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If their team had won, they usually answered, “We won.” But if their team had failed to win the game, their answer was more likely “They lost.” Taking partial credit for your team’s winning is a form of basking in reflected glory. Basically, we want to be close to groups that are successful and distance ourselves from losers.

The sense of wanting to belong to a powerful group may have its roots in evolution. Most social animals seek the protection of a group when they are threatened. Even the appearance of an outsider can make people more aware of their own social network. In the same football project, Cialdini’s interviewers sometimes claimed that they lived in the same town as the respondents. Other times, the interviewers reported that they were from out of state. In other words, half the time the participants thought they were talking to someone like them whereas the other half they believed that they were being interviewed by a football foreigner. The us-them effect was much stronger when talking with the outsider. When reminded of competing groups, our own membership in a successful group becomes more important.

The need to be part of a group is most likely to occur when an outside group threatens the very existence of our own group. Nothing galvanizes people more quickly than a physical attack against them. In the United States, the September 11, 2001, attacks provided a powerful example. In the first days of September, George W. Bush had been president for less than eight months and had an approval rating of about 54 percent. Within a week of the 9/11 attacks, his ratings skyrocketed to almost 90 percent. In every city in the country, people flew American flags and all the news stations discussed the outpouring of patriotism and national pride.

You may recall the large-scale project that we conducted on thousands of blog entries that spanned a four-month period starting two months before 9/11. Within minutes of the attacks, LiveJournal.com bloggers started switching from the use of I-words to we-words. In fact, this pattern continued for several weeks afterward. Coinciding with the elevation in we-words was the brief drop but then long-term increase in positive emotion words. A horrible trauma such as 9/11 has the unintended effect of bringing people together, making them less self-focused, and within a few days, making them more happy.

That natural and man-made disasters can bring people together is not a new idea. When residents of London were enduring an extended period of nightly bombings by the Germans in World War II, several indicators pointed to the much tighter social bonds among the people. One frequently cited statistic is that suicide rates dropped dramatically during this period. More recent data found large drops in suicide rates in the weeks after September 11, 2001, and, in the United Kingdom, after the 2006 subway bombings. You will recall similar findings discussed earlier surrounding the eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano in 1980. Those from cities that had suffered the most damage later reported they were glad that it had happened in their lifetime and that the eruption had brought the community together.

Study after study has found the same pattern of effects, many of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the book. The we-jump and I-drop phenomenon is as reliable as, well, taxes and death. Examples include:

• Newspaper articles, letters to the editors of newspapers, and online tributes following the A&M bonfire tragedy that killed twelve students in 1999. The disaster galvanized the student body, resulting in tighter social connections than ever before. Illness rates over the next six months dropped 40 percent from the year before, unlike all other large universities in the region.

• Online chat groups talking about the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in 1997. The effect lasted about a week.

• Online bulletin boards discussing the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. Even in the earliest days of shared online communication, people rushed to talk