Michael Morris

I'm a former athlete, but I'm also a professor, but I also live in the country.

And I can't follow the norms of all of those identities at the same time.

They have to take turn.

When I go to the country and I see the environment and I see the people there, it brings certain ways of living to the fore.

And when I return to Manhattan, it brings other ways of living to the fore of my brain.

So this is often called code switching.

We talked about it when politicians like Obama would speak in a slightly different way to an African-American audience compared to an audience of white farmers in Kansas.

But we all engage in code switching.

We switch to professional jargon when we get to work.

We talk to our buddies at the gym differently than we talk to our

co-parishioners at church.

We all switch between different code words and different registers when we are trying to mesh with our different tribes.

Well, I think what you're touching on there and in your initial question is that there's been a bad rap for tribes and tribalism over the last 10 years.

And it started around the end of Obama's last term and Trump's first term, where people started noticing political polarization between the red tribe and the blue tribe.

And there was this sense that...

uh something something has been lost in our democracy right that people are not treating each other with respect they're not listening to each other there's political violence and uh and one way that people interpreted this was that we are somehow hardwired to hate other groups and that this deeply buried instinct came back to the surface

And now we're screwed because we're cursed by this ancient instinct to hate others.

And I think this couldn't be less accurate and it couldn't be less helpful as a way of understanding, you know, the partisan conflicts that we've been in.

You know, anthropologists and behavioral scientists, we've made a lot of progress in this area and there's considerable consensus that there are some hardwired instincts that are unique to humans and that make us different, you know, from all the other species, but they are instincts for solidarity, not for hostility.

They are instincts that allow us to coordinate with others so that we can collaborate.