Herb Kelman ran into the same problem with Israelis and Palestinians. In the problem-solving workshops, they came to trust the individuals across the table, but they still held on to their stereotypes of the group.

In an ideal world, learning about individual group members will humanize the group, but often getting to know a person better just establishes her as different from the rest of her group. When we meet group members who defy a stereotype, our first instinct isn’t to see them as exemplars and rethink the stereotype. It’s to see them as exceptions and cling to our existing beliefs. So that attempt also failed. Back to the drawing board again.

HYPOTHESIS 3: BEASTS OF HABIT

My all-time favorite commercial starts with a close-up of a man and a woman kissing. As the camera zooms out, you see that he’s wearing an Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt and she’s wearing a Michigan Wolverines T-shirt. The caption: “Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting.”

As a lifelong Wolverine fan, I was raised to boo at Buckeye fans. My uncle filled his basement with Michigan paraphernalia, got up at 3:00 a.m. on Saturdays to start setting up for tailgates, and drove a van with the Michigan logo emblazoned on the side. When I went back home to Michigan for grad school and one of my college roommates started medical school at Ohio State, it was only natural for me to preach my school’s superiority by phone and prosecute his intelligence by text.

A few years ago, I got to know an unusually kind woman in her seventies who works with Holocaust survivors. Last summer, when she mentioned that she had gone to Ohio State, my first response was “yuck.” My next reaction was to be disgusted with myself. Who cares where she went to school half a century ago? How did I get programmed this way? Suddenly it seemed odd that anyone would hate a team at all.

In ancient Greece, Plutarch wrote of a wooden ship that Theseus sailed from Crete to Athens. To preserve the ship, as its old planks decayed, Athenians would replace them with new wood. Eventually all the planks had been replaced. It looked like the same ship, but none of its parts was the same. Was it still the same ship? Later, philosophers added a wrinkle: if you collected all the original planks and fashioned them into a ship, would that be the same ship?

The ship of Theseus has a lot in common with a sports franchise. If you hail from Boston, you might hate the 1920 Yankees for taking Babe Ruth or the 1978 Yankees for dashing your World Series hopes. Although the current team carries the same name, the pieces are different. The players are long gone. So are the managers and coaches. The stadium has been replaced. “You’re actually rooting for the clothes,” Jerry Seinfeld quipped. “Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to a different team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!”

I think it’s a ritual. A fun but arbitrary ritual—a ceremony that we perform out of habit. We imprinted on it when we were young and impressionable, or were new to a city and looking for esprit de corps. Sure, there are moments where team loyalty does matter in our lives: it allows us to high-five acquaintances at bars and hug strangers at victory parades. It gives us a sense of solidarity. If you reflect on it, though, hating an opposing team is an accident of birth. If you had been born in New York instead of Boston, would you really hate the Yankees?

For our third approach, Tim and I recruited fans of the Red Sox and Yankees. To prove their allegiance, they had to correctly name one of their team’s players from a photo—and the last year his team had won the World Series. Then we took some steps to open their minds. First, to help them recognize the complexity of their own beliefs, we asked them to list three positives and three negatives about fans of the opposing team. You saw the most common negatives earlier, but they were able to come up with some positives, too:

         WHAT RED SOX FANS LIKE ABOUT YANKEES FANS

         WHAT YANKEES FANS LIKE ABOUT RED SOX FANS

Then we randomly assigned half of them to go the extra step of reflecting on the arbitrariness of their animosity:

Think and write about how Yankee fans and Red Sox fans dislike each other for reasons that are fairly arbitrary. For example, if you were born into a family of fans of the rival team, you would likely also be a fan of them today.

To gauge their animosity toward their opponents, we gave them a chance to decide how spicy the hot sauce sold in the rival team’s stadium should be. The backstory was that consumer product researchers were planning to do taste tests of hot sauces in baseball stadiums. People who were randomly assigned to reflect on the arbitrariness of their stereotypes selected less fiery hot sauce for their rival’s stadium. We also gave them a chance to sabotage a rival fan’s performance on a timed, paid math test by assigning harder problems, and those who considered the arbitrariness of their stereotypes picked easier questions for the rival fan.

People weren’t just more sympathetic toward a single fan—they changed their views toward their rival team as a whole. They were less likely to see their rival’s failure as their success, their rival’s success as a personal insult, and criticism of their rival as a personal compliment. And they were more likely to support their rival team in ways that would normally be unthinkable: wearing the rival team’s jerseys, sitting in its dugout at games, voting for its players in the All-Star Game, and even endorsing the team on social media. For some fans, it was almost like breaking a religious code, but their comments made it clear that they were rethinking their stances:

I think it is pretty dumb to hate someone just based on the sports teams they enjoy supporting. Thinking about that makes me want to reconsider how I feel about some supporters of teams that I dislike.

If someone hated me because of the team that I loved, it would feel unfair. Almost like a form of prejudice because they are judging me based on one thing about me and hating me for that reason. After feeling these thoughts, I may change the way I interact with Red Sox fans.

The team they support is not necessarily indicative of who they are. Even though they are wrong.

We’d finally made some progress. Our next step was to examine the key ingredients behind the shift in fans’ views. We found that it was thinking about the arbitrariness of their animosity—not the positive qualities of their rival—that mattered. Regardless of whether they generated reasons to like their rivals, fans showed less hostility when they reflected on how silly the rivalry was. Knowing what it felt like to be disliked for ridiculous reasons helped them see that this conflict had real implications, that hatred for opposing fans isn’t all fun and games.

ENTERING A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Outside the lab, dismantling stereotypes and decreasing prejudice rarely happen overnight. Even if people aren’t on guard from the start, they’re quick to put their defenses up when their attitudes are challenged. Getting through to them requires more than just telling them that their views are arbitrary. A key step is getting them to do some counterfactual thinking: helping them consider what they’d believe if they were living in an alternative reality.

In psychology, counterfactual thinking involves imagining how the circumstances of our lives could have unfolded differently. When we realize how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we might be more willing to update our views.* To activate counterfactual thinking, you might ask people questions like: How would your stereotypes be different if you’d been born Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions would you hold if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a culture on the other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if you lived in the 1700s?

You’ve already learned from debate champions and expert negotiators that asking people questions can motivate them to rethink their conclusions. What’s different about these kinds of counterfactual questions is that they invite people to explore the origins of their own beliefs—and reconsider their stances toward other groups.