How Tribalism Can Unite Us w/ Dr. Michael Morris

prominent narrative. He argues that human tribal instincts are not bugs in the system, but are actually distinguishing features of our species that creates rich cultures that drive many of our greatest achievements. But are actually distinguishing features of our species that create rich cultures that I have many of our greatest achievements. In essence, doctor Marris argues that tribal

psychology is our best hope for social change. We also discussed the three tribal instincts and practical implications for workplace inclusion, individual well being, uniting different tribes, and cultural change. More broadly, this was a really informative episode with a giant in the field of psychology. So without further ado, I bring you doctor Michael Marris. Doctor Michael Marris. So great to have you on the Psychology Podcast.

we understand why. There's been a lot of group conflicts that are pretty upsetting, from the you know, the red and Blue tribes not you know, accepting election outcomes and political violence in our country, and then record racial protests, you know, inequality and justice suspicion, and then religious conflicts, whether it's somebody shooting up a synagogue or you know, in Sudan civil wars between Islamic and non Islamic tribes.

It's understandable that people are looking for an answer, but the answer that's emerged, you know, and I could point to the pundits who who were most responsible. You know. Tom Friedman talked about the virus of tribalism that has infected our democracy, and Andrew Sullivan said that a deeply buried, evolved dribe has resurfaced to make us hate outsiders and

feel blindly allegiant, you know, to one group. And the La Times came up with toxic tribalism, and you know, made the case that people, a lot of the people who died of COVID died because of tribalism because it was Biden's Biden's vaccine and they didn't want it. So I think that I'm rambling a bit, but I think that what's problematic about this trope is is not that

tribal psychology is irrelevant to these things. It is relevant, but there's an almost despairing tone to it, a sort of fatalistic doom, saying that we were genetically predisposed to hate the other group and to not see reality clearly, and so the end is near. And I think I think every generation thinks the end is near, and so I just don't think it's accurate. And I don't think it's helpful.

One of the ways that we establish in group identity as using out groups as a foil, right, And that's very salient. But within the larger picture of the human tribal instincts, it's kind of a footnote, you know what, these what the species that evolved to hate outsiders and lash out at them would not be as successful as species as ours. You know. In fact, there was a species like that, It was called Neanderthals, and they went extinct for a reason because this more cooperative species, you know,

out survived them, out competed them. And so we need to remember that these group affinities, and these desires for identity, and these needs for meaning associated group member ship are largely adoptive and they have been harnessed by effective leaders throughout history. So it's it's not a cause for despair that people are enmeshed with their groups, you know. And one of the other fallacies is that that culture is somehow fixed, and you know, you and I have lived

long enough to know that's not the case. You know, the culture of screens is something that we didn't grow up with, right. The culture of self driving cars is just coming to us. The culture of using they as a as a pronoun for a single person something we've seen changed in the last ten years. So the culture is constantly influx, and it's influx on a day to day level based on the environment you're in, and it's influx on a year to year level based on you know,

how things evolve. And so I think that understanding the levers involved in tribal psychology is enormously important, you know, for activists, for leaders, for politicians, and so this fatalistic despairing trope about toxic tribalism, I think is really not It really couldn't be more wrong. Wow.

all sorts of maladaptive ways. Of getting belonging, like signing up with violent violent extremist groups for instance, or various extremes. So I do think that, like in the main you have a great point. And then it's also and it's also really interesting to look at it in the at the extremes when there's a real deficiency for belonging and such a craving for for for seeking an identity, And I think tribals can can truly run amok. It can truly run up run amok.

the conflict is not starting from primal range rage. It's not it's not starting from hostility towards the other group. Hostilities may eventually arise when we get frustrated and we lose trust in another group, but it's not the root cause. And stating that that's the case is not helpful because it doesn't. It's not a diagnosis that shows us how to treat the disease.

We can recognize that in us today, the sideways glances at our classmates, our co workers, our neighbors, and the impulse to match their behavior and mesh with them and be similar. And this meshing instinct gave us the gift of coordination. When a group can act as a united force, it's more efficient at foraging, it's more efficient at self defense. And so that was the first way in which we went beyond other primate species and we developed this way of learning what the norm is in the group and

this impulse to match it. And it's largely adaptive, and it produces conformity, and we're all on the lookout for conformity. Conformity can be problematic, it can reduce independent thinking, but the same conformity is also what enables us to stand on the shoulders of giants and work collectively, told to build a house that neither of us could build alone. You know that we know. And the important thing is not just that I know something and you know something,

but I know that you know it. You know so I can coordinate with you because I know that this is shared knowledge within our group. So that's the peer instinct. It's this capacity to use shared knowledge as a basis of coordination.

that's a good thing. It enables us to live in large groups and mesh with each other in a way that reduces collisions of all kinds, whether they're cognitive collisions or you know, vehicular collisions. Okay, And that's something we've had for like two million years in our species, and it's really the basis of human culture.

And I argue that the conflict in our politics between the red tribe and the Blue tribe is largely a case of the peer instinct running amok. And I call it epistemic tribalism because it's a matter of We're getting all of our news from our neighbors who are ideologically sorted, and our social media communities, which are ideologically and algorithmically sorted, and so we feel like we're thinking rationally and gathering information,

but it's very corrupted by an our side bias. And so we then look at the other side and they seem crazy. Their ideas seem crazy because their ideas are so different from our own, and we're not aware that our own ideas are, you know, shaped by the community. We think of them as reality. And so and there are all these efforts now to try to bridge the red Blue divide, and I applaud those, but I think some of them are wrongheaded because they don't take into

account the group affinities in the group psychology. I can

tell you, I can give you an example, an example. Yeah, one of our post toxic Columbia is working on this there's a set of foundations and organizations that are kind of like red bridging the red Blue divide, and a lot of them have names like Hello from the Other Side, or the Town Gown Rift or you know, Red Blue meet Up something, and they're making very salient that when you come to these you're going to be paired with somebody who is from the other side, and that puts

people on defense and it can even lead to polarization of attitudes because I'm stealing myself against any of these ideas. But then there's another set of organizations and one of them is called Coffee Party USA or Make America Dinner Again, or you know. Some of them are about outdoor activities. And these activities are chosen because they crosscut liberals and conservatives, and so you show up and they deliberately make sure that it's a bipartisan group that shows up. But you

don't talk about politics. You talk about you know, hiking, or you talk about coffee, or you talk about you know,

Tuscan cuisine. And what people have found is that the latter type are more effective at depolarization, at reducing negative attitudes about the other side, and at producing new friendships that actually last beyond the event, because you know, you're you're drawing on an identity that people actually have, like I'm a foodie or I love coffee, or I'm an outdoors person, and allowing for common identity to you know, build a bridge, and people eventually realize that their new

friend is a Republican or a Democrat. But that's okay, and that's that's that's how that's how it works, when it works.

campus than any other American University. And then we had this more diffuse, you know, anti genocide group they would call it, they would call themselves. And I tried to, you know, listen to both groups, and there was some effort to, you know, have professors talk to the groups. I wasn't central in that. And then I've also played

a role in the last few weeks. We in the final days of the president who resigned, I was asked to lead a workshop about tribalism and managing tribalism for the president and the deans of each of the school, of the law, school, of the med school, the Social work school, some of which were unaffected, some of which were very effective. So social work school was a real hotspot. You know, arts and science is also a real hotspot.

And then before the event could take place, we had a succession event, so we had a new president and on her second day and awkward second Well, it actually made the event a lot less awkward, you know, I would in the first version of it, I would have had to say mistakes were made last year, but I was able to be a little bit more direct about what I saw as some of the problems, some of the yeah, inflection points last year that at the beginning of the year, I was proud of both groups. I

thought it was a teaching moment. It brought back nostalgia, you know, the South Africa apartheid protests when I was in college, you know, thirty years ago, which I think, you know, are something that everyone at Columbia should be very proud of. That they started at Columbia, they spread to campuses across the country. It was one of the reasons that South Africa let Mandela go, you know, these worldwide campus protests, and it had a consequence. It wasn't

meaningless student activism. And I think the students today are inspired by that example. And if the country of South Africa cared about Ivy League protests, I think the country of Israel would care. You know, they're much more connected to the elite American universities than South Africa ever was. So I think that at the beginning of the year, until you know, maybe April or something, I thought of it as a very positive development. I thought, maybe inconvenient

for a lot of people, but still positive. But then it turned it turned into people.

not really the core. You know. But both both sides, the anti genocide campaign and the pro Israel campaign, both sides have gotten co opted by outside groups in ways that have led that have led them to say a lot of regrettable things. You know, some of my colleagues are among the leaders of the Israel groups and suddenly they're you know, at least Stephonic is retweeting their tweets

more than anybody else. And you should you should ask yourself when you thought you were a liberal, progressive person and suddenly the right wing is is your fan, You should ask yourself what's happening? You know. So, but you know, none of us are professional political activists. Where it's a combination of nineteen year old students and nerdy grad students and the occasional professor, So we shouldn't expect that these protests operate seamlessly and without stupid things being said. You know,

we should give everyone a break. I think their heart is in the right place for the most part, and it spills over into ugly forms. But when you think about these these conflicts that have inspired the toxic tribalism trope, left right political conflict, racial ethnic conflict, and then sectarian conflict, this involves all three of them. So all of the frustrations and sentiments that have been built up over the past decade have kind of collapsed together in ways that

people aren't fully conscious of. And it's somewhat opportunistic that the red and the Blue tribes have seized upon this conflict as one more thing to fight about. So it's it's definitely a difficult matter and more controversial, certainly more controversial than than the South Africa apartheid conflict, which was in somebody's pushing against an open door nobody university.

this windfall of protein. At the same time, you see things like advances and tool making that somebody would toil for months to make a perfect spear or a perfect fish net. You know that maybe somebody else would use and get the credit for, but they would do it because they wanted to contribute to a group. It's when you start to see the skeletons of people with handicaps who survived to the age of adulthood, and that only

happens if someone else is taking care of them. And so these pro social instincts evolved around this time, and pro social instincts are a puzzle for evolutionists because how

does the noble savage pass on his genes. You know, for a while people thought, you know, the evolution rewarded selfishness, but we've realized that there are mechanisms and evolution for pro social instincts to pass on and uh the way it shows up in our psychology that we can recognize today is you know, somewhat paradoxical because it's you know, we even intellectuals like you and I, we we catch ourselves reading human interest articles about whether Tim walls you

know where sponsors are briefs or you know what uh Elon Musk eats for breakfast, or uh we want to know about what work out the MVP of the NFL does. And it's it's not so clear that we're learning anything adaptive from this reflexive emulation of people with status, but we are. We are wired for it, and it's why,

you know, celebrities are celebrities. You know, you like Mike Encapsuletes the hero instinct, right, you like Mike, Yeah, when in when in doubt emulate you know so so but what Holmes was not the first tech executive to wear Steve Jobs' black turtlenecks and that that didn't lead to a successful product, you know, but it you know, and others have imitated his diet or imitated his meditation practice, right,

So it's something that even very smart people do. And we can laugh at it in the same way that we laugh at conformity, but it plays a very important role in that this this impulse to emulate, even when it takes sacrifice and work to do so, the behaviors of successful and high status people. It allows for innovations to spread because more people in the rising generation will adopt the practice, whether it's driving an electric car or doing a podcast, you know, as opposed to an old

fashioned form of you know, publicizing research. You know, And there are people like there are innovators like yourself, and then you gain status, and there's young young graduate students looking to your example who are going to want to be podcasters, and a new form comes into into circulation. So it's a it's adaptive for individuals because individuals gain esteem and status and tribute from doing things that are

contributions to the group. And it's adaptive for the group because it allows for collective level learning, tribal learning, and so status seeking may seem like a silly example of human folly, but it's an adaptive impulse, you know, it

makes sense. It helps groups succeed. And then the final one you want me to do, the final one, It may seem like the most primitive of all of them, but the final one to perpetuate traditions to what's a cult is the ancestry ancestor instinct and the teacher and me wants to start with the name of it, very good headlines. This is more like in the last one hundred thousand years, relatively recently, things happened where suddenly you started to see the elders in communities being listened to

very carefully. Groups would discover artifacts from previous generations and then you know, replicate the crafts or the art or the weapon making in those artifacts from the past. So people became very curious about the ways of the past, even ways of the past that weren't immediately relevant. And this allowed for the perpetuation across generations of symbolic traditions like art and religion, you know, as well as making tools that were more complex then I would necessarily understand.

So blindly replicating what I saw the previous generation do was a better way to perpetuate those tools than me trying to figure it out or trying to understand it

from my common sense. And so you know, we have this, we have this impulse in us for rote learning and wrote repetition, and you know, we've we've all done it, and we know that it comes with a set of emotions and a set of motivations, whether it's you know, you know, reading the Torah out of our mitzvah, or doing a piano recital of Beethoven or learning a ballet step. You know, these things are we learned by rote. We don't really know. It's a little arbitrary, why do we

do it this way or not that way? But there's a deep sense of connection not just to a community at this point in time, but to a tradition that spans generations, and it serves very deep sidecological needs, including our needs related to fears of mortality because transcendence. Yeah, if we feel that we are part of something that has lasted a long time, it probably will extend into the future a long time. And so we gain a kind of symbolic immortality from our are reveling in traditions.

And so this was also very adoptive for groups because it created tribal memory and groups didn't have to reinvent the wheel every generation because there was this impulse to hang onto things and and the hero instinct energy could instead go into building on the base of what people had done in the previous generation. And when all three of these things came together, the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct, our species crossed a rubicon that

is called cultural accumulation. Cultures started accumulating every generation and tuning themselves to the and so we had differentiation and we had cultural growth. And then people became wiser and more capable without anyone becoming more brainy as an individual because they could tap into a larger, larger pool of inherited wisdom. And that, more than any gain in brain size, is why we are different from Neanderthals and why we

are so different from chimps. You know that we we are the beneficiaries of inherited knowledge, and ninety nine percent of what we know we inherited. We didn't figure it out.

out of this rut of our ancestors. Our ancestors weren't always wise, you know.

character belief. And you still hear this when the World Cup comes, you know, the sportscasters will be like, notice the teutonic discipline on this German team and the graceful samba like play of the Brazilian team, and the tidy efficient British mentality and the Italian you know esthetics, you know, and it's kind of this notion that the people from this country can only play one way and the people

from that country can only play another way. And that never rang true to Hitting because you know, he had played in various countries as a player, and he thought that, you know, players are adaptable, and you can mold players and you and so he was asked relatively relatively at the last minute, just just a year and a half before the World Cup to coach the South Korean team in two thousand and two when they were the host of the World Cup and they had bid to be

host at a time when their economy was doing great and their team was doing great, you know, in the in the mid to late nineties, and then they hit the you know, the Korea Crisis of the late nineties, which was very humiliating and kind of brought down their economy.

And then around the same time, their soccer team started, you know, bombing out of the Asia Cup, and you know, they were usually a regional power and they weren't even winning, you know, in their local competitions, and so they were desperate and they're like Okay, well, let's try to bring in this Dutch wonder kind and maybe he can work his magic. And at first it looked like a terrible decision because he didn't even know who the stars were

in Korea. He he didn't make much effort to kind of learn about the soccer culture of Korea, which was very well established, and he arranged that they He negotiated for three things when he took the job. He asked for complete control over the roster, which wasn't traditional there because usually the soccer officials, you know, would choose some of the roster and choose it based on social considerations

rather than strictly play considerations. He asked for the Korean soccer club season to be suspended so that he could have his players for much longer than any of the other World Cup coaches. And he asked for a budget to bring the world's best teams to Korea for exhibition games. And so they lost all of those exhibition games by big scores. He sort of cloistered away his team in

these training camps, cut off communication to the outside. The Korean sports press was in a panic, you know that the only thing they saw of their team was like losing six nothing, losing five to nothing, you know, and they weren't able to watch what was going on in the practices. But what he thought he needed to do

was to first break the old culture that existed. So his first training camps, instead of holding them in Korea, where people are constantly reminded of Korean social norms like to be deferential to people who are senior to you, he held them in the United Emirates at an international soccer facility, where players professional identities as soccer players came to the fore rather than their Korean identities as being you know, differential, polite, you know, members of the Korean quality.

And then he worked really hard to kind of build the team culture, to remold the team culture around sort of egalitarian norms among teammates, which was different from what the team culture has had been. The team culture had been that the veterans eat dinner at one table and

the rookies eat dinner at a separate table. And so in the short term he did things to kind of de emphasize the norms so that people could learn new tactics, and then he slowly built these new social routines that ultimately led to new relationships and the new ways of

interacting on the field. And then when the Korean team was unveiled at the World Cup, they were extraordinary because they were able to play this cutting edge soccer strategy that nobody expected and they made it to the semi finals and it was unprecedented and you know, a great inflection point for the country because it was an emotional moment of we are capable, we can beat the world's best.

go to a rally, everyone wear their hat. He kind of tapped into a blue collar, very middle American thing of wearing baseball caps and it, you know, it gave people a sense of our group is similar, even though you know, the Republican coalition is odd bedfellows. It's these Wall Street people and these main street people, and they don't have that much in common. Trump doesn't have that much in common personally with most of his followers. But

the red cap brought them together. And so I think one really adept move recently was the the Harris Walls Camo cap. You know, and Tim Walls as a selection was very adept because he's he's a person who looks like he's actually gone hunting in his life rather than just claiming to be a hunter. I've heard him described as an RAI candidate because he he looks like a guy who's gone camping, and so I think he he looks like a member of the sort of middle American

blue collar tribe. There are people who are going to be drawn to that coalition just because he looks like one of them, he talks like one of them, and then the cap is a kind of symbol that can be effective.

of America. You know, these are these are the kinds of identities that can bring some people to the fore. The redeeming factor about tribalism is that there are many tribes inside each of us, and we must not forget that and think that we are only red and blue. You know, the red and blue identities. It's a relatively

new thing. And you know, two generations ago, there was as much diversity within the Democratic Party and Republican Party as there was between them, because there were the Southern Democrats and the Northern Democrats, and you know, people at that time didn't know what party their colleagues and their neighbors were, aside from the occasional xilot who puts a long sign up every couple of years. And it has become this mega identity only only in the last generation,

as as some other salient identities have faded. You know, we don't live in ethnic neighborhoods so much anymore, mostly for the good. Most people are not members of religious congregations anymore, which you know, I don't know if that's good or bad, but those were the kinds of local, like minded tribes that gave people a sense of epistemic

security a few generations ago. And with the residential sorting and then the sorting into online communities, the political tribes are serving a function that they never did before, which was, you know, shoring up your daily sense of identity. And so that's something that hopefully will shift and hopefully people will just grow tired of it, or enough people will parody it that people will want to have more creative identities rather than just I'm a blue tribe member, I'm a red tribe member.

your book, really been raw. Raw. We need to transcend tribalism.

with parochialism as an opposite of universalism. Right, And the whole spirit of universalism is let's leave behind these primitive reflexes of ethnic affinity and religious affinity and let's be more abstract and think about what we value and or say, I identify with huge in kind, and I think that, you know, we have to recognize that our deepest motivations and our deepest feelings of meaning come from thick identities, come from identities of people that we that we interact

with and that we know a lot about that. But that doesn't have to be parochial. The when we think about cosmopolitanism, when we think about a city that's cosmopolitan, like New York or Paris, it is composed of neighborhoods that are very different from each other. And that is part of the magic of cosmopolitanism that I can I can go to Korea Town and then i can go a few steps and I'm in the East village, you know,

and it's a very different vibe. You know, it's a different tribe vibe here and a different trib vibe there. But there is a spirit of curiosity and mutual learning between the groups. And that's what cosmopolitanism is. So cosmopolitanism is not the absence of tribalism. It's not the absence of you know, it's not people just shedding tradition. It's a selective retention of tradition combined with curiosity and openness. There's a form of universalism like you know Esperanto. You know,

the Esperanto movement in the mid twentieth century. They invented an artificial language that had sort of the least common denominator of all the languages of the world, and they said, we really need need to get beyond this tower of babble of people speaking different languages. We've invented the perfect language, Esperanto. It doesn't have any tradition of poetry, and it doesn't have a tradition of you know, family memories or anything.

But it would be a lot more efficient. Maybe we could get the un behind it, and then you know, basically it may take a generation, but we'll all speak esperanto. The world would be a better place. Right didn't happen? We can't even use the metric system. I don't think we can go sweak esperanto. And so there is there is a kind of you know, there's a kind of inefficiency and hanging on to things, not all of which

are adaptive. That is an inherent part of tradition. But I think that we shouldn't we shouldn't be an enemy of tradition, you know, like or like when Mao, when Mao tried to have a cultural revolution to destroy all the olds. You know that we're holding society back. A lot of a lot of good things get thrown out with the bad things when you try to when you try to throw away tradition. So no conservative, well, I think that the conservatives have a point. They do agree.

I agree, you know, I mean, these things that have been around for a long time, we don't know, we can't always immediately see the value of them, and especially when we're young, we can't always see it. But many of these things that have been around for a long time serve institutional purposes that are not so obvious on the on the surface. So you know, yeah, I just think we shouldn't approach tradition with a wrecking ball, you know, we should approach it with skepticism and humor, you know.

have not moved up in an organization. And I think that that certainly used to be the case, you know, it was overt. But the best survey evidence we have, you know, from anonymous surveys, you know, suggests that outgroup hostility, racial animis is not dead. But it's a it's a small it's a fringe for most people. It's a small group of people. Yet the inequality is not going away. It's it's it's it's in many ways as present as

it was a generation or two ago. Interesting, So it's time to think, Okay, maybe there's a different motivation that's contributing to that inequality or that discrimination. And what I argue is is that the tribal motivation, that maybe the biggest cause of it is in group love rather than outgroom hate. We have impulsive, uncon conscious drives to be generous to people who are similar to us, you know, ethnically, religiously,

and that is something that reproduces inequality. And a lot of organizational procedures like hiring for cultural fit or building referral systems into recruiting, they've turbocharged this in group favoritism. So I would say that you know, we we we're looking at the problem wrong. You know, we we put so much. You know, Google spends a billion dollars a year on these anti bias workshops, and yet two percent

of their technical employees are people of color. So it's obviously not working, and I think it's it's not really addressing the real problem. The real problem is that you have people hiring people just like themselves because they're similar. It's not because of animist towards people who are different. So we need to take a really close look at our policies and the policies that are enabling in group favoritism,

because that's the mechanism for most of this discrimination. Inequality, not the kind that makes everybody feel bad because you're you feel falsely accused of being a racist, right because most most of these people are not racists.

know how to articulate them. So thank you for having me on the show, and thank you for being an example.