The lunch cafeteria in my New Jersey high school was populated by several different cliques: the athletes, the cheerleaders, the math club kids, the metalheads, the theater crowd, the all-black-wearing smokers. As a Korean-American teenager in the ‘80s, I had a perm, Aqua Net-sprayed bangs and friends in several different groups. This was unusual, since most students tended to stay within their own cliques. (I was what social scientists refer to as a “code switcher,” someone who communicates and moves adeptly between different identity groups.) The racial divides in my high school certainly played a role in how cliques were formed, and influenced the perception of in/out group identity…
The “Spillover Effect”: What the Lunchroom Says About Your Company
