Group Think

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantham. 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 the 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.

0:32But to many white South Africans, they saw him as a criminal and a terrorist. 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. Play continues. Offside by New Zealand.

1:02He 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.

1:32And 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 South Africa that day. The match was a nail-biter.

2:04It went into overtime. South Africa ended up winning 15-12. Across the country, black and white South Africans cheered together in triumph.

2:15Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela is cheering along with the whole of the stadium. 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.

2:34But 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily.

3:06On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms. Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn.

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4:39When 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.

5:11He 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. You grew up in Canada, and I understand your parents told you to sew the Canadian national flag onto your backpack.

5:42Did 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.

6:18And 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, you know, 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.

6:52Yeah, 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. 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.

7:25We'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.

7:59They 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 maple syrup roughly the same. But when they were primed with their Canadian identity, they liked the maple syrup more than the honey.

8:29And 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,

9:04came 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. 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.

9:35So all these things that Canadians really cherish as part of who they are and part of their culture. And Canadians often don't have a very strong sense of identity. And this ad captured it. And it is pronounced Zed, not 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. And this ad, you know, won a number of awards because it signaled to Canadians something really important.

10:06Like, 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.

10:19Group 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.

10:35I asked Jay about a study out of the University of Sussex involving a very stinky t-shirt.

10:42This 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, you know, 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.

11:24And 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.

11:55But 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.

12:28One 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.

13:04Goal 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.

13:35The 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.

14:00We 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. Yeah. And sports fans often think the referees are, you know, 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.

14:33And 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.

14:44The 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.

15:17The members of the first group were supposed to like the artist Paul Klee. Members of the second group were supposed to like the artist Wassily Kandinsky. 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 Tajfel 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.

15:48And 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. The volunteers in the Klee and Kandinsky camps were then told to divvy up money among people in the different groups. 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.

16:24So they'll actually give in-group members less if it means giving out-group members even way less.

16:35What'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. Yes. And this is something, you know, that you might be skeptical when you hear these results. And I was too. And then I ran studies like this, you know, in Canada and the U.S. at many universities and online. And I've seen this same pattern over and over again. The moment that people are assigned to a team or a group, even though they often can know it's a coin flip that's determining this,

17:10means 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. 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.

17:45And so what it suggests is what is referred to in the literature as basking in reflective 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.

18:12What 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? 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.

18:43And so we survive by cooperating in groups and coalitions within those groups. And so we have those same tendencies. And then what you have in a modern environment that matters is that groups feel 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. Groups offer us a sense of belonging, and they can bring out the best in us.

19:20But the flip side of most in-groups, there's an out-group.

19:25When 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms.

19:58Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources.

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20:49This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

20:53We've seen how groups can pull us together, give us shared cultural touch points, 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. In their new book,

21:25The Power of Us, the psychologists Jay Van Bevel 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.

21:44Jay, 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? 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 Rudolf's family. And Addy said, according to legend, the dirty bastards are back again. And we don't know if Addy was referring

22:15to the Allied warplanes who were coming to bomb them. But Rudi 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. And so people on one side of the river of the town identified with, you know, Addy,

22:46and the other side identified with a shoe company run by Rudi. 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 with 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.

23:17It's just a little town in Germany. But these companies, the two shoe companies that were launched by them are now known as Adidas, which was founded by Addy, and Puma, which was founded by Rudi. 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. So, you know, 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,

23:48you know, to me, it seems absurd. You know, 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? 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

24:19and 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.

24:44So 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? What I've noticed is there's an increasing trend towards polarization that's linked to out-group hate more than in-group love.

25:13And this is where politics in the U.S. 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.

25:45You'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? 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

26:16with 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. Are you serious? There's blue Tinder and red Tinder now? 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.

26:43So 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? 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.

27:15And 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 threat in the environment, you got to get ready to act.

27:46And seeing it as closer can sometimes trigger that reaction. But we see it with groups as well. 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. 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

28:16than it is. But also how many people they think are coming over the border. They tend to overestimate the size of the group. 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 camera is being worn by police officers. These can provide an objective answer

28:47as to who's in the right. What are these protesters and the police officials getting wrong, Jay? The body cams operate under the assumption that if we just capture it all in the cameras that it's going to dramatically 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

29:17and 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. Jay and his colleagues have looked at how social media in particular exacerbates tribal loyalties

29:49and group divisions. We explored some of this research in an earlier episode. It was titled Screaming into the Void. The important thing to understand about social media, the average social media user scrolls through 300 feet of news feed a day. Wow. So that means if you have a 6-inch iPhone or Android, that means you're scrolling down 600 times. It's the height of the Statue of Liberty. Wow. 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.

30:19We'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. 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

30:50of 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. You've also conducted a study looking at the effectiveness of fact-checking partisan beliefs. What do you find, Jay? 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,

31:21they'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.

31:44Across 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. Support for Hidden Brain

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33:56This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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 feedback at hiddenbrain.org using the subject line

34:27groups. Again, that email address is feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

34:37In their book, The Power of Us, the psychologists Jay Van Bevel and Dominic Packer explore how we can harness our group identities to solve important challenges in our lives. 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

35:08those 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.

35:33I 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 going to 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. So tell me the story of how the bond between the two of you got established.

36:04I understand a cube of cheese was involved. 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,

36:35into 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 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 want to be alone and not have other people see them. So I went to the bartender and I couldn't speak

37:06but I kind of like, you know, made the universal choking signature and then I twisted into him with my back but he didn't really know what was going on and it 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 he looked like white, like he had seen a ghost. But eventually, he got in the position and I kind of like started moving his hands towards my diaphragm and he gave me the Heimlich. It came out and I remember

37:36at 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. 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.

38:08Stressful situations and dramatic situations have a capacity to bond people together. I'm reminded of those studies involving, you know, dating couples and, you know, when the couples are having a date on a rickety bridge where, you know, 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

38:39comes sort of this very intense bond. 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 through back to the story was that when you're all in this crisis together, it creates a sense of shared purpose.

39:10And 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 and people who had small children.