Fair weather friends... Mark Buchanan

In one of my guest columns at the New York Times, I touched on the tendency we all have to see the social world in terms of groups -- crudely speaking, in terms of "us versus them". As any number of experiments in social psychology have established, if you separate people into two groups, even on a completely random basis, most will pretty soon start to feel an affiliation to those of their own group, and some degree of antagonism, animosity or distrust of the other group.

We seem to be hard-wired with good skills for detecting group alliances, no doubt because such alliances were for our ancestors a matter of life and potential death, and those who didn't get it right, quickly, suffered.

Some forthcoming research adds a new twist to this topic, showing that we have a surprising flexibility on who we consider to be a member of our "in group", and who we cast off as a deplorable "out group" member.

In 1988, the Jamaican-born, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the gold medal for the 100 meters sprint. Johnson was then later disqualified for steroid use. Canadian psychologists Monika Stelzl, Leslie Janes and Clive Seligman -- stimulated by a personal perception that Johnson’s identity, his Canadian-ness, seemed to shift during this episode -- tested the idea by a quantitative study of articles in a database of Canadian newspapers.

Their results suggest that, in fact, Johnson's identity did shift: he was "‘Canadian’ after winning the gold medal but ‘Jamaican’ after disqualification."

The interesting point is the feedback on group identity -- we have allegiance and emotional solidarity with "in group" members, but at the same time, it seems that who we perceive our in group members to be is subject to subtle redefinition.

Curiously, the authors point to an unlikely early scientist who also wrote about this effect:

"In the two reported studies, we have data capturing a dynamic that Albert Einstein poignantly noted more than 80 years ago: ‘If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew’."