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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. Okay, Carol, you know, I was out in Colorado. I was biking last month with my dad. I went all over the state. I saw in some situations neighbors dueling with each other when it came to political signs across the street, next door, neighbors literally calling each other out depending on where I was. A few times. It was kind of funny out there, but it reminded me of the deep divide that we see in the
American political landscape. Not that I need to be reminded of it, because out there in the media, it's there each and every day. It's not just our imaginations though. A report from the Pew Research Center this summer said, quote, Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines and partis antipathy is deeper and more extensive than at any point in the last two decades.
Well, we feel it, right. We talk about it constantly. This division that we're seeing, whether it's a party, lines are elsewhere.
Oftentimes folks out there use division and the word tribes to sort of describe division. It's often looked at in a pejorative way, just another thing that kind of pushes us apart, and it makes us separate from one another. Yet, Michael Morris argues in a new book that perhaps, rather paradoxically, what keeps us apart can actually bring us closer together.
Kind of love that idea.
Michael Morris is Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School. His new book is out today, Tribal How the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together. He joins us from New York.
Michael, so great to have you here with us, so relevant in terms of here we are in an election year. So talk to us a little bit about first of all, that this just kind of general concept of what divides us can bring us together. Why did you think we needed you needed to write this book and bring it bring it to people.
Well, thank you for having me. This is a book that I've been working on for almost ten years. I'm a behavioral scientist, you know, a re search psychologist, and my specialty is cultural psychology, which is the study of the cultural frames in our heads that guide our thinking, guide our actions and decisions, and what activates them and
how they change. And I've been teaching at top business schools for decades at Columbia Business School, formerly at Stanford Business School, So I've developed a toolkit for thinking about how to use the cultural forces that shape people's thinking to create unity in a group, or to create change
in a society or in an organization. And that's the reason that I started writing this book sort of to create a playbook for activists, leaders, managers, high school teachers, coaches, anybody who has to orchestrate a group into a productive direction.
Well, and what's interesting is you hear the word tribe or tribalism, and you might get a little i don't know, maybe put off a little bit or think one way. But you say, when we think of tribes, it's countries, it's churches, it's political parties, it's companies, it could be families, right like, it's it's you know, groups that we deal with all the time.
Yeah, tribes, you know, from a from an evolutionary standpoint or from a you know, classic anthropology standpoint, it just refers to the distinctively human form of social organization, which is large communities that are united by shared culture as opposed to being united by blood relations or being united by you know, diadic bonds between people. And that's you know, that's how we differ from other primates. We can you
could never have a Chimpanzee Manhattan. You know, once, once they get more than fifty individuals in a group, it starts to break apart because they depend on either being related or having a direct personal bond of trust. We can trust total strangers because we share culture with them, so we can understand them, and we can predict their movements, and we can predict what they will do, so we can trust them. So, yeah, tribalism is mostly a good thing.
It's what made us human, It's what got us where we are now. I think what's really interesting is, you know, over the past ten years while I've been writing this book, there's been kind of a trope of toxic tribalism that has emerged among the pundit class and has been picked up by politicians and business leaders. And the idea is that somehow, a deeply evolved drive to hate each other has somehow reawakened, and now we're screwed because we don't talk to each other anymore. And there's no way to
get the genie back into the bottle anymore. And this makes for colorful articles, and maybe it makes for you know, riveting speeches, but it's a kind of despairing, fatalistic take on the conflicts of our time. I don't think it's a helpful way to think, and I don't think it's an accurate way to think. It's not a way of talking about tribal instincts that any evolutionary scholar or any
behavioral scientists would recognize. So I think we've kind of talked ourselves into this take on tribalism that's not scientifically founded and not helpful.
Would you dispute the idea in the book.
Is to try to debunk that way of thinking about tribalism.
Well, professor Morris, would you? Would you dispute the idea that we're more divided now, like the Pew research says, than we are at least politically, and then we have been in previous decades, for the last twenty years. Does that seem miss like it's not necessarily accurate to you.
Well, you know, perhaps in the last twenty years, but certainly not the claim that I hear more often, which is that the American people have never been this divided. You know, if you if you read history. In eighteen sixty Abraham Lincoln became president, he had less than forty percent of the popular vote. Seven states seceded before he was even inaugurated. The Civil War breaks out. A few weeks afterwards, four more states secede. Now that's that's a crisis.
That's that's a legitimacy crisis for a president, and that's a that's a big rift to heal. But Lincoln was one of the leaders, and there are many throughout history political and business leaders who they had faith that the best way to heal a divide was tribal memory. It was it was appealing to our common ancestors, appealing to our common past. You know, Lincoln had that famous, mysterious line in his first inauguration that the mystic cords of men shall yet swell the chorus of the Union. You
know what was he talking about. Well, he he thought of himself as a storyteller in chief, and he made all of these wonderful speeches like the Gettysburg Address that you know, made reference to the sacrifices of our common ancestors and the common ideals that you know, even people in the South were moved by that speech. One holiday we have coming up as Thanksgiving, and we we often associate Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, but it was really Abraham
Lincoln who started Thanksgiving as a national holiday. And he did it because he thought that we need we needed a national ritual of gratitude and memory. Uh and that and that, more than anything else, could bring people together. So, you know, we may think of nostalgia and sentimentality about the past as a you know, as a silly, irrational way of thinking, but it's a deep part of our tribal wiring and one that can be used for inclusiveness,
not just for divisiveness. You know, we see, you know, we see a brand of populist politics nowadays where the story is, you know, things used to be great, but now we have all these immigrants and things are going to hell. Well that's a divisive form of populism. But there have been many leaders who practiced inclusive forms of populism. And I think, you know, we need to we need to understand tribalism and understand all the ways that we can use it at a time like this.
Well, when we come back. We want to continue. We have to do a little bit of news, but we want to come back with you, Professor Morris, and continue
this conversation. And because you've also advised political campaigns that we know, whether it was Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, we wanted to do a little bit more deeper into politics, but also maybe tools that we can all use so that when we have kind of the division aspect of our society out there, maybe how we can get to a better, better place that actually brings us together, what we can all do to get to that point.
Also full disclosure. Professor Morris was my professor at business school as I was doing research and saw his name for this segment. Oh yeah, my first class in business school. We're gonna Professor Morris. It's an intensive sort of social psychology class that you take what for two and a half weeks? Is that right?
Professor? We can go in your files and check out what grade Tim goes.
We can like grade non disclosure is a great thing about business school.
Professor Morris, Michael Morris, Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School.
We're gonna come back.
We're talking about his book Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts that divide Us Can Help bring Us together? More to come on the other side, Carol Master along with Tim Stenowick. As we mentioned, we're talking with Michael Morris, Professor of Leadership at the Columbia Business School. We're talking about his new book, Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts that divide Us
Can Help Bring Us Together? And at the beginning of the book, he notes that he has advised political campaigns about cultural about culture relevant policies and messaging, and that include the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, also Joe Biden, which made us want to ask him about
kind of that political environment. We've talked about politics already a little bit, but I do wonder, I don't know, do campaigns want to hear about culture relevant policies With everything that's going on, how do they think about messaging and getting to people who in a world where it's like you're either in one camp or the other and you don't necessarily want to hear about the other camp.
Well, I think you know, we're in for a treat tonight in this debate between two you know, very articulate, talented communicators, and I happen to be part of a team advising one of the one of the sides of the of the debate, and I think that there are there are really important issues related to tribal identities that that the sides have to work on. For example, Kamala Harris is a person who has multiple social identities, and
she's been sort of lambasted by Trump. I don't think very effectively for claiming to be you know, both African American and South Asian American. And I think that what she has to do and has to do well is is code switching of you know, showing an African American audience that she understands them and that they can trust her, and showing a legal audience that she's as tough a prosecutors as any, and showing you know, other other audiences
that she connects with them. You know, she has a Jewish husband, she was raised by Indian American mother, So she's a person who can have a legitimate, authentic connection with a really broad swath of the society. Now, Tim Walls is a perfect compliment to her. I've heard him described as an RII candidate. You know, he's he's the only candidate who looks like he's actually been camping in his life. You know that you could you could go fishing with him and he would know, you know how
to bit a hook. And I think he, you know, he needs to leverage that. He needs to show people that he knows how to fix a car. He knows how he could help you, you know, jump your your battery on a cold winter night. He's that kind of guy, and there are relatively few of them in the elite levels of politics, and I think he has to show that to us. One of the things that's not talked about so much is that there's a huge gender discrepancy
in support for the two sides. Young men are twelve percent less likely to support Harris Walls than women, and among young men it's even even sharper, and it could really make a difference in some of the swing states like Arizona. So I think I think Tim has to, you know, he has to step up and show show that he's coach Walls and he can be kind of a man's man tonight in the way that sorry.
No, this is fascinating. I guess I want to ask you about what's going on in our culture where so many younger white men are pretty angry and feel left behind.
What's happened, Well, they used to have a not automatic, but a relatively easy path to success in social standing because they were from the favored group, the group that was sort of the prototype of who should have positions of power and responsibility and affluence. And that is declining. It's certainly not over, but it's it's it's diminishing, and so they feel like people are cutting ahead in line, you know, people are taking the places that should be theirs.
And you know, it's not completely new. I mean, there's been resentments about affirmative action for decades, but I think now it's not just affirmative action. It's it's that we've had waves of very talented immigrants coming into the country, you know, for the past twenty years, and that means that a lot of our you know, native born white male good old boys are not you know, are not
getting those promotions. You know, it's it's it's Russians and you know, Brazilians and you know Nigerians who are getting those promotions. Uh and and not necessarily because of any dee E policies, just because we have so many talented people from all around the world who've arrived.
Have you seen anecdotally have you seen anecdotally that show up in your business school classes in the decades that you've been teaching, have they become more diverse?
Very much so. The MBA population compared to when you were in it has changed dramatically. And you know, I had a class last spring, a class of fifty people, and I had seven Nigerian students, you know, some of them Nigerian Americans, but they were all, you know, students who were Nigerian, you know, by identity, and that's you know, Nigeria is one of the most populous countries in the world. So we shouldn't be surprised. But it wasn't the case
when you were in the business school classroom. We weren't We weren't recruiting from Africa and the African diaspora in the same way. It's good for the world that we are.
Listen, we've just got about Professor Morris about a minute left, your advice to folks who where we see so much division, but you say in your book it can bring us together. What are tools we can do? Piece of advice. Again, we've only got about a minute left.
Well, what we need to do is understand what tribal psychology really is. And there are three parts to it, what I call the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. The idea that we were driven to kind of imitate our peer group. We're driven to emulate our heroes, and we're driven to perpetuate the ways of our ancestors and maintain traditions, and all of those things can be positive forces for unity. And what we need to do is understand the levers for invoking these forces.
They're inside every person, but there are triggers that bring them to the four that are invisible to us because they operate unconsciously. And so I've tried to explain what we've learned from lots of research about what those triggers are that a teacher or a manager or a politician can use. And then over the longer term, cultures are malleable and we have to understand what are the signals that we can send to help evolve the culture. Culture
is not a fixed thing that we're stuck with. It's something that we can mold good.
That's a great way to wrap it up. Michael Morris, Thank you so much of Columbia Business School. His new book out today, Tribal, How the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together. You're listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week.