#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?

Why does tribalism exist? Why did it evolve? Well, tribalism is what got us out of the Stone Age. It's what led to our human-specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees.
They live in minimally collaborative troops that can ever get larger than about 50 individuals, or they turn into a bloodbath. And we evolved some social quirks that enable us to live in culture-sharing groups.
And these culture-sharing groups allow for a level of collaboration and um common fate and common concern that that is not uh present in other uh in any other social species and so tribes uh tribes are large groups united by shared culture and our tribal instincts were, you know, adaptations or mutations that changed our psychology slightly to enable us to live in this kind of group. And it just turned out to be the ultimate killer app of evolution because once we were in these culture sharing groups, it snowballed.
The cultures started getting more complex and more adapted to the local ecology with each generation. And then humans, without becoming any brainier, were more capable of surviving and thriving because they could tap into these better cultures each generation.
And they just left all the other species in their dust. So that's the basic story about tribalism.
And we're stuck with it because it's in our wiring. It doesn't always lead us to do the right thing, but I still believe that it's mostly adoptive, that our tribal instincts enable us to do most of the things that we are proud of and that we benefit from, we notice it more when it leads us to do things that are dysfunctional.
And certainly there are examples of that in the world today. That, so tribalism is predicated on culture, that without culture, there can be no tribalism.
Is that, is that a fair? Yeah, that's a fair way to say it. And that's not always a prominent theme.
I mean, most of the talk about tribalism is by the sort of political pundits, you know, and they're just kind of grasping for a catch-all explanation to understand, you know, the red-blue rift and the record racial protests and religious conflicts. And it's an easy, quite facile thing to say.
Oh, it's our resurgent tribalism. Our tribal instincts have reappeared and we're descending into tribalism and our democracy will never be the same.
That's what we've been hearing. And I think it's, I call it the trope of toxic tribalism.
And it's a pretty despairing theme because the idea is that somehow the genie got out of the bottle and there's no way to get it back inside again. And I don't really think that's what's going on.
I think, you know bad conflicts in the world today, but that's true. That's true every generation.
Every generation thinks they're presiding over the end times.

You know, what's new is this, this way of talking about the conflicts as though they reflect some evolutionary curse, you know, some, some drive to hate other groups that is always going to be, you know, undermining us. And I don't think that's true.
I think that the tribal instincts are instincts that evolution sculpted in order to help us be culture-sharing animals. And that enabled us to live in very large collaborative groups.
And a side effect of those tribal instincts is that we sometimes get into conflicts with other groups. But, you know, they're not instincts for hostility.
They're instincts for solidarity. All of our instincts will lead us astray in some situations.
You know, we evolved to be attracted to sweet tastes tastes because fruit has a lot of nutrition. Now, if you live on a block with two donut shops, that wiring might lead you to eat in an unhealthy way.
It doesn't mean that it's an instinct for gluttony. It's an instinct for fruit.
And if we understand that, we have a better way of coping with the problem than if we think that we're cursed with some flawed wiring, which is, you know, a way of thinking about human nature that is kind of attractive in a tragic way, you know, like that. Why do you think it is? Because I've noticed this too.
And look, I'm going to fight the fight for the, it seems like people hate out groups more than they love in groups today. I'm going to try and stress test it as much as possible.
Thank you. But what do you think is so alluring about this sort of myth of martyrdom, this woe is everything, it's all sort of, why is it that that's a tempting seductive uh well it's this kind of manichaean message right that you know the the world is coming to an end because you know along with our evolutionary blessing of intelligence and you know familial loyalty has come this curse of genocide.
You know, it's like, it's, you know, the person delivering the message feels very important, you know, and the people listening are spellbound, at least in the short term. Oh, it gives everybody the opportunity to be Cassandra.
Exactly. Yeah.
And, you know, it's,'s yeah tragic plays don't always don't always talk about the end of the world but um even a tragic play which talks about the end of a particular person's life or success is is kind of um riveting you know and always has been riveting But yeah, but yeah, I think, I think that, uh, the problem, the problem in the media or the problem with thought leaders, you know, and you and I are probably, you know, prone to this is that, uh, we get rewarded for dramatic statements. Uh, the more dramatic, the more worrisome, the more clicks, So I think that there has been a cascade of Cassandras.

Everybody wants to out Cassandra the other Cassandras

and become the pundit du jour.

So I think that some of that has been going on.

And what makes for good op-eds doesn't necessarily make for good policies. And that's where I think a little bit more grounding in science when we talk about tribalism would elevate the discussion a little bit.
The perverting incentives of cliques. I wish I had a more sexy answer because it just seems so cliche and so obvious for me to say well people need to get attention and this is how the attention economy works and blah blah blah and then downstream from what people say other people believe because people believe what others say especially people who have been chosen by the media or whoever to be the proselytizers about our current level of culture.
So I think an interesting framing is,

is tribalism an us thing or a them thing? Like how much of tribalism is in-group favoritism versus out-group persecution? That's really well put. I would say 95% of our tribal wiring is about us, not about them.
Our evolutionary forebears did not have that much contact with other tribes. The population density

in Stone Age Europe or Africa before that was very low. There were very few Homo sapiens total.

You know,

you know, in Stone Age Europe or Africa before that was very low. There were very few homo sapiens total.
The entire population was like a small city today. So they didn't have that much contact with other tribes.
What they had a lot of contact with was each other. They had daily contact with each other.
And what paid off evolutionarily was having traits and having capacities that enabled you to collaborate effectively with the fellow members of your tribe. and evolutionary scholars can, you know, slice the salami very thinly

when they talk about these adaptations.

I'm someone who, I've been a business school professor

and a sort of political consultant, organizational consultant for 20 years, and also a researcher of cultural psychology. So, I tend to distinguish tribal instincts in three major waves, because I think it corresponds to three major systems in our group psychology that we can still recognize in ourselves today, and that effective leaders or activists or managers or coaches draw upon and harness today.
So I can go into those, but I think I would say an answer to your question is that it's 95% us instincts. They're not them instincts because them instincts just wouldn't have been adaptive, right? It wouldn't have been adaptive to go looking for other tribes to fight with.
Yeah, understood. So just to linger on that, I want to get into peer, ancestor, etc.
instinct in a bit, but what does it mean to have an us instinct in absence of a them instinct? What does that mean? Surely only by there being a them can we define an us? Well, I'll agree partly with that. I think that an out-group is often a foil that allows for a more precise definition of the in-group and a stronger feeling of distinctiveness in the in- group.
And part of in-group identity is usually trying to find some way to feel slightly better than another group. And it's interesting, when you look at studies all around the world, it's not like every group feels like they're more technologically advanced than everyone else.
And it's not that everybody feels like they're better looking or that they are better athletes than everybody else. But almost every group in the world feels that somehow they're more humane.

You know, they're sort of more human than the other group.

In a lot of indigenous groups, the name for their own group is also the name for human.

You know, so like the implication being that other people are slightly less human than the end group. So yeah, I can imagine that groups that had almost no contact with other human groups, they had contact with animals.
They had contact with other kinds of things. They had some basis for a comparison.
But in the modern times, where we have a lot of contact with other groups, it does become a salient part of how we define the internet. Interesting.
So I'm thinking about, again, ancestrally, let's think about some of the stories that would have been told about what the weather is, about the moon being a god or a goddess, about the sun being some sort of either benign or malevolent or assistant force in some way. We have all of these personified stories that we have, which created them.
The them may be different species, different astral astral plane different dimension different whatever um but we have a them and an us is it your opinion then i'm jumping way ahead but this is just too interesting to ask what has been so perverting about the modern world to cause tribalism to happen in the way that it is is it simply our exposure to the number of different ways that we can slice and dice and fracture and fragment society?

Yeah. Well, I guess, you know, it depends on what we mean by the modern world.
Do we mean, like, contemporary times? I think that's what you mean. Like, why do we have political tribalism so much worse than just a few generations ago.

And I think you can tell very clear stories about these particular historical developments. So in the case of the political tribalism in the States, and I think in many other Western democracies as well, you have political parties that didn't used to be a salient basis of individual identity.
Two generations ago, my parents, they didn't know whether their neighbors were Democrats or Republicans. They didn't know if their work colleagues were Democrats or Republicans.
There's the occasional zealot who puts out a lawn sign, but that was it. But what has happened in the United States, at least over the last two generations, is you first had an enormous wave of residential sorting.
As technology changed and transportation changed, you were freer to live in any part of the country that you wanted to. And liberals moved to the coasts and to the college towns.
Conservatives moved to the heartland and to the exurbs. And that meant that you weren't going to the Norman Rockwell town meeting and listening to a wide range of opinions and having to reconcile your beliefs to your neighbor's beliefs.
You were living in these ideologically inbred communities where when you went to the grocery store or the softball game or whatever, you kind of heard opinions very similar to the ones that you already held. And then starting in, I think, the 90s, you had this fracturing of the media landscape where previously there were three network television shows that were required by the FEC to provide very boring, bland, balanced coverage of every issue.
So everybody was listening to Walter Cronkite. Everyone was getting their news from the same place.
And everyone knew that everyone else was doing that, which contributes to that sense of common knowledge, right? Like, I know you watched Walter Cronkite last night too, so I feel a lot of commonality with you. And what happened is you started to have cable news stations that were 24-7 news instead of one hour a night, and they were partisan.
You had Fox, you had MSNBC, and then the next generation were websites that were even more partisan, like Talking Points Bulletin or The Hill. And then you have social media feed, which is even more of an echo chamber for reasons that we've all talked in the last years, you know, that it's not just that I am connected to people who share my politics, but that I have ready opportunities to spout off on my politics and get massively reinforced for it.
The costs of virtue signaling have gone way down and the rewards have gone way up, you know, compared to the old days where you had to actually go to a political rally and shout in someone's face and maybe get shoved, you know? So, so yeah, so we've had this first, this fracturing or this, this sort of change in our residential landscape, and then a change in our media landscape, where we get our news from. And one of the fundamental tribal instincts is what I call the peer instinct.
And it's something we all know about. It's our tendency to conform.
It's our tendency to imitate what we see around us more than we realize. It happens unconsciously.
And that's become the primary way that we form political beliefs. We sort of learn by osmosis from what we're seeing on TV and what we're hearing across the neighbor's fence.
And so we have these political beliefs that we think are well-informed, but they come from a relatively narrow range of the full opinion spectrum. But because we consume more news than ever before, we're confident in our beliefs.
And then we hear a politician from the other party on television, and we're just dumbfounded. We're baffled.
We don't understand how they could possibly believe what they're saying. And so then the attribution is, well, maybe they don't believe it and they're not sincere and they're just saying it because it's in their self-interest, even though they know it's wrong.
Or they have some cognitive problems. You know, that accusation was being made about, you know, Biden, about Trump, then about Harris, right? You know, we had so many accusations of IQ deficiencies.
Apparently everybody's got senility or dementia now. Yeah, of some kind, right? So whether you think that they're being insincere or you think that they lack cognitive acuity, it's, you know, it's not a very charitable attribution.
And so there are negative feelings. And so I think that's how this sort of antipathy for the opposite party and this polarization has become so much more salient in the last two generations than it was in our parents' or grandparents' time.
And it's not something that came from an innate drive to hate. It came from this conformist instinct, which is an us instinct.
You know, it's an affinity for the in-group. It's a desire to mesh with the in-group that operates pretty subconsciously.
And we're not aware of how much it drives us. And we kind of naively think that we have an accurate view of reality.
But in fact, our view of reality is conformist and the other side's view of reality is conformist, but we don't realize our own bias. So their bias looks so extreme to us that we then start to attribute all sorts of negative things to them.
So that's what I think and what I think a lot of behavioral scientists think about the political tribalism. And then there is also tribalism ethnically and racially in the United States that has escalated in the last 10, 20 years after a long period of progress.
And I think that we can explain that in terms of the us instincts, not in terms of hate. And that's an important correction because there's this enormous DEI industry that is not exclusively, but it largely makes use of bias training workshops where people are told that they have a sort of unconscious hate for the other side.
And it makes people feel falsely accused. And there's a lot of evidence that it polarizes groups.
It makes people more inhibited about interacting or mentoring or hiring across ethnic lines. So it can have counterproductive effects.
Yeah, I think it's good to move on from just focusing on sort of political divides only a week or so after the election, still in the blast radius of that. But yeah, when I think about tribalism, and I keep on getting it in my head, it's not just tribalism, it's polarization.
And I think that the word is being used interchangeably. It seems like you maybe have a more sort of scientifically grounded definition of what tribalism is, and that what the media is using the word tribalism for is maybe to just highlight polarization, groups that don't agree with each other.
Yeah, sometimes yes. But I think often they're trying to say, what is the psychology that is driving this? And then they have different theories about, it's a funny thing because they often want to say it's an evolved psychology.
And I think they're right about that, that our evolved psychology is contributing to this. But then they sometimes can't really explain why now, why is it worse now if it's our age-old psychology.
And I think if you go into the science of tribal instincts, you can start to understand why certain things have become more salient at certain points in time. Yes, I think, know the again to fight for the hang on i thought everybody hated each other yeah you're being a good devil's advocate a conversation needs that trying my best um i you know thinking about breaking it down yes racial lines you know we we've seen an awful lot of movements a good example of this blm a lot of the time, a movement called Black Lives Matter, defining itself around the in-group.
But what did much of that movement, what did much of the communication end up being? It was a demonization of the out-group. A lot of that discussion was around pointing the finger outside.
The Me Too movement, right, was around protecting women. Title IX, around protecting women.
But how was the communication? What was the sort of language that was being used? A lot of the time, it seems to me, and again, that might be the more nefarious edges, the spiky extremes of these movements almost certainly will be the newsworthy ones that capture the sort of crazy Twitter reposts and whatnot. But still, it seems to me like a lot of even in-group movements defined around an in-group communicate themselves as being not an out-group.
And I've seen the stats that said in 2012, people stopped voting for the in-party and started voting against the out-party. The messaging that was come around, was it 30% of Trump's campaign budget in some states were only spent on that one kamala harris is for they them trump is for you thing like it's apparently it was the most apparently it was the most effective ad in this election yeah so i think you're right and oddly enough it was about pronouns you know or it was about you know at least sort of about pronouns so yeah it it was very effective it it was pithy and it captured that.
So I think you're right. I would push back, you know, the Me Too movement.
It wasn't just a woman's empowerment movement. It was a movement of saying, you were sexually abused by your boss, Me Too.
I was sexually abused by my boss. I kept quiet for a variety of reasons,

but now there's strength in numbers because we know it happened to so many people. And so we can all speak out and there's the possibility for change.
So I think that movement, it wasn't something that metastasized from a us movement into a your bad movement, you know, the other group, other groups misbehavior. But Black Lives Matter, I think you're right that it, but again, it was implicitly about police brutality and, you know, and then people can argue about the statistics, you know, exactly.
It is certainly the case that African-Americans had a higher statistical likelihood of having interactions with police and then of having interactions that were harmful in one way or the other. Um, but so, yeah, so with you that these movements are adversarial or oppositional at some level.
I wonder whether that's a natural outgrowth of just the pushback of anyone disagreeing with your in-group proposition. You make a proposition around us, a group that isn't you pushes back against that.
So what do you do? You lean in against the argument. So I guess, you know, we've spoken about a number of different ways that people can get split up in terms of tribes.
What do people become tribal around mostly? Is it accent, appearance, familiarity, gene pool? Like, what are the core characteristics that compose tribals, tribes? It's a very interesting question.

So, and again, I think it varies with these three basic tribal instincts,

but I'll start with the base one that I've mentioned,

the peer instinct.

I think what's really interesting about the peer instinct

is that many studies show that race is not one of the primary triggers. It becomes a trigger that people learn to use as a group marker if they live in a society like the United States where physiognomy is correlated with cultural groups.
But in places like Israel, you can't always tell from somebody's face whether they're Palestinian or Israeli. In Ukraine, you can't tell whether someone's Russian or Ukrainian from their face.
If you get them to talk, then you can tell. You can sometimes tell from their clothing.
So these other cues are um there's a lot of evidence that we are wired um more to use language as our basis of sorting i'm so glad i'm so glad you said that because i have been spouting this people are more racist against accents than they are against skin colors thing for a while it may very well well be some of your work from a long time ago that I've been harping on about. But if that's true, then I'm...
No, it's totally true. Kids don't use race.
They don't preferentially socialize with a stranger of the same race until they're six. But the language thing starts when they're infants, because even in the womb, the kid is hearing their mother's language and even their mother's dialect.
So even like neonates, they'll have a preference. If you kind of put them in front of two screens and there's someone talking with their mother's dialect and there's someone talking with a different dialect they'll reach for the food you know in front of the screen no way it's not their mother but it's their mother's dialect so they so they you know the mother tongue is a super important and fundamental thing and uh it's it's all there's also some funny studies that show that uh children are wired to to start assuming that people who speak the same language as them will prefer the same food as them.
And the way they do these studies is that they've got like a baby who can't talk yet, but the baby can listen, right? And the baby sees one adult maybe speaking French and one adult speaking English. And then there's two kinds of food.
And they've seen an English speaker eat this food and they've seen a French speaker eat this food. And then if the French person reaches for the English food, the baby shows a surprise reaction, startled, like, oh my

God, the French person is eating.

So what's really interesting is that babies are not racist.

They don't judge you based on your race, but they already judge you.

They will judge you based on your accent.

They already judge you on your accent and on what you eat.

They're already watching what you eat and your accent.

So they're not little Buddhas. They're not racist, but they're not little Buddhas.
They're judgmental already. Fantastic.
Well, dig into, we've got these three instincts, peer instinct, hero instinct, ancestor instinct. Let's run through those.
They seem like one. So I've mentioned the peer instinct.
That corresponds to what we might call conformist impulses or the herd instinct, the bandwagon instinct. We're wired to sort of unconsciously learn what the people in our group do.
We just form like a register of what's normal in our group without even trying to. And then we feel a sense of satisfaction when we mesh, when we match, when we fit in with what other people do.
And this evolved its thought to enable coordination. Even like a million years ago, our forebearers, Homo erectus, we have evidence now that they started hunting as a sort of collaborative group, you know, and gathering as a collaborative group in a way that other species can't do, like working from a common plant.
And that is something we deride today, but it does limit independent thinking sometimes, but it is something that enables all of our collective thinking and enables our collective work. And even in fields like art and science, you know, the great contributions build on, you know, they build on the work of other people.
It's not being done completely in a vacuum by one person. So I think while we are wise to be wary of conformity, we should understand that this ability to mind meld with other people and this impulse to mesh actions and this ease that we have at collaborating with people in our group, it empowers most of what we do.
Yeah. Where's a peer instinct at its best, peer instinct at its worst? The peer instinct at its best is the kind of, think of the seamless interaction between a basketball team that plays together, you know, behind the back, no look passes, you know, like I, or in football or soccer, you know, like, I know you so well that I know that you know that I'm going to be here, like, we can read minds, and we can do these amazing things together.
Where it's at its worst is when, you know, I'm an engineer, and I know that the airbag design is unsafe. But the other 11 people around this boardroom are all saying it's good enough.
And so I censor myself and I go along with the group and then a customer dies in an airbag explosion, right? That's where conformity is at its worst. And I think all of us have probably had an incident in our life like that, where we kind of went along with the group because we didn't want to get in the way of progress, but we knew we were right and we should have spoken up.
So that's the danger. Just one point here, I guess you've mentioned as this sort of taxonomy, this breakup of different types of instincts, but I can see a world in which peer instinct would be restricting because conformity limits creativity.
If you're sort of following a lot of the time, I imagine that breaking out of the box is something that then becomes more difficult. Yes, but I think part of creativity is having a point of departure, which is often somebody else's work.

And some creativity, you know, think of a jazz quartet, right? It's not one individual's work. You know, it's playing off of each other because of reading each other's mind and knowing where somebody is going to go and then doing something that complements it.
So I agree with you, but I think we have a kind of stereotype of creativity that involves the lone genius. And I would submit that most creativity, even in the arts or in the sciences, is collaborative creativity.
Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, hero instinct.
So the hero instinct, it's something that was born about a half a million years ago when our ancestor homo heidelbergensis uh began doing things that no humans had been doing before like uh at this time we start to see in the fossil record skeletons of people with congenital deformities that survived to the age of adulthood. What does that tell us? Someone was taking care of a person who probably couldn't pay them back.
You know, somebody was doing something pro-social. They were doing something good.
We also see around this time, they started hunting much larger animals like woolly mammoths and rhinos and stuff, which, you know, in some cases indicates an individual was willing to take some personal risk, you know, be the lead hunter, uh, so that the group could then rush in and take down a much larger prey than, uh, was possible before. you also see at this time the tools, much more sophisticated tools that required a lot more work are showing up at this time.
And the idea is that people started to have a new motivation, not just a motivation to be normal, which is the peer instinct, but a motivation to be normative, to be a contributor, to be more respected than the average person in the group. And how do you do that? Well, you have to make sacrifices for the group.
You kind of take a personal hit to benefit somebody else. But you also have to know what the group values, and that's not always trivial.
And so a cognitive quirk that came along with the hero instinct is this idea of emulating people in the group with status. So we look to the sort of cultural heroes in our community as beacons of what does the group value as a contribution.
And we look for distinctive quirks or behaviors of those people, and we tend to emulate them. And this is also something that we often deride today because it is this kind of superficial status seeking.
Like I saw, you know, LeBron James wears these sneakers. So I'm wearing these sneakers.
It doesn't, I still can't dunk, you know, it doesn't really help, you know, but I'm trying to be like LeBron, right? That there's, there's a silly side of it. It leads to superstitious learning in some cases, But in general, it provided a sort of engine of innovation and adaptive cultural change.
Because imagine, you know, an early agricultural group where everybody was planting, you know, one kind of peas and then somebody starts to plant corn or something, you know, or yams. And then that tends to grow well because maybe the climate

changed or maybe the group migrated to a different ecology. And the younger generation sees that and they will emulate that.
And then you'll have a sort of gradual shift of the culture towards what's working currently or working in the new environment.

So while we... shift of the culture towards what's working currently or working in the new environment.

So while we can deride status seeking, this hero instinct, it was a way for individuals

to become rewarded by the group, to have status and tributes. And it's funny, anthropologists,

there's a certain group of anthropologists who are really invested in the idea that in hunter-gatherer groups, there was absolutely no hierarchy, that everybody was totally equal and that it was like classical communism, you know, like food was distributed according to need. Everyone's starved.

Yeah.

And there were reasons for this.

Like in the Bushmen, you know, the Bushmen of – which for a while you weren't supposed to say the word Bushmen.

Now you're supposed to say Bushmen again, apparently.

What were you briefly supposed to say that you're not supposed to say anymore?

You're supposed to call them like the San people or the Kung people.

But now I've read some things that they actually – that, some things that some people actually think Bushman is a better word. I don't know.
So I've said all three words now. So I should be safe.
Equally safe or equally canceled. Yeah.
Yeah. So they have this wonderful ritual in their group that's called insulting the meat.
And the way it works is when the young hunters come back from hunting, you know, like one, you know, most of them probably got nothing. And one of them got like a little rabbit and then one of them got an antelope.
And so the old men and women of the village, when the hunters come back, they start insulting the hunter who got the antelope. And they're like, look at that scrawny thing.
There's practically no meat on it. What is that, a mouse? And they kind of go on like that in the way that you could picture uncles in Brooklyn on their stoop.
Shit-talking. Shit-talking, essentially.
And they call it insulting the meat. And so anthropologists said, oh, look, they obviously don't want to have any status differentiation.
But sort of modern anthropologists who use more biological methods, they're really into measuring fertility. So they'll measure for over time, living with a group, they'll measure for, you know, over time, you know, living with a group,

they'll measure, okay, which hunters were successful most often? Like what's the batting average of these different hunters? And then 10 years later, okay, which of these hunters has the most children, you know, and surprise, surprise, the correlation between status measured by successful hunts and um and reproductive uh reproductive success um is just as high in the hunter-gatherer group as it is in the kingdoms you know in the groups that that celebrate inequality you can insult the meat all you want but what can i say I'm not going to complete that sentence for you. That's an attractive man carrying a good antelope and taking him to bed.
There would be a serious incentive problem if the hunters genuinely felt insulted. It's a status leveling thing, right? You don't want the hunter to get too big a head because we all have live but also if there was think about it this way if there was no reward for working that hard beyond the caloric input that you get like you're working you have this excess output there's additional risk you know if you're the one that takes down the antelope or the whatever it's you that's the one that's potentially going to be killed by it you've got to drag it back presumably you're carrying it for a good chunk of the way if not all of the way yeah why why are you doing that is it just because you want to bestow your caloric excess surplus onto the group or is it because you think you're going to get laid or is it because you think that you're going to be your children are going to be better protected or that people are going to revere you or that all of the downstream benefits that come from status are going to be bestowed on you.
Obviously, that's going to be the case. Yeah, I think that what's really interesting about it is that pro-social behavior is socially rewarded, right? We can see in this group, it's rewarded through social opportunities.
In other groups that are hunter-gatherer groups, like the Aceh, they distribute food in a completely socialist way, but the productive hunters get better medical care. If they're injured, the chief sees to it that they get the medical care.
You've got to prioritize the person that's providing all the food. Exactly, right? I mean, it's not surprising.
But what's interesting is that evolution didn't just wire us to be calculating and to be revenue maximizing, even though my economist colleagues tend to think that the world works that way. It also wired us to care about esteem as an end in itself, the standing in which we are held and the internal esteem that we feel when we know that we've done the right thing.
And I think one of the reasons that we became wired with that sort of pride-shame system is because social rewards tend to come probabilistically and with considerable delay. So if I was a person who was only going to be pro-social, like I was only going to try to hunt hard if I was sure that there was a reward waiting for me, I wouldn't do it very often.
But if I'm wired that I want the feeling, I want the feeling of being celebrated and the feeling of knowing I'm the contributor, then I probably will get more rewards because I'll do the pro-social thing more often. So I think we're wired for both.
We're wired to contribute in order to be rewarded, and we're wired to contribute as an end in itself. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what the conscience is, right? I've been thinking about this a lot more recently.
I did a ton of therapy over the last year, and if you do tons of psychotherapy and you're talking to someone face-to-face, your conscience apparently just the volume gets turned up and you can't hide things from yourself anymore. So I've been really thinking about that.
You have this sort of, I don't know, it's like a representative of the group sat on your shoulder, your better self sometimes, just judging you. Should you have done that? Should you have said that? Is that a virtuous behavior? Is that a non-virtuous behavior? Like, what is that? If not, this sort of sense of social obligation to the rest of the world.
Now, if you're religious, maybe it's your virtue speaking up on high. It's something a little bit more transcendent than that.
But at least functionally, adaptively, why would it work? Well, it's to ensure that you know what other people would have thought about the thing that you just did or said or thought about doing. Yeah.
Yeah. Freud talks about the superego as your sort of internalized voice of authority.
But I really think it's more like it's the internalized voice of the respected members of the community. It's like your board of advisors, your internal board of advisors is suggesting that what you're about to do is unwise.
And that's the emotion of pride. Shame is kind of like a good PR agency.
It encourages you to do the things that are thought well of, and it encourages you to decline the temptations to do things that are not thought well of. And then it also encourages you to publicize when you've done a good thing.
So in every culture, when Olympic athletes win a gold medal, they go like they go like this, you know, they expand their body. They, they, they speak more loudly.
And when people lose, they, you know, they cower, they, they disappear, they become smaller. So we, we not only have these emotions that are driving us to, to do what the group rewards, but we are also wired to showboat when we have done something well and to hide it when we have not done something well.
Yeah, exactly. Just to kind of round out the hero instinct bit, in a more socially complex group structure where status bestows on certain people, the people achieve it benefits that requires a degree of experimentation adventure risk-taking divergence from the peer instinct exactly which would be more conformist right so someone's going to go and do this thing we then have benefits bestowed to that person which which is the reward for them taking the risk effectively and well and pulling it off, doing the dance, killing the antelope, whatever.
And then downstream from that, because you now have this kind of social capital capitalist system where everybody is trying to accrue as much social equity as they can. I look at the person that's done really well and I think, okay, well, he did that.
What are some of the principles that I can take from that, maybe specifically, or maybe even sort of more philosophically? Well, he did something different, or he was courageous, or he was, you know, honorable, or whatever it might be. Is that a good framing for Hero Instinct? Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think, I don't know, when I was writing about this, and obviously I've been reading a lot and I do research in the area, but I often reflect back on when I was an adolescent, like when I was in high school. And I feel like a lot of my mental life in those days when I was unfolding as a person was these Walter Mitty like fantasies of heroic action and, and glory, you know, like, oh, the high school caught on fire.
Oh, I'm going to save the pretty girl, you know, or, oh, you know, my parents are in a car crash. Well, I'm going to, you know, go run and get, get medical attention.
You know, it was all this constant scenarios about things that I might do, which, you know, I would regard as, you know, I think a lot of our fantasies, whether they're sexual fantasies or fantasies about achievement, they reflect, you know, these programs that are partially evolved programs and then take on a particular cultural, you know, instantiation,

but they're programs for action. And so I think that probably these hero scripts, you know, that go through our heads are gendered and they may take a different form in different subcultures, but they certainly seem to be things that are essential parts of your mental life, especially when you're young.
When you get older, then you're actually doing things. You don't have time to dream.
You're too busy with tasks. Yeah.
Yeah. And then there are people like, I don't know, Walter Mitty might be a reference where I'm aging myself, but it's a story by James Thurber about this guy who goes through his life fantasizing about acting heroically, but never doing it.
And it was sort of a commentary on modernity. But I think that there's also some interesting studies that help us understand who are the Walter Mitty's and who are the people who actually step forward and do contribute to groups at a sacrifice to their own safety or at a sacrifice to their own comfort and then gain the actual glory rather than just the fantasized glory.
Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm going to have to ask you if I imagine that you do know, I want to have a conversation with someone about the psychology of courage and bravery.
Yeah. I'm sure that there's somebody out there that's done it, but it's something I've been pretty fascinated by recently.
And it sounds like that, you know, you posit an ideal, you find yourself falling short from that ideal. And it's not due to something structural.

It's simply due to your own commission, your own lack of willingness, of effort. Yeah.
Well, in my book, Tribal, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to mention it, but I write about this one study that I found fascinating. um there was this program called the Freedom Summer, which was designed to help register African-American voters in the state of Mississippi in the 1960s, when a very small percentage of African-Americans were registered to vote

because, you know, arbitrary inconveniences were put in place to stop them. So this group said, okay, we will train idealistic college students to go for the summer to Mississippi, and they'll go to every community, and they'll sort of build trust with people, and then help people fill out the paperwork so that we have a much higher rate of registered African-American voters.
And applications were taken at all different colleges across the country and people answered all sorts of questions and sent in their applications. And then the best people were selected and they were brought to a university in Ohio,

not in the South, for some initial training. And then just when the first volunteers were sent

down to Mississippi, several of them were murdered in a very brutal way by the KKK.

And that created a crisis in the program, as you might expect, where people thought this was going

to be a difficult summer, but they didn't think they were going to get murdered. And so a third of the people, I'm trying to remember, I think a third of the people stayed and two thirds of the people decided probably don't want to do this in the end.

And then they ran the program at a slightly smaller scale than they expected. And there were no more killings, but there were some difficult circumstances.
And after the fact, this sociologist realized all those applications are still on record. So I want to go back and look at those applications and see if I can distinguish who were the stayers and who were the quitters, right? Who are the people who stayed even though suddenly it was looking like a much tougher gig? You know, it was looking like something that was going to be dangerous.

And what was interesting is that these people had written essays about their political values, and they had talked about their experience being involved in political activism, that sort of thing. And none of those things mattered.
None of those things differed between the stayers and the quitters. The only thing that differed was that the stayers were people who happened to have close personal friends who were also in the program and were people who were part of organizations that were involved with the program.
Like they belonged to a political organization that was one of the sponsors of the program. So the conclusion was that these people were embedded in relationships where they couldn't quit without really disappointing some people that they definitely were going to see again, right? They were definitely going to see the political club that they were a part of back in their hometown hometown and they definitely were going to see their friends who are also part of this group so these being in a network of people who are committed to a cause it sort of anchors you to that cause so that you stay with it even when the going gets tough's saying that the key to bravery and courage is social pressure.

Well, social pressure and social incentives, right?

Correct. A sense of support if you do it well and a sense of… Studies of militaries have found that, you know, why do people risk their life on the battlefield?

Is it for their country? Is it because they care about democracy? No, it's because of their buddies from boot camp. It's their buddies from boot camp who are out there and they're not going to run if their body's out there.
Even in insurgent groups, or you might call them terrorist groups, there was a theory that terrorists were mentally ill, crazy people. But then when people actually did studies, they typically found the inconvenient finding that these terrorists were above average in mental health and were not these weird deviant loners.
They were popular people, well-connected. And so it's because, for the same reason, the people who are central members of the community, like the mosque or whatever, if the mosque gets radicalized, those are the people who are going to throw stones or throw Molotov cocktails.
I had Edward Slingeland on the show. Oh, yeah.
He's one of the researchers of this material it's phenomenal so um he did that book about alcohol uh over time and he told me this really great story about how it's a very common initiation slash bonding ritual for armies troops to drink together maybe not the night before the battle but at some point not too far off and uh it's the impact of alcohol fascinating it makes you worse at lying because it down regulates your pfc but it makes you better as a lying detector so it's this sort of uh a truth serum milieu that gets thrown through everything but even more important than all of that is the fact that you're going to feel like shit the next day. It's the suffering, the shared suffering that you go through.
So when you're on the battlefield with your buddies in a week's time, and there's a ton of horses charging at you, and you've got your pikes in the ground or whatever, there is this sense of shared camaraderie because you have been through something already that was difficult, albeit maybe just a rough hang um but yeah i just really love that idea i love you know we often and i think this is something that's potentially robbed from uh modern generations who get two coddled two cotton wool helicopter snowplow parented that um if you don't not only do people not create the ability

to be anti-fragile and resilient

against life individually,

but they don't get the opportunity

to go through the really important

formative bonding processes

of sharing in that suffering,

sharing in that discomfort

with other people too.

And as somebody who,

I spend a lot of time in solitude.

I'm an only child.

This business and everything that I've done

is in one form or another,

been on my own. The more that i'm able to let other people in the guys that work with me now on the podcast the people that i worked with in my events company previously the more that i can do that the more i feel like i've got sort of uh stabilizing wheels to sort of weather the ups and downs the turbulence uh that that comes along with stuff because i'm like, fuck, we're in it together.
Like we're in it together. They're doing it for me.
I'm doing it for them. Isn't this cool? And yeah, it's good.
It's noble. It's definitely functional as well.
Yeah, I'm in a pretty solitary profession myself, you know, being a behavioral scientist and a professor. And I found that even I tend to like courses that are team taught, the core courses where we have to have a team of professors who all go and deliver the same material on the same day to different groups.
Even though there are more work, there's something wonderful about that experience of being in a shared battle.

Then you regroup at the end of the day. And how did it go? Oh, yeah, my afternoon session was a nightmare.
Oh, it couldn't have been worse than mine. The commiseration and working together.
Yeah, it's a wonderful bonding experience. in a lot of traditional cultures, particularly ones that are cultures where people have to hunt or people are in battles where people are warriors, you have rites of passage that adolescents go through that are really dysphoric, that involve painful and frightening experiences that you typically go through with your age mates, with the group of people within one or two years of you.
And you are, for the rest of your life, bonded with those people because you've gone through this terrifying, painful experience with them. Okay.
And then we've got the ancestor instinct. Yes.
The ancestor instinct is the most recently evolved wave of adaptations that contributes to our ability to live in tribes. And in some ways, it sounds like the most primitive of them.
It's the urge to replicate the ways of past generations to, to maintain traditions. It, we can recognize it in ourselves.
It's our, our curiosity about past generations of our family or, you know, the original family recipe for this, you know, this meal we, we sort of fetishize antiques, you know, objects that come from the past. We want to hear about founders, not just the founders of our nations, but the founders of religions, the founders of the organizations that we are a part of.
So we have this kind of irrational curiosity, this kind of irresistible curiosity about the past and this impulse to maintain these ways. And we feel really good when we maintain a tradition because we feel that we feel connected, not just to the current community, but to the past generations of the community.
And many anthropologists think that it has something to do with our fundamental fear of mortality, that because we are the animal that knows that we will die, we have a sort of latent terror about our mortality. But if we feel like we are part of this enduring tradition, then we can feel that we are part of something that will also endure for many generations into the future so that it's less terrifying.
We have a kind of indirect immortality from our membership in a culture. So the ancestor instinct, the reason it was adaptive is that it allowed early human groups to hang on to the discoveries and the inventions of past generations, even ones that weren't immediately needed.
So it's what you see at this time is you start seeing that not just like the, it was not just the case that people were replicating the tools like the spears that were being made by the prior generation, but they were also replicating the cave art and the, you know, the little Venus figurines and the bone flutes, things that didn't have an immediate instrumental purpose, but it was something the past generation was doing. So therefore, let's treat it with reverence.
Let's continue it. We're not sure why we're doing it, but we're doing it.
Give me the adaptive reason, because this just seems like superfluous, archaic bullshit. Well, the great thing about it, it sort of corresponds to myths and rituals, right? Why did we have this ritual learning modality where we sort of learn something by rote and then we repeat it even though we don't understand it? Well, it allows us to learn things that kind of go beyond our understanding.
Maybe the past generation figured out some way of making a fishing net.

And we don't really understand why it works. But if we have this kind of sacrosanct attitude toward it, we will just copy it the same way it was.
And then it allows us to benefit from the technology, even if we wouldn't be able to invent it. Or imagine that we're a group that lives near the ocean and there's a tsunami that happens maybe every 60 years.
If there's a myth about the tsunami and we repeat that myth, even though generations go by without a tsunami, but we still repeat the myth, the myth is there to protect us when the tsunami does come. And it's not a hypothetical example.
There's a group that are sometimes called sea gypsies that live pretty much on the water in Thailand. And they did not lose many people in the great tsunami of 2006 we don't even though many people in the coastal villages died because they have all these songs and and myths about how the ocean looks when there's a tsunami it's tricky you know the ocean actually recedes before a tsunami which is like a invitation to go look in the tidal pools but if you have a lore in your culture of like if the ocean ever recedes head for the hills you know that's that's an adaptive um it's an adaptive cultural uh lesson are there any other uh seemingly superfluous uh cultural artifacts that you've fallen in love with during uh research for this this that ended up being quite adaptive or just had a kind of interesting use? Well, there are many examples where I was like, oh my God, I didn't know that.
I wouldn't have suspected that. Not all of them are things that have been adaptive like, you know, we have this myth about a primordial flood, you know, the Moses story, right? And many things about the story, even as a child, when you hear it, you're like, this is made up nonsense, right? Like, yeah, he built a boat just by himself and then he had all these animals.
all these animals. But it turns out that groups all around the world have myths about a primordial flood.
And around, I guess, around 8,000 years ago, there was a major rise in the oceans that corresponded to the end of some kind of mini ice age or something. I can't remember the exact geological details, but the ocean level rose all around the world.
And the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, they all have myths about a primordial flood, they have different kinds of myths about like what the ocean did. And a few years ago, some anthropologists who had collected the flood myths all around the country, they teamed up with some geologists who built simulations based on the topography of different parts of Australia.
And what they found is that the myths of these groups correspond pretty well to what we can simulate happened 7,000 years ago in that part of Australia. So these really traumatic events, they get really well-preserved by myths because we treat myths in such a sacrosanct way, you know, where you're not allowed to tell your version of the, you know, Noah story.
You know, you're supposed to tell the exact version that's in the Bible. And similarly, in these Aboriginal groups, you're supposed to tell, you know, the exact story of the primordial flood myth.
So the Moses story, sorry, I keep saying Moses, it's the Noah story. The Noah story is our primordial flood myth, but it likely is the remnant of this event that happened, that really happened.
To you, it may just seem like a whimsical story, but it's actually geology and meteorology masquerading as a tale from the past. Yeah, and it lasted in the oral tradition for thousands of years before it was written down.
This is one of the fascinating things. I had a great conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is an atheist skeptic type person out of Oxford, but very open to the idea of religion.
And he was arguing for the side of religion and saying that basically in the modern world, what we told was for people to let go of the thing that they found most easy to believe, which was story. It was a persona and personification.
It was narrative. And to start to believe in the thing which is the least believable, which is data and stats.
And it's very sterile. And we have to put ourselves into this very different type of world, this very different type of mindset in order to be able to go, and this many people will be saved by a mosquito net or et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to what we lived through for our entire human history and yes the problem with that is that you can't it's unfalsifiable it allows all sorts of fuckery to be slipped in here and there uh but yeah i always think about that frame i always think about uh things that are um figuratively true but literally false or things that are functionally true but but literally false, and things that are literally true, but functionally false.
And that myth story, you know, very well may be one of those things that's literally not that true, but functionally is like perfect. Right, right.
In the sense that it, you know, it provides a warning, you know, the person who lived to tell the story probably had some sort of boat. Yeah.
Yeah, so I was someone who grew up as a very individualistic and very rationalistic person when I was young. And I studied the humanities and I was told that what distinguished humans from the beasts was our rationality, our morality, and maybe our aesthetics, right? That's the glorified notion of what makes humans humans.
And in the process of doing the research for this book, I came to see that as very incomplete, that some of the things that make us human and that enabled us to build these wonderful, comfortable civilizations that we live in today are conformity, status-seeking, and kind of nostalgia about the past, sentimentality about the ways of the past. And these are the kinds of things i always used to critique my parents for you know like so yeah i think that i've i have come to a different understanding of um the world you know through uh thinking a lot about how how the mighty have fallen uh okay so Okay, so what are the levers that pull on tribalism? What causes culture or tribalism to ossify more or for it to change or become more contagious? Great question.
One of the themes that I try to express is that there's a myth that cultures are kind of like permanent fixtures, you know, that the red and the blue party that we see today in the United States will be around forever and always have been. False.
You know, like I'm old enough to know that it was completely different when I was a kid. There was as much variation within the democratic party as there was between, you know, there was Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats.
And, and so cultures are in flux and the cultures that individuals and small groups express are in flux in an even more rapid way, because we all internalize multiple cultures and the situations that we go into trigger different cultures. So I'm meeting you in your podcast self, but I'm sure if I knew you from the gym or if I knew you from church or whatever else you do in your life, I would see a different Chris, right? I would see a different person.
So we have short-term

fluctuations based on situations, and then we have long-term evolution of cultures. And there

are levers of those short-term changes and levers of the long-term changes. So in the short-term,

these three instincts, these three levels of tribal motivation, they are triggered by

Thank you. In the short term, these three instincts, these three levels of tribal motivation, they are triggered by slightly different things.
So the peer instinct, this kind of conformity, this kind of set of shared habits that we just jump into, it's triggered more than anything else by the audiences around us, by the ways that they speak, by the ways that they dress. What we call code switching is an example of this.
So when Barack Obama used to speak in a slightly different register when he was in front of an African American group, as opposed to a group of farmers from Kansas, that wasn't something that he was doing intentionally. That was just a reflex that came from the fact that he grew up with a mixed family and with different parts of his life living in each of those communities.
And when he's in front of people who look a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and yes, have certain ethnic characteristics, although that is less fundamental to it. He clicks into one set of speech habits or another set of speech habits.
And some of my research pushed a little deeper on that and showed that it's not just speech habits, it's your basic biases in making sense of the world, making sense of ambiguous events. You know, cultures have different biases.
And when you are around an audience from one of your cultures, you start thinking with that worldview. And when you're around people from another one.
So when I'm around my fellow professors, you know, I terms of data. I'm thinking in terms of economic theory, that kind of thing.
When I go to my hometown and I'm with my buddies in a dive bar, I'm thinking in terms of different templates, different scripts, ones that help me bond with them and help me be understood by them, but that wouldn't work as well with my colleagues at Columbia. So it's audiences, the tribes that we're around that trigger those peer instincts.
And then for hero instincts, the impulses to contribute, the impulses to sacrifice and do something exemplary for the group. Some very potent triggers of that are cultural symbols.
So for the longest time, armies would follow a national flag into battle. Crusaders followed the cross.
You know, they took the cross. Sports teams, you know, the mascot runs out on the field and people go crazy would an anthem be something similar what's that what an anthem exactly the song that they come out to exactly an anthem um you know whether it's a national anthem or whether it's you know the fans will chant a song in the stadium so it's it's a kind of a set of images or a set of words or phrases like in the United States, if you say, all men are created equal, you trigger a certain political creed, which is why Martin Luther King quoted the Declaration of Independence when he was trying to build a broad Coalition for Civil Rights.
And so these symbols, these cultural icons are potent triggers of hero instincts. If you want to get people to be pro-social, to take risks, to make sacrifices, surround them with the symbols of their tribe.
And then the one that is maybe least obvious is the ancestor instinct. What is it that causes people to start thinking in terms of tradition and letting tradition guide them? One of the kinds of cultural cues that is most important is ceremonies.
So ceremonies are public events that involve symbols, but that often involve synchronous movement. So you're talking in unison, you're moving in unison, you're often marching, or you're in church, you're getting up and down in a yoga class, you're going through these positions together.
And there's even a neuroscience literature on this, that synchronous behavior, it lulls people into a different mental state where their self-concept as an individual is reduced. They become more open to unity experience.
Their critical thinking is somewhat reduced. And so they become more open to this idea of accepting tradition.
So if you have a moment in a yoga class or in a religious service where suddenly you feel part of a tradition, that's because you've been in a ceremony, and ceremonies bring that out in us. I suppose that's one of the vectors of weakness that cults, cult leaders take advantage of too.
Exactly. Make people more suggestible.
You are a part of the bigger thing. Do you not feel this sense of connection to the wider world? Yeah.
Yeah. In cults, I mean, there are daily ceremonies where you're kind of made to feel part of a broader system.
Your individual self-consciousness gets dampened. And I think people join cults because this unity experience is a wonderful thing to experience.
It's all, you know, a lot of us will experience it on a sports team or, you know, if you're part of a political campaign and you're throwing yourself into it, you, you feel part of something larger and you're making sacrifices for that group and you feel connected to prior generations of people in the same community. So it's a wonderful experience that people get when they start to join a cult.
And then I think cults differ from just a strong culture in some of their recruitment techniques. One thing that really characterizes cults is what's called network isolation, where they'll find somebody who maybe is not tightly embedded in a community, like maybe a transfer student who is new on a large campus or someone who's recently gotten out of the army and hasn't really started work yet.
And they will invite that person to some social activity, maybe a volleyball game or a dinner, and they love bomb them. They surround them with people who hang on their every word and tell them they have spiritual potential and make them feel wonderful.
And if they respond well, then they get an invitation to come to our group's retreat. It's in this beautiful mountain setting where cell phones don't work and where there are no newspapers and no television.
And then you have long days of getting up early, eating a low-protein diet, maybe meditating, chanting, hiking together, listening to charismatic lectures, having sort of confession sessions. And this is the same routine that seminaries use to recruit priests.
It's the same routine that the Muslim Brotherhood uses to recruit. Cults don't have a monopoly on this set of recruitment techniques, but basically what you're doing is you're pulling somebody out of the mixed social network that they ordinarily live in.
And then after the retreat, usually 10 or 20% of the people are willing to move into a cult residence. And then once they're in the cult residence, then they're told, you know, you should probably cut off some of these old friends because they don't really get it about the important work we're doing here in the cult, or at least give them a break.
And maybe don't talk to your family so much because a lot of families, they may seem like good people, but they're a little bit hostile to the church. And then, of course, the family gets angry because they haven't heard from you, and they do things like trying to kidnap you or trying to convince you that the cult is bad.
And that ends up corroborating what the cult has been saying. And then you get into a world where you're living in a day-to-day routine where you're completely surrounded by fellow cult members and they look up to the cult leaders and the cult leaders basically have this monopoly on status.
Nobody else in your world has status. You're not seeing deference to anybody else.
And that's when it gets really dangerous because it's abnormal. You know, in normal life, even if you're a very religious person, you know, you may think the Pope is a wonderful person, but you're also a big fan of Messi and you like, you know, the music of Mick Jagger.
And so no one of these heroes can dominate you completely. But when you're in a cult and you're not allowed to listen to Mick Jagger, you're not allowed to watch Messi, and it's all day long, ceremonies involving the cult leader, that gets dangerous.
What about factors or situations in the environment that cause people to focus more on either collaboration or on competition? I kind of have it in my head around warfare, peacetime, wartime threat, etc. Surely those sorts of things, but there must be a ton of these.
You're right. In addition to these sort of social triggers or who you're around or whether you're in a ceremony or you're seeing symbols or you're seeing audiences, particular emotional states also contribute to these things.
And so threat tends to be something, particularly existential threat, like the fear of death, a brush with death, or the fear of

collective threat, like there's some sort of threat to your organization or threat to your country. That leads people to cling to traditions in ways that they don't do otherwise.
So that can be very tricky in terms of setting off dysfunctional traditionalism because, you know, in a

course- that can be very tricky in terms of setting off dysfunctional traditionalism because, you know, in a corporation when, you know, there's a tendency to think that your own traditions are wonderful and that the competition, that their traditions are silly, but then imagine it's a time of threat, like your business is not doing well. Well, the tribal reflex is to cling to your traditions even more, but that's not adaptive because that's really a time when you want to be learning from the competition.
You want to be open-minded. Similarly, in warfare, if you're trying to negotiate, uh, a peace treaty, uh, but there's like a risk of death because, you know, there's been some killing.
Well, that makes it harder for people to, you know, take the perspective of the other side. So threat, uh, leads people to anchor on their own traditions,

on their own group. How much of that do you think is playing into the modern world, the polarization side of tribalism? Lots of headlines, very scary news out there, threat yeah um i don't know you When COVID happened, a lot of people were dying, but I don't know that it led to partisan polarization.
I do think that in the, you know, we see a lot of tribalism with regard to the Israel-Gaza conflict. The campus that I teach in, it's sort of like getting into an airport to get into the main campus because there's been protests that were very disruptive, and now there's really strong management of who can enter the campus.
And I think that that was a conflict that escalated and became very acrimonious because of the brutality of not just that people died, but that people just died in a horrible way, both on October 7th and in Gaza.

You know, so I do think in a case like that, people start to, even though their fellow college students are marching and chanting and calling their classmates Nazis. And it's bizarre because, you know, yeah, there is a big problem in the world, but your fellow Columbia undergraduates are not the problem.
But there's this tendency for the, you know, these, these protests started as vigils, vigils expressing solidarity for vulnerable civilians in Israel and in Gaza. But then a few months later, the protests were accusations, you know, accusing the opposite faction of students of being Nazis and being genocidal.
So I do think in that case, because people are aware of the mortality and the bloodshed, there's this way in which people take on this exaggerated sense of being vulnerable themselves. Some of my Israeli colleagues who are leaders in the protests, they would say things like, my children would be more safe in Israel or in the Gaza Strip than they are at the Columbia campus.
And I'm like, okay, there's not a lot of threat to physical safety. There's a threat.
There's been a threat to people's peace of mind because there's been some harassment, but there are not people being killed. There's a threat to your ideological mental model purity because you're going to brush up against and push up against other people that say you're wrong.
That thing's not right. Yeah, I mean, there's conflation between emotional or intellectual insults with physical ones.
And even the ratcheting up of emotional insults as being something that you're never supposed to encounter is a really interesting pivot. So I guess we've laid out a nice paradigm.
So I want to kind of come back to where we started, which was your compelling science that proves that we don't hate outsiders, that it is an us thing, not a them thing. like I say, you know, the internet, unfortunately, and again, you've chosen a hell of a time to release a book given the recent election, but a lot of people will just think this can't be the case.
I've heard all of these stories about how people aren't voting for their own side, they're voting against the other, look at the messaging, look at the fear, look at the cetera. There is hostility.
I'm not arguing that there's no hostility in these conflicts. I'm just saying it doesn't start from hostility.
It doesn't start from a drive to derogate and fear outsiders, and that solidarity within one's group does not imply or necessitate antagonism towards other groups. And now that may sound like semantic hair splitting, but it's not because the diagnosis that, you know, there's this discourse that we talked about of people saying like, a deeply buried drive to hate outsiders has somehow atavistically reawoken to doom us to a future of internecine, you know, it's like very grandiose rhetoric.
And it doesn't, it doesn't suggest ameliorative, it doesn't suggest ameliorative policies because, well, if we're cursed by some drive to hate and to be hostile, that is not something that we can really work with. But if, for example, we believe that the root of the increased partisan conflict has to do with this conformity instinct, which got into a feedback loop because it,

it created residential sorting and then news media sorting.

And then once you're in these inbred environments,

then being conformist created,

you know,

different political worlds. If that's your diagnosis, well, there are things you can do about it.
You can break out of your bubble. You know, I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where there are not a lot of Trump signs and there are a lot of Harris signs.
And then even the businesses are like Lululemon and Whole Foods, which basically don't, they don't operate in Republican districts. You know, these are blue tribe symbols, blue tribe icons.
And I've been quite busy the last couple of days because I'm buying a house upstate. And upstate, it's different.
You know, upstate, if I'm going to be spending more time up there, I'm not going to be constantly reinforced and constantly triggered to think about the world through these blue tribe lenses because I won't be in an ideologically inbred environment all the time. And there are things we can do beyond ourselves personally.
You know, there's been a lot of efforts to create dialogue across the red-blue factions of society. Some of it's going on at universities or, you know, town gown, you know, like bringing the university students to talk to the people in the university town who may not share their view.
Or we bring some of our students to industrial towns in the Midwest that have suffered from globalization. The first wave of these programs, very well-intentioned, but a lot of them had names like Red Meets Blue or Town Gown Encounter or Hello from the Other side.
And it sort of accentuated that you are about to be confronted with one of them, one of these people from the other side. And that raises defenses.
That's not a form of interaction that people tend to learn more moderate views from. And the kinds of programs that the research suggests are more effective, they're named things like Coffee Party USA, Make America Dinner Again, Open Lands Discussions.
And the logic here is you bring together, you deliberately bring together people that you know are registered Republicans and Democrats, but not to talk about divisive political issues, you know, to talk about things, passions they have in common, like they all like coffee or they're all foodies or they're all Christian believers or they're all people who, you know, are outdoors people. And the idea is you start talking and then you move from this conversation to that conversation and you maybe eventually get to politics.
But the conversation is one that is bonding and one that is more likely to last than if you ask people to discuss global warming or if you ask people to discuss abortion or something like that. It doesn't lead to usually a conversation that lasts very long.
So I think the diagnosis does matter when it comes to trying to think about what can we do to get ourselves out of this bind that we're in. It's not like we've always been in this bind.
It's something that happened in the last couple of generations for particular reasons that involve the interaction of some of our tribal psychology with some technological changes and demographic changes. And, you know, we can find our way out of it.
And we're not, the doomsayers often will say things like, America has never been more divided politically. That is absolute nonsense if you know your history.
Abraham Lincoln took over with less than 40% of the popular vote. Seven states seceded before his inauguration.
Civil war started a few weeks afterwards. And that's what we call a political rift.
Your country, where your, your country is in a civil war.

You are not considered to be a legitimate president by a lot of people. And that's a real struggle.
But, um, it's really interesting to me what he thought was the answer to that in his first inauguration. He said, um, you know, he talked about the, the daunting prospect of what the country faced.
And then he said, I'm not going to get this perfect, but something like the mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the union. And what he meant by that is that the best resource we have for healing the rift is our common heritage, our common history, our common ancestors.
And if we think about them, we will feel like our current divide is not such a big deal. And the other thing that Abraham Lincoln did, which is kind of a seasonally topical point, is that he is the one who instituted the holiday of Thanksgiving.
Most Americans have the notion that Thanksgiving has been practiced ever since the pilgrims landed on these shores. That's a myth that was created in part by Abraham Lincoln and the people around, the thought leaders of the day who believed that this holiday would be an effective way to unify the country.
They made reference to the precedence of the pilgrims and the precedence of George Washington holding a Thanksgiving event. In order to make people feel like this new holiday was not some alien thing,

but was something that was already a time-honored tradition,

already something that was part of the American tradition.

And it became an instant tradition within a decade or so of Abraham Lincoln

announcing that we're going to have this new holiday, Thanksgiving.

It was a sacred national tradition,

and it's something that helped bring the country back together.

So I think we talk a lot about, you know, references to the past involved in divisive populism, you know, like talking about the good old days as a way to, you know, blame immigrants for a problem. But talking about history has also been useful for inclusive populism, for creating a broader group identity, for reminding people that we all share certain ancestors.
So I'm someone who I don't believe that we're seeing the end of democracy. I think that the problems that we face are not larger than the problems that our country has come through before or that other democracies have come through before.
And that it's helpful to have a diagnosis that is realistic rather than a diagnosis that is Manichaean that talks about good versus evil, the end of the world, this kind of really grandiose ways of talking about our situation. Yes, maybe less sexy, but hopefully a lot more inspiring and more accurate as well.
Dr. Michael Morris, ladies and gentlemen, I really love this orthogonal approach to tribalism.
I think that we need to try and draw back some of that. And it's so interesting to think about the positive outcomes

that you get from having this, from having access to teamwork, from having access to aiming up, from having access to your history, trends, archetypes from the past. It's cool.
It's a really nice thing.

Tribal psychology is what made us human

and underlies all of our proudest accomplishments.

It goes awry sometimes, yes,

like every instinct does.

But if we understand the instinct,

then we can manage that.

Okay.

Michael, where should people go

to keep up to date with all of your work?

Well, I have a book website

that's called tribalbook.org.

Thank you. Michael, where should people go to keep up to date with all of your work? Well, I have a book website that's called tribalbook.org that is a good place to go to

learn more about my book. I also have a site called michaelwmorris.com where you can learn

a lot about my research and the kind of courses that I teach, as well as learning about the book

and other things that I've written.

I'm right.

Michael, I appreciate you.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me.