Hidden Brain - You Are Not Ordinary

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Stories about unlikely heroes have captivated people for thousands of years. This week, social scientist Ben Rogers explores why the "hero's journey" resonates so deeply, and how the stories we tell about our own lives can shape our sense of purpose. He explains why seeing ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories may help us face challenges with greater confidence. Then, on Your Questions Answered, psychologist Jay Van Bavel returns to respond to listeners' comments and questions about group identities.  Interested in learning how to discover the hero's journey in your own life story? Ben Rogers shares practical tips in a companion conversation for Hidden Brain+. That episode is titled "Discovering Your Inner Hero.” If you're not yet a Hidden Brain+ subscriber, you can get a free seven-day trial at support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to http://apple.co/hiddenbrain. Thanks for listening and supporting the show! What does economic inequality do to our minds? In our latest YouTube video, we explore the psychology of social comparison. Check it out, and be sure to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos!  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the early days of Soviet cinema, a filmmaker conducted an experiment that would change our understanding of the human mind. Lev Kulishav showed an audience a short film featuring a famous actor. The footage of the actor was always the same, a single, unmoving, and entirely neutral expression. But the filmmaker intercut the shot with three different images. A bowl of hot soup, a child in a coffee. and a woman reclining on a sofa. Even though the actor's face never changed,

the audience was mesmerized by his performance. When paired with the soup, they saw a man gripped by hunger. When paired with a coffin, they saw our face transformed by grief. They didn't see a sequence of unrelated pictures. They saw an integrated story. The human brain is wired to make connections like this. We want to see the frames as part of a narrative, and so we invent the connective tissue. We turn frame one and an unrelated frame two into a cohesive story.

This psychological tendency also shapes how we see our own lives. We are the editors of our own personal documentaries, constantly splicing together random chaotic events into a narrative. Depending on our personalities and temperaments, our documentaries might be comedies or trussing. They might be gripping tales or boring stories where nothing much happens. But all of this raises a question. If we are the ones sitting in the editing room, are we making the best use of the footage?

Are we choosing to tell the right stories? This week on Hidden Brain and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, the tales we tell about our lives and why some stories turn out to be better for us than others. When we turn on the TV or read a novel or buy a ticket to a movie, we're in search of a good story. A narrative that will capture our imagination, transport us to a different world, offer a satisfying resolution. The best stories create this magic. How do they do this? At Boston College, Benjamin Rogers studies how narratives generate meaning and significance in our minds and the implications of the story.

we tell about our own lives. Ben Rogers, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hi, Shankar. It's great to be here. Ben, I understand that starting when you were a teenager, you've been interested in stories. In the books that you've read about the craft, especially when it comes to the craft of filmmaking, you learn that there was one storytelling framework

that audiences find especially compelling. Now, this framework shows up in ancient literature and modern tales. I'm wondering if we can start with a story like Harry Potter. How does the Harry Potter story follow the storytelling framework? Sure, yeah. So it starts off with Harry at the time that you meet him. He's an orphan boy.

He's living with his uncle, an aunt and cousin, but he's just kind of put down upon, doesn't have anything special about him. But then mysterious things keep happening, and then he ends up having a moment of shift. And that's when a series of wizards and wizard-adjacent people tell him that he's actually, unbeknownst to him,

a wizard and he needs to go off to Hogwarts a school to learn how to craft magic and to take up the mantle by his parents that he didn't know a lot about. And so over the course of the first story and over the series, he learns, he faces a series of challenges in terms of facing monsters and people who want to hurt him and hurt his friends. But he learns magic and he ends up transformed and really embracing the idea that he's there to help others and become someone who can stand up to fight for the little guy. And this is one of those stories that, both within an individual novel or a movie,

but across the entire series, he follows the main elements of what we call the hero's journey. One of the things that you and others have pointed out is a hallmark of the hero's journey is not just about the plot and the events and the narrative and the things that the hero does, but an internal change that happens within the hero. Talk about this,

that the internal change that happens within the person is as much the story of the hero's journey as much as the action of the plot, if you will. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the secret powers of the hero's journey or maybe one of the reasons it's such a popular framework is this idea of it allows storywriters to make manifest an internal change

via some sort of external, obvious, sometimes fantastical version. So in the case of Harry Potter, we see this boy who does not feel like he has any powers, is not important or interesting in any way. And he comes to realize that actually there is something special about him. But that's not enough for the story. What needs to be more is he needs to learn what to do with that power, how he can make friends, how he can bring along people. And so the magic and his strength that he grows in that area ends up paralleling his internal transformation as he grows up. into a young man and figures out how to be truly a hero both in terms of how he treats other people. But the story represents that in terms of the challenges he faces and the literal transformation he has in terms of his powers.

You know, I'm thinking about the story now for the first time in a slightly different fashion, because I've long known that the story of Harry Potter is a story of magic. It's a story about wizards and all kinds of magical spells. But as you're talking now, I'm realizing that part of what the magic really is about, is about this internal realization, this transformation that happens within Harry, when he realizes the power that he has within himself, that's where the magic actually is. Absolutely. And you see this sort of on two tracks, but the main focus is that, you know, while it's exciting to watch someone like Harry Potter, face magical, you know, face-down dragons

and face-down monsters in Volda-Bort, but what really brings people back to the story time and time again, is this idea that you're watching someone transform and learn and figure out how to be an adult, how to be someone who is worth wanting to model your life after. And the hero's journey is the way to represent that psychological change on a broader, more adventurous, exciting way that people want to experience on both levels. In the 1940s band, the mythologist Joseph Campbell looked at a variety of myths across different cultures. Tell me, what he did and what he found? Yes, so Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College,

and he worked in comparative mythology and religion. So he's looking at some of the most enduring ancient stories across the globe, so not just in terms of the West, but looking at all these stories across various areas and various cultures. And what he found was when he was looking at all of these myths and looking at these enduring stories, that there seemed to be the same basic plot line. And he ended up calling this the monomyth, but that's what we call the hero's journey.

And what he attributes this to is this idea of birth and death and separating from yourself in the past. And these stories are able to represent this really profound human condition in a way that replicates and shows up. So while the individual aspects of the story might vary, Campbell was able to say, look, look at these various stories from all of these countries across the world. they actually follow the same plotline in a really interesting way, which he wrote in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is one of the most popular narrative psychology or narrative, maybe even philosophy books that exist today. And so if you look at a story like Homer's Odyssey or the Ramayana from India or the King Arthur story or even the Bible, Joseph Campbell would argue that in some ways, you know, perhaps some of these are religious texts and some of these are just stories, but they all follow the same basic. arc, if you will. Absolutely. And if you ever read Hero with a Thousand Faces,

I think what's most, what's really powerful about that book is it's told through examples from myths that you've heard of and from myths that at least I had not heard of or had not learned while I was in school. And I think that speaks to the power of this, this idea that all of these stories,

even stories you may not have ever imagined or may not ever heard of otherwise, actually are all speaking the same language or using the same underlying plot. I understand that Joseph Campbell's work has influenced generations of Hollywood screenwriters and directors, and that includes George Lucas, who made Star Wars? Yes, absolutely.

George Lucas really attributes a lot of the success of Star Wars to Joseph Campbell, and I believe they became friends, or at least George Lucas saw Campbell as a mentor as he went along. And actually, there was a speech that I really love that George Lucas gave, I think, in 85, in which he mentioned that he had been working on many, many drafts of Star Wars. And he just couldn't quite get it to work.

There was something that wasn't clicking. And maybe in his struggles and trying to figure out how to improve the story, he actually came across the hero with a thousand faces, and suddenly it all clicked. And suddenly the story made sense. He knew how he needed to structure the plot and the overall arc of those first three films. And he even went so far as to call Joseph Campbell his Yoda, the mentor that he made. look to in terms of how to tell a good story. When we come back, we'll use the example of Star Wars to unpack the discrete elements of

the hero's journey. We'll also look at how this framework can shape the stories we tell about our own lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. From time immemorial, people have told stories in which a brave but uncertain figure sets out on a quest, heading into the unknown in search of treasures, both external and internal.

At Boston College's Carroll School of Management, Ben Rogers studies the way people make meaning from their lives. He draws some of the inspiration for this work from great books and movies that show us how characters make meaning from their journeys. Ben, according to Joseph Campbell's framework, the hero's journey has 17 elements. When you and your collaborator studied the phenomenon, you condense those elements in into seven elements. The first is what you call the emergence of a protagonist. Let's use the Star Wars movies as an example. How does Luke Skywalker emerge as a protagonist of the story? So, yes, we begin with the idea of just someone having a clear and defined character and an identity.

And specifically in a hero's journey, that often starts with the protagonist being relatively unknown, or at least not remarkable in any way that they might be aware of. And Luke Skywalker, to me, is one of the prototypical examples of the protagonist. And when we meet him in Star Wars, he's a, I believe he's a farmer on a moisture farm on Tatouine, a very set aside planet. He does not have anything that seems remarkable or magic about him. And in fact, when we first see him, he's really just dealing with the struggles and the chores that he has to face. And it does not seem like he's destined for greatness in any meaningful way. I want to play your clip from that first Star Wars film called A New Hope. In this scene, wise elder, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the young farm boy Luke Skywalker have just viewed a holographic

message from a desperate Princess Leia pleading with them for help. You must learn the ways of the force if you're to come with me to Alderan. Alderan? I'm not going to Alderan. I'm going to Alderan. I'm going to get home. It's late. I'm in for it as it is. I need your help, Luke. She needs your help. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing. I can't get involved. I've got work to do. It's not that I like the empire. I hate it, but there's nothing I can do about it right now. Talk about the idea that in many of these accounts of the hero's journey,

the hero is initially reluctant to get involved in. Yes. So in Joseph Campbell's version, this is called Refusal of the Call. And while it's not explicitly in our version of the condensed hero's journey, it's still a very significant part of this initial moment of shift or change that the protagonist faces. And I think it's important because people are often dealing with how do we handle huge changes in our lives? And we know from psychological research that's very difficult for people to do. And so I think that being such a key part of the hero's journey is really important because it feels authentic to the audience members.

If they were imagining how they might experience someone going, actually, you think you're a farmer but you're destined for greatness, you might initially go, whoa, I don't know if that's quite true. And so I think that being part of the hero's journey is supposed to mimic the human experience. of how do we actually deal with these massive changes when they're thrust upon us. I'm going to play another clip from A New Hope. In this scene, Luke Skywalker returns home to his aunt and uncle's farm only to find the homestead destroyed and his relatives killed by imperial forces. Obi-Wan Kenobi consult him. There's nothing you could have done, Luke, had you been there?

You'd have been killed, too, and the droids would now be in the hands of the empire. I want to come with you to Alderman. There's nothing for me here now. I want to learn the ways of the force and become a Jedi like my father. So this marks a moment where the reluctant hero is reluctant no longer, Ben. What's going on here in terms of the hero's journey? What's going on here is Luke, in this case, is finally being pushed beyond his refusal of the call. At a certain point, while he might be reluctant to embrace what.

has been thrust upon him in terms of potentially becoming a Jedi, now that his aunt and uncle have been killed and he has to figure out what to do next, his past life is no longer tenable. There's no way he can go back to what he wanted to, so he no longer is really able to refuse that call. And in a sense, this makes his quest very simple in terms of what he should do. He wants to avenge the murder of his aunt and uncle and become powerful and be able to do that. He's using this finally kick out the door in order of, I can't go back, but now I need to really embrace and grow and learn and eventually transform.

And I think you see this again and again in different versions of the hero's story. The protagonist reaches effectively a point of no return. There's no going back to the earlier life. That door has been closed. The only way to move now is forward. Yes. While all of us would like to think that when we're presented with a great opportunity, that we wouldn't sort of shirk our duties and try to live on our current lives.

Often what happens in the real world and what's mirrored in our narratives is that we do need that push out the door. We need to be able to not go back and have the courage, or at least the lack of fear, to start facing the challenges. I think that's one of the things that's represented in the hero's journey that, like the refusal of the call, is really very authentic to the human experience. We talked earlier about how Star Wars was explicitly modeled on the hero's journey, as described by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Another classic hero's journey is found in the Lord of the Rings, the series of novels by J.R.R. Tolkien.

In this tale, the protagonist Frodo Baggins undergoes a shift and sets out on a quest, but he doesn't go alone. He finds allies. Set up the premise of the story for us, Ben, and explain why finding allies is an important part of the hero. journey. Sure. So in the telling of Lord of the Rings, and I'll make sure I try to represent it as accurately as I can, so Frodo is living at the Shire. He's living a pretty idyllic life, not really facing any monumental challenges or that many interesting stories. He is thrust upon him this challenge by Gandalf, who's a wizard. And he's told that he needs to help on this big quest to help destroy the one ring to rule them all. Evil is stirring in Mordor.

The ring has awoken. It's heard its master's call. But he was destroyed. Sauron was destroyed. No, Frodo. The spirit of Saron endured. And Frodo obviously doesn't want to do that. He has enjoyed his life and is continuing to enjoy it.

But he is pushed out by Gandalf. And along the way, he ends up making a series of other allies, Samwise Gamgee, Mary and Pip, then he meets others like Aragon, Legalis, Gimley, and lots of other people. And so this is representing this idea of allies is, while we might think of the hero as like a solitary hero on a journey, what actually is an intimate part of the hero's journey is this idea that no hero walks alone. They often only reach the distances that they're trying to reach when they're helped along by other people. And in particular, that help can sometimes be kind support, but can also be sort of being pushed out the door towards greatness.

Now, along the way, Frodo encounters innumerable challenges, and of course, this is an essential component of the hero's journey. Absolutely. Facing challenges is both representative of the human life, but it's also what makes a really interesting story. I have a young four-year-old daughter, and we read lots of stories at night. And while the stories are fun and clever, they often don't have a lot of challenges or stakes about them. And so they're not stories that I'm always jumping to repeat. But Heroes Journeys, on the other hands, are these stories filled with monsters and nemeses and all of these different things that people are trying to overcome.

And it gives it a sense of excitement, but also a sense of things could go wrong. We're riding a knife's edge here. And I think that's what makes a really powerful story. Talk about the idea that as the protagonist faces these, challenges, the protagonist undergoes personal transformations. And in some ways, that is key to the hero's journey. So it'd be one thing to face challenges and just immediately win them. And that might be a satisfying story on some level, but that wouldn't be a story that people might come back to. What we really like to see in our protagonists is this idea that we face challenges, we face

things that we don't know if we can overcome. And we realize that as a result of facing those challenges, we become transformed. Now, in a lot of stories, that's a literal transformation. So you might gain magical powers, gain superpowers in various superhero films, but that often parallels or goes along with a personal transformation of realizing maybe you're stronger than you thought you were, or realizing some sort of depth of character that might not have ever been apparent had you not had to face these challenges and figure out, can you face them down on your own.

And this is true for Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. He starts out being, you know, small and inexperienced and sheltered, and he eventually discovers in some ways the hero within. It's one of the things I love most about Lord of the Rings is the idea that Frodo as a Hobbit, you know, is both sort of unknown and unremarkable in terms of his character at the start, but he's also pretty unremarkable in terms of his stature. The hobbits are literally small. And what's great about the Lord of the Rings and the journey that he goes on

is Frodo and some of the other hobbits as well end up being some of the most heroic characters. They're the ones who stand up to take the ring to try to destroy it at the end when other people are too nervous. So both in terms of their stature, but also in terms of their character, more importantly, they go through this transformation and end up being the ones that people really remember and identify with. So in the stories that we've talked about so far, you can see the similarities. You know, Harry Potter starts out as this orphan kid who basically has been ignored and discarded by society. Luke Skywalker starts off as this farm boy. Frodo Baggins is this unremarkable hobbit.

And you can start to see now why these stories appeal to so many people, because people feel, you know, I am unremarkable, I am ordinary. And what these stories are telling you is, you are not. Absolutely. I think there is a strong degree of identification. and the most powerful stories are the ones that, while it might be circumstances that we never actually find ourselves in, it's really enjoyable to imagine what would I do in that case. And the hero's journey kind of takes you from this unremarkable baseline protagonist, farmer, orphan, etc., to something more powerful. And if you follow along in that journey as the reader, you're also going on that journey yourself where, while you might not be the one,

who's literally gaining magical powers or superpowers, but you're in the perspective of the reader, and it feels like you're developing some deep personal insight by following the steps of this journey. The seventh and final element of a hero's journey that you've identified involves leaving a legacy. What is this idea, Ben? Yes, the legacy is this idea of making some sort of positive impact.

And in a lot of heroes journeys, people might think that it ends where they become transformed, They gain some magical superpowers and they defeat their enemy, but most of those stories don't end right there. They actually go on a little bit longer to show how the hero goes back to their home community to share either literal or metaphorical treasures with those around them. They often repair relationships that they had. They help people with whether that's the new depth of character or their new powers. They're able to give back in a really profound way to show that, yes, you've transformed personally, but that also can transform the communities around us.

Does that happen with Frodo and the Lord of the Rings? Yes, so in the books, Frodo ends up going back and helping to restore the Shire. So as a result of the events that transpire in the story, the Shire is destroyed or at least put in terms of really bad circumstances. And so Frodo actually returns back to his homeland at the end to help restore his homeland and sort of rescue his fellow hobbits. Just as screenwriters and directors make choices about how to tell a fictional story, all of us make choices about how we tell the stories of our lives.

When we come back, applying the framework of the hero's journey to our own stories. In our companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at several practical techniques to help you discover the hero's journey in your own life story. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled Discovering Your Inner Hero. If you're not yet a subscriber, please give it a try. You can get a free seven-day trial at support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.com slash hidden brain.

Your support does more than give you access to all our subscriber-only content. You're also helping to support the careful research, writing, fact-checking, and sound design that go into every episode of the show. Again, those sites are support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.com slash hidden brain. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you think about your own life, what is the narrative that comes most easily to mind? How would you say this narrative affects the way you think about your own life?

If you would be willing to share your story with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org using the subject line, Heroes Journey. Again, that's Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org. Social scientist Ben Rogers explores how people make meaning from their lives. He has studied how retelling the story of our lives,

using the framework of a hero's journey, can change our psychological well-being. Ben, you and your collaborators have developed a scale that measures how much an individual's life story resembles the framework of a hero's journey. You've evaluated the life stories of a large group of people using this instrument. Do some people report having a hero's journey that runs through their lives? We surveyed a number of people and we collected a lot of life stories. And like all psychological constructs, there's a heavy degree of variability where some people are very high on the hero's journey. They see the elements of the hero's journey in their own lives,

or they tell their story often featuring a lot of these elements. But also some people don't. Some people say in our stories, I don't see my story in that way. I have lived an unremarkable life. Or they write on a questionnaire that we have that they don't feel like those elements of the hero's journey are heavily present in their lives. I'm wondering the people who report their lives as a hero's journey,

did you notice anything about their mental well-being? their satisfaction about their lives? Yes, we asked a series of different questions, but the main one that we were focused on and what we saw repeated time and time again in our studies was that the people who either saw their life as a hero's journey or told their story naturally as a hero's journey, those were the people who also reported feeling like their lives were highly meaningful, that they had a lot of meaning in their life in terms of their life felt significant, it felt purposeful, felt very coherent.

And this was exciting to us to find that the way that you see your life story or the way that you might naturally tell it seem to have this profound impact on the types of attitudes that people carry around with them in terms of their mental well-being. And what about the people who did not tell their life stories in the form of a hero's journey? What did their personal narratives look like, Ben? Yes, their life stories took a number of different forms. So I'd say one of the most common versions in terms of the studies that we collected is people would just write stories of this happened to me and then this happened to me, sort of like a series of biographical steps of I grew up here, I went to college here, or I didn't go to college, and this is what happened.

So sort of just a checking the mark on literally the events that had happened without any connective tissues. Now, the other examples that we would see is sometimes people would tell these stories of what some psychological researchers called contamination narratives, but we also saw versions where people were saying, I had all this promise in my early days, and I either didn't fulfill it or situations outside of my own control happened, and I ended up either plateauing or ended up in a state that I'm not particularly proud of right now. And so instead of being able to face challenges and transform, people might have faced those same challenges and felt like they were not able to succeed in the way that they wanted. What were the psychological effects of constructing these narratives that featured, you know,

stagnant or downward trajectories? Yes, we looked at a number of different outcomes. I think the ones that are most useful to call out was we looked at how resilient people felt that their lives were. So if they were facing personal problems, people who often told these contamination narratives or these narratives where they felt stuck did not feel well equipped in order to face down those challenges. So they would report that they either tried to ignore personal problems or that they didn't

know how to face them. They felt really powerless. And we also looked at depressive symptoms, so not a clinical diagnosis, but the idea that people are saying, my mood right now, I feel very downtrodden. I feel like I don't have a lot going for me. And the people who told those life stories in that way often reported feeling more in terms of that negative well-being. Now, of course, it could be that the stories that people are telling about their lives are simply accurately reflecting their lives. And so if one person, you know, has a series of successes and has a lot of breaks and, you know, starts out, you know, not in great shape, but ends up

in great shape, you know, it's easy for them to tell it. triumphant story, a hero's journey type of story. If somebody's life has taken a different turn, if they've experienced illness and setbacks and divorce and separations and tragedy, you know, you could say that their lives, in fact, reflect a downward trajectory. So I think a reasonable question to ask Ben is, as you hear these stories from people, do you think that people's lives are predicting their psychological well-being or the stories that people are telling about their lives are predicting their psychological well-being? That's such an interesting question, and I think it's one we grappled with a lot as we were doing this work of,

are we just showing that people who live really heroic or really positive lives feel very positive about their life? That would be interesting on some level, but would not be speaking to sort of the powerful versions of the life story in and of itself. And so what we would say is based on the stories that we collected is often people who rated their lives as high on a hero's journey. they were living lives that might not be on from the outside a story that you might go they're obviously going to feel like they have a highly meaningful life some of the stories that people would report to me were facing some extremely difficult circumstances people who had been in and out of prison who had dealt with substance abuse who had dealt with relationship issues things where people would say i've had this i've had a really tough life and maybe i'm not rich and famous or a huge

hero, but I've been a hero within the context of my life. Maybe I've shown a lot of resilience. Maybe I've helped people who have faced similar circumstances. And so that to me speaks to some of this of the stories that were really high in terms of hero's journeys were not always stories that were just massively amazing from the outside. Sometimes they were really heartbreaking, but in a way that people seem to find deeper meaning out of them. So you and your colleagues have given a lot of thought to why the hero's journey might be such a powerful formula, both on the screen as well as in real life. One idea is that the brain simply is hardwired for story and the hero's journey makes for a better story. Yes, so there's

work out of evolutionary psychology that speaks to this idea that, as you said, our brains are just wired for stories. And the idea being that when, you know, back in cave person days, there's a lot of uncertainty about the world. You might eat something and fall ill. You might face some sort of animal and not know what to do. And so the idea being that humans learned how to tell these succinct, meaningful stories or packages of information in a way that people would be able to remember that and multiply that over thousands and millions of experiences and across thousands of years is our brains still seem pretty oriented to respond to stories in a powerful way. And you see this across a lot of different research. We see that, you know, in the courtroom,

if lawyers tell their, you know, closing arguments in terms of a narrative versus just facts, that that's way more successful. You can look at the marketing world. Any commercial that you might see is often a miniature version of a story versus them just highlighting the pros and cons of their product. We just are really oriented towards stories, and both marketers and anyone who's trying to communicate information will often lean on stories because it helps people remember it, and it helps us know what framework and how do we take that information and act upon it. We've talked about the idea of contamination stories in our conversation. Researchers have also looked at what's called a redemptive arc.

Now, we've talked about the idea of redemptive stories on the show previously as well, Ben. But what is a redemptive arc, and how is it different from a contamination story? Yes, so a redemptive arc or redemptive narrative. A lot of this work is done by Dan McAdams, who is actually as part of the Heroes' paper along with my fellow collaborators, a redemptive arc is quite simply a story that starts negative or starts maybe neutral and ends up positive in some way. It has a positive arc in terms of the end of the story. A contamination narrative in contrast is one that might start positive and end up negative in some profound way. And research has looked at people who tell their stories

as either a redemptive arc or a contamination art will feel profound results in terms of their well-being, the extent that they want to help others in their lives. So the way that we tell these stories is really important. And the hero's journey is an example of a redemptive arc, though it contains with it some additional elements. Now, the hero's journey also pulls together different elements that increase people's sense of meaning. You know, as we discussed, the hero's journey features a protagonist who has agency, a protagonist who experiences psychological growth, a protagonist who seeks out friendship with allies, each of these things has been shown to have psychological benefits on its own.

Yes, we see the hero's journey as this really succinct, compelling package of a lot of work that has been done in psychology and social psychology and even organizational behavior over the years. So running through the elements relatively briefly with protagonists, we know that, you know, feeling in charge of your own destiny, feeling like you have a clear sense of yourself, there's a lot of work that shows that that relates to meaning in life. We know in terms of shifts of experiences that people who are high on the personality trait of openness to experience, they often rate their lives as more meaningful. In terms of quests, having a sense of purpose or goals is strongly linked to meaning in life. Having allies, so social support is probably the most robust predictor of meaning in life amongst all of the other things.

And then in terms of facing challenges and transformation, there's a lot of work that shows that people really do find profound meaning out of facing, growth. and dealing with challenges in their lives. And then in terms of legacy, there's a lot of work that shows that being pro-social, helping, donating to others, is strongly related to a sense of meaning in life. So what the hero's journey narrative does, maybe consciously, maybe just by coincidence, who knows,

is this idea that we have all of this like menu items of things that can make life feel more meaningful, and how do we put this into a succinct narrative that people want to listen to? I understand that you and your colleagues have wondered, if it's possible to help people shape their life stories into a form that resembles a hero's journey. You've administered this restorifying intervention to a group of some 1,700 volunteers. Have you found the intervention works?

Can you increase the meaning that people are perceiving in their lives? This was one of the things that we were sort of worried about in terms of this work, is this idea that we're showing that this narrative matters, and we had looked at it a number of different ways from looking at how people see their life, tell their life, controlling for various psychological factors, but there is still something about we want this to be useful for people. We don't want just the people who naturally tell their stories life as a hero's journey to be the only ones to experience these meaning benefits.

And so we sought to develop an intervention to see, can we help people guide them in terms of retelling their story as a hero's journey? And as a result of doing this intervention, what we found were many of the same benefits that we had seen just out of people who naturally told their story that way. As a result of taking our intervention, people reported their life meaning to be higher. They reported that they felt like they were flourishing in their life. They reported fewer depressive symptoms.

And importantly, they also felt more resilient. They felt more ready to face down life's challenges that might continue to face them in the future. You also discovered something very interesting and surprising. which is this restorifying intervention increased the tendency among volunteers to perceive more meaning, even in something as a random string of letters on a computer screen. Talk about this finding and what it means. This was a study that we had the idea about and we wanted to see if what we were talking about in terms of seeing your life as a hero's journey helps kind of raise your expectations

and raise your connection in terms of making meaning, then that might have other behavioral benefits that are not just related to, yes, my life feels more meaningful. And so we ran a study in which we had participants, look at these random strings of letters. And the task was, to what extent do you find patterns in these strings of letters?

And so we had one group of participants, take the heroes journey intervention, and we had one group, just do a random reflection on basic aspects of their lives. And what we found was for the participants who had done the restoring intervention, they seemed more primed to just see more meaning overall. And so while these just looked like strange strings of letters, they actually reported that they felt like there was higher amount of patterns, that there were some underlying aspect to these strings of letters beyond just complete randomness. And this sort of pointed us to this fact of being in this mindset of, yes, my life is more meaningful. So there must just be more meaning around me.

it's actually putting us into a mindset to find more meaning everywhere that we can find it. So this tendency to find more meaning in random stimuli is related to our ability to see more positive meaning in our personal problems, Ben? I think it really goes back to this idea of connection. And to what extent are we making connections between aspects of our lives? So just as the participants in that study seem to find these hidden connections within these strings of letters, when we ask people, are you able to solve? personal problems. The idea of can I make connections between the resources that I have, the allies that I have, past experiences that I had, if you're able to make those connections in a more easily accessible way, you're going to feel more equipped to face down difficult personal problems. And that was a study that we ran where we had people do the hero's journey

intervention and ask them, how might you actually solve this problem in the course of the next month. And then we rated it in terms of how adaptive were the solutions that were coming up with. So people who may not have taken the hero's journey intervention, they were sometimes more likely to say, you know, this is a difficult problem. I just don't think I know how to solve it. But the people who had done the hero's journey intervention who are sort of primed to find more meaning, find more purpose, they were more likely to try to make those connections, solve their problems, and figure out, you know, how do I actually tackle this in a meaningful way? A reminder that if you have a question or comment about this episode or a story that reveals

the hero's journey in your own life that you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at Feedback at HiddenBrain.org. Use the subject line, Heroes Journey. Again, that's Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org. Ben, I'm wondering whether you've tried to discover the hero's journey in your own life? I have, yes.

It's one of those things that researchers often call what we do me search, where you realize that what you're studying actually relates to some profound experience that you've had in your life. And so, yes, I have absolutely applied this framework to my own life in a way that's really had profound benefits for me. Tell me a little bit about that. I understand that as a young person, You were a happy-go-lucky child and a teenager who hadn't really experienced much adversity. If you want to tell your own life story as a hero's journey, how would you tell it?

So, as you mentioned, I had had a really great childhood. I was headed off as an 18-year-old to the University of Texas at Austin. I was going to study finance and liberal arts. And I had a great group of friends. Everything seemed great, although unremarkable. I did not feel like I was destined for any broader sense of meaning. In fact, I figured I'd join the corporate world and maybe become a consultant or do other types of things. But shortly before I headed off to college, I had what I look at now is a really profound moment of shift.

Right before I headed off to orientation, my mom got really sick and had what we thought was appendicitis. Over time, over the next month or two, we quickly realized that she had stage four pancreatic cancer. And within just my first freshman year at college, she passed away from the disease. And as someone who had never really experienced death before and had by all other measures of pretty fortunate life, this was obviously something I was ill-equipped to deal with and was something that I needed to figure out. And that, while I didn't know it at the time, was really my quest in college. My studies were going fine and I was making friends. But looking back on it, I was really lost.

I really needed to figure out how to deal with this profound change in my life. And like many of the hero's journeys that we had talked about, I wanted to refuse the call. I didn't want to change as a result of this experience because I really didn't want this experience to have happened. And so I wanted to put it away into a box and not have to return to it. But what I realized over time was I needed to deal with it. I needed to find some sort of broader sense of meaning. And that really became something that I came back to time and time. again in college. And with the friends that I made in college and I actually met my wife while I was

an undergrad at UT Austin, they helped me sort of realize that this was a very important thing in my life. And this was a challenge that I really needed to face. And the way I ended up transforming as a result of it is I ended up, you know, after a short career in terms of consulting, realized that I actually felt a grander calling. I wanted to go back and do academic research to understand a little bit more about how people deal with things such as this. And I very quickly gravitated towards meaning research and narrative research as a way to find meaning. And that brought me to work on the hero's journey very profoundly. I felt like I was called to study it. And specifically with the intervention piece is not just saying, you know, it's nice to have meaning and some people

have more or less, but actually using my research to help people find more meaning in their lives or maybe they're at work. And that also shows up in my teaching as well. I teach in a business school. I teach organizational behavior, so topics like leadership and teamwork and really important things. But I also love to infuse in my class work

this idea of meaning in life is really important. Finding meaning in your work is something that is not just a nice to have, but is really important. And I like being there for students at a really formative time in their lives where they're facing a lot of pressures to get that investment banking job

or to get that consulting gig. And I like being there to say, yes, those are important. Yes, those are great goals. But also, you should think about broader sense of impact in terms of your lives. So both in terms of my research and my teaching, I sort of transformed into someone who might have been able to help me along when I was in those same shoes a few years ago. In your very first semester of teaching band, you found a way to have your own hero's journey leave a legacy in the lives of your students.

Tell me what happened. Yes, so this is one of those moments where looking back on it, it felt like fate or it felt like, you know, the natural end of the hero's journey that I now realize. And so what happened was I actually had not one, but two students in my first semester whose parents or who one of their parents passed away. So one, their parent had just passed away right before this semester

and one, one of their parents had passed away during the semester. And as you can imagine, based on my past experiences, I felt a profound sense of duty to try to help these students however I could. And while I wasn't able to fix what had happened to them as I had been through that same experience, I was able to pull on both my research and my own life experiences to try to point them towards the ideas of meaning, the ideas of well-being, the ideas of how do they march forward that I think I would have really appreciated it at the time. And in fact, in my last class day, I decided to have my students do the hero's journey intervention. And it was a pretty emotional experience for me. I actually found myself tearing up as I was teaching these students and looking at these two students in particular and telling them my own personal hero's journey that we've kind of discussed today. And seeing the wave of recognitions over them was really a profound way of giving back that I didn't anticipate being able to make so early. And maybe a lot of this legacy is in my own mind, which is still very memorable to myself. But it's something that I'm really proud of

that I was there and that I was able to use all of the transformation, all of the challenges I had faced in my personal and my professional life to try to make a difference in these students beyond just teaching them concepts in the classroom. And this is very much like what we talked about. Frodo Baggins returns to the Shire and is now able to use the personal transformation that he has experienced to help the people around him. This was very much. my small way of returning back to the Shire and trying to give back and help, you know, kick people out the door in a very positive way of you're dealing with this very difficult experience, but, you know, life will go on. And here's some tools and some insights from my challenge

and transformation that maybe would be helpful for them. Some time ago, we heard from a listener named Lisbeth, who was about to embark on a journey. It wasn't a hero's journey, but one that many of us dread. In 2018, Leesbeth was on the hunt for a new apartment. There was just one complication. I had a partner who was moving across country

to live with me, and she had three dogs and multiple cats, and I had cats, too. But it wasn't just that. One of the dogs was a pit bull. It is very hard to find someone who will rent to you. One, if you have more than one pet, but

two, if one of those pets is a pit bull. After looking at more than 20 apartments, not a single one came through. Finally, one couple said yes. Leesbeth knew why they said yes. We finally found this gay couple, that that is the reason that they took a chance on us. It was our connection in the LGBTQ plus group. The apartment search was one of many times when Leesbeth felt supported by the queer community. I came out in college, so that's when.

I joined the LGBTQ plus group. And I know there are a lot of parents who don't want their kids to come out. They think it's going to be such a hard life. They're so scared. But I've had the opposite experience. I've held so much belonging and connection from being part of that group. I mean, when one queer person passes another queer person, we look at each other and smile with this like knowing, like, yeah, we're in the same group. And it's such a good feeling. Such a good feeling. Think back to the last time you experienced something like this. Maybe you were at a work conference chatting with people in your particular field.

Or at the grocery store, where you laughed with a stranger because you were both wearing the same band's t-shirt. Or perhaps you were thousands of miles from home in a foreign country, and someone came up to you and started speaking in your native tongue. This happened to researcher J. Van Baville when he was a teenager. He was in Italy, and a girl about his age came up to him and started speaking in English. She'd seen a maple leaf on his sweater and recognized a fellow Canadian. Even when these moments are fleeting, a glance of recognition, a chat in a McDonald's in Italy, they give us a boost. We sense this other person is like us. Maybe they share the same interests or a similar past.

Maybe they see the world as we do. The opposite also holds true. When we interact with people from a different group, we feel some distance from them. We wonder if they have different interests, different values, different priorities. Our minds do this so quickly that we're not aware of how we're putting people into boxes, us and them. When we come back, the psychology of group identities and how group dynamics shape our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

At New York University, psychologist Jay Van Bavel studies the power of group identities. Along with Dominic Packer, he is the author of the power of us, harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation,

and promote social harmony. Jay was a guest on a previous Hidden Brain episode. It was titled Group Think. Today, he joins us to respond to listener questions and comments about his work. Jay Van Bavel, welcome back to you. hidden brain. Thank you so much for having me again. Jay, you found that the groups we belong to

shape everything from how we vote to the beer that we drink. Paint me a picture of the range of ways in which our groups shape who we are? The best way of thinking about it is that our groups are part of our identity, that we think of ourselves sometimes as individuals, but much of the time we think of ourselves as part of a group, as part of a fan of a sports team or in terms of our national identity, or even in terms of the role we have at our work. And once we think about ourselves through that lens, it changes how we interpret everything in our environment, from the people around us to our goals, to the food that we taste. So in other words, when I say that I'm a man, for example, in some ways, that is a group

identity. In fact, I'm pointing to something where I'm a part of a very large group of people. Yeah. And this can be good. It can help you build an affinity and solidarity with other men. it can also be bad if it leads to discrimination against women. Why do you think it is that the groups we belong to influence us so deeply, Jay? The reason is because it's fundamentally who we are.

I like to think of it as something that's baked into our DNA. Humans evolved in small groups, and the only way that we were able to survive and spread around the earth is by cooperating with one another. And the individuals and those groups who got kicked out of the group didn't survive and didn't pass on our genes. We are the descendants of people who manage to fit in. And after generation and generation of generation of people who manage to do that,

we are groupish creatures. You and other researchers have found that groups can shape us in big ways, but they also shape us in subtle ways down to even our sensory perceptions? Yes. We've run studies where we find that, for example, if you go into Switzerland, where chocolate is a big part of their national identity, and a source of national pride, if you make them think about themselves in terms of their Swiss identity,

they smell chocolate as more intense than when they're just thinking about themselves through a different identity. Wow. Let's talk about some of the factors that bind us together. We heard from a listener named Evelyn. She's a film teacher,

and she organized a summit to make films that brought together young people from around the world. The kids came from 26 countries. Evelyn writes, making films about serious subjects like climate change, discrimination, and women's rights, was the shared purpose that brought them together. Talk about how a sense of shared purpose, Jay, can bind people together. I feel like we see examples of this all through history.

Yeah, I think that 75 years of research on this topic has taught us one thing. It's that when people have a goal that pulls them together, where they all have to contribute, is one of the most powerful ways of binding people together. And it can pull together people who are normally in groups in conflict. Suddenly they're motivated to cooperate and try to accomplish something that's really important to all of them. And so climate change is a great example of that. It motivates and inspires all kinds of people from around the world to care about a real

important issue. Now, groups can also come together around shared pain. A listener named Edith is a clinical psychologist in Miami. she worked with survivors and family members of people who died in the collapse of the surfside condominium in 2021. Through meetings of groups every day for almost a month, we were able to get people together of all different kinds of religions, genders, countries of origin, and races and beliefs to get together and really come together as a family, overcoming many, many differences that maybe in

another circumstance they would not be able to overcome. So we talked a second ago about the role of shared purpose. Can you also talk about the role of shared pain? Yes, one of the most powerful ways to bind people together is a shared experience that requires them to support one another. And so this can happen under threat when you feel like your group is being attacked. And it can happen under a disaster traumatic experience like the one that happened in Miami. And this is part of, again, human nature. We tend to think of humans as having this reaction to stress as fight or flight. But research has found that we also engage in what's called tending and befriending.

That under stress, two of the most powerful ways of coping are to work together and build support networks and relationships and tending to one another, to help one another get through it. I mean, this might be why when you think about people who are in military outfits, for example, they may have served in combat 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 70 years ago, and they still think about the buddy in the trench next to them from all those years back as being one of the closest people to them in their entire lives. Yeah. And I've actually heard that people in the military, why they're willing to throw themselves on a grenade or jump out of a trench and defend their fellow military members is not necessarily even because they care about the belief system

of their country, but they're there to defend the immediate group of people who are in the trenches with them. Their bonds are incredibly well-connected and powerful. And the military does lots of things like marching and chanting in unison, as well as their experiences in war that bind them together. I'm wondering if it's also the case that when people go through some shared suffering together, in some ways they have an understanding of the world that is different than people who have not been through that terrible thing.

So if you've gone through a natural disaster, for example, and you know what that was like, you know, you can try and explain it to people who weren't there, but it's not the same as someone who actually was there with you while it was happening. Yes. One of a core part of any group is having a shared sense of. reality. And so sometimes we rally around a shared experience. A part of it is because other people from the outside might not understand what it's like to go through that and experience it and suffer through it. The other thing that groups do is create a shared sense of reality. In this case,

they create a sense of meaning and purpose that helps them get past the pain and find a way forward in their lives. Now, there's a flip side to the warmth and connection that group identities can bring us. A listener Rebecca grew up in the Midwest. She had a question about group dynamics when it comes to tightly knit religious and cultural communities. I noticed when I was growing up and in high school many years ago that it was a big deal if a young person moved away from the community to the point that I was told that they

would have a ceremonial funeral for that person if they did not come back within some period of time. I got to believe that there's a group dynamic at play there that's attracted some research, and I'm curious what drives that, because these are family members, often parents and siblings. Thank you. So, J, the story shows the power of religion to bind some people together and to exclude others. And I think what I hear Rebecca asking is how a parent can set aside family bonds with a son or a daughter in favor of religious ties? Yeah, the point. The point here is really profound, which is that we think of our family and these people share our DNA. They're like as close to us as possible.

And yet these other group identities can become more important. And what's happening in these situations is something that could normally be positive, which is you're part of a religious community that looks out for one another, cares for one another, provides support and meaning. But in this case, if you're getting people to turn against their own family members and have a funeral when they're gone, what that starts to look like is cult psychology. And we have a chapter of this about cult psychology in our book.

And when people are part of a cultish type of group, and this can happen in religious communities, it can happen at work. The example of a cult that we studied in organizations was Enron, which was a massive energy company that went bankrupt because they had a cult-like mentality. And in those environments, you create social norms that are very unhealthy. People, when they're part of a group, they want to be good group members and belong.

And so they look to see what the norms are in the community of fellow group members and they follow them. And so what you're seeing in this example is that the norm is to treat anybody who leaves as dead to them. In some traditional religious communities, they also engage in what's called shunning. If you leave the group, your family is not allowed to talk to you anymore, ever again. And so these are where the norms get very strong and can lead to very negative relationships with people who would otherwise be the closest to you, the ones you'd care about and love and would be there for you as well. Do you think there's a bright line or a blurry line between, you know, let's say fans of a sports team and they're devoted to the sports team and they have antagonism to the fans of other sports teams and what you're describing as a cult? Yeah. So I think sports are a really good example because I'm a big sports fan.

I've been to lots of football games, hockey games, baseball games. And you can walk into a stadium with 100,000 other people chanting and covered in the colors of the team. And it can feel like actually a hostile environment. But in almost none of the stadiums I've ever been to has anything ever broken out into actual conflict. And again, the reason here is because of norms. because when you go to a professional football game or baseball game, the norm is that everybody's there to cheer and you're allowed to cheer for the opposite team

and people will maybe give you a hard time or tease you, but it will never cross a line. And they have people there to enforce the norms, you know, the ushers security that's now they scan you when you come in to make sure you're not a risk to anybody and bringing in anything dangerous. And when you do that, you can actually have incredible numbers of people

all chanting and cheering and feeling all of the intense emotions associated with groupishness without spilling over into the violence that you see in normal intergroup conflict. When we come back, why we can sometimes feel part of a group one day, but not the next. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In his book, Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam, that since the 1950s, Americans were engaging less with social groups. Gone were many of the bowling leagues, civic organizations, and religious groups

that bonded us with neighbors and friends. Instead, we watched TV by ourselves or buried our faces in our phones. But at New York University, J. Van Bavel argues that group identities, while changing, remain a central part of who we are. Jay, one thing we talked about in our last conversation was sports fandom, and we've talked a little bit about it today as well. We received an email from a listener named Lois, who writes, having had polio as a child, I have lived over 70 years with a partially paralyzed right leg. Sports teams have not been a part of my life, but musical groups

have been. I'm quite sure you would find the closest groups with the strongest interpersonal bonds are those involved with performing music. I'll expand on what Lois is saying here, Jay, to include all performing arts, theater, comedy, dance, can being part of an artistic troupe help to bring people together? That is something I think that's really important to point out, is that groups can form around all kinds of shared interests, certainly around people who are part of a symphony or a musical group, part of other creative endeavors. And often those connections are really profound. And there's lots of good reasons for it. So there's research showing that when people listen to music together, it actually binds them and generates a shared identity.

This is in part why concerts can be really powerful emotional experiences because everybody's dancing and moving and just immersed in the music. And certainly other creative endeavors where you're part of a community where you get a sense of belonging and a sense of distinctiveness are really powerful for driving really strong group identities. And so for artists, a lot of times they are kind of the rebel. of society. They're trying new things. They're creative and different from mainstream society. And so that actually can be something that makes them feel special to be part of something that's

different from the way everybody else is approaching and thinking about life. We received a message from listener Christina about the role of place in shaping identity. I was reflecting on how group identity has shaped my life. And at first, it was really difficult to come up with examples. And then I stopped for just a moment to think about my biggest identity. And one of those is being a Houstonian, someone born and raised in Houston, Texas. So people often have really strong affinities with the place that they identify as home, Jay. What I find so fascinating about this is a place is just, you know, a place. It's the land, the streets and buildings. Why do you think our hometowns exert the force on us that they do?

Place is an incredibly powerful way that we find and connect with other people, build shared memories, have a sense of purpose. And there's lots of symbols associated with place that signal that were special. So I live in New York City, and I've lived here for last 16 years. And I've developed an identity as a New Yorker, even though I didn't move here until I was already 30 years old. And in New York, there's a very strong identity. I've actually heard that even having the phone number 212 at the start of your phone number is something that New Yorkers value. and really don't want to lose once they get it because it's a powerful signal that you're a true New Yorker.

But I will say this. I was just actually last night planning my high school reunion with my friends because I grew up in a small town called Fox Creek, 2,000 people in rural, northern Alberta and Canada. And we still talk, you know, it's now 30 years since our graduation. And we have a shared sense of identity from that place, experiences, memories, and connections that will still draw us together that will pull people together from multiple countries to get together to revisit

those and remember them and share them. So place is incredibly important to people, whether it's a country, a state, a town or a city, or even your local community. Some communities have a really strong identity where they have like group barbecues and activities that are just community focused. So this can happen at all kinds of place. So Christina, as we heard, is from Houston. But besides identifying with Houston, she took care to mention that she does not identify with another city. Here she is again. And a big part of that identity is not only love for our city and our sports teams, but along with that comes a dislike for the city of Dallas, our rival in many things,

not only in business, but in sports. And I was like, well, that hasn't really affected my life until I stopped for just another moment and realized I actually turned down a job offer that I really wanted because of the simple fact that it was in Dallas. And as a Houstonian, that was just so unpalatable to me. So Jay, you found that these days much of our connection to our groups is actually motivated by our animosity toward outside groups. Say more about this idea. Yeah, a core part of identity is a sense of us and them. Not only is there a sense of who we are, but who we are not.

There's a critical group boundary. And in the case where you have a rivalry, like between Houston and Dallas, it actually provides a very powerful motivating force for people to come together to compete with people in Dallas, whether it's sports or forms of civic pride. And that can actually be an incredible motivator. There are studies that have been done actually at NYU's business school about the power of arrival. That when we have a rival, it is actually one of the triggers that can really. bind us together and motivate us to do incredible things. And those things can be great things in America, I think, of the Cold War and the space race and the development of all the technology that came up from that competition.

And then it can lead to negative things. If you really start to spill over this animosity into hatred, it can lead to violence, discrimination, and conflict. And so we have to be very mindful that it can be very useful to have healthy competition and healthy conflict, like the example of Houston versus Dallas and sports teams. But we have to be very mindful that there has to be a boundary where it doesn't spill over into those negative aspects of group identity. I'm wondering why many animosities around group identity are connected with people who are

quite similar to one another. So for 90% of the people on the planet, Dallas and Houston are both cities in Texas. They have so much in common. Why do you think it is that people from Houston and Dallas focus on what makes them dissimilar. Yeah, the classic term for this is called the narcissism of small differences that we actually often become obsessed with people who are very similar to us, in part because we're comparing ourselves to them. And so this can be where you're competitive with a good friend or an office mate because they seem the most relevant comparison to you. Now, that's different from

the way that most people think about conflict, where they think that we have conflict with the people who are most different from us, the people who have radically different belief systems or religions or come from different countries, different skin colors, different genders. But in most situations, it's actually the people who are similar to us because we see them as a relevant form of competition. I'm wondering if the same thing is true in politics. Republicans and Democrats in the United States feel like there are, you know, chasms separating them. But of course, so most people on the planet, that Republicans and Democrats within the U.S. are all Americans, and the distinction between them is probably small. Do you think this affects the way political polarization operates, Jay?

It is definitely part of the puzzle of polarization. I would say there's two pieces of the puzzle of polarization. One is that people do have genuine disagreements about some policies like health care or immigration. But on top of that, there is what we call affect of polarization, where it's just you really don't like a group. simply because they're part of another party, even if they agree with you on the actual policies. And so this leads to all kinds of real discrimination. And I will say part of it is exaggerated. If you actually measure what people believe, the average Democrat and average Republican

aren't that far apart. But if you ask them what they think the other party believes, they imagine that people from the other party hate them way more than they do. They imagine that people in the other party are very different from them in terms of beliefs in terms of demographics. And so it creates a funny situation where they tend to avoid each other. They now move to different places

and communities and states. But if you actually put people from these different political parties in a conversation, they predict it will go badly and they're shocked when it goes as good as it does because their stereotypes are so negative

and so distorted from reality that most people they're talking to once they're in the flesh and blood are actually much more personable and interesting and reasonable than they imagined. Yeah. One thing that I think many of us notice when it comes to group identity

is that it can create very different conversations depending on who you're talking to. So, for example, you hear New Yorkers complain all the time about New York City. They'll say things like it's really dirty, there's trash everywhere, it's crowded, the housing is so expensive. But if you come in as an outsider and criticize New Yorkers,

will fight you. Yeah. There is something about the New York identity that is about complaining, about the smell, about the garbage, about all kinds of things. But it is also a source of pride. And there's actually a funny aspect of identity in that way. And again, this goes back to this optimal distinctiveness. New York feels different than every other city in America. And the things that make it distinctive are the things that can be really frustrating as you live here day to day. But they're also the things that make it special. And when someone from the outside, criticizes those things, you defend it.

My favorite quote on this, I saw someone post this on social media. They said everybody complains that New York smells like urine. But they said the way you have to think about it is urine happens to smell like the greatest city on earth. You're thinking about it the wrong way. We heard from a listener named Karen. She has two daughters. And when they were younger, they played in a soccer league.

And she writes, the teams were chosen randomly, and every year you would sit with different people on different sides of the field based on what team your daughter was assigned to. So you could no longer sit with your friend whose daughter was on your daughter's team last year because they were now the enemy. It's interesting how one year you're cheering on a child because they are on your child's team and the next year you want them to lose. So it almost sounds, Jay, that, you know, Karen was taking part in a social science experiment, the way these soccer teams were constructed. but talk for a moment about how malleable group loyalties can be. So Karen's experience maps exactly onto my experience. When I was a kid, we'd play games of pick up hockey or pick up basketball or pick up football. And I had my one friend, Jaron, he and I were almost best friends.

And if we flipped a coin and ended up on the same team, we got along famously. But if we were on the opposite team, by the end of the game, we'd be yelling and fighting with one another because we were both very competitive. And that inspired me actually to study group identity. And most of the research I started doing on this when I was a PhD student was bringing people into lab and flipping a coin and putting them on two teams. And what we found over and over and over again is just that simple random flip of a coin makes people identify with their own group and discriminate against the other group. They will give more resources to members of their own group.

They see them as friends. They automatically trust them more and believe. what they say. And these are the things that happen, even if they don't have a chance to interact or even meet anybody in their own group, just knowing that they're part of the group is sufficient. And so this is actually called minimal groups because these effects have been found for 50 years over and over again. I actually think this is one of the most important findings in all of psychology that a flip of a coin changes our identities and radically changes how we see ourselves and how we treat other people in really deep, profound ways. And so,

This is essentially what Karen's experiencing with her daughter and the soccer teams. This is a powerful psychological force. And it's something that it's easy to take for granted until you're in it. And you see what it does to you. But this is something that's important part of human social psychology. When we come back, what happens when you disagree with your group? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Psychologist J. Van Bavel studies how group identities can bridge religious, racial, and political divides. With Dominic Packer, he's the author of The Power of Us, harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. As we've discussed, Jay, our group identities shape how we as individuals view the world, but being part of a group of people can be complicated. Maybe a political leader of your party or the coach of your sports team takes your group. group in a direction you might disagree with. Here is listener Miriam. I am a Jewish person. I identify very much with my group as a Jewish person, but I do not at all agree with what's happening in Israel right now in the conflict with Gaza. As a result, it makes me feel almost ashamed of my religion, and when it comes to the holidays, I'm very conflicted about

celebrating them. So I was just wondering, my question is, how does it affect people when the group identity that they've always had suddenly manifest something that they don't agree with or they feel uncomfortable with and they feel conflicted about it? What do you think, Jay? I mean, that's a really powerful question, Shanker. So what Miriam's talking about is the fact that you can feel pride when your group does well. Again, a national group winning a gold medal, your favorite sports team. But it can also be a source of shame. Or in this case, it sounds like she's feeling a lot of cognitive dissonance. Like she feels really identified at this group and very upset about where it's going. So when I hear stories like this, I think that one of the most important things about any group,

is to create healthy norms. And in this case, the norm that I think is really important in any healthy group is about dissent. The research on this, done by my co-author Dominic when we were in grad school, he wanted to understand why people speak up when they think their group is going wrong. And what he found was actually really counterintuitive. Many people have this notion that dissent happens when people don't like the group and want to leave it. But what actually happens is the opposite. it is often driven by people who really identify with the group and care about it and worry about

where it's going and think that the group is going to be damaged if it continues down this direction. And so they speak up despite the fact that they know they're going to get pushback or social ostracism or punishment. Because I always just remind people, think of the terms we have for dissenters. You know, throughout history and how they're treated like heretics, how are they treated, traders, even devil's advocates. You go to a company and they'll say so-and-so is the devil's advocate. And I say, is there a meaner word you could come up for someone than devil's advocate? So like pause and think about what you're saying. And so what any group needs to do,

whether this is a national group, part of a community, I often see this in organizations, to avoid that kind of cult mentality is to make sure that you make it safe for people to speak up in dissent, and part of it is understanding that the people who are doing it are doing it because they want to help the group and they're worried about it. And they think it's gone wrong. And so that is a fundamental norm that needs to be reinforced and ideally by leaders, because leaders can make it very hard to dissent if they punish dissenters, or they can make it easy by expressing how much they value them and how important it is. And in society, this is often through protest. This is like one of the most important signals of a healthy democracy is that

people can peacefully protest. So this is like a signal that we're healthy in our society if we can do this, that we can speak up. I've been to countries around the world where I talk openly of my criticisms of my home country and people's eyes get wide because they would never feel safe doing that in their own country. And so this is something that is really critical in any group that you're part of is to understand the dissenters are often the people who care the most. And they're speaking up because they're concerned and giving them a platform. and hearing them out, even if you don't agree with them,

at least taking them seriously and understanding they're doing it out of a position of care. You've done a lot of work looking at group identities in political context. Listener, Jacqueline, sent us a message about that. We definitely have a whole lot of tribalism going on in political parties, in families and friend groups, but certain groups are coded as bad or harmful. and I feel like we've collectively, we've just lost our collective culture.

What we're taught to do is stand on the other side of the stream and point a finger at somebody and hate them because of all of the ways that they're different from us. And what I've begun doing is seeking out people that don't agree with me and doing so from a place of curiosity, trying to understand them, and as a secondary to be understood, to listen more than I talk. So we talked earlier about how outgroup hate can be as or even more motivating than in-group love. And it's possible that maybe every generation feels that we are more divided than previous

generations. But what do you make of Jacqueline's point, Jay, about conflict between different political groups and also her approach to addressing it? So Jacqueline puts her finger on a feeling that many people right now in the United States have and many other countries. In the United States, as you said, this is a political divide in many cases. But hate can come from all kinds of angles. It can be driven by racial hatred. It can be driven by religious hatred. So I think we have to take it always very seriously that it is a dangerous thing because it is very powerful and motivating. And the other

thing to understand is one of the reasons why people are so passionately hate other groups is because it's driven from a position of morality. I actually have studied this in have several papers on it, that when people hate something, they say it's because that group or that belief system violates their sense of morality. And the moment that something violates your sense of morality, you see it through the lens of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. And it's hard for you to listen. If you see things that way, it's hard for you to treat other people like human beings when you think that they're morally evil. But what Jacqueline's doing is almost textbook what social psychologists have found is actually really important to get past

these issues, which is that you need to realize that you can reach out to people and they're not the evil, sinister beings that you believe. Some of them might be, but often our mental images and stereotypes are way worse than reality for the entire group, and we shouldn't apply them to everybody in the group. The other thing that you need to understand is that if you approach it from a position of curiosity and you listen and reach out to other people to hear their perspectives, that turns out to be the single thing that is most powerful at putting other people at ease. Because in these types of intergroup conflicts, people, when they're interacting with someone from the other group, expect to be criticized or manipulated. And so they immediately move to the defensive and shut down.

But if you approach it from a perspective of curiosity and listening, it turns out you actually are more persuasive. They actually appreciate. the conversation more, you actually start to shatter their stereotypes as well as your own, and that becomes the foundation for having a real relationship that's built on mutual empathy and respect. And so I can't stress enough how the world would be a better place if we had many more people like Jacqueline. You know, Jacqueline's comment made me think about conversations we've had about intellectual humility. You and some colleagues recently published an interesting paper on the role of collective intellectual humility and how it might be easier as a group than

as an individual to be humble about what we know or don't know. Tell me more about this work, Jay. Yeah, a topic that really has fascinated me for the last half decade or so is intellectual humility. And what this means is essentially openness to different people, to different experiences, without getting threatened or defensive if you disagree or they challenge you. And this is often considered a virtue. It's an intellectual virtue that any of us can cultivate. Now, most of the research on this has been at the individual level, that some individuals are more intellectually humble. And it turns out people who are are less polarized, more willing to listen to people who are different than them, more willing to accept criticism of their own perspectives and accept kind of

well-rounded views of things. So it turns out to be a real superpower. But it also operates at the group level. So you can be part of a group and have an openness. to dissent and criticism in the group. And sometimes even in a group, it can be useful to have someone who's low on intellectual humility because they push everybody to think about something that they're not taking seriously. And they continue to pound away at it. This is often the psychology of a whistleblower that they're not going to drop it because they think something really bad is going on.

And so they're going to continue to hammer at home or get the word out to the public about it because they're very deeply concerned about it. So again, this is partly the role of leaders. to create norms. And when I run my research meetings every Friday, we have a research team of 15 to 20 people who meet, if I'm talking about a paper we're working on or something that I've written and I share it for feedback, I share my opinion last because what I learned is once I became a professor, the students saw me as powerful. And if I would say I really like something or disliked it, they would go around the room trying to find reasons to agree with me. And they're smart,

so they could do that. But we got much smarter as a group. group when I shut up and I asked them for their opinion and they would go around the room and share all kinds of different perspectives, including ones that were quite different from mine and kind of caught blind spots that I had. And in those cases, we came up with much better solutions, more creative ideas, and we became more innovative and our research became better, became more impactful. And guess what? That's an environment that everybody loves. So it also became a place that people wanted to be part of that group more and more once they realized that there was kind of this vibe of intellectual humility. So it's something I'm trying to study now is how you can

create this in other groups because I think this is really fundamental to, A, getting a shared sense of reality, but also being creative and innovative and creating a space that people want to be a part of. Now, being part of a group is something that most of the time I think we are able to choose, but sometimes this choice is made for us. That was the case with listener Radica. I'm wondering if we could explore group think when it comes to being put in a group that you don't necessarily want to be put into, right? So there's certain identities that you want to be part of who you are. But society puts you into buckets. Society puts labels on you that maybe you don't want to have on you.

And maybe in the beginning, you sort of resist. or you fight those labels, and then eventually you're just maybe tired of fighting those labels, and you sort of just like sink into that identity. And you're like, well, I guess everyone is making me out to be this way. You know, maybe I am this way. Talk about the role of agency and choice in group membership, group participation, and group identity, Jay. The issue of agency in groups is crucially important.

The message that I try to send to people all the time is that you should be very, very thoughtful about the groups that you join because those groups will shape you. And that was something she mentioned that once you're part of the group and people will see you that way, you start to adapt to that view. And the other way in which the group shapes you is by their values and norms, you start to internalize those. So we should be very thoughtful about the groups we join because they're going to lead us to be our best selves or worse selves.

And if you try to join the groups that are going to help you attain the type of identity that you want to have and achieve the goals you want, you're going to be a lot happier and more successful in life. Now, what she's talking about is the case that happens to all of us at some point is that you're going to get put into groups. And for many of us, those groups are our age, our gender, our ethnicity, where we're born, our family lineage, because we cannot control any of those. And people stereotype us on the basis of those things. And they often do it within 100 to 200 milliseconds of seeing somebody. Wow.

This is what the neuroscience shows. You show somebody something within a few hundred milliseconds. They're often encoding their race, their gender, their age. And so we can't avoid that. And if people treat us differently on that basis, it's a challenge to escape it. And so this is why I strongly encourage us to, like, talk to people and be open and listen to who they are. And what identities they actually care about.

I do this exercise in groups sometimes when I'm giving you. talks. I ask people to list the 10 most important identities to them. It's a great actual conversation starter at cocktail parties or work retreats because you learn a ton about a person by what identities actually matter to them. For me, that may be a father, an author, a professor, a New Yorker now, a hockey fan, but you start to learn about what I really value and the things that I don't actually care about that aren't central to me. But when you see me, you might not see those identities. They don't pop out from the picture of me. And so it is really important that we have an open mind and talk to people because they are all of these things. The classic phrase for it is

we contain multitudes. And people don't like to be stereotyped and pigeonholed into an identity, especially one that they did not choose. And so I think we need to create a space for people to have more freedom and agency to select the identities and the groups that matter to them. And you'll see people do this. They'll signal it by wearing a hat of their favorite team or the city they're from or the country from the nation that they're born in. If that matters to them. And this is their way of sending a signal out into the world about the identities that matter to them and who they really are.

J. Van Baville is a psychologist at New York University with Dominic Packer. He is the author of The Power of Us, harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. Jay, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me again. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

You are part of an important group. Listeners of Hidden Brain. If you feel we are a part of your group identity, please help us to broaden the circle and invite more people to join our group. Please share today's conversation with a few friends, family members, or co-workers. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.