Michael Morris is a professor of cultural psychology at Columbia University and an author. Why are humans so tribal? Despite our capacity for empathy and inclusion, why do we always gravitate toward groups of similar individuals? And is there such a thing as good tribalism? Expect to learn why tribalism exists and how it evolved in humans, why we can hate people outside of our group and why we become hostile, if the modern world has worsened tribal instincts, whether tribalism is actually a good thing for our society, why so many people identify as not the opposition instead of as for their own group and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $600 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on your Chairman Pro at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why does tribalism exist and how did it evolve?
Why does tribalism exist? Why did it evolve?
tribalism is what, uh, got us out of the stone age. It's what, uh, led to our human specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees. Um, they live in minimally collaborative troops that can ever get larger than about 50 individuals or they turn into a blood bath. And we evolved, uh,
some social quirks that enable us to live in culture sharing groups and these culture sharing groups allow for a level of collaboration and common fate and common concern that that is not present in other in any other social species and so
tribes uh tribes are large groups united by shared culture and our tribal instincts were you know adaptations or mutations that changed our psychology slightly to enable us to live in this kind of group and it just turned out to be the ultimate killer app of evolution because once we were in these culture sharing groups uh it snowballed you know the the cultures started getting
more complex and more adapted to the local ecology with each generation. And then humans, without becoming any brainier, were more capable of surviving and thriving because they could tap into these better cultures each generation. And they just left all the other species in their dust. So that's the basic story about tribalism. And we're stuck with it because it's in our wiring.
It doesn't always lead us to do the right thing. But I still believe that it's mostly adaptive, that our tribal instincts enable us to do most of the things that we are proud of and that we benefit from. We notice it more when it leads us to do things that are dysfunctional. And certainly there are examples of that in the world today.
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Chapter 2: What are the social advantages of tribalism?
So tribalism is predicated on culture, that without culture, there can be no tribalism. Is that a fair...
is by the sort of political pundits, you know, and they're just kind of grasping for a catch all explanation to understand, you know, the red blue rift and the record racial protests and religious conflicts. And, you know, it's, it's an easy, quite facile thing to say, you know, Oh, it's our resurgent tribalism. You know, our tribal instincts have reappeared, you know, and we're, we're, uh,
we're descending into tribalism and our democracy will never be the same. That's what we've been hearing. And I think it's, I call it the trope of toxic tribalism. And it's a pretty despairing theme because the idea is that somehow the genie got out of the bottle and there's no way to get it back inside again. And I don't really think that's what's going on. I think
we have some bad conflicts in the world today, but that's true. That's true every generation. Every generation thinks they're presiding over the end times. What's new is this way of talking about the conflicts as though they reflect
some evolutionary curse you know some some drive to hate other groups that is always going to be you know undermining us and i don't think that's true i think that the tribal instincts are are instincts that evolution sculpted in order to help us be culture sharing animals And that enabled us to live in very large collaborative groups.
And a side effect of those tribal instincts is that we sometimes get into conflicts with other groups. But they're not instincts for hostility. They're instincts for solidarity. All of our instincts will lead us astray in some situations. We evolved to be attracted to sweet tastes because fruit has a lot of nutrition. Now, if you live...
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Chapter 3: Is tribalism an inherent part of human nature?
on a block with two donut shops, that wiring might lead you to eat in an unhealthy way. It doesn't mean that it's an instinct for gluttony. It's an instinct for fruit. And if we understand that, we have a better way of coping with the problem than if we think that we're cursed with some flawed wiring, which is a way of thinking about human nature that is kind of in a tragic way.
Why do you think it is? Because I've noticed this too. And look, I'm going to fight the fight for the... It seems like people hate outgroups more than they love in groups today. I'm going to try and stress test it as much as possible. Thank you. But... What do you think is so alluring about this sort of myth of martyrdom, this woe is everything, it's all sort of broken?
Why is it that that's a tempting, seductive talk point?
Well, it's this kind of Manichaean message, right, that, you know, The world is coming to an end because along with our evolutionary blessing of intelligence and familial loyalty has come this curse of genocide. The person delivering the message feels very important, and the people listening are spellbound, at least in the short term. It gives everybody the opportunity to be Cassandra. Exactly.
Yeah. And you know, it's, it's yeah. Tragic plays don't always, don't always talk about the end of the world, but even a tragic play, which talks about the end of a particular person's life or success is, is kind of riveting, you know, and always has been riveting. But yeah, I think, I think that the problem is,
The problem in the media or the problem with thought leaders, you know, and you and I are probably, you know, prone to this is that we get rewarded for dramatic statements. The more dramatic, the more worrisome, the more clicks, you know, the more, you know, so I think that.
there has been a cascade of Cassandras, you know, everybody wants to out Cassandra, the other Cassandras and become the pundit du jour. So I think that some of that has been going on and what makes for good, what makes for good op-eds doesn't necessarily make for good policies.
And that's, that's where I think, you know, a little bit more grounding in science when we talk about tribalism would elevate the discussion a little bit.
The perverting incentives of clicks. I wish I had a more sexy answer because it just seems so cliche and so obvious for me to say, well, people need to get attention and this is how the attention economy works and blah, blah, blah.
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Chapter 4: How has modern society affected tribal instincts?
And then people can argue about the statistics exactly. It is certainly the case that African Americans had a higher statistical likelihood of having interactions with police and then of having interactions that were harmful in one way or the other. But so, yeah. So I agree with you that these movements are... These movements are adversarial or oppositional at some level.
I wonder whether that's a natural outgrowth of just the pushback of anyone disagreeing with your in-group proposition. You make a proposition around us, a group that isn't you pushes back against that. So what do you do? You lean in against the argument. So I guess we've spoken about a number of different ways that people can get split up in terms of tribes.
What do people become tribal around, mostly? Is it accent, appearance, familiarity, gene pool? What are the core characteristics that compose tribes?
It's a very interesting question. And again, I think it varies... with these three basic tribal instincts, but I'll start with the base one that I've mentioned, the peer instinct. I think what's really interesting about the peer instinct is that many studies show that race is not one of the primary triggers of
It becomes a trigger that people learn to use as a group marker if they live in a society like the United States where race, where physiognomy is correlated with cultural groups. But in places like Israel, you know, you can't always tell from somebody's face whether they're Palestinian or Israeli. In Ukraine, you can't tell whether someone's Russian or Ukrainian from their face.
You know, if you get them to talk, then you can tell. You can sometimes tell from their clothing. So these other cues are – there's a lot of evidence that we are wired more – to use language as our basis of sorting.
I'm so glad. I'm so glad you said that because I have been spouting this people are more racist against accents than they are against skin colors thing for a while. It may very well be some of your work from a long time ago that I've been harping on about Um, but if that's true, then I'm, uh, no, it's, it's, it's totally true.
Like kids, kids don't use race. They don't like preferentially socialize with someone, a stranger of the same race until they're like six. But the language thing starts when they're infants, because even when, even. In the womb, the kid is hearing their mother's language and even their mother's dialect. So even like neonates, they'll have a preference, you know, if you kind of put them in front of
you know, two screens and there's someone talking with their mother's dialect and there's someone talking with a different dialect, they'll reach for the food, you know, in front of the screen. No way. It's not their mother, but it's their mother's dialect. So they, you know, the mother tongue is a super important and fundamental thing.
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Chapter 5: What drives political tribalism in today's world?
And then there's two kinds of food. And they've seen, you know, the... They've seen like an English speaker eat this food and they've seen a French speaker eat this food. And then if the French person speaks, reaches for the English food, you know, the baby shows a surprise reaction, like startled, like, oh my God. So what's really interesting is that babies are not racist.
They don't judge you based on your race. but they already judge you on your accent and on what you eat. They're already watching what you eat and your accent. So they're not little Buddhas. They're not racist, but they're not little Buddhas. They're judgmental already.
Fantastic. Well, dig into, we've got these three instincts, peer instinct, hero instinct, ancestor instinct. Let's run through those.
Sure. So I've mentioned the peer instinct. That corresponds to what we might call conformist impulses or the herd instinct, you know, the bandwagon instinct, we're wired to sort of unconsciously learn what the people in our group do. We just form like a register of what's normal in our group without even trying to.
And then we feel a sense of satisfaction when we mesh, when we match, when we fit in with what other people do. And this evolved its thought to enable coordination. Even like a million years ago,
our, um, our forebearers, Homo erectus, we have evidence now that they started hunting as a, as a sort of collaborative group, you know, and gathering as a collaborative group in a way that other species can't do like working from a common plant. And, uh,
that is something we deride today, but it does limit independent thinking sometimes, but it is something that enables all of our collective thinking and enables our collective work. And even in fields like art and science, you know, the, the great contributions build on, you know, they build on the work of other people. It's not, it's not being done completely in a vacuum by one person.
So I think while we are, we, wise to be wary of conformity we should understand that this ability to mind meld with other people and this impulse to mesh actions and this this ease that we have at collaborating with people in our group is it empowers most of what we do yeah where's where's a peer instinct at its best peer instinct at its worst the peer instinct at its best is the kind of um
think of the seamless interaction between a basketball team that plays together, you know, behind the back, no look passes, you know, like I, I, or in, in, in football or soccer, you know, like I know you so well that I know that, you know, that I'm going to be here. Like we can read minds and we can do these amazing things together. Where it's at its worst is when you,
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Chapter 6: How do tribal instincts influence social behavior?
I can't remember the exact geological details, but the ocean level rose all around the world. And the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have, they all have myths about a primordial flood. They have different kinds of myths about like what the ocean did. And a few years ago,
some anthropologists who had collected the flood myths all around the country, they teamed up with some geologists who built simulations based on the topography of different parts of Australia. And what they found is that the myths of these groups correspond pretty well to what we can simulate happened 7,000 years ago in that part of Australia. So these really traumatic events
they get they get really well preserved uh by myths because we treat myths in such a sacrosanct way you know where you're not you're not allowed to tell your version of the of the you know noah story you know you're supposed to tell the exact version that's in the bible and uh Similarly, in these aboriginal groups, you're supposed to tell the exact story of the primordial flood myth.
So the Moses story, sorry, I keep saying Moses, it's the Noah story. The Noah story is our primordial flood myth, but it likely is the remnant of this event that happened, that really happened.
To you, it may just seem like a whimsical story, but it's actually geology and meteorology masquerading as a tale from the past.
Yeah, and it lasted in the oral tradition for thousands of years before it was written down.
This is one of the fascinating things. I had a great conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is an atheist, skeptic-type person out of Oxford, but very open to the idea of religion. And he was arguing for the side of religion and saying that basically in the modern world, what we told was for people to let go of the thing that they found most easy to believe, which was story.
It was a persona and personification. It was narrative. And to start to believe in the thing which is the least believable, which is data and stats. And it's very sterile. And we have to put ourselves into this very different type of...
This very different type of mindset in order to be able to go, and this many people will be saved by a mosquito net or et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to what we lived through for our entire human history. And yes, the problem with that is that you can't, it's unfalsifiable. It allows all sorts of fuckery to be spread.
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