One afternoon in Maryland in 1983, Daryl Davis arrived at a lounge to play the piano at a country music gig. It wasn’t his first time being the only Black man in the room. Before the night was out, it would be his first time having a conversation with a white supremacist.

After the show, an older white man in the audience walked up to Daryl and told him that he was astonished to see a Black musician play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Daryl replied that he and Lewis were, in fact, friends, and that Lewis himself had acknowledged that his style was influenced by Black musicians. Although the man was skeptical, he invited Daryl to sit down for a drink.

Soon the man was admitting that he’d never had a drink with a Black person before. Eventually he explained to Daryl why. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist hate group that had been murdering African Americans for over a century and had lynched a man just two years earlier.

If you found yourself sitting down with someone who hated you and all people who shared your skin color, your instinctive options might be fight, flight, or freeze—and rightfully so. Daryl had a different reaction: he burst out laughing. When the man pulled out his KKK membership card to show he wasn’t joking, Daryl returned to a question that had been on his mind since he was ten years old. In the late 1960s, he was marching in a Cub Scout parade when white spectators started throwing cans, rocks, and bottles at him. It was the first time he remembers facing overt racism, and although he could justifiably have gotten angry, he was bewildered: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”

At the end of the conversation, the Klansman handed Daryl his phone number and asked if he would call him whenever he was playing locally. Daryl followed up, and the next month the man showed up with a bunch of his friends to see Daryl perform.

Over time a friendship grew, and the man ended up leaving the KKK. That was a turning point in Daryl’s life, too. It wasn’t long before Daryl was sitting down with Imperial Wizards and Grand Dragons—the Klan’s highest officers—to ask his question. Since then, Daryl has convinced many white supremacists to leave the KKK and abandon their hatred.

I wanted to understand how that kind of change happens—how to break overconfidence cycles that are steeped in stereotypes and prejudice about entire groups of people. Strangely enough, my journey started at a baseball game.

HATE ME OUT AT THE BALLGAME

“Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” It was a summer night at Fenway Park, my first and only time at a Boston Red Sox baseball game. In the seventh inning, without warning, 37,000 people erupted into a chant. The entire stadium was dissing the New York Yankees in perfect harmony.

I knew the two teams had a century-long rivalry, widely viewed as the most heated in all of American professional sports. I took it for granted that the Boston fans would root against the Yankees. I just didn’t expect it to happen that day, because the Yankees weren’t even there.

The Red Sox were playing against the Oakland A’s. The Boston fans were booing a team that was hundreds of miles away. It was as if Burger King fans were going head-to-head against Wendy’s in a taste test and started chanting “McDonald’s sucks!”

I started to wonder if Red Sox fans hate the Yankees more than they love their own team. Boston parents have been known to teach their kids to flip the bird at the Yankees and detest anything in pinstripes, and yankees suck is apparently among the most popular Tshirts in Boston history. When asked how much money it would take to get them to taunt their own team, Red Sox fans requested an average of $503. To root for the Yankees, they wanted even more: $560. The feelings run so deep that neuroscientists can watch them light up people’s minds: when Red Sox fans see the Yankees fail, they show immediate activation in brain regions linked to reward and pleasure. Those feelings extend well beyond Boston: in a 2019 analysis of tweets, the Yankees were the most hated baseball team in twenty-eight of the fifty U.S. states, which may explain the popularity of this T-shirt:

I recently called a friend who’s a die-hard Red Sox fan with a simple question: what would it take to get him to root for the Yankees? Without pausing, he said, “If they were playing Al Qaeda . . . maybe.”

It’s one thing to love your team. It’s another to hate your rivals so much that you’d consider rooting for terrorists to crush them. If you despise a particular sports team—and its fans—you’re harboring some strong opinions about a group of people. Those beliefs are stereotypes, and they often spill over into prejudice. The stronger your attitudes become, the less likely you are to rethink them.

Rivalries aren’t unique to sports. A rivalry exists whenever we reserve special animosity for a group we see as competing with us for resources or threatening our identities. In business, the rivalry between footwear companies Puma and Adidas was so intense that for generations, families self-segregated based on their allegiance to the brands—they went to different bakeries, pubs, and shops, and even refused to date people who worked for the rival firm. In politics, you probably know some Democrats who view Republicans as being greedy, ignorant, heartless cretins, and some Republicans who regard Democrats as lazy, dishonest, hypersensitive snowflakes. As stereotypes stick and prejudice deepens, we don’t just identify with our own group; we disidentify with our adversaries, coming to define who we are by what we’re not. We don’t just preach the virtues of our side; we find self-worth in prosecuting the vices of our rivals.

When people hold prejudice toward a rival group, they’re often willing to do whatever it takes to elevate their own group and undermine their rivals—even if it means doing harm or doing wrong. We see people cross those lines regularly in sports rivalries.* Aggression extends well beyond the playing field: from Barcelona to Brazil, fistfights frequently break out between soccer fans. Cheating scandals are rampant, too, and they aren’t limited to athletes or coaches. When students at The Ohio State University were paid to participate in an experiment, they learned that if they were willing to lie to a student from a different school, their own pay would double and the other student’s compensation would be cut in half. Their odds of lying quadrupled if the student attended the University of Michigan—their biggest rival—rather than Berkeley or Virginia.

Why do people form stereotypes about rival groups in the first place, and what does it take to get them to rethink them?

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.

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.*

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

         WHY RED SOX FANS HATE YANKEES FANS

         WHY YANKEES FANS HATE RED SOX FANS