Michael Morris

You didn't know which of your colleagues were Democrats or Republicans.

It wasn't as salient an identity a generation or two ago.

Well, we started living in tribes about 50,000 years ago, and civilization is only like 5,000 years old.

So it's pretty well established that a lot of our social behavior is wired by evolution in ways that

were adaptive for early humans that you know helped them survive and thrive and then we live in a very different world but with the same psychological hardware that uh evolved in the in the stone age so uh we also have conscious beliefs about community but the reason it feels good when we're in a like-minded group and everybody knows your name and everybody understands you is because

we have you know hardwired motivations needs that get satiated by that experience so it's it's part of the human nature

Yeah, and a different side of you comes out spontaneously.

You're an engineer, you walk into a group, it's the engineering wing of the building at work, and then you can just start talking about safety factors and degrees of freedom and other technical terms, and everybody knows exactly what you mean, and everybody respects you for it.

Whereas when you are on an interdisciplinary task force or a multifunctional task force at work,

You know, you're around people from the marketing division, people from the accounting division, people from sales.

Those are different tribes.

And there's something exciting and stimulating about diversity, right?

And that's why we designed for diversity.

But there's also something deeply comfortable about having like-minded groups that provide support and security.

Oh, you're describing the feeling really well.

And I think that it's definitely very connected to how social media has this kind of filter bubble.

It filters what information comes to you, and then it's like a bubble, like an echo chamber, that when you express an opinion, you get immediate positive reinforcement.

And it gives you, it satisfies the peer instinct itch, you know, because you feel understood.

It also satisfies the hero instinct itch because you feel like you have status.

You know, the whole idea of virtue signaling is, you know, I say something really extreme and then people say, oh, you're so right.