by Adam Alter
RCTV’s protest was simple, but powerful and effective: it began broadcasting upside-down images of the Venezuelan flag. Protesters took to the streets, and they, too, carried the inverted flags. Chávez had left the nation in disarray, and the flag’s inversion was a powerful emblem of that disorder. The government reacted harshly, forcing the remaining television channels to broadcast a severe message of rebuke. RCTV hadn’t torn, burned, defaced, or otherwise damaged the flag, but its inversion was enough to anger the volatile government.
National flags hold similar importance across the globe. In a classic Civil War poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, patriot Barbara Frietchie dissuades Confederate soldiers from destroying the American flag: “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.” Other nations share America’s fervor. China imposes up to three years in prison for flag desecration, Mexico up to four years, and even liberal strongholds like New Zealand and Denmark legislate against flag destruction. Saudi Arabia’s flag is so sacred that in 1994 McDonald’s restaurants had to remove take-out bags bearing the flags of the nations taking part in the FIFA World Cup. In 2002, FIFA designed a ball that featured each participating country’s flag, but the Saudis balked when they imagined players kicking their national symbol.
Flags are the symbolic embodiment of national identity, which explains why so many countries outlaw public flag burning. It stands to reason, then, that exposing people to their national flag might prime patriotism and national solidarity, but it might also prime the dark sides of those concepts, like insularity and nationalistic aggression.
First, the good news: priming nationalistic Americans with the U.S. flag reminds them that the United States was founded on the principles of equality and liberty. Three social psychologists invited students at a large American university to complete a brief questionnaire that began by asking how fervently nationalistic they felt toward the United States, and then assessed their attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims. Some of the students sat facing a large American flag, whereas others faced a blank wall instead. The flags didn’t affect the students who weren’t particularly nationalistic; they reported feeling very little anger or hostility toward Arabs and Muslims regardless of whether they sat facing a flag or a blank wall. But the pattern was very different for the nationalistic students, who were far more tolerant of Arabs and Muslims when they sat in front of the U.S. flag. These results show that flags temporarily remind people of the ideals that define their national identity, and in the case of the American flag, people are transiently more accepting of ethnic and religious minorities.
The American preoccupation with Islam began quite recently, but the land debate between Israelis and Palestinians is biblical in both origin and proportion. When conflict roils for generations, even reasoned argument fails to bridge the chasm that separates the opposing camps. Contemporary Israeli elections are fought and won on the battleground of Palestinian domestic policy. On the right, parties like Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) refuse to entertain the notion of territorial compromise, while leftist parties like Hadash (the “New” party, or “Democratic Front for Peace and Equality”) propose an expansive Palestinian territory. As surprising as it might be that the U.S. flag dampens anti-Muslim sentiment among non-Muslim Americans, it seems like too much to expect the Israeli flag to unite left-wing and right-wing Israelis. A team of social psychologists took up the challenge when they exposed Israeli voters from across the political spectrum to an image of either the Israeli flag or a scrambled version of the flag. The Israeli flag unites all Israelis, whether they’re right-leaning or left-leaning, so the researchers expected the voters to converge on a moderate middle ground when they were exposed to the flag. The flag (or its scrambled alternative) was presented very briefly so the voters were unable to report what they’d seen. After this priming procedure, some of the voters reported their views on contentious political issues, and others stated which Israeli political party they preferred from the menu of a dozen options.
When they were primed with the scrambled flag, the left-wing voters expressed leftist views and the right-wing voters expressed rightist views. For example, the rightists anticipated feeling much sadder when Israel pulled out of the contentious Gaza region, and the leftists believed it was more unfair to an Israeli family’s children when that family moved to the Gaza region to protest the withdrawal. But these differences miraculously melted away when the voters were exposed to the flag. The leftists and rightists became moderates, and their views were practically indistinguishable. Even their voting intentions shifted, so their preferences were again more moderate and largely overlapping. Some weeks later, when the researchers phoned the voters after the Israeli elections, they found the same pattern: those who saw the scrambled flag voted along party lines, but their counterparts who saw the flag tended to vote far more moderately. Incredibly, reminding Israeli voters of their national identity—even below the level of conscious awareness—compelled them to compromise with their political opponents.
Unfortunately, national flags also have the capacity to bring out the worst in people. A team comprising some of the same researchers noticed that the media portrayals of the United States during the mid-2000s suggested that Americans were particularly aggressive. The United States was entangled in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and a spate of school shootings and other acts of domestic violence painted a similarly bleak domestic picture. As the researchers expected, Americans who often watched the news seemed to associate the flag with concepts like war and guns, whereas those who watched the news less frequently had far weaker associations between the flag and aggression. In one study, the researchers subliminally primed a group of American undergraduates with an image of either the U.S. flag or a meaningless configuration of shapes. The students began working on a long and boring task, but after they’d completed eighty trials of the task, an error message flashed on the screen: DATA SAVING FAILURE.
In fact, the experiment was going according to plan; the experimenters had rigged the program to deliver this warning in an attempt to frustrate the already bored and irritated students. The students called the experimenter, who apologized and asked them to begin the task again, from scratch. As far as they were concerned, the eighty boring trials they had already completed were for naught. A hidden camera recorded the students’ reactions so the researchers could determine whether they responded with aggression or patience. As the researchers expected, the news-watching students who were primed with the U.S. flag were especially aggressive; considering the hidden camera footage, the experimenters rated their reactions as more hostile, angry, irritated, cold, and unfriendly than those of the students who didn’t watch the news or weren’t primed with the U.S. flag.
These results raise the question of why national flags unite political foes in some contexts and prime aggression in others. Why did left- and right-wing voters come together in Israel when primed with an Israeli flag, while the American flag primed citizens who watched news of American military progress to become more aggressive? As with so many of the effects in this book, the answer lies in the associations inspired by those primes. A flag for one person might signal national unity, while for another it signals militaristic aggression and nationalistic fervor. Many flags begin as a collection of empty colorful elements that acquire meaning over time, often inspiring different associations for different populations. While the U.S. flag signals aggressive patriotism for some people, it reminds others that the nation values liberty and equality.
Like nationalism, religious identity is such an important part of how people see themselves that it has the capacity to provoke wars and genocides, hunger strikes and self-sacrifice. Many people are defined in large part by their religious identities, which involve adhering to a set of strongly held group norms. For example, religions prize honesty and integrity, and frown on cheating and impropriety. A few years ago, my colleague Virginia Kwan and I began to
wonder whether we could compel people to be more honest by exposing them to religious symbols. We began the study by asking students to estimate the value of four pieces of jewelry. The jewelry included a gold ring, a silver brooch, earrings, and a necklace. The ring, brooch, and earrings were identical for all of the students, but for half the students the necklace featured a diamond-encrusted crucifix, whereas for the other half it featured a diamond pendant. The students who estimated the value of the crucifix were unwittingly primed with the concept of Christianity and its virtuous trappings: honesty and truthfulness.
After the students estimated the value of the jewelry, they completed a seemingly unrelated questionnaire that was designed to measure their honesty. Some of the questions asked whether the students would admit to sometimes engaging in widespread but socially questionable behaviors (e.g., “I sometimes feel resentful when I don’t get my way”), and others asked whether they sometimes failed to commit virtuous behaviors that are almost impossible to uphold all the time (e.g., “I always admit when I make a mistake”). As we expected, the Christian students honestly admitted their shortcomings 70 percent of the time when they were primed with the crucifix, but only 60 percent of the time when they weren’t reminded of religion. The non-Christian students behaved just like the unprimed Christian students, admitting their shortcomings about 60 percent of the time regardless of whether they were primed with the crucifix. The symbol obviously didn’t have the same resonance for the non-Christian students, so it failed to shape their behavior as it did the Christian students’.
Unfortunately, religious priming also has a dark side, because it reminds people that they’re incapable of fulfilling the impossibly strict standards demanded by orthodox religions. According to the Torah, Jews are expected to uphold 613 commandments, which range from not sprinkling frankincense on the meals of wrongdoers, to breaking the neck of a calf by a river valley following an unsolved murder. Catholic men fail to complete the seven sacraments if they choose not to enter the priesthood, and Scientologists must complete a series of psychological “audits” before they become consummate members of the Church of Scientology. It’s no wonder that reminding people of religion primes not only honesty but also self-doubt.
In the late 1980s, psychologists showed one of two images to a group of Catholic students. The researchers flashed the images onto a white screen for such a brief period that it was impossible to perceive them consciously. For some of the students, the image was the solemn visage of Pope John Paul II, whereas the other students were exposed to an image of an equally solemn adult stranger. Later, though none of the students claimed to have seen a face, those who were exposed to the pope’s face reported having a substantially poorer self-conception and a lower opinion of their own moral standing. Priming people with religious symbols has paradoxical consequences, because they tend to perceive themselves as relatively immoral beings while simultaneously behaving more honestly.
The Flip Side: Kryptonite to Symbols and Images
It’s difficult to measure the power of a symbol like the crucifix or the U.S. flag using strict scientific techniques, but some symbols are so powerful that they inspire reactions without further explanation. Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most recognized brands, and the corporation capitalized on its dominance with an audacious billboard advertisement. The ad featured a silhouette of the company’s famous contour bottle below the words “Quick. Name a soft drink.” The brand’s name was absent from the billboard, but its bottle was so well recognized and its name so strongly associated with soft drinks that “Coca-Cola” immediately came to mind. In some sense, this is the holy grail of advertising: a brand that becomes so strongly associated with a product category that people begin to refer to the whole category by the brand’s name. But the power that comes from widespread familiarity also brings with it a symbol’s greatest weakness: minor tweaks to the symbol that turn out to have grave consequences.
Companies regularly rejuvenate their brands by replacing old logos and packaging with “improvements.” Brand makeovers are delicate, because there’s a fine line between rejuvenation and failure. In the 1980s, Coca-Cola panicked when a sample of blind taste testers preferred a few sips of Pepsi to a few sips of Coke. The company unveiled New Coke to much fanfare in 1985, but consumers weren’t looking for a newer version of their old favorite. The launch failed, Coca-Cola compromised its crushing market dominance, and consumers refused to rest until the classic Coke formula returned to supermarket shelves. In fact, part of the reason they preferred Pepsi was because it was slightly sweeter than Coke, and people respond positively to sweetness in small doses. Had the testers consumed an entire can of each product, as they did later, the results would have been quite different. What tastes pleasantly sweet after one sip becomes cloying after a dozen sips. Part of the reason people continued to buy Coke ahead of Pepsi was that they enjoyed drinking an entire can of Coke more than they enjoyed drinking an entire can of Pepsi.
People rail against these obvious changes to beloved symbols and brands, but what happens when the changes are so subtle that most people ignore them? One of the most powerful symbols today, as we’ve already seen, is monetary currency. Every few years, the U.S. government updates bills and coins, though many of those changes are quite subtle. The U.S. Treasury has introduced numerous currency updates, unveiling plans to produce a new series of banknotes covering all denominations from $5 to $100 in August 2008, while the U.S. Mint announced that thirty-eight “Presidential” $1 coins would be released between 2007 and 2016. A similar announcement in 1999 preceded the release of fifty “U.S. State” quarters between 1999 and 2008. The Treasury’s official motivation for these updates seems somewhat frivolous: to “return . . . circulating currency to its position as an object of aesthetic beauty.” People have come to associate money with its capacity to purchase goods, so my colleague Danny Oppenheimer and I wondered whether the purchasing power of money might be compromised by these changes. Put simply, would people perceive currency as slightly less valuable when we introduced a series of small tweaks to existing bills?
We asked a group of American train commuters to estimate how much they could purchase with different forms of American currency. In one study, each person estimated how many of each of ten inexpensive items—like thumbtacks, paper clips, pencils, and white paper napkins—they could purchase with $1. We gave half the adults a questionnaire featuring a photocopy of a real $1 bill, and the other half a very similar questionnaire, with one important difference: the $1 bill depicted at the top of the questionnaire was subtly altered so that it looked similar but not identical to the original. The adults who were looking at the photocopy of the fabricated $1 bill also estimated how much they could purchase with $1. To give you a sense of how the two bills looked, they are shown side by side below.
The train commuters spent very little time looking at the photocopied bill, but it still shaped their estimates of the bill’s purchasing power. Those who completed the questionnaire featuring the real bill estimated they could purchase an average of twenty-two of the inexpensive items, whereas the adults who completed the questionnaire featuring the altered bill estimated they could purchase an average of only twelve of the items. That’s a huge difference—and keep in mind that not a single person noticed that the fabricated bill wasn’t real, even when the experimenter asked them whether they noticed anything strange about the bill. The symbol of money is very powerful—it can make us independent and selfish and insensitive to physical pain—but it’s also quite fragile: as soon as you tweak currency, even subtly so people don’t notice the difference, it starts to lose its symbolic association with value.
Real (left) and fake (right) dollar bills from the purchasing estimate study. There are half a dozen minor differences between the two bills, but not a single adult who responded to the questionnaire noticed that the fabricated bill had been altered.
The forces that shape the world with
in our heads—names, labels, and symbols—derive much of their power by association. In chapter 1, Hurricane Katrina tugged just a bit harder at the heartstrings (and purse strings) of Kims, Kevins, and Kaylas because they associated the storm’s name with their own. In chapter 2, people were happier to travel to a store five miles south of town than to an identical store five miles north of town, having come to associate southerly journeys with the ease of moving downhill—a relic of gazing at hundreds of maps that depict north above south. And, in this chapter, the literal illumination of a lightbulb led students to metaphorically illuminate the hidden solution to a tricky mental problem. In each case, a feature of the environment activated related concepts in the minds of the people who encountered those features, prompting unexpected thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that come to make sense once you trace a mental path from the original word or image to the final outcome.
Just beyond the world that exists within our heads is the world that exists between us: Earth’s seven billion inhabitants. Association plays a big role in this world, too (consider how difficult it is to dissociate your impressions of identical twins), but other people also shape how we think, feel, and behave through complex biological processes. While men produce more testosterone when surrounded by beautiful women, neonatal mothers produce more of the hormone oxytocin when their newborns are near, and each of these biological responses goes on to influence how they behave. While men become more reckless in the wake of a testosterone spike, mothers become fiercely protective of their babies. This sensitivity to the presence of other people—whether strangers or loved ones, whether they’re alone or in groups, and even the mere suggestion of another person’s presence—is enough to change how we behave. Chapter 4 opens by discussing how being alone differs from being surrounded by others, and how adding or subtracting people from the environment changes how we behave across a huge variety of situations.