Michael Morris

It can sometimes look that way if you see like a wolf pack hunting, but they are not working with a shared intention.

They are just working on reflexes when they work together.

Chimpanzees are the animals closest to us.

And when they hunt as a group,

It's just side-by-side individual hunting.

There's not like a plan that they've shared.

And the first tribal instinct of humans, the peer instinct, this idea that we're driven to imitate the people around us and to mesh with them, it's what allows us to form shared plans so that we could...

that we could hunt and we could gather and we could defend our group in an organized way as a united front.

And other species can't really do that.

That's one way to describe, I think, the peer instinct, which is that it's motivating to be among a like-minded group.

It gives us a deep feeling of security and a feeling that we understand the world because we're in consensus with other people.

And I think that people used to get their peer instincts satisfied

because they lived in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods, or they went to a house of worship every week and they were around a group of people who may not have been the same ethnicity as them, but who subscribed to the same dogma and religious worldview as them.

And that has waned away in our country over the last two generations.

The most frequent religious identity on the census now is none.

There's been residential sorting largely on the basis of a political ideology.

So the liberals have moved to the coasts and the conservatives have moved to the heartland.

And so I think that's part of why we see a change

in the way people relate to political parties that the sort of primary identity groups that give us this feeling of security and the feeling of understanding have become the Democrat and Republican parties.

Whereas a generation ago, you didn't know which of your neighbors were Democrats and Republicans.