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who, in turn, had done better than the women reminded of their female in-group. Your in-group identity influences the way you judge people, but it also influences the way you feel about yourself, the way you behave, and sometimes even your performance.

We all belong to multiple in-groups, and, like the groups Asian Americans and women, they can have conflicting norms. I’ve found that once we are conscious of this, we can use it to our advantage. For example, I occasionally smoke a cigar, and when I do I feel a certain in-group kinship with my best friend in college, my PhD adviser, and Albert Einstein, all fellow physicists who liked their cigars. But when I think my smoking is getting dangerously out of hand, I find I can kill the urge quickly by coaxing myself to focus instead on another in-group of smokers, one that includes my father, who suffered from lung problems, and my cousin, who had debilitating mouth cancer.

The conflicting norms of our in-groups can at times lead to rather curious contradictions in our behavior. For example, from time to time, the media will broadcast public service announcements aimed at reducing petty crimes like littering and pilfering relics from national parks. These ads often also decry the alarming frequency with which these crimes occur. In one such ad, a Native American dressed in traditional garb canoes across a debris-ridden river. After the Native American reaches the heavily littered opposite shore, a driver—John Q. Public—zooms down an adjacent road and tosses trash out of his car, strewing garbage at the Native American’s feet. The ad cuts to a close-up, showing a lone teardrop running down the man’s face. That ad explicitly preaches an anti-litter message to our conscious minds. But it also conveys a message to our unconscious: those in our in-group, our fellow parkgoers, do litter. So which message wins out, the ethical appeal or the group norm reminder? No one studied the effects of that particular ad, but in a controlled study done on public service announcements, another ad that simply denounced littering was successful in inhibiting the practice, while a similar ad that included the phrase “Americans will produce more litter than ever!” led to increased littering.¹¹ It’s doubtful that anyone consciously interpreted “Americans will produce more litter than ever!” as an order rather than a criticism, but by identifying littering as a group norm, it had that result.

In a related study, researchers created a sign condemning the fact that many visitors steal the wood from Petrified Forest National Park.¹² They placed the sign on a well-used pathway, along with some secretly marked pieces of wood. Then they watched to see what effect the sign would have. They found that in the absence of a sign, souvenir hunters stole about 3 percent of the wood pieces in just a ten-hour period. But with the warning sign in place, that number almost tripled, to 8 percent. Again, it is doubtful that many of the pilferers literally said to themselves, Everyone does it, so why not me? But that seems to be the message received by their unconscious. The researchers pointed out that messages that condemn yet highlight undesired social norms are common, and that they invite counterproductive results. So while a college administration may think it is warning students when it says, “Remember! You must cut down on binge drinking, which is prevalent on campus!” what sinks in may instead be a call to action: Remember! Binge drinking is prevalent on campus! When, as a child, I tried to use my friend’s habits to justify, say, playing baseball on Saturday instead of going to the synagogue, my mother would say something like “So, if Joey jumped into a volcano, would you do it, too?” Now, decades later, I realize I should have said, “Yeah, Mom. Studies show that I would.”

I’VE SAID THAT we treat our in-groups and out-groups differently in our thinking, whether or not we consciously intend to make the distinction. Over the years, curious psychologists have tried to determine the minimal requirements necessary for a person to feel a kinship with an in-group. They have found that there is no minimal requirement. It is not necessary for you to share any attitudes or traits with your fellow group members, or even for you to have met the other group members. It is the simple act of knowing that you belong to a group that triggers your in-group affinity.

In one study, researchers had subjects look at images of paintings by the Swiss artist Paul Klee and the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and then indicate which they preferred.¹³ The researchers labeled each subject as either a Kandinsky fan or a Klee fan. The two painters had distinctive styles, but unless the subjects happened to be fanatic art historians specializing in early-twentieth-century avant-garde European painters, they probably had no reason to feel any particular warmth for those who shared their opinion. For the vast majority of people, on the passion scale, Klee versus Kandinsky was not exactly Brazil versus Argentina or fur coat versus cloth coat.

After labeling their subjects, the researchers did something that may appear odd. They, in essence, gave each subject a bucket of money and told them to divide it among the other subjects in any way they saw fit. The division was carried out in private. None of the subjects knew any of the other subjects, or could even see them during the course of the experiment. Still, when passing out the money, they favored their in-group, those who shared their group label.

A large body of research replicates the finding that our group-based social identity is so strong that we will discriminate against them and favor us even if the rule that distinguishes them from us is akin to flipping a coin. That’s right: not only do we identify with a group based on the flimsiest of distinctions, we also look at group members differently—even if group membership is unrelated to any relevant or meaningful personal qualities. That’s not just important in our personal lives; it also affects organizations. For example, companies can gain by fostering their employees’ in-group identification, something that can be accomplished by creating and making salient a distinctive corporate culture, as was done very successfully by companies such as Disney, Apple, and Google. On the other hand, it can be dicey when a company’s internal departments or divisions develop a strong group identity, for that can lead to both in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination, and research suggests that hostility erupts more readily between groups than between individuals.¹⁴ But regardless of what kind of shared identity does or doesn’t exist within a company, many companies find it effective to use marketing to foster a group identity among their customers. That’s why in-groups based on Mac versus PC ownership, or Mercedes versus BMW versus Cadillac, are more than just computer clubs or car clubs: we treat such categorizations as meaningful in a far broader realm than they have any right to be.

Dog person versus cat person. Rare meat versus medium. Powdered detergent versus liquid. Do we really draw broad inferences from such narrow distinctions as these? The Klee/Kandinsky study, and literally dozens more like it, followed a classic experimental paradigm invented by Henri Tajfel, who conducted the line-length experiment.¹⁵ In this paradigm, subjects were assigned to one of two groups. They were told that their group assignments had been made on the basis of something they shared with other members of the group but which, objectively speaking, was really quite meaningless as a way of affiliating with a group—either the Klee/Kandinsky preference or whether they had overestimated or underestimated the number of dots that were quickly flashed on a screen.

As in the study I quoted earlier, Tajfel allowed his subjects to dole out awards to their fellow subjects. To be precise, he had them give out points that could later be cashed in for money. The subjects did not know the identities of the people they were giving points to. But in all cases they knew the group to which the person belonged. In Tajfel’s original study, the handing out of points was a bit complicated, but the crux of the experiment lies in just the way it was done, so it is worth describing.

The experiment consisted of over a dozen stages. At each stage, a subject (“awarder”) had to make a choice regarding how to dole out points to two other subjects (“recipients”), who, as I said, were anonymous. Sometimes the two recipients were both members of the subject’s own group or both members of the other group; sometimes one was a member of the subject’s own group and the other was a member of the other group.

The catch was that the choices offered to awarders did not represent a zero-sum game. That is, they did not entail simply deciding how to divide a fixed number of points. Rather, the options offered added up to varying point totals, as well as differing ways of splitting those points among the two recipients. At each stage, the awarder had to choose from among over a dozen alternative ways to award points. If the awarders felt no in-group favoritism, the logical action would be to choose whichever alternative bestows upon the two recipients the greatest total number of points. But the awarders did that in only one circumstance: when they were dividing points among two members of their in-group. When awarding points to two members of the out-group, they chose options that resulted in awarding far fewer points. And what is really extraordinary is that when the options required awarders to divide points between one in-group member and one out-group member, they tended to make choices that