A few pieces of news before we start the show. First, many of you wrote me asking if I was planning on doing an episode about debunk bot. That's the AI, the LLM, recently developed by researchers at MIT in Cornell and American University in D.C. that in a series of studies demonstrated it could via fact-based debunking and conversational format reliably reduced the belief in conspiracy theories and even reliably completely changed the minds of conspiracy theorists, even people who are
deeply entrenched. And I'm happy to say that yes, I have already conducted the interviews with all the researchers and that will be the very next episode. If you're a patron over at Patreon, I'll be posting the video of my conversation with all the researchers right after this episode, the one you are listening to right now, right after it goes live. And also, two weeks after this episode airs, I will be in Las Vegas at CSIcon, the Center for Sceptical Inquiry Conference.
The Center for Sceptical Inquiry is the place made popular by the amazing Randy, by Carl Sagan, and they have a conference every year. And I will be joining Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox in the Skeptics Guide to the Universe and thinking his power and many, many others to give a lecture about how minds change amid all the other people interested in and giving lectures and hosting workshops about critical thinking, intellectual humility, cognitive biases, and so on.
But as conferences go, most of the time, we're just all going to be hanging out and you can join us. Tickets are still available. You can get them right now at csicomference.org. The link to that in the show notes.
Two more things the Alliance for Decision Education is holding a student forecasting tournament called Forecasting the Future on November 11. Registration is open now. The Registration deadline is November 10th and students can win up to $1,500 by making predictions based on historical and current data. More details in the middle of this episode. And you can go to kittedkitede.shop and use the code Smart50, smrt50 at checkout, and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box.
If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out in the middle of the show. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. Episode 298. Tribal Psychology. Tribalism. It's something we have discussed a whole lot on this podcast, especially after the insurrection, the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, and all of the different responses people had to the COVID pandemic, like anti-masking and anti-vaccination, which were for the large part tribal.
We've also discussed tribalism on dozens of episodes about things like conspiratorial thinking, and status seeking, and the psychology of cults, and fandoms, and politics, and general. And there's a whole chapter devoted to this in my most recent book, How Minds Change. The innate quote, unquote human tribal psychology that is very often the thing that is motivating, that is driving people to do a lot of the stuff that seems really strange.
In the modern information ecosystem in which we find ourselves. I'll have links to all of that in the show notes, and there's always a link to the book in the show notes. But in general, what I'm saying here is my take, and the take of most people writing about this, scientist included, has been that it is bad.
That human tendencies to group up, and then favor our in groups, over our out groups, is a very bad thing that we should learn how to deal with properly, if we have any hope of overcoming our worst tendencies when it comes to polarization, misinformation, prejudice, and at the most extremes, war.
That is usually the take, but my guest on this episode, while acknowledging there are definitely huge downsides to tribalism, wants you to know that in his opinion, the upsides greatly outweigh the down. These instincts are mostly us instincts, they're not them instincts, they're their instincts for solidarity, not for hostility. They can go sideways sometimes and contribute to misunderstandings and conflicts between groups, but that is not the core of them.
That is world renowned psychologist, Michael Morris. I'm a professor at Columbia University in New York. I am a professor in the psychology department, and also a professor in the graduate school of business. And as Dr. Morris was just saying, when it comes to tribalism, he would like all of us to factor into our thinking going forward. The fact that we are an us species, not a them species, is just that when our us goes sideways or gets out of hand, very bad things can happen.
And the conflicts in the world that people are worried about and that they are describing in terms of sometimes toxic tribalism is often how it's sometimes stated. There is a role of tribal instincts in contributing to these conflicts, but it's not primal rage against outsiders. These conflicts don't start from hostility, and asserting that that so is not helpful, and at worst it's fatalistic doom-same.
If this hot take causes you to feel a little pushback rising up inside you, I hear you. I felt the same thing when I first sat down with Michael Morris's new book about all of this tribal, a book whose subtitle says it all,
how the cultural instincts that divide us can bring us all together. But I have to say, Michael's book makes a lot of compelling arguments for seeing humans as social primates who are great at collaboration, and if all the conditions are just right, will greatly favor collaboration and cooperation over competition, which is not something that is true of our primate cousins.
chimpanzees, bonoboes, gorillas are all pretty terrible at on purpose planned out emotional and cognitive empathy and empathy-based collaboration. Michael Morris's entire book is full of scientific evidence suggesting human beings are genetically predisposed to collaborate, coordinate, and cooperate. We pass down and inherit genes that encourage us to work together to solve problems and reach goals.
Dr. Morris takes to position that if you know just a little bit about how and why all this operates, you can use that knowledge to improve your life, your relationship, your job, and on top of all of that, save the world or at least save democracy, which can really help when it comes to saving the world.
He simplifies all that in his book, tribal, by breaking it down into three instincts. The peer instinct, we are genetically predisposed to want to learn from others and to teach others, whether or not they want to learn. The hero instinct, we are genetically predisposed to seek status and to improve our reputations among our peers, especially the ones that we're learning from and teaching, and the ancestor instinct.
We have a genetic predisposition to create, copy, and pass down behavioral practices, and what we assume is accumulated knowledge to new generations. So we're about to talk about all of that in this episode, and we're going to discuss one of my favorite things, dual inheritance theory, which is the model in biology, anthropology, psychology, and many otherologies that settles the nature versus nurture debate.
At least for me, and for lots of scientists by showing that the two are not in conflict, nor does one hand off to the other, really they're just in constant conversation. They're twisted into a braid. Like I said, I love this model, and I write about it extensively in my own book, How Minds Change. I even interviewed one of the scientists who proposed this entire model, while he was barbecuing on his houseboat with his wife.
So before we get into all of the interview back and forth stuff, let's briefly break down dual inheritance theory, because I think it's a really great foundation to talk about all the other stuff that we're going to get into in this episode. The whole reason we have culture is that when an organism finds itself in an environment that changes so rapidly that individual learning can't track those changes, can't keep up with them, can't develop new behaviors and routines and habits and so on.
And genes can't adapt in time to create innate behaviors tailored to that rapidly changing environment. Social learning becomes extremely evolutionarily beneficial. Learning from others like yourself who have figured out how to survive at those times when you have not. They're doing things right, you're doing things wrong. At least they're doing things better than you're doing.
And if you can pick up on that and learn it and add it to your behaviors, you can sort of imagine what's going on in their heads. That becomes an incredible advantage. And once social learning is the key to success, natural selection will favor this. It'll improve upon it. And if you have the cognitive complexity that allows for it, natural selection will also favor cumulative social learning.
The ancestors of homo sapiens, your ancestors, they had that cognitive complexity during the Pleistocene, during the ice age, a by genetic standards rapidly changing epoch that lasted several million years. And when you add all of these ingredients together, you get the form of cumulative social learning we call culture. Ideas, beliefs, behaviors, tools, languages, specialities and so on that you're not born with.
But that you can learn as a child from other humans who were also born not knowing all of those things who also had to learn them as children and who contributed to the evolution of all of those things during their lifetime and change them somewhat just like you will. And they did all that before you came along to learn what they had learned so far.
And once you have culture, once you have a cognitive environment that is relatively stable, genes will adapt to better survive within it, just like they would in any environment. And the adaptations that come about because of this create slightly different brains that will then create slightly different cultures. That's the back and forth. This is the essence of dual inheritance theory. And it's so named because you inherit at birth, genes and you inherit all throughout your childhood, memes.
And evolution of both of these things is affected by both of these things, interacting with each other. It's kind of like a never ending game of evolutionary ping pong where you are the ball. You're getting smacked back and forth by nature and nurture. And thanks to that game of evolutionary ping pong, our species developed three instincts that Micomoris writes about in detail in his new book, Tribal.
Those are the peer instinct, the hero instinct and the ancestor instinct. And after this break, he will tell us all about them and how we can harness them to make the best out of our tribal nature, the us of us, that innately drives us if the conditions are met. To collaborate, coordinate, cooperate and coexist. The Alliance for Decision Education is holding a free student forecasting tournament called forecasting the future on November 11th.
Registration is open now. The registration deadline is November 10th. And students can win up to $1,500 by making predictions based on historical and current data. Even things like how many people will watch a new movie on release day or how many songs will debut on the Billboard Hot 100.
This is a chance for students to learn about forecasting, improve decision-making skills and compete for cash prizes and learn important lifelong decision-making skills all in a fun and engaging competition with other students across the country. Registration takes just a minute, link in the show notes or at AllianceForDecisionEducation.org. Okay, here's the other thing I was talking about at the very beginning of the show before the show started. The School of Thought.
I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non-profit organization. They provide free, creative, commons, critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide. And their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility.
So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called KITED thinking tools, KITED thinking tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the KIT that you want, and there's tons of them. And the School of Thought will send you a KITED a very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality.
Each one about double the size of a playing card, Matt Chelo, 400 DSM stock prompt cards, a nice, magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops. Level up brain storming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. And each KIT can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app.
Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and keynote templates. There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the investor's critical thinking kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding.
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So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, you know, or those sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart. You're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right. Half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to kitted.shop.
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Welcome back to the you are not so smart podcast. I'm your host and producer and editor and everything else of this show David McCranny. Yes, in the nearly 300 episodes over the nearly 13 years. This podcast has been going this show is still made by just me only me. So if you are a patron over at page we on thank you very, very much your contributions continue to be super, super helpful.
And if you're not well, there's a link in the show notes for this episode and most of the episodes if you have yet to become a patron on patreon before the break. We were discussing dual inheritance theory, which we will discuss in even greater detail later in this episode along with one of my favorite psychology experiments involving a jar, a marshmallow and a feather.
The experiment involves a jar, a marshmallow and a feather. It's not my favorite experiment of all of the experiments that involve those things. I'm not aware of the are any other experiments that involve all of those things.
And we will hear a story about a forbidden tuber, a death yam, which illustrates why you might might should reconsider skipping all those weird family traditions this year if you are indeed considering skipping them or just picking and choosing through them, which is usually what I do. I picked the ones that have the best food and skip the others, but after spending time with our guest in this episode, Dr. Micomoris, I'm reconsidering that.
And before we get into all those things and explain all those things, I think it's best that we sit down with Dr. Micomoris, imminent psychologist and discuss the three genetic predispositions that serve as the major load bearing concepts covered in his new book, tribal. How the cultural instincts that divide us can bring us all together. And the first of these instincts that we are going to discuss with Dr. Micomoris is the peer instinct.
The source of conformity, even when I was going to school and learning psychological principles, it was always looked at as like, you know, there was always like any no conformity. You'll be looking down on it. Then your book often brings up the upside of these things. So I'm interested in that as well. So let's hear about the peer instinct.
Let me introduce it with just one sentence, which is to say that when you and I were getting our undergraduate education, the standard binary in day one of every class was nature versus nurture, you know, and your anthropology professor would say, we believe that it's nurture and that the human brain is a blank slate.
And there are cultures where the men have short hair and the women have long hair and our other cultures where the men have long hair and the women are sure, you know, any idea is that nothing is genetically influenced. It's all socialization. And then you would take an evolutionary biology class and it would be the exact opposite. It would be like pretty much everything is nature and then culture is different in some parameters.
And we kind of stopped having that debate at a certain point because what became clear is that human nature, the distinctive psychology that is rooted in the distinctive wiring of humans, stands out in that our nature is nurture. Our nature is that we will behave socially in the way that the community that nurtures us does. And we are wired to automatically learn from those communities that we are a part of without trying to, without even realizing we're doing it, we're sponges.
We just pick that up. We become imprinted with the ways of the community that we are nurtured by. And the peer instinct is a suite of adaptations that happened. We now know quite a long time ago, like two million years ago, that enable coordination in small groups at that time, humans lived in bands, which are small groups of fairly related people who hunted and slept together and wandered together.
And it was beyond the level of a chimpanzee troop because they became able to hunt and gather in coordinated ways that were more efficient than every individual for themselves, which is pretty much how chimpanzees hunt and gather. They occasionally inadvertently benefit each other, like I spoke some pray and they run towards you, but they don't collaborate with a common plan in mind.
Even these very early humans, two million years ago, we now have signs that they hunted for antelopes in a way that required coordinated work of multiple people gathered a complex array of plants, some of which involved more than one person to harvest. They started gathering fire in some areas a long time ago, more than a million years ago, and you didn't roast an antelope over a campfire as a one-eighth man job.
That required a crew, that required someone to get the firewood, someone to do this, someone to, you know, it required collaboration and coordination. And now we tend to derive conformity and the field that I did my PhD in social psychology, one of its central research programs is showing that people are prone to conformity and that they can make errors.
They stop thinking independently, they stop thinking critically, and all that is true. The human peer instinct, which is an impulse to mesh, an impulse to match the behavior of the people around us, can lead us to see reality falsely and to make some optimal decisions. But it also enables us to work collectively and to kind of build on the ideas of other people in a way that no other species can do.
So I regard it as the foundation of human culture and human social organization, human collaboration, and we need to recognize the fallibility, the weaknesses that we have as a conformist society.
And we need to be able to work together to make a conformist species, but at the same time we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water and reject and not recognize that our superpower is this ability to think collectively, you know, to kind of meld minds and mesh actions and work as a united force. And we have demonstrated that, if you could speak on them for just a second, where we are great at switching to the method of a peer or in a way that chimpanzees are not.
And it was a great experiment by Michael Tomasello, who is one of the world's leading experts on child cognition, child cognitive development, and he's also one of the world's leading experts on primate cognition. So he's been in a unique position to conduct comparative experiments where he will compare human children to chimpanzees and orangutans to see what their patterns of learning and their patterns of response are.
And in one of the studies that is just calm, it's just delightful as comedy, they socialized participants, whether it was a human child or a young chimpanzee, into one way of solving a puzzle that delivered a treat, delivered a food treat, like M&Ms to the student to the human and maybe grapes, you know, to a chimpanzee. And it's like a box puzzle where you have to kind of push this button and then move this and then, you know, the treat is released.
But some of these box puzzles, there's more than one strategy to release the treat. And so what they did is after socializing people into method A, they then showed people several peers, say three people like them solving the puzzle through the other method, method B. And what humans do in that situation is they switch to method B, you know, because, you know, they learn method A, it worked for them, they were reinforced by method A in the past.
But we are so trigger happy, so quick to draw lessons from what we see the peers doing, things working for the peers and a consensus appears are doing it that we will switch. And chimpanzees put through the same procedure, they don't switch, they'll watch three chimpanzees solve it through method B and they'll say, thank you very much. And they think what has worked for me personally, you know, and they don't switch, you know, they're more loyal to their what they've learned directly.
We are more oriented towards social learning, you know, as humans, 99% of what we know comes from social learning, you know, what either somebody instructed us in or what we observed our peers doing. But you know, there's social learning in other animals as well, but there's a higher ratio in those other animals of learning a lesson directly from trial and error experience, you know, trying something until it works.
And the amount that you can learn is much, much higher when you rely on social learning because you don't have to engage in this time consuming direct trial and error experience with the world. So strong hypothesis that even the fact that we have whites of our eyes, the scleras is, if you, dear listener, you may have noticed lots of animals do not have this, we have this. What is this this opposition that why we have whites of our eyes?
That's I think for me, one of the most fascinating research programs, the idea is that humans and, you know, evolution doesn't have foresight, you know, these mutations happen. And then if they somehow work for the species, then they persist, then they get built upon, right?
Most, and most of mammals, including most primates, like gorillas and apes and chimps, they have dark scleras. So we have an iris that moves across the whites of our eyes, the sclera, and it reveals the direction of our gaze. So you have readable eyes, you know, from if I look like that and like that, you have a sense of what I'm paying attention to, and often a sense of what the goal of my behavior is, or the reference of my statement is.
And so we evolved an automatic reflex, the gaze following that the other primates don't have. So even a one year old infant, if the mother gazes to the side, the infant will gaze to the side. And so if the mother is looking at something and reacting, the infant automatically sees that and associates the reaction, and that that creates, you know, shared reality, shared beliefs, shared experience.
And so it's one of the ways that the peer instinct ratchets up, you know, where we develop a lot of shared understanding with the peers around us. It's related to things like pointing other primates don't point things out to each other.
You know, we were two chimpanzees and there was a leopard behind you that you didn't see, I wouldn't have a strong enough sense of your mind being different from my mind, and your mind not containing the knowledge that there's a tiger behind you that I would say, you know, like I wouldn't have the words to say it, but I wouldn't also be able to point it out.
They can't engage in the kind of collaborative hunting that even the earliest humans engaged in because you have to coordinate on an individual antelope, you can't, you coordinate on one antelope and separate it from the herd and chase it around until it's exhausted.
You can't chase different antelopes around all afternoon, you can only do that if you can point, you know, if I can point and you know what I mean, it's fascinating that for the most part, the species that's closest to us is chimpanzees, you know, they're like night, they share like 99% of our DNA and there's really only a few mutations that made all the difference between us.
In this particular respect, dogs, which, which co-eval, you know, the dog species co-evolved with humans are closer to us. So some dogs have lighter sclera. If you work with chimpanzees in the wild and you point to something like bananas, bananas have been provided right over there, they won't know what you're doing, you know, but dogs follow human pointing.
They don't follow human gaze in the way that a human infant would, but they do follow pointing and they have, they have evolved eyes that are more similar to our eyes. And so in some ways they evolved to plug into our social ways, you know, that was adopted for dogs. Beautiful stuff. If you ever tried to point something out to your cat, you've experienced this. Your cast just like what's on your finger and.
We, we protect this rich inner life to our cats, you know, but there are moments where we realize that it's, it's largely an illusion. They're basically interested in will you feed me when it's time to be fed, you know, and they're not processing things with the same level of ambiguity and empathy. The whole theory of mind in cat land.
The next wave here, the hero instinct and I was wondering where you're going to go when I was reading this in your book and I really enjoyed how you open it up basically by saying, okay, let's think about the fact that we're coordinating, we're working together to try to do something. We have this theory of mind. I know that you have an inner universe. I have an inner you're like whatever this is all starting to get plugged in.
I know I can learn from you. You have information I don't have. I have information you don't have. And then one of us has to do something incredible for the rest of us. Perhaps even sacrifice yourself for the good of the whole group. Other creatures also don't do this at least not with any awareness, not not in a way that they knew they were doing and everyone else did.
Tell me a little bit more about this hero instinct. Many other species engage in altruism in the form of kin selection, which is that they will sacrifice their life to save their offspring. But they don't engage in pro social behavior where they sacrifice themselves for the community in general for the greater good of the group that they're a part of. This is a very different set of social behaviors that appeared in humans about a half a million years ago.
If the peer instinct was a drive to be normal and a drive to mesh with the group and join the herd, this is a drive to be normative to do something exemplary, not just something typical. And it showed up in new ways of hunting where individuals would take an individual risk to benefit the group. It showed up in more advanced tool making where one individual would toil and obscurity for a long time in order to come up with a fishing hook or a spear that then other people would benefit from.
And it also showed up at this time. It's the first time where archaeologists find adult skeletons of people with congenital deformities. Earlier humans, those individuals would not survive to the age of adulthood. It was only when somebody was taking care of them in a giving in a way that wouldn't be reciprocated because it was appreciated by the rest of the group.
So the psychology of the hero instinct is this drive to contribute to contribute something that is valued by the community so that I gain the esteem of the community. And to some extent, the tribute of the community that comes with it, the social opportunities, the privileges that come with being a member in high standing, a member with prestige.
And it's not trivial to figure out what the group values. And so one of the ways of discerning that that we evolved is to look to those members of the group that have the highest status. And nowadays, status is often marked by a job title or a fancy car or something. But status is also marked by the currency of attention. So the members of any community who get the most positive attention from other members of the community are the ones who are highly regarded and valued.
And so the behavior of those individuals is a beacon to the rest of us about what the group values. They are cultural heroes or role models to the rest of us. And this is a way that adaptive group level learning also started to happen. So in a farming community, if a few people in one generation start to plant sweet potatoes instead of yams. And they have a better harvest than the average farmer. And they gain a little bit more wealth and a little bit more status.
Well, then in the decade that follows and in the generation that follows more people will emulate that status associated behavior. And what you have is adaptive group level learning where the population is shifting over time towards a mode of life, which is more survival enhancing.
And so, you know, we may think of status seeking as a folly as a bug in the system, but it is something that was adaptive and we developed it as humans. And it allows for cultural progress and cultural adaptation and adaptation to changing ecologies for a group that's migrating. So it definitely was a whole new superpower of our species is that accounted for its spread through the world. And it's rise to the top of the food chain.
And it's more sophisticated forms of collaboration that happened when you had this more advanced pro social cooperation being wired into the way that we reacted to each other. You write pro sociality pays off in a reputation minded species that's that's really well put. And it helps us look at modern day celebrity like the what's changed very rapidly in just the last hundred or so years is our ability to for millions of people to look at one person that's that's new.
And for one person to do things that millions of people will look at on both sides of that exchange that's a new thing that's going to require a whole lot of adaptation. But if someone achieves celebrity in a time before that the fact that a lot of people are looking their way as an indication as you said that, oh, that person's really good at farming.
Which means if I emulate them, that'll be good for me and it'd be good for my family and so on. It's really changes the way you see the idea of celebrity. The that person makes an incredible tool. What that's actually a much superior tool. I should make mine that way or I should have systems that up to make tools in that fashion.
And then the status symbols also make more sense to you sure having a very expensive car. Maybe a status symbol in some way or another, but how did you acquire the ability to gain that very difficult to gain object is the calculus is taking place like, oh, you probably do something that I should learn from something I should emulate so that I may have that much ability so that I can have things that that are of equal expense, but maybe I don't want that car.
But that's really great. Like it totally starts to take shape when you think of it in this more suited to a different ecosystem ecosystem that we live in today, but we still got all this programming. It's really fantastic stuff. I love it.
You know, all of these forms of social learning can lead to a lot of spurious conclusions and superstitious inferences Elizabeth Holmes that Theranos was not the first young tech entrepreneur to emulate Steve Jobs in her black turtle necks and her daily meditation practice. And we don't know which of the behavioral quirks or lifestyle quirks of a hero account for their success and their status. So we sort of blindly emulate.
And in some cases, there are useful lessons. If you know that LeBron James shoots 500 free throws a day and you emulate that, well, you may gain a better free throw percentage. But if you emulate, you know, what he eats for breakfast, that may be unhealthful and if you lean lean too much on it, it may get in the way of more useful lessons. Our third wave is the ancestor instinct. What do we have here, sir?
Well, in some ways, this may seem like the most primitive or simple or potentially malfunctional forms of travel wiring, but it's actually the crowning touch to human social wiring. And this is a set of cognitive habits and motivational impulses that enable learning from past generations. And we recognize it in ourselves today.
We have a deep curiosity about founders, you know, the founders of our nation, the founders of our profession, the founders of our corporation. We are interested in family recipes and old photographs of ancestors and what sports did my great grandfather enjoy and geo. Maybe I should keep that traditional live, you know, badminton or whatever it was. We have a sort of beyond rational curiosity in antique objects, you know, objects that can't come from the past.
And this is all part of a set of wiring for kind of wrote learning from artifacts and teachers about ways of the past that enable the wisdom of the past to be transmitted into the future. And the wrote learning is actually an important aspect of it because we don't, we can learn things beyond those things that we actually understand because we are blindly following the steps that we learned from our grandmother or grandfather.
And that is an aspect that comes up in our traditionalist thinking where we, when we're performing a ritual, it must be done in these steps in this order. And we don't like the idea that it would be altered or that would be improvised. So the rigidity of ritual and tradition is an important part of it. And it enabled expertise to be transmitted even through generations when it wasn't needed.
And we have ocean side cultures have traditions about tsunamis that may only occur every 80 years because they're passed down through myth and ritual. And this knowledge about tsunamis doesn't get lost in a generation when there's no tsunami. And so nobody finds it imperative to learn about nobody is asking questions about tsunamis in that generation.
Everyone is going to learn about tsunamis because it's part of the folklore, it's part of the wood carving, it's part of the, you know, every canoe paddle is carved in a tsunami pattern. And so the knowledge transmits and it's there when a later generation needs it.
So here is an amazing fact. At some points, ancient humans developed the ability to create fire. And from there, developed other forms of food preparation. They then passed that knowledge around and developed cultural practices, traditions and rituals that aided in passing this knowledge down to their children and after thousands of years of this.
These behaviors altered our caloric intake to the point that our bodies could support brains so large that if we didn't have fire, we'd need to eat for roughly nine hours a day to keep those brains going.
So yeah, finding fire was great and it altered our lifestyles, which then we adapted to genetically, but it also introduced all sorts of problems like, well, now childbirth is much more difficult because we have big, old heads and brains finding all of this food all the time and then cooking it. We have to keep up with this and do this all the time now and we now have much longer childhoods and an adolescent period and all sorts of other things that we had to adapt to.
But the fact is our brains made our brains bigger and then those bigger brains came up with ways to deal with having bigger brains. And all this happened because natural selection led to mutations here and there that together created a collection of genes that operating in concert provided the ability to make change and accumulate the sort of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, norms, values and practices that would interact to become the collective cognition of a group of cohabitating humans.
And this system of shared schemas, which we call culture was so adaptive that we each now live within one of these things from birth, a culture to which we continuously contribute to and for which we provide constant upkeep like ants maintaining a nest or bees adding to a hive.
And dual inheritance theory posits that genes shape brains, brains shape cultures, then those culture shape future genes that shape future brains, then those culture shape future genes that shape future brains and round and round the feedback loop spins until we get things like bonfires and beards and the cosmic evolutionary miracle that is cheese.
The theoretical insight is often called co evolution or dual inheritance theory and it is the brainchild of Robert Boyd and Peter Richardson, a cultural anthropologist and someone who I think he was trained to study evolutionary biology, you know, but then he started studying humans.
And students of theirs like Joe Henrik and the idea here is that it's not like you read some popular books like sapiens and you get this idea that like genetic evolution went on to a certain point and then stopped and then cultural evolution began, you know, and that's not that's not the current understanding.
The current understanding is that these two things operated in tandem and made each other possible. So when a certain amount of shared knowledge collected in early human groups, that created the selection pressure for the peer instinct, you know, for this set of tools for peer learning.
And then those tools for peer learning led to it a much richer body of knowledge that then created the preconditions for another genetic adaptation that led to the hero instinct and this, this more pro social behavior, which then in turn revolutionized the cultural development of human groups in ways that then created the selection.
Created the selection pressure for the ancestor instinct for this this this quirk of wanting to learn about the past generations and retaining it and feeling that it's important to retain it. And then once all three of those things all three of those instincts were present together, you got this thing called cultural accumulation, which is that you didn't have to reinvent the wheel every generation because the knowledge was retained through the ancestor instinct.
So then the hero instinct could focus its energy on building on the insights and the expertise of the prior generation, rather than reinventing the wheel every generation. And the three instincts contribute in this system that led to human groups developing richer and more differentiated cultures, you know, with every generation. And that is a sort of positive feedback loop between the way that we genetically changed as the species and the way that we were socially changing.
It's called dual inheritance theory because both the inheritance of genes and the inheritance of memes or cultural adaptations, it operates through Darwinian principles of blind variation, selective retention and then spreading of things that work. So it is a remarkable new synthesis using Darwinian logic that goes beyond the nature nurture divide of the past and goes beyond the, you know, the notion that one kind of evolution operated early on and another kind of evolution operates later on.
And this leads to something called niche construction. Sometimes this is a social niche construction and sometimes this is an external environment niche construction. Either way, what happens is an organism starts to affect the environment in which it lives and then that environment in which it lives becomes the environment in which it evolves. And one of the most striking examples of this in humans is lactose tolerance.
Once human groups in northern Europe were engaged in animal husbandry, once they were keeping cattle, it paid off to be lactose tolerant, which is not a natural thing for mammals, you know, naturally mammals.
You drink milk as an infant and then you don't drink milk again, but it somehow paid off to be like able to survive on cow milk and that spread through northern Europe where they were keeping these large animals, but it didn't spread throughout the rest of human groups because not everybody was keeping cattle.
So a lot of human groups like in Asia are not lactose tolerant and the mutation for lactose tolerance that evolved in northern Europe is actually a different mutation on a different gene with different chromosomes than the one that evolved in the Middle East, you know, because they were keeping camels.
It's kind of just fascinating how culture changes genes, you know, instead of the old the old eugenic idea was that, you know, genes are shaping culture, but you know, now we know it goes in both directions is a co evolutionary cycle.
There's somebody in France who is the world's greatest cheese maker, they're the hero of cheese making and they're the hero of cheese making because they took a traditional pattern and form and method of creating incredible cheese, which they learned through one of their family members teaching it to them.
And then they went to a school that got them to enhance their skills and then they offered it up to us. We all enjoy is a really wonderful combination of everything that we've talked about so far. The pure instinct, the hero instinct, the ancestor instinct and a niche construction through dual inheritance theory for that person to exist. The world's greatest cheese maker may be the ultimate expression of our species.
Ironically, at least it seems to me one of the ways scientists who study this sort of thing like to illustrate how all this comes together is to tell a story about how Portuguese colonizers ignored the traditions of the world. The traditions of the people of the Amazon after barging into their lives. And here's how this story goes.
In the 1500s, the kingdom of Portugal, who was already well on its way to colonizing just about everywhere they could land a ship and build a town, made their way into South America. Into what we today call Brazil and Colombia and other places in the Northwestern Amazon and as they were colonizing those places, they encountered a native people who already lived there. People with an established culture and centuries of tradition known as the Tukano.
They subsist primarily on Casava, which is the sort of starch, it's the sort of tuber that you can grow in a rainforest condition where you can't grow potatoes or rice or wheat or the kinds of things that many other cultures subsist on. The Portuguese were very happy to discover that this plant grows quite well in this harsh new land, new to them. It was difficult to grow anything else. It was a rich and staple crop that the Tukano people subsisted upon.
Often in the powder form of tapioca flour. The only problem is if you don't know how to prepare cassava, it will kill you. The form of cassava that grows in that region is toxic unless treated. It has high levels of cyanide, which is a poison that affects people cumulatively.
You can consume some of this cassava and you won't show any symptoms in the short term, but if you continue to do so for a year or two, you will suddenly start to show the long term symptoms of cyanide poisoning, which involves full body paralysis.
You can probably see where this is going, even though this variety of cassava, also known as Maniac, is toxic, which is why it does so well in these harsh ecological conditions where it grows because its toxicity is a defense against being eaten by insects. Even though it leads to chronic cyanide poisoning, if you eat a lot of it for a long while, it tastes great. But if you want to avoid paralysis and neurological devastation, you must prepare it in a very specific way.
That was something that the Tukano people had been doing for generations. The Tukano people through trial and error cultural learning had developed a very elaborate fixed procedure that every kitchen of every household followed scrupulously about leaching the cassava in water, letting it dry in the sun, waiting a week.
It's a set of steps that are not at all obvious to the outsider of why they work, but they have the effect of detoxifying the cassava, and then it can be used to make Maniac or any of the dishes that they would serve.
So here's the thing, in this part of the world where most crops do not do well, cassava is abundant and pretty easy to cultivate. However, the process for turning this tasty but poisonous plant into something safe for human consumption involves a lot of steps, steps that take several days.
You must scrape it and grate it and wash it and separate the fibers and boil them and let them sit out for days and then bake the fibers and then grind them into a flour and then prepare that flour and then you can eat it. It takes forever.
Properly preparing this plant takes up most of their day every day. It's very labor intensive. So there's plenty of incentive for a Tukano person to be a rebel, to skip some of these steps, to reject tradition, to see all of this as some kind of superstition and just boil them into a layer tender like a potato and then do all the things you would with a potato.
The only problem is that if you skip some of these steps or do them in a different order, in a few years you will get very sick and eventually you will die. And since it takes years for the poison to build up and do all of that, you may never make the connection that it's the cassava plant that's killing you. So you might be asking who taught the Tukano to properly prepare the cassava. And the answer is no one. This is a grand example of cultural evolution.
The traditions in that region that hurt or didn't sufficiently help their practitioners, chances of survival, died along with the practitioners in much the same way genes in that environment that hurt or didn't sufficiently help the chances of survival of the organisms they built, died along with those organisms. Over time, that left only the people who did it the right way.
We each inherit the genes that make it possible to create practices and pass them down and we inherit the practices that allow those genes to keep encouraging this kind of cognition and behavior in our offspring.
And I want to emphasize how incredible it is that over time, bit by bit, the Tukano people developed a tradition around following a series of steps, a laborious ritual, a folkway, a sacred practice, one that they handed down generation by generation and they did that without knowing or needing to know the chemistry of play or the pharmacological significance of what they were doing.
The Tukano people, if you ask them why are they doing this, they say, because this is what we have always done. This is what our ancestors did. This is what our grandparents taught us. As researchers at the University of Notre Dame, if you were to just happen upon this plant as an individual alone, you'd likely never figure out how to prepare it properly. The toxic effects would hit you long after it was too late and you might never realize what it was that led to your illness.
This is the danger of delayed causality. We often struggle with non-immediate feedback, hidden causalities, long latency, cause-effect relationships. Obesity, cancer-causing vices, liver destroying beverages, we are bad at the sort of pattern recognition required to notice latent toxicity.
But as those same researchers explained, a Tukano child never has to worry about this, not with this plant, because they never see anyone succumbing to cyanide poisoning because the tradition for preparing cassava has been so long maintained. They learn the rituals and carry them forward because they work. Even if they don't know why they work or even that they work.
As the researchers there put it, the steps are quote, causally opaque, which is something the Portuguese colonists would discover when they failed to copy any of these traditions. Because when they witnessed the elaborate practices of the Tukano, they interpreted them as superstitious, primitive nonsense. When the Portuguese colonial settlers came to the Amazon and were exploring, they needed to find local products that they could eat.
And so they learned about this cassava product. And then they learned the whole set of folklore, the whole set of cultural knowledge around it that you had to leach it in water for a few days, let it dry in the sun for a week to this country. And they said, okay, this is a superstitious nonsense. We will consume this local product, which seems great. We're not going to engage in this rain dense procedure before doing so. And they learned the error of that only too late.
A year or so later when people were suddenly unable to get out of the chair that they were sitting in, the Portuguese even, they were so excited about this that they even introduced the crop to some of the reinforced areas in Africa, like Angola that they had colonized creating cyanide poisoning problems there.
The crop was unknown there. Yeah, it's just it's a great story in terms of the fact that cultural practices evolve through somebody trying something for whatever reason, not necessarily knowing that it has this detoxifying effect. And then the family that did that live to pass on, you know, their genes to the next generation, as well as their recipes, the next generation and families that were serving the maniac in other ways, didn't necessarily live to pass on their genes or stories.
And so part of what when people critique tradition, they say, oh, it's blind adherence to tradition, you know, just following by wrote without understanding why it works. Well, in some ways, that's best because it allows for innovations that go beyond the scientific understanding that a people has at a given time that are practical, you know, and that can be passed on because people.
Because people have this, this wiring that I call the ancestor instinct, which is we are, we are prepared to be taught certain procedures elaborate procedures that may not have an obvious practical basis. And that's how rituals get passed on. That's how arts have gotten passed on. And that's how various kinds of recipes and tool making procedures have gotten passed on that have greater complexity than people can consciously explain.
Look as a person who grew up around people who to this day express beliefs and values and norms and traditions that I do not engage in or agree with, I would never use a story like that. So the person who grew up around people who to this day express beliefs and values and norms and traditions that I do not engage in or agree with, I would never use a story like this to argue that blindly following tradition is superior to pursuing the truth.
And then developing a method for answering that question, clearly it is better to apply the scientific method. We're better off for inventing such a tool and we're better off when we engage in skepticism and intellectual humility.
So we're not the argument here, what this story is meant to illustrate is that we inherit genes that encourages to do this sort of thing to develop traditions and rituals in folk ways, traditions and rituals in folk ways that in the past have allowed us to inherit valuable adaptive behaviors that we couldn't have inherited through genes because waiting on our genes to adapt to new environments would have taken too long.
And inevitably when we have done that, a variety of false beliefs and unnecessary rituals and way off base assumptions have formed around those adaptive behaviors, especially if they became sacred religious practices. As long as those practices or traditions or ways of preparing food or anything else like this wasn't detrimental to the survival of the group, all the unnecessary stuff would get passed down along with the bits of tradition that were evolutionarily beneficial.
Another great example of this comes from the anthropologist Joseph Hinnrick, formerly a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, currently a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. He wrote a book about the complexity of human culture titled The Secret of Our Success.
And in that book he mentions the Tecono people, which we just talked about with the Kassava, along with other examples like the Nascapi people of the Arctic regions of what is today Northern Quebec. They lived as nomads and followed the migration patterns of the caribou. However, some years, caribou were scarce. So any disadvantage when it came to hunting could be deadly to their entire civilization.
And as Hinnrick explains, the Nascapi developed a tradition that unbeknownst to them, nullified the deadly effects of the gambler's fallacy. That's one of our cognitive biases. That's the one that causes us to erroneously believe in winning streaks and losing streaks. In chance-based situations, it's the one that causes us to think we should take advantage of when luck is on our side and hold back when we think that it's not.
And we do this because we're generally bad at recognizing when randomness gets clumpy in the short term, it's still randomness in the long term. So, yeah, you might flip a coin and get heads seven times in a row, but the 50-50 probability has not changed. And that will become very apparent if you keep flipping that coin.
Still, noticing patterns in the noise is a generally good thing. But as the gambler's fallacy demonstrates applying that in situations where that could get you in trouble, especially like casinos, well, it becomes very much a bad thing. And as Henrik points out, hunting is actually one of those times when sticking to patterns can be a bad idea.
For instance, if you hunt a constantly on-the-moved species, like, say, caribou, which is what the Nascapi people depended upon for food, clothing, and tools, and your hunting party continues to return to a location where they recently had a success that they didn't realize was a random success, where they just happened upon some caribou. Well, the caribou will, as they keep going back to that location, learn to avoid that location as they move from feeding ground to feeding ground.
So, in that harsh portion of the world with that particular species and that particular hunting practice, the best option would actually be to go where the caribou are likely to be in general, like the trails they walk on in the vast territory where they roam. But then, randomize the precise location where you plan to search for them on each hunting trip.
Keep the caribou guessing, basically. Never let them know your next move. Groups who do this will have a greater rate of hunting success over time, and over time, they will be the groups who survive. If you were to leave humans to their own cognitive biases, they would never get a chance to learn this technique before if you failed hunts in the Arctic, ended their hunting for good.
And you can't wait on your genes because they will not adapt fast enough to prevent you from doing this silly thing. So, you need a cultural solution to overcome a millions of years old cognitive bias. And you're biased in that way because in other environments, it's a good move. So, you need something that will alter your group's behavior quickly, something that can then be passed down because it works.
To overcome this bias, before each hunt, then a scoffy engage in a divination ritual, a tradition in which they heat the shoulder blade, the bone of a caribou over hot coals until it cracks. And they then treat that pattern as a map, telling them where the caribou will be, and they follow the pattern of the cracks into the wilderness as if they were directions. And it works. But not because the cracks actually predict where the caribou will be, but because it randomizes their behavior.
And they maintain this tradition because it works. You can keep following those cracks over and over again until you do eventually find a caribou. So, it seems like, yeah, it did predict where they would be. And if you didn't engage in such a randomizing behavior, you would lead to very bad outcomes. Despite their beliefs about why it works, having nothing to do with the true mechanisms it play, in some ways, their belief was the opposite of the truth.
What they saw as predicting the future with accuracy was actually leaving the future to chance. Way, way back, natural selection granted humans an incredible capacity to copy the behaviors of others of our kind. That way, if someone developed a solution to a problem, an innovation, a better way, a different way, one that led to better outcomes,
a few nearby fellow trusted humans could change their behavior routines to match. And that change, but then spread to others in the group, first via early adopters, and then some holdouts who were curious, and then even if some people never updated their ways, the tradition would be passed down to people born long after the innovation was struck upon.
In other words, one of the reasons human beings are so incredibly successful as a species is that we evolve the innate drive to create and maintain culture. A culture that deeply affects everyone born into it, a culture that continuously evolves, and much of that drive takes the form of behavioral imitation.
In fact, behavioral over imitation, a very human trait that encourages us to pass down hard-earned wisdom that in some instances may not seem like wisdom at all, just some sort of tradition, some sort of thing that people do here, which leads me to one of my favorite series of studies in all of psychology, the one involving a feather, a marshmallow, and a jar. This is a set of studies about something that researchers of cognitive development, they call the over imitation effect.
Once again, that's psychologist Michael Morris. And that's a label that accentuates the bias, but it's become understood as a largely adaptive thing. And the participant who is a young child, either a two-year-old or a four-year-old, is shown a procedure by an adult, and that adult might show them a jar with a marshmallow in it, and a top on the jar that twists off. And they will say, I'm going to show you how to get the marshmallow from the jar.
At this point, the researcher picks up the jar, rotates the entire jar in the air several times, and then picks up a feather, and waves the feather across the top. Then after all of that, they set down the jar, screw off the top, reach inside, and grab the marshmallow. A two-year-old who observes this procedure, and then has given a turn himself or herself, will skip the jar spinning and skip the feather waving, and simply unscrew the top and take the marshmallow.
What chimpanzee puts through the procedure will do the same thing that the two-year-old does. But after age three, humans respond differently, which is when given their turn, they repeat the exact steps that the adult showed them, feather waving at all.
If you ask them questions in a different way, they kind of betray the knowledge that the feather waving may not causally contribute to the marshmallow getting, but they think of it as an appropriate step that should be taken, because their ritual learning procedures have come online in their development. Not only is there an age, a point in time, in the development of a human being, in which human beings will begin to act completely differently than other primates.
It's at this age, the age in which we will copy the behaviors of a person teaching us something exactly as they showed us, feather waving at all, that we become capable of learning the rules to games, the rules to imaginary worlds, as described to us by an adult, in the description of imaginary creatures. We've never seen, as described to us by an adult. This is around the age when children become interested in ghosts and magical spells and things of that nature.
So this capacity for learning rituals and passing on traditions and an interest in doing so comes online in humans at this age. And yet it leads to this inefficient behavior in the marshmallow task, but it enables all kinds of things that two-year-olds and chimpanzees can't do. And researchers have taken this experiment further by investigating how it could be tweaked to generate the most over-imitation, the highest rate of rigidly imitative behavior.
And the tweak that leads to the most over-imitation is making it so there are two adults, or even more, all engaging in the extra and unnecessary steps, like feather waving.
And they simultaneously enact the procedure, like when you're learning a ritual, you learn a ritual from ceremonies where people engage in simultaneous behavior, whether it's dancing or marching or kneeling and genuine, reflecting or whatever ceremony it is, it usually involves synchronous behavior, dancing, singing, that kind of thing. And that form of social event is a very strong indicator or cue of the ritual learning mechanism.
And it also is increased when the adults presenting the instruction say things like, this is how we've always done it. They kind of use the line which that signal, like, we are now teaching you one of the conventions of the community, pay attention because you will get credit for doing this correctly and you will get severely, severe disapproval for doing this incorrectly.
But we've evolved both to have this teaching instinct and to have this learning instinct. And the counterintuitive side of it is this blind-wrote learning that people like you and I probably rebelled against because we thought, no, everything should be rationally justified and everything should be efficient. Why do we have to fast before going to, this doesn't make sense? The blind repetition is an important part of what makes it work, it's an important part of what makes it adaptive.
Okay, let's circle all the way back around again to the original thesis of Dr. Michael Morris, the psychologist who wrote this book, Tribal, who says that from his perspective, the upsides to tribalism greatly outweigh the downsides.
And he says that when you understand the pure instinct, the hero instinct and the ancestor instinct and all the things that are underpinning all of that, then it gives you an opportunity to tweak things in our day to day lives, in our governance, in our democracies and so on, to avoid the worst tendencies when it comes to things like polarization and prejudice. And at the most extremes war, he wants you to know that you can really lean into the fact that we are an us species, not a them species.
And here he is saying that in his own words, and then here he is saying a whole lot more in his own words. Our evolutionary ancestors lived in a world with much less population density, they didn't encounter other tribes very often, but they encountered their in group members every single day and relied on them every single day.
And so the thing that was adaptive was instincts that enabled new and more sophisticated forms of cooperation, coordination, collaboration, tradition, things that built the power of the in group, not things that were oriented towards out groups, which, you know, we're not, that's not that present in their experience. These instincts are mostly us instincts, they're not them instincts, they're, their instincts for solidarity, not for hostility.
They can go sideways sometimes and contribute to misunderstandings and conflicts between groups, but that is not the core of them. Some of these pundits have said, we've become infected with the virus of tribalism, the genius out of the bottle and there's no way to get it back again. We are witnessing the demise of our democracy, and I just think this is chicken little overstatement that sells newspapers, but it's despairing cynical.
It's certainly not the way that we can ameliorate these problems. It's not a healthy way for people to think when we look ahead to things like global warming, which is a matter that does require cooperation across groups, and we shouldn't think that we're somehow genetically predisposed to be at war with each other.
There was a species with that wiring, it was called neanderthals, they went because there was this other human species, homo sapiens, who live in more collaborative, larger scale communities, and are not primarily oriented towards warring with the neighboring group. It's something that happens occasionally with us, but it's something that wise leaders throughout history have intuited ways to manage and ways to redirect.
I started to write the book just to share the toolkit that I've developed over the years, teaching about social and cultural psychology in the world's top business schools. I've done that for about 30 years, and it's the primary activity of my life, and I teach about it every day, and so why not share it in a book. Because then a secondary agenda of the book has been to push back against this somewhat despairing, fatalistic conception of what's happening in the world right now.
I don't think the conflicts in the world right now are any deeper than they were a generation ago, or two generations ago, or three generations ago. The only thing that's different is this despairing way of talking about them that I think needs to be debunked, and that's the secondary agenda of my book.
We've discussed in detail how us we are, and I want to just take a moment to talk about the them things, because it's top of mind for many people right now, how some of these things have feedback looped into a bad place. I want to ask you, as just a question, and you can talk about this at any length, you're an expert on this topic, and you have a very optimistic and positive view of the us of our people, and we're in a world where them comes up a lot.
It's undeniable that there's some really bad outcomes of us versus them thinking all around us. What do we know from the literature and from your own research, from your experience with all this, and your academic expertise, how should we be approaching this them that seems to be pervasive, and what can we use from the positive side of all of this to affect the negative?
It's a very, very important question. Going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, I think there's a way of thinking about tribalism as we're wired to hate. I think that is a false diagnosis of these current conflicts, whether political, racial, or sectarian, that are troubling and trenchant conflicts that we worry about and worry that these will be the end of civil society.
I think that when we're trying to analyze the conflicts that we face today and we're trying to think about how to ameliorate them, it's useful to have slightly more specific diagnoses than this notion of primal hate for outsiders. You did a great job of summarizing these things. Epistemic tribalism is this kind of groupthink that happens when we are processing things in an overly conformist way, which we have all started to do in the political realm.
We didn't do this a generation ago in the political realm when the Red Tribe didn't live in one part of the country and the Blue Tribe in another part of the country. Now that we've sorted ourselves into ideologically in-bred neighborhoods, and now that social media has created a media landscape where we only get the news that supports our view and we engage in social media loops of virtue signaling with our co-party members.
We all, much more than we realize, are forming our political beliefs through a very conformist process. And so understanding that can help us break out of it. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be in echo chambers and bubbles that produce conformist political thinking and then lead us to be shocked at election results and suspicious of the other party and antagonistic towards fair elections.
So understanding what the disease is in our current politics, it's much more specific than primal rage for outsiders. It has to do with epistemic tribalism. And then this other crisis, which is the sense of racial and ethnic inequality and injustice, it is a very legitimate concern. There is rampant inequality along racial and ethnic lines in the hiring and promotion of work organizations in the United States.
I talk about in the book how organizations have adopted HR procedures over the last generation that seem innocent, they seem efficiency oriented, but they have turbocharged in group favoritism. One of them is hiring for cultural fit. It's this idea that the organizational culture is important. So in addition to looking at people's objective qualifications, we should look at whether they seem to be people with taste and lifestyles that would naturally fit with the partners who are already here.
And this turns out to be a really big thing at sort of like blue chip law firms or banks or consulting firms, sociologists like Lauren Rivera of Northwestern, she's embedded as an ethnographer in the hiring procedures of these firms.
And she's observed that they place an inordinate emphasis on the extracurricular activities of their candidates. They, you know, she quotes these moments where people will say Jake's squash background combined with Louise's crew experience would probably enable them to get along really well on the trading floor and and be mentored by the current partners in that part of the organization.
So that's a reason to hire them. And there's no mention that these extracurricular activities also happen to be the ones, you know, practice almost exclusively in in wasp affluent suburbs. So it's something that seems innocuous, but contributes to this reproduction of the same sorts of people being hired. Another one is referral systems in organizations.
You know, organizations realize that when they're hiring a new manager and it's a referral from a current manager, they're more likely to accept the job more likely to onboard quickly, more likely to stay longer. So gee, why not use referrals as opposed to these external applicants where you don't really know you don't have anyone vouching for them. The problem is that referrals tend to be people of the same gender and ethnicity and religion as the employees referring them.
But if you simply tweak the referral system where you say we're keeping our referral system where you will still get a bonus if the person you nominated, you know, gets hired for the job and you will still get your friend as a new colleague. But we only want referrals of people who are either veterans, neurodiverse, LGBTQ or from an underrepresented minority group or women in a tech field.
People are just as happy to nominate people. They nominate people from their lives who are different from the ones who would be top of mind in an unfocused referral system. But they given this challenge, they can think of people they've met in their career or their church or their school system who are minorities or veterans or, you know, in a wheelchair or, you know, women in an organization that doesn't have many women.
All of the advantages of the referral system still operate. Making the right diagnosis of what exactly is the tribalism going on here helps us recognize dimensions of the problem and also recognize ways to fix it. So I think that there's a lot of value in getting a little more specific in our diagnosis of what tribal tendencies are creating this problem and are creating that problem and creating a third problem. That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.
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