Think Again

FITTING IN AND STANDING OUT
For decades psychologists have found that people can feel animosity toward
other groups even when the boundaries between them are trivial. Take a
seemingly innocuous question: is a hot dog a sandwich? When students
answered this question, most felt strongly enough that they were willing to
sacrifice a dollar to those who agreed with them to make sure those who
disagreed got less.

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In every human society, people are motivated to seek belonging and
status. Identifying with a group checks both boxes at the same time: we
become part of a tribe, and we take pride when our tribe wins. In classic
studies on college campuses, psychologists found that after their team won
a football game, students were more likely to walk around wearing school
swag. From Arizona State to Notre Dame to USC, students basked in the
reflected glory of Saturday victories, donning team shirts and hats and
jackets on Sunday. If their team lost, they shunned school apparel, and
distanced themselves by saying “they lost” instead of “we lost.” Some
economists and finance experts have even found that the stock market rises
if a country’s soccer team wins World Cup matches and falls if they lose.
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Rivalries are most likely to develop between teams that are
geographically close, compete regularly, and are evenly matched. The
Yankees and Red Sox fit this pattern: they’re both on the East Coast, they
play each other eighteen or nineteen times a season, they both have histories
of success, and as of 2019, they had competed over 2,200 times—with each
team winning over 1,000 times. The two teams also have more fans than
any other franchises in baseball.
I decided to test what it would take to get fans to rethink their beliefs
about their bitter rivals. Working with a doctoral student, Tim Kundro, I ran
a series of experiments with passionate Yankees and Red Sox supporters.
To get a sense of their stereotypes, we asked over a thousand Red Sox and
Yankees fans to list three negative things about their rivals. They mostly

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used the same words to describe one another, complaining about their
respective accents, their beards, and their tendency to “smell like old corn
chips.”