You-Heard-It-Here-First Department

A theme I kept returning to in Us and Them was the power of direct, personal experience on a mind that is always classifying and reclassifying people into groups. As I mentioned in the book, the Muslim-Christian division counts for a lot in Lebanon, but it was not difficult for experimenters there to create conditions in a summer camp that made its teen-age residents care much more about the boundary between Blue Ghosts and Red Devils. They were two gangs they had created on the spot, both of which were a mix of Christians and Muslims.

The depressing aspect of this idea is that people can decide that a Star Trek identity is the center of their lives. But the positive aspect is that people can easily drop longstanding ideas about ``others.''

Flash forward to last week, and this report about simple exercises that reduce people's scores on measures of prejudice. Four hours of conversation and parlor games with total strangers -- played with people of other races or ethnicities -- is all it takes, Benedict Carey writes (and the whole piece is very much worth reading):

``Trivial as they may sound, those exercises create a relationship `that is as close as any relationship the person has,' said Art Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University who developed the program with his wife, Elaine N. Aron.''