climático, necesitamos una cooperación internacional que no hemos visto antes. Y la experiencia de estos astronautas sugiere que es posible.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Muchas entrevistas con astronautas que han visto la Tierra desde arriba tienen esta experiencia de asombro y conectividad con toda la humanidad. Y muchos dicen que están cambiados por ello permanentemente.

• 48:56Speaker 07

  Estamos ahora acercándonos al sur de la Luna. Y para todos los que están de regreso en la Tierra, el equipo de Apollo 8 tiene un mensaje que nos gustaría enviar.

• 49:11Speaker 07

  Desde el principio, Dios creó el cielo y la tierra. Y la Tierra no estaba formada.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  No es necesario que nos pongamos a todos a la Luna, pero lo que sugiere es que si podemos hacer que la gente ve a sí mismos conectados a toda la humanidad, podemos cambiar la forma en que piensan en sí mismos. Se ven a sí mismos como parte de algo más grande, parte de algo más grande que su nación. Y puede ser el indicador que necesitamos para motivar a la gente a trabajar hacia un propósito común, para luchar contra los peligros que van a afectar a todos nosotros, y el mayor de los horizontes, el cambio climático. Va a ser un tsunami. Ya estamos viendo los efectos. Y realmente requiere una sensación de propósito común entre todos, entre cada país, porque si perdemos esta Tierra, no tenemos dónde ir.

• 49:57Speaker 07

  Y desde el equipo de Apollo 8, terminamos con un buen día, buena suerte, un Merry Christmas, y Dios los bendiga, todos ustedes, todos ustedes en la buena Tierra.

• 50:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Think about the last time you were part of a group and the experience lifted you up. Maybe you were at a concert, one of thousands in the audience as everyone sang along with the band. Maybe you were in the stands when your favorite sports team eked out a big win, tears of happiness streaming down your face as you hugged the stranger standing next to you. These joyful moments can be transformative. But joy isn't the only emotion that can bind us to other people. Think about the last time you watched a scary movie with someone else or went to a haunted house attraction around Halloween. It really is a very social experience because you learn a lot, not just about yourself, but importantly about the people you're there with. And oftentimes, you're there with someone who you're already very close with

• 51:11Shankar Vedantam?

  or you want to be very close with.

• 51:16Shankar Vedantam?

  After the break, listener stories about the surprising power of horror and true crime to create connections between people. Stay with us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 51:45Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 51:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Imagine you're driving down the highway. In front of you, taillights glow red. As you join the slow-moving river of congestion, you realize what caused this traffic buildup: a crash up ahead.

• 52:08Shankar Vedantam?

  As you get nearer, you tell yourself to keep your eyes on the road, to keep driving, to not stare at the wreckage.

• 52:17Shankar Vedantam?

  But you can't help yourself. You crane your neck to look at the ambulances, the mangled steel, and the poor people in the crash who are having one of the worst days of their lives.

• 52:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Why do we do this? At Arizona State University and Urhus University in Denmark, researcher Colton Skriven studies why we are drawn to grisly and gory things. He says it's not abnormal to be fascinated by car wrecks and horror movies and violent video games.

• 52:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Colton joined us on a recent episode titled Murder Mystery. If you missed it, you can find it in this podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org. Today, he returns to the show for our popular segment, Your Questions Answered. We received so many notes and stories from listeners about this episode. Colton Skriven, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 53:12Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me back on.

• 53:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Colton, let's start by looking at one metric of the scale of our interest in what you call morbid curiosity. What is the scale of the entertainment industry that caters to gore and to horror?

• 53:27Speaker 06

  I think people think about it as just being, you know, the horror genre, and that's where morbid curiosity lies. But really, almost any story that we tell has elements of violence or disease or social betrayal, predators. I mean, there's any number of stories from drama to thrillers to even romance films have elements of violence and danger that can pique our morbid curiosity. So I would say it's really kind of storytelling broadly that can pique our morbid curiosity.

• 54:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Many of us, of course, think that people who rubberneck or people who watch horror movies, these must be creepy people themselves. You've studied these people. Is that what you find?

• 54:13Speaker 06

  That's not what I find. I think the intuition, I understand, you know, especially if you're somebody who doesn't really like horror movies or true crime. Maybe someone who watches a lot of horror movies might be, might have something wrong with them. But that's simply not what the empirical science seems to show. It seems to show that not only are those people who really love scary things pretty normal psychologically, but actually morbid curiosity itself is fairly normal. So most people have some degree of morbid curiosity. And sometimes that's not displayed through an interest in horror movies or true crime. But as I mentioned, through maybe an interest in thriller movies or maybe dramas that have a particularly compelling villain.

• 54:57Shankar Vedantam?

  You argue that there is an evolutionary reason for our obsession with the scary and the creepy. What is that reason?

• 55:05Speaker 06

  Well, our interest in things that are scary or dangerous, it really is about learning about things that could be dangerous and what happens to people who experience things that are dangerous. So, you know, it's easy to imagine certainly 100 or 1,000 years ago that most people learned about dangerous things by observing them, right? Or hearing about them, hearing a story about them from someone. So you observe or hear a story about somebody who got hurt or somebody who died and what behaviors led to them being a victim of this particular danger or accident. And, you know, our attentional systems evolved

• 55:45Speaker 06

  to prioritize this kind of information about harm or death or even social taboos because those signals carry incredible survival value. And this is something that's not unique to humans, right? I mean, other animals also have attentional priorities towards threats.

• 56:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. Many lovers of true crime and horror reached out after our episode to share why they find these stories fascinating. Here's a listener named Arby. The only genre of TV that I wish to consume is true crime TV where something heinous happens to a real person, not the fictional types, but things like forensic files, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, where ordinary people do extraordinary things and they commit heinous crimes. I've just very much always been curious about what would make ordinary people do these extraordinary things. And the additional thing I'm curious about

• 56:44Shankar Vedantam?

  is how do people sometimes survive these things, such as kidnapping, being held captive? What are the ways by which some of them find freedom? Colton, talk about the idea that learning can be rewarding and that might be particularly true as we're learning about potential threats.

• 57:02Speaker 06

  Well, that's a very common perspective that people have on true crime themselves. You can actually learn quite a bit about why people like true crime by simply asking them. And some of the more self-reflective individuals are really good at understanding that what draws them to true crime is that rewarding feeling of learning about, in particular, what someone did to escape a potentially dangerous situation. So what did they do correctly when they were in danger? Or what did they do incorrectly that caused them to be captured or harmed? So kind of these hinge points in the story about, you know, did they get away or not? And what was the critical thing that they did or failed to do?

• 57:45Speaker 06

  There's actually empirical research on that, showing that that is the most interesting aspect of a true crime story to most listeners.

• 57:52Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, both the situations where someone does something that gets them in trouble, or does something that gets them out of trouble, both of those in some ways are learning opportunities.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And horror movies tend to focus on things you do wrong, right? There are a lot of tropes. Don't go down there. Don't, don't split up. Don't go in the forest alone. Don't do this, don't do that. They tend to focus on the things that we do wrong, at least for most characters. Sometimes the final girl will do, you know, the right thing at the right time at the very end. And true crime kind of has a mix. It has a lot of things that the people did correctly and got away, but they also talk about, you know, things that they, they may have missed that caused them to fall prey to an individual or be harmed.

• 58:34Shankar Vedantam?

  You told me in our earlier conversation about how empathetic people are often drawn to horror. That is very much at odds with the stereotype that many of us have of people who are drawn to blood and gore.

• 58:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's tricky because empathetic people are both really drawn to horror because it's a deeply social genre, right? It includes... People out there most vulnerable. But at the same time, if you have really high levels of affective empathy in particular, so you feel what others feel deeply, it can also be pretty aversive. Horror can be more difficult to grapple with. And so empathetic individuals do tend to engage very strongly with characters in horror. You know, they imagine what it would like to be in that position. They maybe even feel what they imagine that character is feeling. And that can make horror really meaningful because it deals in emotions and situations

• 59:29Speaker 06

  that other genres don't deal with so often. You know, it doesn't, as I mentioned, violence is common kind of across storytelling, but horror really deals with vulnerability in a way that many other genres don't. And I think that draws in a lot of empathetic people. That's what makes it scary to them. But it does make it kind of a delicate balance where too much fear, too much gore, too much fright can push them away. So I think they are initially drawn to it a little more, but maybe could be pushed away a bit sooner than other people.

• 1:00:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's talk about another dimension of scary entertainment. Listener B struggles with anxiety and finds there is only one thing that helps.

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  The only thing I've found that works every time when I'm in the midst of an acute anxiety attack is to play horror video games. I found this out by accident. I would sometimes try to distract myself by reading or playing games on my phone or on my Playstation. The time I discovered this, I'd had a panic attack and I went to play whatever game I was playing at the time, usually something lighthearted, but this time the game happened to be Resident Evil. I was afraid that it might make it worse because it's such a scary, violent horror game, but it had the opposite effect. Suddenly, my panic made sense. My anxiety was appropriate for the activity I was doing and therefore was less distressing. It was a good thing. It was the point of the game. I laughed, I screamed in terror, and when I finished my session, I had forgotten why I started playing in the first place.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  My anxiety went away when I put the controller down and turned off the TV. Now, I play a horror game every time I start to have misplaced anxiety. It works every time. Experiences like what B described are exactly what drew me to this question.

• 1:01:07Speaker 06

  Because I initially did not have this insight that horror could help people with anxiety. What brought me to that was actually reading accounts. Like, I accidentally discovered this, where I was feeling anxious and I just happened to turn on a horror movie or I happened to turn on a video game that was scary and play it. And what I found was that it allowed me to kind of package my fear or anxiety into this bounded experience, where there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you're in control of that to some extent. And you know you're safe, you know the fear will stop, you know that you can pause the game, pause the movie. And for anxious individuals, particularly, it can be an incredibly regulating experience.

• 1:01:50Speaker 06

  You know, it gives your fear, your anxiety target, right? Allows you to then confront that and experience overcoming it. That's very empowering in many ways.

• 1:02:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Is there a relationship between consuming scary media like horror movies and psychological resilience as a result of this relationship that you just described?

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  There's some evidence for that, yeah. I mean, there's certainly anecdotal evidence, like what Bee gave us here. But there's some empirical evidence. I did a study with some colleagues in 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic, right around, I think it was April of 2020, when we started collecting data for this. So, one month, you know, after COVID was declared a global pandemic. And what we tested in this study was really simple. Do people who have a history of engaging with frightening media, like horror movies, do they experience greater resilience in the face of this novel danger, right? Or this novel threat? Or even just the general uncertainty of what was happening in April of 2020? And we did find that.

• 1:02:54Speaker 06

  We did find that people who scored high in morbid curiosity and people who were horror fans were more likely to score better on measures of resilience during those early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 1:03:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. A related idea that we heard from listeners is that when they feed their morbid curiosity, this is often a social experience. When you watch a scary movie in a theater, for example, you're with other people who are also screaming in terror. Here's listener Caitlin.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  For me, listening to true crime, it often makes me at least feel less alone in having experienced bad things. So I think that's part of the reason that a lot of people...

• 1:03:35Shankar Vedantam?

  A lot of empathetic people enjoy true crime. It's just it it feels less alone for them. Talk about this idea, Colton. In some ways, Caitlin is saying that watching scary movies or watching movies where bad things happen makes her feel less lonely.

• 1:03:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, again, here Caitlin's experience is something that I've heard quite a bit over the past, you know, five to seven years or so that I've really been diving into this topic. And I think what's going on is just that when you have examples of really bad things happening to people, it helps you put some boundaries on your own experiences, right? So there's some great empirical work on when people are given real examples of sort of extreme trauma that that individuals might go through, they're more specific in defining trauma for themselves. And that can help you feel like what you're going through, sure, it's difficult, but it's it could be a lot worse, right? And then that can make you feel less alone.

• 1:04:38Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, what's happening in our bodies when we experience something scary? Why do some people love that feeling while others despise it? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:05:04Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:05:09Shankar Vedantam?

  At the end of every year, many media outlets publish their best of the year lists, best music, best TV shows, best novels.

• 1:05:20Shankar Vedantam?

  One thing stands out on those lists. Many popular books and movies feature lots of violence and gore.

• 1:05:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Why do we seek out intense and disturbing stories and imagery? At Arizona State University and Orhus University in Denmark, researcher Colton Skrivna studies what he calls morbid curiosity. Colton, what's happening inside our bodies when we watch a scary movie or visit a haunted house? And why do you think this experience feels good to some of us and not so good to others?

• 1:05:53Speaker 06

  Well, what happens inside of our minds and our bodies when we watch a really good scary movie or go through a haunted attraction during Halloween is actually very similar to what happens when we're truly afraid. So the horror genre is really good at simulating scary experiences to the extent that your body responds in a very similar way. Now, in your mind, you still have executive control that can go back and then say, okay, this is scary, but it's fake, right? Or but I'm safe. But your body will still have those same sympathetic nervous system responses. So your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your fight or flight response, which many people are familiar with, right? Your heart rate increases, your attention kind of sharpens,

• 1:06:38Speaker 06

  cortisol floods your system, your stress hormones rise, and your body begins to treat incoming information about a threat as highly important. And what happens in the case of a movie or a scary simulation like a haunted attraction is that that experience ends. And when it ends, your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for sort of the rest and digest or the calming, regulation, and recovery aspects of a frightful experience, it will kick into gear. And this causes you to physiologically calm down. And that cycle is really important for these kinds of playful experiences with stress.

• 1:07:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Your research suggests that there are many reasons people would be drawn to disturbing material. And you've developed something of a three-part typology of people who enjoy such content. Who are the people in these three groups?

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this research project came out of the idea that people who like scary things, people who like horror movies in particular, must like it for the sensations, right? And that didn't quite seem right to me because... Well, for one, you know, a horror movie is not really the best way to get a kick of adrenaline. If you really want to get a kick of adrenaline, you would go skydiving or bungee jumping or buy a motorcycle. There are a lot of ways that you can get a much higher adrenaline kick than watching a movie in your house. And so some colleagues and I teamed up and we came up with about 50 or 60 different responses that people had written or talked about, about why they like horror. And we, you know, gave these responses to hundreds of people.

• 1:08:15Speaker 06

  And we asked them, you know, how much do you agree with each of these? And what we found is that people's answers tended to lump into three categories or three types. And one of those types was the sort of adrenaline junkie, right? That high sensation seeker horror fan. And those people enjoy horror for these sensations that they get from it. But many people were lumped into one of the other two categories. So another category, we called that the white knucklers. And these are people who said that they did enjoy horror, but they didn't actually enjoy those extreme sensations very much. And they don't necessarily enjoy feeling afraid. Rather, what they seem to have enjoyed is the experience of overcoming fear, right? So that doing something challenging and then overcoming it is what they enjoyed.

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  And then there was a third category that we called the dark copers. And those people, what they really focused on when they were going through a frightening simulation, like a horror movie or a haunted attraction, is that it helped them deal with difficult emotions. So we heard this from one of the listeners not earlier in the episode, that watching true crime or watching a horror movie can kind of help you get through feeling anxious or feeling depressed or feeling alone, feeling isolated, because that genre deals with emotions that other genres often don't touch.

• 1:09:34Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked about how morbid curiosity can distract our minds from anxious thoughts. We heard from a listener named Jimena, who's a fan of the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Many years ago, when I got separated from my ex-husband, I realized on Christmas that the whole family that I wasn't really part of anymore was going to be celebrating right next door to my house, because my in-laws lived next door to where me and my then-husband lived. I was not invited for obvious reasons. So I thought, okay, I'm by myself, what should I do? So I went to the video store and I picked up a bunch of Lars von Trier movies.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, he's usually seen as misogynistic and terrible, depressing. I actually love his movies and sometimes I'm afraid to say it because of the assumptions that people may say about me. But anyway, so what I would do every Christmas for many years is that I would go and pick two movies of his and just watch them by myself while next door to my house, I would see everybody having fun, doing their Christmas thing. But somehow, watching these movies made me feel so much better.

• 1:11:10Shankar Vedantam?

  So this isn't about reducing anxiety, as was the case with Bee. Is Jimena right in believing that dark tales can help combat sadness and depression?

• 1:11:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, this sounds similar to the dark copers that I mentioned in the three types of horror fans that we saw. So the dark copers would often mention that, you know, it wasn't just anxiety, it was also depression or loneliness. The sort of dark nature of a lot of horror movies explores that in a way that other films don't. And so it actually is very similar to Bee's example in the sense that it's about sort of affect matching, right? Like giving those emotions an outlet, giving those emotions somewhere that they make sense. And then having a, you know, a story that is completed within that, kind of having that that cycle finished. I think it's actually a pretty similar phenomenon.

• 1:11:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Jimena said that she was afraid to say that she liked these kinds of movies because of the assumptions that people might make about her. What kind of moral judgments do we attach to people who indulge their morbid curiosity, Colton?

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  Well, I think we tend to think that people who enjoy stories where there's a lot of suffering and violence must be people who are accepting of suffering and violence, right? And that's, of course, not the case, in the same way that people can enjoy any number of stories with any number of topics. You know, again, going back to action films, action films are probably more violent on a per-minute basis than the average horror film. And yet, we don't always make that same assumption about action films, right? And so I think it's just the case that horror deals with a lot of taboo topics. And so we, you know, imagine that people who want to be exposed to those taboo topics must be socially taboo in other kinds of ways, including real ways, right?

• 1:12:56Speaker 06

  They must be OK with these things in real life. And I think that's mistaken. I think, in fact, many people who are unfamiliar with social taboos might be more drawn to safe experiences of understanding them.

• 1:13:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. Now, not everyone agrees with the premise that scary stories can be good for us. We heard from a listener named Yonhee, who has mixed feelings about her own consumption of true crime. When I had been in a low, heavy, or icky mood for several days in a row, I began to seek out stories about dark human psychologists involving murder or other gruesome events. Once I start, I find it really hard to stop wanting more of them. While I'm observed in those stories, I may forget the bad feelings I had been feeling, and momentarily, I might feel even better.

• 1:13:53Shankar Vedantam?

  But what I noticed is that a short time later, I'd feel worse than when I had started. Not only those dark stories... Seems to have dragged my mood further down. There is also a sense of guilt and shame that I had allowed myself to fall into this rabbit hole. It is quite similar to what I experienced with eating junk foods. I would have a craving for certain types of foods when I am in a bad mood. And those foods make me feel good only for a short time, but make me feel worse physically or emotionally sooner or later.

• 1:14:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Because of this similar behavior, I started calling those media content involving dark stories mental junk food. So Colton, we've talked about some of the benefits of morbid curiosity, but does the research bear out Yonhe's experience that it can also have negative consequences?

• 1:14:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it certainly can. You know, any behavior that's sort of taken into excess can lead to psychopathologies, right? In the case of true crime consumption, I think the biggest danger is that if you consume it and don't go out into the real world and talk to people and meet with them and maybe even watch other types of films or TV shows. You could develop a sense that the world is more dangerous than it really is, right? You can develop this, which could have negative consequences, like feeling more anxious about things. I think the key is to just remember that anything in too much excess is not good for you, right?

• 1:15:32Speaker 06

  And most things in moderation are fine. And the same thing is true of the stories that deal with difficult emotions. And I think it's often not good to rely on something external as an emotional crutch, right? At least not for a long term. Again, this is something that might help you get out of a cycle of rumination or a deep level of anxiety. But I think as long as you spend some time reflecting on why that helps you get out of that and what you can do in the future to maybe stave those feelings off, it's probably not a bad thing. But certainly, anything used in excess or used as a crutch anytime you're feeling bad is probably not good for long-term use.

• 1:16:16Shankar Vedantam?

  We heard from a listener named Kristen. She had a friend who was quite elderly and couldn't remember much about her early life. That was until Kristen mentioned a famous New York City landmark, the Coney Island Boardwalk.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  And she said, oh, yes, the boardwalk. There was food and there was rides and it was so much fun. And the roller coaster ride was a broomstick with a horse head on it and a seat that the boy would sit down and hold on to the girl as they went down the slide. No seat belts, no helmets, open gears. But it was so much fun because it was scary and the girls were held by the boys and the boys got to hold on to the girls.

• 1:17:06Shankar Vedantam?

  This makes me think of the fact that horror movies have long been a staple for date nights, Colton. Talk about the connections we form with others when we are scared.

• 1:17:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, many people don't go to horror movies alone. And certainly when it comes to haunted attractions, you know, I've done studies kind of all over the world and haunted attractions. And I don't know that I've ever seen someone who came by themselves. And I don't think it's because they're too scared. I think it's because it really is a very social experience because you learn a lot, not just about yourself, but importantly, about the people you're there with. And oftentimes you're there with someone who you're already very close with or you want to be very close with. And experiencing, you know, a frightening simulation with them can tell you quite a bit about how they handle stress and how they handle fear. You know, I've heard the advice before that if you really want to get to know someone

• 1:18:00Speaker 06

  and how they handle stress, you know, go on a road trip with them, right? Because they're kind of out of their element and they don't have the comforts of home. And I think there's a similar thing going on here with horror movies where you get a chance to see how does someone react when they feel afraid? Are they protective? Are they, do they distance themselves? Do they talk about it with you afterwards? And, you know, that could, that could give you a lot of insight into how someone might behave under situations of real stress.

• 1:18:34Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, I ask Colton about his experience in a haunted house. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:19:02Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Colton Skrivenner is the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.

• 1:19:13Shankar Vedantam?

  So, Colton, one interesting aspect of media like horror or true crime is that people who consume them feel like they're having fun. It's a form of scary play. Now, research by some of your colleagues at the recreational Fear Lab in Orhuss, Denmark, has found that people actively regulate their fear and arousal levels when engaging in scary play. You cited a study in which soldiers played a version of a zombie apocalypse game called Left 4 Dead and had their arousal levels monitored during and after the game. What did that study find?

• 1:19:46Speaker 06

  What they did is they had these military personnel in the experimental condition play Left 4 Dead, which is a sort of apocalyptic, you know, horror game. And then they gave them a stress simulation experience, like an ambush, for example. And what they found was that people who had played the Left 4 Dead game as opposed to being in the control condition and not playing it, they had lower marks of stress or markers of stress physiologically than people who had not played it. And so the idea is engaging in these simulated stressful experiences, but playful experiences, may have helped these individuals regulate their stress in a serious situation that's

• 1:20:31Speaker 06

  related to their job, but also the life or death of people they're with.

• 1:20:36Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if the same thing might also be true in haunted houses, that part of the reason people are going is not just to test themselves, to learn about themselves, but in some ways to almost inoculate themselves against the stresses that they experience in the real world.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  It could be, and you know, probably some people have that thought going in and many people maybe don't have that thought going in, but realize it afterwards. This probably relates to a common fear that I think the public has of, you know, if you watch too much horror or go to too many haunted houses, don't you become kind of numb to it, or don't you become desensitized to it, right? And I think desensitization has kind of a nasty tone surrounding it, but really it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? If you can blunt your stress response a little bit, it might actually help you behave more adaptively in stressful situations. And that's what this Left 4 Dead study showed, you know,

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  in the case of military personnel, they often engage in very high stress situations that might cause many people to feel paralyzed with stress. And so they actually need to be maybe a little bit inoculated against it so that they can perform the functions they need to perform.

• 1:21:52Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked a lot today about the benefits of scary play for the people being scared, but we haven't talked much about the people who are doing the scaring. We heard from a listener named Christian who wanted to share the story.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  We have a local festival here in the Blue Mountains, Australia, Winter Magic, where people dress up. And my predilection is to dressing as a zombie doctor with a full latex makeup. And I'm quite horrifying to look at. And I love to lurch around the streets scaring people amongst the crowd. I'm a full-time paramedic and have been so for the last 27 years or so. So I spent a lot of time working in the community and dealing with intensely traumatic scenes. And for me, dressing as a zombie is an outlet

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  and somehow gives me a sense of relief, strangely,

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  delighting and also scaring people in a safe way. So very interesting that people who are otherwise altruistic are somehow attracted to this.

• 1:23:04Shankar Vedantam?

  So when we think about horror movies and haunted houses, Colton, we think about their effects on the people consuming them. Christian's comment makes me wonder, what about the people who make scary movies or who act in haunted houses? What do you think they get out of it?

• 1:23:18Speaker 06

  This has been a study question that I've had for so long, and I've always wanted to study this. And it's just one of those things that I haven't gotten around to it. But, you know, as he mentioned, he's a paramedic and often engages in these life-saving activities for his community. And he's not interested in scaring people because he likes that people are afraid. I mean, he explicitly mentioned that he gets to delight them, right? With thrills. And so he's still kind of helping them in a way, but maybe a way that's very different from his paramedic job.

• 1:23:50Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I'm thinking about parents sometimes will play games with their kids, you know, pretending to be a monster.

• 1:23:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Shankar Vedantam?

  That is chasing them around the living room. And of course, the parent is not trying to upset the child and in fact, probably carefully regulates the game so that the child is in a state of mock terror, but not actual terror. And in some ways, the parent is providing a service for the child, even though the child pretends to be really frightened and runs around screaming.

• 1:24:17Speaker 06

  That's right. And, you know, we have an intuition, most of us, that this is not only playful and fun for them, but maybe good for them in some ways. But I think we forget that. It's actually scary for them, too. We forget that from a kid's perspective, some of these pretend play games that don't seem scary to adults are a little bit scary to kids. And that's why they're enjoying it. They're enjoying it because it's thrilling. But we don't think about it as like, I want to scare them and I want them to feel bad. So similar to our paramedic listener, you know, he's not trying to scare people and make them feel bad. He's trying to scare people so that they can delight in it.

• 1:24:56Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that besides being a researcher, Colton, you recently participated in a paranormal investigation taking place at a mansion in Savannah, Georgia. Can you paint a picture of the place for me and describe for me what happened?

• 1:25:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this was at the Sorrel Weed House in Savannah, Georgia. It's an old sort of Civil War era mansion, beautiful, huge mansion. And is famous for being paranormaly active, in part because Savannah itself is famous for being a haunted location and in part because there were some tragedies that took place at the house. There was a woman who, I believe, she hung herself in relation to an affair, which is a pretty common story at haunted locations. I was in Savannah not that long ago and did go on a paranormal investigation. There was a late night one with about 10 or 12 of us.

• 1:25:52Speaker 06

  And one of the more frightening spaces in the house is the basement. I think basements are inherently a little creepy anyway. And certainly when you're in the basement of a famously haunted mansion, they're extra creepy. And one reason that the basement is considered one of the scarier places in the Sorrel Weed House is that there's a pretty common apparition that people see down there of what appears to be a very tall soldier and he's kind of standing at the end of this long hallway, this long dark hallway. And many people report seeing this soldier there. You know, when I was there, there was a small wooden chair at one end of that hallway. I think it's important to mention here that I don't really believe in ghosts.

• 1:26:36Speaker 06

  And I love paranormal hunts. I find them kind of a fun scary play. I mean, I certainly feel afraid at times when I'm there. And so when I went and sat in the chair, you know, I looked down this long, dark hallway and reminded myself that I don't believe in ghosts. And so I start to kind of see, you know, the outlines of a uniform or a gun or a tall man. And it's funny how that works, you know, and then there's a really great study that made me feel very validated when I read it. And it was a study showing that Regardless of whether or not people believe in the afterlife, their bodies actually respond very similarly to potential hauntings. So in this case, it was like a light that flickered and in the control group, you know, the control group was told nothing about the the lab space

• 1:27:21Speaker 06

  they're in potentially being haunted. And then the experimental group, they were told that someone had died in that room not long ago, and someone had seen a ghost in there. And in both the experimental and the control group, they asked, you know, do you believe in the afterlife? And it didn't matter if you believed in the afterlife or not. If you were in the experimental group with a light flickered and you were told about a ghost, your body had that physiological arousal, that sort of preparation for fight or flight. And in the control group, you know, it made no difference at all. People just thought it was a light that was faltering. And of course, it didn't matter if you believed in ghosts or not, because you didn't have an intuition that a ghost might be there. So, you know, despite the fact that I don't believe in ghosts, I was in a place where people believe there were ghosts. And my body certainly responded as if there were ghosts there.

• 1:28:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that at one point, you felt a physical sensation on your right leg. Tell me what happened, Colton.

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's it's one thing to see something, right, or hear something. But when you feel something that that feels more real, right, that feels more, it feels harder to fake. And so there's there's two ghosts, I guess, that are commonly reported in the basement. One of them is the soldier, right? That's the kind of frightening one. But there's also apparently the children who lived there originally liked to play in the basement. And some people report, you know, seeing toys in the basement that get moved around, or they report feeling kind of things brushing up on their legs about the height of a small child. And I was there, and I was wearing I was wearing shorts, because it was, you know, it was in Savannah, it was fairly warm out, even though it was late at night. And

• 1:28:56Speaker 06

  I was standing kind of by myself, you know, we'd split up to kind of, the exact thing they tell you not to do in horror movies, where we split up a little bit. And I was standing kind of by myself, and I felt something kind of brush up against my leg. And of course, I looked down, and there's nothing there. But I, it was a very distinct sensation. And then, you know, just a moment or two later, you know, someone else who was 15 or 20 feet away in our group, kind of let out a small yelp and said she felt something touch her leg. So unless there was a Very sneaky cat or something in there. You know, we had very similar experiences again. And we, we were told about the potential ghost children in the basement. So maybe that influenced, you know, where we felt the sensation.

• 1:29:41Speaker 06

  Or maybe, you know, maybe there's a, a small ghost child running around in the basement of the house.

• 1:29:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Colton Skrivner is a researcher at Arizona State University and Orhus University in Denmark. He's the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Colton Skrivner, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 1:30:13Shankar Vedantam?

  We also heard today from psychologist Jay Van Bevel. Along with Dominic Packer, he's author of The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony.

• 1:30:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:30:48Shankar Vedantam?

  If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider sharing it with your friends. Put out word on social media or on your office Slack channel. Maybe talk about it with your family at your next movie night. Word of mouth recommendations make a big difference in helping others find the show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.