October 17, 2024 • 53 mins
This week Scott is joined by author and professor of leadership at the Columbia Business School, Dr. Michael Morris. Scott and Dr. Morris discuss the upsides of tribalism—
from uniting different tribes to practical implications for workplace inclusion to how tribal psychology may be our best hope for social change.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Understanding the levers involved in tribal psychology is enormously important
for activists, for leaders, for politicians, And so this fatalistic,
despairing trope about toxic tribalism, I think, is really not
It really couldn't be more wrong.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's so great to have doctor Michael Morris on the show.
Doctor Marris is a professor of Leadership at the Columbia
Business School, and he also serves as a professor in
the psychology department at Columbia. The topic of today's discussion
is his new book, Tribal How the cultural instincts that
divide us can help bring us together. Doctor Morris has
a bit of a different take on tribalism than the
prominent narrative. He argues that human tribal instincts are not
(00:48):
bugs in the system, but are actually distinguishing features of
our species that creates rich cultures that drive many of
our greatest achievements. But are actually distinguishing features of our
species that create rich cultures that I have many of
our greatest achievements. In essence, doctor Marris argues that tribal
psychology is our best hope for social change. We also
discussed the three tribal instincts and practical implications for workplace inclusion,
(01:13):
individual well being, uniting different tribes, and cultural change. More broadly,
this was a really informative episode with a giant in
the field of psychology. So without further ado, I bring
you doctor Michael Marris. Doctor Michael Marris. So great to
have you on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Thank you, Scott. It's an honor to be here, and
it's great to see you again.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Great to see you too.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
I mean, we have published a paper together since we
last saw each other in person, So that's it. Gps P. GPSP.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
No one knows what that means, but it's a prestigious journal. No,
but thank you so much for bringing me into that project.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
We drew on your foundation, you know, so it.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Was thank you. I really admire you and your research.
And I want to go through the thing that's kind
of most top on your mind these days, which is
tribal And you say tribalism is not necessarily a bad thing,
because I do see everywhere these days it's like toxic tribalism, right,
tribalism's ruining us all and you kind of have a
(02:11):
counterintuitive approach to it.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, one of the reasons to write this book is
to try to counter the trope of toxic tribalism that
has emerged, particularly in the last five years. And you know,
we understand why. There's been a lot of group conflicts
that are pretty upsetting, from the you know, the red
(02:33):
and Blue tribes not you know, accepting election outcomes and
political violence in our country, and then record racial protests,
you know, inequality and justice suspicion, and then religious conflicts,
whether it's somebody shooting up a synagogue or you know,
(02:55):
in Sudan civil wars between Islamic and non Islamic tribes.
It's understandable that people are looking for an answer, but
the answer that's emerged, you know, and I could point
to the pundits who who were most responsible. You know.
Tom Friedman talked about the virus of tribalism that has
(03:16):
infected our democracy, and Andrew Sullivan said that a deeply buried,
evolved dribe has resurfaced to make us hate outsiders and
feel blindly allegiant, you know, to one group. And the
La Times came up with toxic tribalism, and you know,
(03:38):
made the case that people, a lot of the people
who died of COVID died because of tribalism because it
was Biden's Biden's vaccine and they didn't want it. So
I think that I'm rambling a bit, but I think
that what's problematic about this trope is is not that
tribal psychology is irrelevant to these things. It is relevant,
(04:01):
but there's an almost despairing tone to it, a sort
of fatalistic doom, saying that we were genetically predisposed to
hate the other group and to not see reality clearly,
and so the end is near. And I think I
(04:22):
think every generation thinks the end is near, and so
I just don't think it's accurate. And I don't think
it's helpful.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Wow, because you even go further you say it, you
say that tribalism can unite us. That's like, that's like
the obstinent of toxic Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Well, if you know, if you talk to a behavioral
scientist or if you talk to an evolutionary theorist, what
are the instincts that evolved that enabled humans to become
humans to live in our particular form of social organization. Well,
these are solidaristic instincts. These are in thinks that help
(05:01):
groups coordinate, cooperate, establish continuity, and yes, as a side effect,
occasionally bring them into conflict with other groups. You know.
One of the ways that we establish in group identity
as using out groups as a foil, right, And that's
very salient. But within the larger picture of the human
(05:23):
tribal instincts, it's kind of a footnote, you know what,
these what the species that evolved to hate outsiders and
lash out at them would not be as successful as
species as ours. You know. In fact, there was a
species like that, It was called Neanderthals, and they went
extinct for a reason because this more cooperative species, you know,
(05:45):
out survived them, out competed them. And so we need
to remember that these group affinities, and these desires for identity,
and these needs for meaning associated group member ship are
largely adoptive and they have been harnessed by effective leaders
(06:08):
throughout history. So it's it's not a cause for despair
that people are enmeshed with their groups, you know. And
one of the other fallacies is that that culture is
somehow fixed, and you know, you and I have lived
long enough to know that's not the case. You know,
the culture of screens is something that we didn't grow
(06:31):
up with, right. The culture of self driving cars is
just coming to us. The culture of using they as
a as a pronoun for a single person something we've
seen changed in the last ten years. So the culture
is constantly influx, and it's influx on a day to
day level based on the environment you're in, and it's
influx on a year to year level based on you know,
(06:54):
how things evolve. And so I think that understanding the
levers involved in tribal psychology is enormously important, you know,
for activists, for leaders, for politicians, and so this fatalistic
despairing trope about toxic tribalism, I think is really not
(07:16):
It really couldn't be more wrong. Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, I mean, you look at Roy Baummeister's seminal paper
on the need for belonging kind of laying out there
that this is really a fundamental need. And Mark Leary
I think was the co author on that, if I
remember correctly, the need for belonging is such Wow, it's
so deeply ingrained in us, and you can definitely see
(07:40):
how if you're desperate for belonging that can lead to
all sorts of maladaptive ways. Of getting belonging, like signing
up with violent violent extremist groups for instance, or various extremes.
So I do think that, like in the main you
have a great point. And then it's also and it's
also really interesting to look at it in the at
(08:01):
the extremes when there's a real deficiency for belonging and
such a craving for for for seeking an identity, And
I think tribals can can truly run amok. It can
truly run up run amok.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
It can. And it's a great point. And I really
I appreciate.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
The pushback because it helps me clarify it was yes
and not a respect Yeah, it was a yes, and
but but good point.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I think that's an important point, and I try to
I try to describe that that these tribal instincts, like
almost any instinct, can get caught in feedback loops and
can underchange social conditions, get out of range and be dysfunctional.
(08:52):
But it's not It still doesn't look like what the
toxic tribalism pun it's are talking about, because when tribal
psychology gets out of control and contributes to a conflict,
the conflict is not starting from primal range rage. It's
(09:13):
not it's not starting from hostility towards the other group.
Hostilities may eventually arise when we get frustrated and we
lose trust in another group, but it's not the root cause.
And stating that that's the case is not helpful because
it doesn't. It's not a diagnosis that shows us how
(09:33):
to treat the disease.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Oh wow, and I guess there's a lot more nuanced
and we talk about the different tribal instincts.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, I would say that, as you know, in research,
we tend to split distinctions very fine, so we might
we might distinguish forty tribals.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I love doing that, but.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
You know, I work a lot with business leaders and
with political campaigns, and what I've found over the years
when I've tried to build a toolkit that works for people,
that there's three major categories that are useful to distinguish,
and they correspond to what the evolutionists distinguished and essentially
their instincts to imitate peers, to emulate heroes, and to
(10:15):
perpetuate traditions. And so the first of these, the peer instinct.
We can recognize that in us today, the sideways glances
at our classmates, our co workers, our neighbors, and the
impulse to match their behavior and mesh with them and
be similar. And this meshing instinct gave us the gift
(10:39):
of coordination. When a group can act as a united force,
it's more efficient at foraging, it's more efficient at self defense.
And so that was the first way in which we
went beyond other primate species and we developed this way
(11:00):
of learning what the norm is in the group and
this impulse to match it. And it's largely adaptive, and
it produces conformity, and we're all on the lookout for conformity.
Conformity can be problematic, it can reduce independent thinking, but
the same conformity is also what enables us to stand
(11:22):
on the shoulders of giants and work collectively, told to
build a house that neither of us could build alone.
You know that we know. And the important thing is
not just that I know something and you know something,
but I know that you know it. You know so
I can coordinate with you because I know that this
is shared knowledge within our group. So that's the peer instinct.
(11:45):
It's this capacity to use shared knowledge as a basis
of coordination.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
And that's a good thing.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
That's a good thing. That enables us to have, you know,
the smooth functioning of organizations and society. You know, you
can imagine what traffic conditions would look like if drivers
were not conforming to what other drivers are doing. You know,
when you look at a busy highway, it's it's quite
amazing that there aren't more accidents. And it's because you know,
(12:14):
at a very deep level, you know, the inner conformist
is stronger than the interactivists or the inner creative. And
that's a good thing. It enables us to live in
large groups and mesh with each other in a way
that reduces collisions of all kinds, whether they're cognitive collisions
or you know, vehicular collisions. Okay, And that's something we've
(12:37):
had for like two million years in our species, and
it's really the basis of human culture.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
In what ways can the peer instinct instinct be a negative?
I'm thinking of creativity okay, right, because like you don't
want to just conform, You want to like do not
conform right for creativity.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
So yeah, a lot of a lot of people who
have tried to optimize their lives for creativity choose the
route of exile. You know me. Yeah, I mean, well,
you know, Warren Buffett moved back to uh, Nebraska for
a reason. He doesn't want the noise of Wall Street.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Can't stand people, can't stand piers.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
You know, there's all sorts of character. Georgia O'Keefe, you know,
moved down to New Mexico partially for the for the landscape,
so partially to get away from the New York arts
scene so she could be more original. And it's a
real dangerous universities because you know, we live, we work,
cheek and jowl with people in our same disciplines and
it becomes very ingrown.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, yeah, So where does that leave us? Then it's okay,
It's okay to buck the pure instinct for your art.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
It's totally fine because you know as an artist, as
an artist, coordination with other people is not so important.
Like if you're on a soccer team, coordination with other
people may be more important than individual creativity, but if
you're a painter, not so much. You know. In the
end of my book, I try to talk about the
(14:08):
problematic conflicts of our time, and I try to show
that for several examples you can see which of the
tribal instincts has gotten out of control and contributed to this.
And I argue that the conflict in our politics between
the red tribe and the Blue tribe is largely a
case of the peer instinct running amok. And I call
(14:31):
it epistemic tribalism because it's a matter of We're getting
all of our news from our neighbors who are ideologically sorted,
and our social media communities, which are ideologically and algorithmically sorted,
and so we feel like we're thinking rationally and gathering information,
(14:53):
but it's very corrupted by an our side bias. And
so we then look at the other side and they
seem crazy. Their ideas seem crazy because their ideas are
so different from our own, and we're not aware that
our own ideas are, you know, shaped by the community.
We think of them as reality. And so and there
(15:19):
are all these efforts now to try to bridge the
red Blue divide, and I applaud those, but I think
some of them are wrongheaded because they don't take into
account the group affinities in the group psychology. I can
tell you, I can give you an example, an example. Yeah,
one of our post toxic Columbia is working on this
(15:41):
there's a set of foundations and organizations that are kind
of like red bridging the red Blue divide, and a
lot of them have names like Hello from the Other Side,
or the Town Gown Rift or you know, Red Blue
meet Up something, and they're making very salient that when
(16:03):
you come to these you're going to be paired with
somebody who is from the other side, and that puts
people on defense and it can even lead to polarization
of attitudes because I'm stealing myself against any of these ideas.
But then there's another set of organizations and one of
(16:25):
them is called Coffee Party USA or Make America Dinner Again,
or you know. Some of them are about outdoor activities.
And these activities are chosen because they crosscut liberals and conservatives,
and so you show up and they deliberately make sure
that it's a bipartisan group that shows up. But you
(16:47):
don't talk about politics. You talk about you know, hiking,
or you talk about coffee, or you talk about you know,
Tuscan cuisine. And what people have found is that the
latter type are more effective at depolarization, at reducing negative
(17:07):
attitudes about the other side, and at producing new friendships
that actually last beyond the event, because you know, you're
you're drawing on an identity that people actually have, like
I'm a foodie or I love coffee, or I'm an
outdoors person, and allowing for common identity to you know,
build a bridge, and people eventually realize that their new
(17:30):
friend is a Republican or a Democrat. But that's okay,
and that's that's that's how that's how it works, when
it works.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Did you feel an impulse to do anything on Columbia's
campus when we recently had essentially a shutdown because of protesters.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yeah, I mean, like a lot of the faculty, I.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Was we could apply some of your research, right.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, I mean there's a there's a tradition at Columbia
and other universe cities of professors standing in between the
protesting students and the police. And I definitely went as
many days as I could and did that and also
tried to listen, you know, to what both sides were saying,
because you know, we had two very ardent groups. You know,
(18:21):
we had the sort of the sort of pro Israel group,
and we probably have a stronger Israeli contingent on our
campus than any other American University. And then we had
this more diffuse, you know, anti genocide group they would
call it, they would call themselves. And I tried to,
you know, listen to both groups, and there was some
(18:43):
effort to, you know, have professors talk to the groups.
I wasn't central in that. And then I've also played
a role in the last few weeks. We in the
final days of the president who resigned, I was asked
to lead a workshop about tribalism and managing tribalism for
(19:07):
the president and the deans of each of the school,
of the law, school, of the med school, the Social
work school, some of which were unaffected, some of which
were very effective. So social work school was a real hotspot.
You know, arts and science is also a real hotspot.
And then before the event could take place, we had
a succession event, so we had a new president and
(19:30):
on her second day and awkward second Well, it actually
made the event a lot less awkward, you know, I
would in the first version of it, I would have
had to say mistakes were made last year, but I
was able to be a little bit more direct about
what I saw as some of the problems, some of
the yeah, inflection points last year that at the beginning
(19:53):
of the year, I was proud of both groups. I
thought it was a teaching moment. It brought back nostalgia,
you know, the South Africa apartheid protests when I was
in college, you know, thirty years ago, which I think,
you know, are something that everyone at Columbia should be
very proud of. That they started at Columbia, they spread
(20:14):
to campuses across the country. It was one of the
reasons that South Africa let Mandela go, you know, these
worldwide campus protests, and it had a consequence. It wasn't
meaningless student activism. And I think the students today are
inspired by that example. And if the country of South
Africa cared about Ivy League protests, I think the country
(20:37):
of Israel would care. You know, they're much more connected
to the elite American universities than South Africa ever was.
So I think that at the beginning of the year,
until you know, maybe April or something, I thought of
it as a very positive development. I thought, maybe inconvenient
for a lot of people, but still positive. But then
it turned it turned into people.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Taking over buildings doesn't seem best method.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, I think in the in the aparth I protest.
They did something exactly right, which is that they they
occupied Hamilton Hall because Hamilton Hall was occupied during the
Vietnam War, so it's a symbol. But they occupied it symbolically,
like I think, by surrounding it, you know, not by
going inside and breaking furniture. And the people who went
(21:23):
inside and broke furniture were largely anarchist groups that were
not really the core. You know. But both both sides,
the anti genocide campaign and the pro Israel campaign, both
sides have gotten co opted by outside groups in ways
(21:43):
that have led that have led them to say a
lot of regrettable things. You know, some of my colleagues
are among the leaders of the Israel groups and suddenly
they're you know, at least Stephonic is retweeting their tweets
more than anybody else. And you should you should ask
yourself when you thought you were a liberal, progressive person
and suddenly the right wing is is your fan, You
(22:06):
should ask yourself what's happening? You know. So, but you know,
none of us are professional political activists. Where it's a
combination of nineteen year old students and nerdy grad students
and the occasional professor, So we shouldn't expect that these
protests operate seamlessly and without stupid things being said. You know,
we should give everyone a break. I think their heart
(22:28):
is in the right place for the most part, and
it spills over into ugly forms. But when you think
about these these conflicts that have inspired the toxic tribalism trope,
left right political conflict, racial ethnic conflict, and then sectarian conflict,
(22:48):
this involves all three of them. So all of the
frustrations and sentiments that have been built up over the
past decade have kind of collapsed together in ways that
people aren't fully conscious of. And it's somewhat opportunistic that
the red and the Blue tribes have seized upon this
conflict as one more thing to fight about. So it's
(23:09):
it's definitely a difficult matter and more controversial, certainly more
controversial than than the South Africa apartheid conflict, which was
in somebody's pushing against an open door nobody university.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It was hard to disagree that that's bad.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
That's yeah. Vietnam. I think in hindsight we tend to
look at it as though everyone agreed the war was
a bad thing. But I think if you you look
at original documents from the time, that wasn't the case.
You know, most of the country was in favor of
the war, and you know a lot of people at
universities were too.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Let's talk about your second instinct, the hero instinct. I'd
love to hear your thoughts about that one and whether
you think that's a good one. You think all three
are good and may all evolved because they're adaptive. Adaptive
adopt is not always good.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Well, we shouldn't expect that evolution designs perfect mechanisms that
always operate flawlessly. They operate adaptively more often than not,
and then they spread through the population. But that doesn't
mean that they are you know, just like our taste
for sugar, right, we evolved that because that helped us
(24:21):
get nutrition in the old days, but it can lead
to diabetes and neighborhoods that have a lot of oodigas, right,
So it's not perfect.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
So yeah, tell me your thoughts about the hero instincts.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Okay, So you know, the hero instinct was the sort
of second wave of adaptations in our kind that made
it fundamentally different from other kinds, and it showed up
about a half a million years ago when our forebears.
At that time, you suddenly see signs of things like
hunting wooly mammoths and other large game that were very
(24:56):
dangerous to hunt and where often the lead hunter paid
the ultimate price so that the larger group could have
this windfall of protein. At the same time, you see
things like advances and tool making that somebody would toil
for months to make a perfect spear or a perfect
(25:16):
fish net. You know that maybe somebody else would use
and get the credit for, but they would do it
because they wanted to contribute to a group. It's when
you start to see the skeletons of people with handicaps
who survived to the age of adulthood, and that only
happens if someone else is taking care of them. And
(25:38):
so these pro social instincts evolved around this time, and
pro social instincts are a puzzle for evolutionists because how
does the noble savage pass on his genes. You know,
for a while people thought, you know, the evolution rewarded selfishness,
but we've realized that there are mechanisms and evolution for
(26:00):
pro social instincts to pass on and uh the way
it shows up in our psychology that we can recognize
today is you know, somewhat paradoxical because it's you know,
we even intellectuals like you and I, we we catch
ourselves reading human interest articles about whether Tim walls you
(26:22):
know where sponsors are briefs or you know what uh
Elon Musk eats for breakfast, or uh we want to
know about what work out the MVP of the NFL does.
And it's it's not so clear that we're learning anything
adaptive from this reflexive emulation of people with status, but
(26:46):
we are. We are wired for it, and it's why,
you know, celebrities are celebrities. You know, you like Mike
Encapsuletes the hero instinct, right, you like Mike, Yeah, when
in when in doubt emulate you know so so but
what Holmes was not the first tech executive to wear
Steve Jobs' black turtlenecks and that that didn't lead to
(27:11):
a successful product, you know, but it you know, and
others have imitated his diet or imitated his meditation practice, right,
So it's something that even very smart people do. And
we can laugh at it in the same way that
we laugh at conformity, but it plays a very important
role in that this this impulse to emulate, even when
(27:36):
it takes sacrifice and work to do so, the behaviors
of successful and high status people. It allows for innovations
to spread because more people in the rising generation will
adopt the practice, whether it's driving an electric car or
(27:56):
doing a podcast, you know, as opposed to an old
fashioned form of you know, publicizing research. You know, And
there are people like there are innovators like yourself, and
then you gain status, and there's young young graduate students
looking to your example who are going to want to
be podcasters, and a new form comes into into circulation.
(28:16):
So it's a it's adaptive for individuals because individuals gain
esteem and status and tribute from doing things that are
contributions to the group. And it's adaptive for the group
because it allows for collective level learning, tribal learning, and
so status seeking may seem like a silly example of
(28:38):
human folly, but it's an adaptive impulse, you know, it
makes sense. It helps groups succeed. And then the final
one you want me to do, the final one, It
may seem like the most primitive of all of them,
but the final one to perpetuate traditions to what's a
(28:59):
cult is the ancestry ancestor instinct and the teacher and
me wants to start with the name of it, very
good headlines. This is more like in the last one
hundred thousand years, relatively recently, things happened where suddenly you
started to see the elders in communities being listened to
(29:21):
very carefully. Groups would discover artifacts from previous generations and
then you know, replicate the crafts or the art or
the weapon making in those artifacts from the past. So
people became very curious about the ways of the past,
(29:42):
even ways of the past that weren't immediately relevant. And
this allowed for the perpetuation across generations of symbolic traditions
like art and religion, you know, as well as making
tools that were more complex then I would necessarily understand.
(30:03):
So blindly replicating what I saw the previous generation do
was a better way to perpetuate those tools than me
trying to figure it out or trying to understand it
from my common sense. And so you know, we have this,
we have this impulse in us for rote learning and
wrote repetition, and you know, we've we've all done it,
(30:26):
and we know that it comes with a set of
emotions and a set of motivations, whether it's you know,
you know, reading the Torah out of our mitzvah, or
doing a piano recital of Beethoven or learning a ballet step.
You know, these things are we learned by rote. We
don't really know. It's a little arbitrary, why do we
(30:46):
do it this way or not that way? But there's
a deep sense of connection not just to a community
at this point in time, but to a tradition that
spans generations, and it serves very deep sidecological needs, including
our needs related to fears of mortality because transcendence. Yeah,
(31:06):
if we feel that we are part of something that
has lasted a long time, it probably will extend into
the future a long time. And so we gain a
kind of symbolic immortality from our are reveling in traditions.
And so this was also very adoptive for groups because
(31:27):
it created tribal memory and groups didn't have to reinvent
the wheel every generation because there was this impulse to
hang onto things and and the hero instinct energy could
instead go into building on the base of what people
had done in the previous generation. And when all three
of these things came together, the peer instinct, the hero instinct,
(31:48):
and the ancestor instinct, our species crossed a rubicon that
is called cultural accumulation. Cultures started accumulating every generation and
tuning themselves to the and so we had differentiation and
we had cultural growth. And then people became wiser and
(32:09):
more capable without anyone becoming more brainy as an individual
because they could tap into a larger, larger pool of
inherited wisdom. And that, more than any gain in brain size,
is why we are different from Neanderthals and why we
are so different from chimps. You know that we we
(32:31):
are the beneficiaries of inherited knowledge, and ninety nine percent
of what we know we inherited. We didn't figure it out.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Ourselves, yes, And you know, on the one hand, that's great.
You know, on the other hand, there's a lot of
inherited knowledge that's crap. You know that we don't that
we want to stop keep inheriting over and over and orient.
So that's my segue into this really cool part of
(32:58):
your book where you talk about cultural how where you
talk about how cultural change can be contagious and so
sometimes we want some real cultural We want to break
out of this rut of our ancestors. Our ancestors weren't
always wise, you know.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
No, then there's more inertia than you know. The cultures
of most groups served what they needed ten years ago
instead of serving what they needed.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Or even like, you know, like five fifty thousand years ago.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Like, so tell me a little bit about how cultural
change can be contagious and give me, you know, like
describe the hitting syndrome, okay, which is related to that?
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, I start the I start my book with an
extended story about a Dutch soccer coach named Who's Hitting
And he was well known for somehow being able to
turn around teams that were struggling, and even teams in
countries where he didn't even speak the language. You know.
(33:54):
He went to Turkey, he went to Spain, and at
the time soccer was very enmeshed in an almost national
character belief. And you still hear this when the World
Cup comes, you know, the sportscasters will be like, notice
the teutonic discipline on this German team and the graceful
samba like play of the Brazilian team, and the tidy
(34:18):
efficient British mentality and the Italian you know esthetics, you know,
and it's kind of this notion that the people from
this country can only play one way and the people
from that country can only play another way. And that
never rang true to Hitting because you know, he had
played in various countries as a player, and he thought that,
(34:38):
you know, players are adaptable, and you can mold players
and you and so he was asked relatively relatively at
the last minute, just just a year and a half
before the World Cup to coach the South Korean team
in two thousand and two when they were the host
of the World Cup and they had bid to be
(35:02):
host at a time when their economy was doing great
and their team was doing great, you know, in the
in the mid to late nineties, and then they hit
the you know, the Korea Crisis of the late nineties,
which was very humiliating and kind of brought down their economy.
And then around the same time, their soccer team started,
you know, bombing out of the Asia Cup, and you know,
(35:23):
they were usually a regional power and they weren't even winning,
you know, in their local competitions, and so they were
desperate and they're like Okay, well, let's try to bring
in this Dutch wonder kind and maybe he can work
his magic. And at first it looked like a terrible
decision because he didn't even know who the stars were
in Korea. He he didn't make much effort to kind
(35:47):
of learn about the soccer culture of Korea, which was
very well established, and he arranged that they He negotiated
for three things when he took the job. He asked
for complete control over the roster, which wasn't traditional there
because usually the soccer officials, you know, would choose some
(36:12):
of the roster and choose it based on social considerations
rather than strictly play considerations. He asked for the Korean
soccer club season to be suspended so that he could
have his players for much longer than any of the
other World Cup coaches. And he asked for a budget
(36:34):
to bring the world's best teams to Korea for exhibition games.
And so they lost all of those exhibition games by
big scores. He sort of cloistered away his team in
these training camps, cut off communication to the outside. The
Korean sports press was in a panic, you know that
(36:54):
the only thing they saw of their team was like
losing six nothing, losing five to nothing, you know, and
they weren't able to watch what was going on in
the practices. But what he thought he needed to do
was to first break the old culture that existed. So
his first training camps, instead of holding them in Korea,
where people are constantly reminded of Korean social norms like
(37:17):
to be deferential to people who are senior to you,
he held them in the United Emirates at an international
soccer facility, where players professional identities as soccer players came
to the fore rather than their Korean identities as being
you know, differential, polite, you know, members of the Korean quality.
(37:42):
And then he worked really hard to kind of build
the team culture, to remold the team culture around sort
of egalitarian norms among teammates, which was different from what
the team culture has had been. The team culture had
been that the veterans eat dinner at one table and
(38:04):
the rookies eat dinner at a separate table. And so
in the short term he did things to kind of
de emphasize the norms so that people could learn new tactics,
and then he slowly built these new social routines that
ultimately led to new relationships and the new ways of
interacting on the field. And then when the Korean team
(38:27):
was unveiled at the World Cup, they were extraordinary because
they were able to play this cutting edge soccer strategy
that nobody expected and they made it to the semi
finals and it was unprecedented and you know, a great
inflection point for the country because it was an emotional
moment of we are capable, we can beat the world's best.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, so deep cultural change is possible, and like, what
can we do about changing the culture surrounding politics right now?
Because it just it feels like the culture right now
is that Democrats and Republicans are more polarized. It's almost
like the culture is like they must be polarized. You know,
(39:14):
we can't even imagine a world where they're not extremely polarized.
So I'm just wondering what can we do to kind
of change that culture. Yeah, use tribalism for our advantage,
my friends.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yes, yes, no, I know in the spirit of your book,
I know what you're asking, and I've been I do
work in the political campaigns. I am part of a
group that for many elections has advised the democratic side
and some of the tools of tribalism or the levers
of tribalism are symbols and ceremonies and symbols are really important.
(39:51):
So one of the ways that Trump built this Maga
coalition was they read Maga hat. You know, people could
go to a rally, everyone wear their hat. He kind
of tapped into a blue collar, very middle American thing
of wearing baseball caps and it, you know, it gave
(40:12):
people a sense of our group is similar, even though
you know, the Republican coalition is odd bedfellows. It's these
Wall Street people and these main street people, and they
don't have that much in common. Trump doesn't have that
much in common personally with most of his followers. But
the red cap brought them together. And so I think
one really adept move recently was the the Harris Walls
(40:36):
Camo cap. You know, and Tim Walls as a selection
was very adept because he's he's a person who looks
like he's actually gone hunting in his life rather than
just claiming to be a hunter. I've heard him described
as an RAI candidate because he he looks like a
guy who's gone camping, and so I think he he
(41:00):
looks like a member of the sort of middle American
blue collar tribe. There are people who are going to
be drawn to that coalition just because he looks like
one of them, he talks like one of them, and
then the cap is a kind of symbol that can
be effective.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
So what can we do to change the culture.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Well, we need to We need to recognize that every
individual is a member of many tribes and not all
of those identities are salient at any given moment. And
we need to look at community memberships that cross cut
(41:43):
the red blue divide and find ways to activate those identities.
So I think teachers of America, right, Tim Wallas is
a teacher, sports, coaches of America, hunters of America, parents
(42:05):
of America. You know, these are these are the kinds
of identities that can bring some people to the fore.
The redeeming factor about tribalism is that there are many
tribes inside each of us, and we must not forget
that and think that we are only red and blue.
You know, the red and blue identities. It's a relatively
(42:26):
new thing. And you know, two generations ago, there was
as much diversity within the Democratic Party and Republican Party
as there was between them, because there were the Southern
Democrats and the Northern Democrats, and you know, people at
that time didn't know what party their colleagues and their
neighbors were, aside from the occasional xilot who puts a
(42:48):
long sign up every couple of years. And it has
become this mega identity only only in the last generation,
as as some other salient identities have faded. You know,
we don't live in ethnic neighborhoods so much anymore, mostly
for the good. Most people are not members of religious
congregations anymore, which you know, I don't know if that's
(43:10):
good or bad, but those were the kinds of local,
like minded tribes that gave people a sense of epistemic
security a few generations ago. And with the residential sorting
and then the sorting into online communities, the political tribes
(43:30):
are serving a function that they never did before, which was,
you know, shoring up your daily sense of identity. And
so that's something that hopefully will shift and hopefully people
will just grow tired of it, or enough people will
parody it that people will want to have more creative
(43:51):
identities rather than just I'm a blue tribe member, I'm
a red tribe member.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah, blending, yeah, really big into transcendence and universalism values.
You know, the Schwartz circumplex imbly into universalism values. And
so I'm always trying to think of, well, how can
we transcend tribalism? So it was very interesting to read
(44:17):
your book, and it well, I love reading books like
yours that make me think, that make me even rethink
my own You know, I don't have rigid anything ideas
about anything, and you know I had really prior reading
your book, really been raw. Raw. We need to transcend tribalism.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Yeah, I can see that, because tribalism is usually associated
with parochialism as an opposite of universalism. Right, And the
whole spirit of universalism is let's leave behind these primitive
reflexes of ethnic affinity and religious affinity and let's be
more abstract and think about what we value and or say,
(44:59):
I identify with huge in kind, and I think that,
you know, we have to recognize that our deepest motivations
and our deepest feelings of meaning come from thick identities,
come from identities of people that we that we interact
with and that we know a lot about that. But
that doesn't have to be parochial. The when we think
(45:25):
about cosmopolitanism, when we think about a city that's cosmopolitan,
like New York or Paris, it is composed of neighborhoods
that are very different from each other. And that is
part of the magic of cosmopolitanism that I can I
can go to Korea Town and then i can go
a few steps and I'm in the East village, you know,
(45:47):
and it's a very different vibe. You know, it's a
different tribe vibe here and a different trib vibe there.
But there is a spirit of curiosity and mutual learning
between the groups. And that's what cosmopolitanism is. So cosmopolitanism
is not the absence of tribalism. It's not the absence
of you know, it's not people just shedding tradition. It's
(46:11):
a selective retention of tradition combined with curiosity and openness.
There's a form of universalism like you know Esperanto. You know,
the Esperanto movement in the mid twentieth century. They invented
an artificial language that had sort of the least common
denominator of all the languages of the world, and they said,
(46:33):
we really need need to get beyond this tower of
babble of people speaking different languages. We've invented the perfect language, Esperanto.
It doesn't have any tradition of poetry, and it doesn't
have a tradition of you know, family memories or anything.
But it would be a lot more efficient. Maybe we
could get the un behind it, and then you know,
basically it may take a generation, but we'll all speak esperanto.
(46:54):
The world would be a better place. Right didn't happen?
We can't even use the metric system. I don't think
we can go sweak esperanto. And so there is there
is a kind of you know, there's a kind of
inefficiency and hanging on to things, not all of which
are adaptive. That is an inherent part of tradition. But
(47:17):
I think that we shouldn't we shouldn't be an enemy
of tradition, you know, like or like when Mao, when
Mao tried to have a cultural revolution to destroy all
the olds. You know that we're holding society back. A
lot of a lot of good things get thrown out
with the bad things when you try to when you
try to throw away tradition. So no conservative, well, I
(47:40):
think that the conservatives have a point. They do agree.
I agree, you know, I mean, these things that have
been around for a long time, we don't know, we
can't always immediately see the value of them, and especially
when we're young, we can't always see it. But many
of these things that have been around for a long
time serve institutional purposes that are not so obvious on
(48:01):
the on the surface. So you know, yeah, I just
think we shouldn't approach tradition with a wrecking ball, you know,
we should approach it with skepticism and humor, you know.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah. So last question I have for interview how how
should we re how should we rethink workplace discrimination in
light of your ideas in the book? Are you right
about that in the books?
Speaker 1 (48:29):
I do? I do. I think that, you know, one
of the major conflicts of our time that has been
frustrating is is the inequality Ethnically, there is inequality that
is undeniable, and then then there's a question about what's
(48:49):
what motive is driving this inequality, and there's often a
presumption that the motive is hostility towards the outgroup that
is trying to, like, you know, I'm trying to keep
the non whites down, and that's why the non whites
have not moved up in an organization. And I think
that that certainly used to be the case, you know,
(49:11):
it was overt. But the best survey evidence we have,
you know, from anonymous surveys, you know, suggests that outgroup hostility,
racial animis is not dead. But it's a it's a
small it's a fringe for most people. It's a small
(49:31):
group of people. Yet the inequality is not going away.
It's it's it's it's in many ways as present as
it was a generation or two ago. Interesting, So it's
time to think, Okay, maybe there's a different motivation that's
contributing to that inequality or that discrimination. And what I
argue is is that the tribal motivation, that maybe the
(49:52):
biggest cause of it is in group love rather than
outgroom hate. We have impulsive, uncon conscious drives to be
generous to people who are similar to us, you know, ethnically, religiously,
and that is something that reproduces inequality. And a lot
(50:13):
of organizational procedures like hiring for cultural fit or building
referral systems into recruiting, they've turbocharged this in group favoritism.
So I would say that you know, we we we're
looking at the problem wrong. You know, we we put
so much. You know, Google spends a billion dollars a
(50:36):
year on these anti bias workshops, and yet two percent
of their technical employees are people of color. So it's
obviously not working, and I think it's it's not really
addressing the real problem. The real problem is that you
have people hiring people just like themselves because they're similar.
(50:56):
It's not because of animist towards people who are different.
So we need to take a really close look at
our policies and the policies that are enabling in group favoritism,
because that's the mechanism for most of this discrimination. Inequality,
not the kind that makes everybody feel bad because you're
you feel falsely accused of being a racist, right because
(51:17):
most most of these people are not racists.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
You know, isn't an implication of that that if we
did manage to get rid of the inequalities, and let's say,
even it when in the opposite direction where those who
are considered minorities are the majority, Now, wouldn't they when
the same thing had recreate itselves, and then we certainly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
Certainly would happen, and it does happen. You know, for
every ethnic group there's a country in the world where
they are the majority. Yea, there is the same kind
of discrimination. What happens in those.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Weed to be wary of that? Yeah, yeah, every in
any direction.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
Right, And it just doesn't It doesn't intuitively look like
the problem because it doesn't involve any negative intent or
negative feelings. It looks like generosity, right. You know, It's
like I interview you and you remind me of a
younger version of myself, and so I give you an
extra fifteen minutes and then I have more good things
to say about you, and it all feels like it's
(52:12):
coming out of good heartedness. But it can be just
as much of a problem as malice or hostility.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
Well, it's a great point. It's a really great point, Michael.
And might a wow to call you, but your first
name doctor, doctor.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
I think we know each other.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
We're a first name basis for each other. You are
a legend in the field and have done so much
at Columbia and the Business School, and you've been thinking
about these topics longer than maybe I've been born.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
So I don't know how old you are, but you're
definitely younger.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Than for a long time, and I really want to
give you a hearty congratulations on this book, which really
allowed you to put all these ideas you've been thinking
of for so many years into a single book and
really got me thinking, maybe even rethink thinking some of
my old ideas about self transcendence. And so I must
thank you very much and also thank you for being
on my podcast.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
Well, thank you, Scott. I mean, I've been wanting to
write a book that translates these ideas for some time.
I think I talked with you about it, probably a
decade ago. And maybe you're one of my role models
for someone who's been a top researcher and also invested
a lot of work. And it is a lot of
work to become a translator of the ideas, and there's
(53:27):
too few of those, and too many of the ideas
never reach a broad audience because there aren't people who
know how to articulate them. So thank you for having
me on the show, and thank you for being an example.
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Thank you
Understanding the levers involved in tribal psychology is enormously important
for activists, for leaders, for politicians, And so this fatalistic,
despairing trope about toxic tribalism, I think, is really not
It really couldn't be more wrong.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's so great to have doctor Michael Morris on the show.
Doctor Marris is a professor of Leadership at the Columbia
Business School, and he also serves as a professor in
the psychology department at Columbia. The topic of today's discussion
is his new book, Tribal How the cultural instincts that
divide us can help bring us together. Doctor Morris has
a bit of a different take on tribalism than the
prominent narrative. He argues that human tribal instincts are not
(00:48):
bugs in the system, but are actually distinguishing features of
our species that creates rich cultures that drive many of
our greatest achievements. But are actually distinguishing features of our
species that create rich cultures that I have many of
our greatest achievements. In essence, doctor Marris argues that tribal
psychology is our best hope for social change. We also
discussed the three tribal instincts and practical implications for workplace inclusion,
(01:13):
individual well being, uniting different tribes, and cultural change. More broadly,
this was a really informative episode with a giant in
the field of psychology. So without further ado, I bring
you doctor Michael Marris. Doctor Michael Marris. So great to
have you on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Thank you, Scott. It's an honor to be here, and
it's great to see you again.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Great to see you too.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
I mean, we have published a paper together since we
last saw each other in person, So that's it. Gps P. GPSP.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
No one knows what that means, but it's a prestigious journal. No,
but thank you so much for bringing me into that project.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
We drew on your foundation, you know, so it.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Was thank you. I really admire you and your research.
And I want to go through the thing that's kind
of most top on your mind these days, which is
tribal And you say tribalism is not necessarily a bad thing,
because I do see everywhere these days it's like toxic tribalism, right,
tribalism's ruining us all and you kind of have a
(02:11):
counterintuitive approach to it.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, one of the reasons to write this book is
to try to counter the trope of toxic tribalism that
has emerged, particularly in the last five years. And you know,
we understand why. There's been a lot of group conflicts
that are pretty upsetting, from the you know, the red
(02:33):
and Blue tribes not you know, accepting election outcomes and
political violence in our country, and then record racial protests,
you know, inequality and justice suspicion, and then religious conflicts,
whether it's somebody shooting up a synagogue or you know,
(02:55):
in Sudan civil wars between Islamic and non Islamic tribes.
It's understandable that people are looking for an answer, but
the answer that's emerged, you know, and I could point
to the pundits who who were most responsible. You know.
Tom Friedman talked about the virus of tribalism that has
(03:16):
infected our democracy, and Andrew Sullivan said that a deeply buried,
evolved dribe has resurfaced to make us hate outsiders and
feel blindly allegiant, you know, to one group. And the
La Times came up with toxic tribalism, and you know,
(03:38):
made the case that people, a lot of the people
who died of COVID died because of tribalism because it
was Biden's Biden's vaccine and they didn't want it. So
I think that I'm rambling a bit, but I think
that what's problematic about this trope is is not that
tribal psychology is irrelevant to these things. It is relevant,
(04:01):
but there's an almost despairing tone to it, a sort
of fatalistic doom, saying that we were genetically predisposed to
hate the other group and to not see reality clearly,
and so the end is near. And I think I
(04:22):
think every generation thinks the end is near, and so
I just don't think it's accurate. And I don't think
it's helpful.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Wow, because you even go further you say it, you
say that tribalism can unite us. That's like, that's like
the obstinent of toxic Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Well, if you know, if you talk to a behavioral
scientist or if you talk to an evolutionary theorist, what
are the instincts that evolved that enabled humans to become
humans to live in our particular form of social organization. Well,
these are solidaristic instincts. These are in thinks that help
(05:01):
groups coordinate, cooperate, establish continuity, and yes, as a side effect,
occasionally bring them into conflict with other groups. You know.
One of the ways that we establish in group identity
as using out groups as a foil, right, And that's
very salient. But within the larger picture of the human
(05:23):
tribal instincts, it's kind of a footnote, you know what,
these what the species that evolved to hate outsiders and
lash out at them would not be as successful as
species as ours. You know. In fact, there was a
species like that, It was called Neanderthals, and they went
extinct for a reason because this more cooperative species, you know,
(05:45):
out survived them, out competed them. And so we need
to remember that these group affinities, and these desires for identity,
and these needs for meaning associated group member ship are
largely adoptive and they have been harnessed by effective leaders
(06:08):
throughout history. So it's it's not a cause for despair
that people are enmeshed with their groups, you know. And
one of the other fallacies is that that culture is
somehow fixed, and you know, you and I have lived
long enough to know that's not the case. You know,
the culture of screens is something that we didn't grow
(06:31):
up with, right. The culture of self driving cars is
just coming to us. The culture of using they as
a as a pronoun for a single person something we've
seen changed in the last ten years. So the culture
is constantly influx, and it's influx on a day to
day level based on the environment you're in, and it's
influx on a year to year level based on you know,
(06:54):
how things evolve. And so I think that understanding the
levers involved in tribal psychology is enormously important, you know,
for activists, for leaders, for politicians, and so this fatalistic
despairing trope about toxic tribalism, I think is really not
(07:16):
It really couldn't be more wrong. Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, I mean, you look at Roy Baummeister's seminal paper
on the need for belonging kind of laying out there
that this is really a fundamental need. And Mark Leary
I think was the co author on that, if I
remember correctly, the need for belonging is such Wow, it's
so deeply ingrained in us, and you can definitely see
(07:40):
how if you're desperate for belonging that can lead to
all sorts of maladaptive ways. Of getting belonging, like signing
up with violent violent extremist groups for instance, or various extremes.
So I do think that, like in the main you
have a great point. And then it's also and it's
also really interesting to look at it in the at
(08:01):
the extremes when there's a real deficiency for belonging and
such a craving for for for seeking an identity, And
I think tribals can can truly run amok. It can
truly run up run amok.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
It can. And it's a great point. And I really
I appreciate.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
The pushback because it helps me clarify it was yes
and not a respect Yeah, it was a yes, and
but but good point.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I think that's an important point, and I try to
I try to describe that that these tribal instincts, like
almost any instinct, can get caught in feedback loops and
can underchange social conditions, get out of range and be dysfunctional.
(08:52):
But it's not It still doesn't look like what the
toxic tribalism pun it's are talking about, because when tribal
psychology gets out of control and contributes to a conflict,
the conflict is not starting from primal range rage. It's
(09:13):
not it's not starting from hostility towards the other group.
Hostilities may eventually arise when we get frustrated and we
lose trust in another group, but it's not the root cause.
And stating that that's the case is not helpful because
it doesn't. It's not a diagnosis that shows us how
(09:33):
to treat the disease.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Oh wow, and I guess there's a lot more nuanced
and we talk about the different tribal instincts.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, I would say that, as you know, in research,
we tend to split distinctions very fine, so we might
we might distinguish forty tribals.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I love doing that, but.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
You know, I work a lot with business leaders and
with political campaigns, and what I've found over the years
when I've tried to build a toolkit that works for people,
that there's three major categories that are useful to distinguish,
and they correspond to what the evolutionists distinguished and essentially
their instincts to imitate peers, to emulate heroes, and to
(10:15):
perpetuate traditions. And so the first of these, the peer instinct.
We can recognize that in us today, the sideways glances
at our classmates, our co workers, our neighbors, and the
impulse to match their behavior and mesh with them and
be similar. And this meshing instinct gave us the gift
(10:39):
of coordination. When a group can act as a united force,
it's more efficient at foraging, it's more efficient at self defense.
And so that was the first way in which we
went beyond other primate species and we developed this way
(11:00):
of learning what the norm is in the group and
this impulse to match it. And it's largely adaptive, and
it produces conformity, and we're all on the lookout for conformity.
Conformity can be problematic, it can reduce independent thinking, but
the same conformity is also what enables us to stand
(11:22):
on the shoulders of giants and work collectively, told to
build a house that neither of us could build alone.
You know that we know. And the important thing is
not just that I know something and you know something,
but I know that you know it. You know so
I can coordinate with you because I know that this
is shared knowledge within our group. So that's the peer instinct.
(11:45):
It's this capacity to use shared knowledge as a basis
of coordination.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
And that's a good thing.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
That's a good thing. That enables us to have, you know,
the smooth functioning of organizations and society. You know, you
can imagine what traffic conditions would look like if drivers
were not conforming to what other drivers are doing. You know,
when you look at a busy highway, it's it's quite
amazing that there aren't more accidents. And it's because you know,
(12:14):
at a very deep level, you know, the inner conformist
is stronger than the interactivists or the inner creative. And
that's a good thing. It enables us to live in
large groups and mesh with each other in a way
that reduces collisions of all kinds, whether they're cognitive collisions
or you know, vehicular collisions. Okay, And that's something we've
(12:37):
had for like two million years in our species, and
it's really the basis of human culture.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
In what ways can the peer instinct instinct be a negative?
I'm thinking of creativity okay, right, because like you don't
want to just conform, You want to like do not
conform right for creativity.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
So yeah, a lot of a lot of people who
have tried to optimize their lives for creativity choose the
route of exile. You know me. Yeah, I mean, well,
you know, Warren Buffett moved back to uh, Nebraska for
a reason. He doesn't want the noise of Wall Street.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Can't stand people, can't stand piers.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
You know, there's all sorts of character. Georgia O'Keefe, you know,
moved down to New Mexico partially for the for the landscape,
so partially to get away from the New York arts
scene so she could be more original. And it's a
real dangerous universities because you know, we live, we work,
cheek and jowl with people in our same disciplines and
it becomes very ingrown.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, yeah, So where does that leave us? Then it's okay,
It's okay to buck the pure instinct for your art.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
It's totally fine because you know as an artist, as
an artist, coordination with other people is not so important.
Like if you're on a soccer team, coordination with other
people may be more important than individual creativity, but if
you're a painter, not so much. You know. In the
end of my book, I try to talk about the
(14:08):
problematic conflicts of our time, and I try to show
that for several examples you can see which of the
tribal instincts has gotten out of control and contributed to this.
And I argue that the conflict in our politics between
the red tribe and the Blue tribe is largely a
case of the peer instinct running amok. And I call
(14:31):
it epistemic tribalism because it's a matter of We're getting
all of our news from our neighbors who are ideologically sorted,
and our social media communities, which are ideologically and algorithmically sorted,
and so we feel like we're thinking rationally and gathering information,
(14:53):
but it's very corrupted by an our side bias. And
so we then look at the other side and they
seem crazy. Their ideas seem crazy because their ideas are
so different from our own, and we're not aware that
our own ideas are, you know, shaped by the community.
We think of them as reality. And so and there
(15:19):
are all these efforts now to try to bridge the
red Blue divide, and I applaud those, but I think
some of them are wrongheaded because they don't take into
account the group affinities in the group psychology. I can
tell you, I can give you an example, an example. Yeah,
one of our post toxic Columbia is working on this
(15:41):
there's a set of foundations and organizations that are kind
of like red bridging the red Blue divide, and a
lot of them have names like Hello from the Other Side,
or the Town Gown Rift or you know, Red Blue
meet Up something, and they're making very salient that when
(16:03):
you come to these you're going to be paired with
somebody who is from the other side, and that puts
people on defense and it can even lead to polarization
of attitudes because I'm stealing myself against any of these ideas.
But then there's another set of organizations and one of
(16:25):
them is called Coffee Party USA or Make America Dinner Again,
or you know. Some of them are about outdoor activities.
And these activities are chosen because they crosscut liberals and conservatives,
and so you show up and they deliberately make sure
that it's a bipartisan group that shows up. But you
(16:47):
don't talk about politics. You talk about you know, hiking,
or you talk about coffee, or you talk about you know,
Tuscan cuisine. And what people have found is that the
latter type are more effective at depolarization, at reducing negative
(17:07):
attitudes about the other side, and at producing new friendships
that actually last beyond the event, because you know, you're
you're drawing on an identity that people actually have, like
I'm a foodie or I love coffee, or I'm an
outdoors person, and allowing for common identity to you know,
build a bridge, and people eventually realize that their new
(17:30):
friend is a Republican or a Democrat. But that's okay,
and that's that's that's how that's how it works, when
it works.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Did you feel an impulse to do anything on Columbia's
campus when we recently had essentially a shutdown because of protesters.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yeah, I mean, like a lot of the faculty, I.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Was we could apply some of your research, right.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, I mean there's a there's a tradition at Columbia
and other universe cities of professors standing in between the
protesting students and the police. And I definitely went as
many days as I could and did that and also
tried to listen, you know, to what both sides were saying,
because you know, we had two very ardent groups. You know,
(18:21):
we had the sort of the sort of pro Israel group,
and we probably have a stronger Israeli contingent on our
campus than any other American University. And then we had
this more diffuse, you know, anti genocide group they would
call it, they would call themselves. And I tried to,
you know, listen to both groups, and there was some
(18:43):
effort to, you know, have professors talk to the groups.
I wasn't central in that. And then I've also played
a role in the last few weeks. We in the
final days of the president who resigned, I was asked
to lead a workshop about tribalism and managing tribalism for
(19:07):
the president and the deans of each of the school,
of the law, school, of the med school, the Social
work school, some of which were unaffected, some of which
were very effective. So social work school was a real hotspot.
You know, arts and science is also a real hotspot.
And then before the event could take place, we had
a succession event, so we had a new president and
(19:30):
on her second day and awkward second Well, it actually
made the event a lot less awkward, you know, I
would in the first version of it, I would have
had to say mistakes were made last year, but I
was able to be a little bit more direct about
what I saw as some of the problems, some of
the yeah, inflection points last year that at the beginning
(19:53):
of the year, I was proud of both groups. I
thought it was a teaching moment. It brought back nostalgia,
you know, the South Africa apartheid protests when I was
in college, you know, thirty years ago, which I think,
you know, are something that everyone at Columbia should be
very proud of. That they started at Columbia, they spread
(20:14):
to campuses across the country. It was one of the
reasons that South Africa let Mandela go, you know, these
worldwide campus protests, and it had a consequence. It wasn't
meaningless student activism. And I think the students today are
inspired by that example. And if the country of South
Africa cared about Ivy League protests, I think the country
(20:37):
of Israel would care. You know, they're much more connected
to the elite American universities than South Africa ever was.
So I think that at the beginning of the year,
until you know, maybe April or something, I thought of
it as a very positive development. I thought, maybe inconvenient
for a lot of people, but still positive. But then
it turned it turned into people.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Taking over buildings doesn't seem best method.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, I think in the in the aparth I protest.
They did something exactly right, which is that they they
occupied Hamilton Hall because Hamilton Hall was occupied during the
Vietnam War, so it's a symbol. But they occupied it symbolically,
like I think, by surrounding it, you know, not by
going inside and breaking furniture. And the people who went
(21:23):
inside and broke furniture were largely anarchist groups that were
not really the core. You know. But both both sides,
the anti genocide campaign and the pro Israel campaign, both
sides have gotten co opted by outside groups in ways
(21:43):
that have led that have led them to say a
lot of regrettable things. You know, some of my colleagues
are among the leaders of the Israel groups and suddenly
they're you know, at least Stephonic is retweeting their tweets
more than anybody else. And you should you should ask
yourself when you thought you were a liberal, progressive person
and suddenly the right wing is is your fan, You
(22:06):
should ask yourself what's happening? You know. So, but you know,
none of us are professional political activists. Where it's a
combination of nineteen year old students and nerdy grad students
and the occasional professor, So we shouldn't expect that these
protests operate seamlessly and without stupid things being said. You know,
we should give everyone a break. I think their heart
(22:28):
is in the right place for the most part, and
it spills over into ugly forms. But when you think
about these these conflicts that have inspired the toxic tribalism trope,
left right political conflict, racial ethnic conflict, and then sectarian conflict,
(22:48):
this involves all three of them. So all of the
frustrations and sentiments that have been built up over the
past decade have kind of collapsed together in ways that
people aren't fully conscious of. And it's somewhat opportunistic that
the red and the Blue tribes have seized upon this
conflict as one more thing to fight about. So it's
(23:09):
it's definitely a difficult matter and more controversial, certainly more
controversial than than the South Africa apartheid conflict, which was
in somebody's pushing against an open door nobody university.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It was hard to disagree that that's bad.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
That's yeah. Vietnam. I think in hindsight we tend to
look at it as though everyone agreed the war was
a bad thing. But I think if you you look
at original documents from the time, that wasn't the case.
You know, most of the country was in favor of
the war, and you know a lot of people at
universities were too.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Let's talk about your second instinct, the hero instinct. I'd
love to hear your thoughts about that one and whether
you think that's a good one. You think all three
are good and may all evolved because they're adaptive. Adaptive
adopt is not always good.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Well, we shouldn't expect that evolution designs perfect mechanisms that
always operate flawlessly. They operate adaptively more often than not,
and then they spread through the population. But that doesn't
mean that they are you know, just like our taste
for sugar, right, we evolved that because that helped us
(24:21):
get nutrition in the old days, but it can lead
to diabetes and neighborhoods that have a lot of oodigas, right,
So it's not perfect.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
So yeah, tell me your thoughts about the hero instincts.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Okay, So you know, the hero instinct was the sort
of second wave of adaptations in our kind that made
it fundamentally different from other kinds, and it showed up
about a half a million years ago when our forebears.
At that time, you suddenly see signs of things like
hunting wooly mammoths and other large game that were very
(24:56):
dangerous to hunt and where often the lead hunter paid
the ultimate price so that the larger group could have
this windfall of protein. At the same time, you see
things like advances and tool making that somebody would toil
for months to make a perfect spear or a perfect
(25:16):
fish net. You know that maybe somebody else would use
and get the credit for, but they would do it
because they wanted to contribute to a group. It's when
you start to see the skeletons of people with handicaps
who survived to the age of adulthood, and that only
happens if someone else is taking care of them. And
(25:38):
so these pro social instincts evolved around this time, and
pro social instincts are a puzzle for evolutionists because how
does the noble savage pass on his genes. You know,
for a while people thought, you know, the evolution rewarded selfishness,
but we've realized that there are mechanisms and evolution for
(26:00):
pro social instincts to pass on and uh the way
it shows up in our psychology that we can recognize
today is you know, somewhat paradoxical because it's you know,
we even intellectuals like you and I, we we catch
ourselves reading human interest articles about whether Tim walls you
(26:22):
know where sponsors are briefs or you know what uh
Elon Musk eats for breakfast, or uh we want to
know about what work out the MVP of the NFL does.
And it's it's not so clear that we're learning anything
adaptive from this reflexive emulation of people with status, but
(26:46):
we are. We are wired for it, and it's why,
you know, celebrities are celebrities. You know, you like Mike
Encapsuletes the hero instinct, right, you like Mike, Yeah, when
in when in doubt emulate you know so so but
what Holmes was not the first tech executive to wear
Steve Jobs' black turtlenecks and that that didn't lead to
(27:11):
a successful product, you know, but it you know, and
others have imitated his diet or imitated his meditation practice, right,
So it's something that even very smart people do. And
we can laugh at it in the same way that
we laugh at conformity, but it plays a very important
role in that this this impulse to emulate, even when
(27:36):
it takes sacrifice and work to do so, the behaviors
of successful and high status people. It allows for innovations
to spread because more people in the rising generation will
adopt the practice, whether it's driving an electric car or
(27:56):
doing a podcast, you know, as opposed to an old
fashioned form of you know, publicizing research. You know, And
there are people like there are innovators like yourself, and
then you gain status, and there's young young graduate students
looking to your example who are going to want to
be podcasters, and a new form comes into into circulation.
(28:16):
So it's a it's adaptive for individuals because individuals gain
esteem and status and tribute from doing things that are
contributions to the group. And it's adaptive for the group
because it allows for collective level learning, tribal learning, and
so status seeking may seem like a silly example of
(28:38):
human folly, but it's an adaptive impulse, you know, it
makes sense. It helps groups succeed. And then the final
one you want me to do, the final one, It
may seem like the most primitive of all of them,
but the final one to perpetuate traditions to what's a
(28:59):
cult is the ancestry ancestor instinct and the teacher and
me wants to start with the name of it, very
good headlines. This is more like in the last one
hundred thousand years, relatively recently, things happened where suddenly you
started to see the elders in communities being listened to
(29:21):
very carefully. Groups would discover artifacts from previous generations and
then you know, replicate the crafts or the art or
the weapon making in those artifacts from the past. So
people became very curious about the ways of the past,
(29:42):
even ways of the past that weren't immediately relevant. And
this allowed for the perpetuation across generations of symbolic traditions
like art and religion, you know, as well as making
tools that were more complex then I would necessarily understand.
(30:03):
So blindly replicating what I saw the previous generation do
was a better way to perpetuate those tools than me
trying to figure it out or trying to understand it
from my common sense. And so you know, we have this,
we have this impulse in us for rote learning and
wrote repetition, and you know, we've we've all done it,
(30:26):
and we know that it comes with a set of
emotions and a set of motivations, whether it's you know,
you know, reading the Torah out of our mitzvah, or
doing a piano recital of Beethoven or learning a ballet step.
You know, these things are we learned by rote. We
don't really know. It's a little arbitrary, why do we
(30:46):
do it this way or not that way? But there's
a deep sense of connection not just to a community
at this point in time, but to a tradition that
spans generations, and it serves very deep sidecological needs, including
our needs related to fears of mortality because transcendence. Yeah,
(31:06):
if we feel that we are part of something that
has lasted a long time, it probably will extend into
the future a long time. And so we gain a
kind of symbolic immortality from our are reveling in traditions.
And so this was also very adoptive for groups because
(31:27):
it created tribal memory and groups didn't have to reinvent
the wheel every generation because there was this impulse to
hang onto things and and the hero instinct energy could
instead go into building on the base of what people
had done in the previous generation. And when all three
of these things came together, the peer instinct, the hero instinct,
(31:48):
and the ancestor instinct, our species crossed a rubicon that
is called cultural accumulation. Cultures started accumulating every generation and
tuning themselves to the and so we had differentiation and
we had cultural growth. And then people became wiser and
(32:09):
more capable without anyone becoming more brainy as an individual
because they could tap into a larger, larger pool of
inherited wisdom. And that, more than any gain in brain size,
is why we are different from Neanderthals and why we
are so different from chimps. You know that we we
(32:31):
are the beneficiaries of inherited knowledge, and ninety nine percent
of what we know we inherited. We didn't figure it out.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Ourselves, yes, And you know, on the one hand, that's great.
You know, on the other hand, there's a lot of
inherited knowledge that's crap. You know that we don't that
we want to stop keep inheriting over and over and orient.
So that's my segue into this really cool part of
(32:58):
your book where you talk about cultural how where you
talk about how cultural change can be contagious and so
sometimes we want some real cultural We want to break
out of this rut of our ancestors. Our ancestors weren't
always wise, you know.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
No, then there's more inertia than you know. The cultures
of most groups served what they needed ten years ago
instead of serving what they needed.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Or even like, you know, like five fifty thousand years ago.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Like, so tell me a little bit about how cultural
change can be contagious and give me, you know, like
describe the hitting syndrome, okay, which is related to that?
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, I start the I start my book with an
extended story about a Dutch soccer coach named Who's Hitting
And he was well known for somehow being able to
turn around teams that were struggling, and even teams in
countries where he didn't even speak the language. You know.
(33:54):
He went to Turkey, he went to Spain, and at
the time soccer was very enmeshed in an almost national
character belief. And you still hear this when the World
Cup comes, you know, the sportscasters will be like, notice
the teutonic discipline on this German team and the graceful
samba like play of the Brazilian team, and the tidy
(34:18):
efficient British mentality and the Italian you know esthetics, you know,
and it's kind of this notion that the people from
this country can only play one way and the people
from that country can only play another way. And that
never rang true to Hitting because you know, he had
played in various countries as a player, and he thought that,
(34:38):
you know, players are adaptable, and you can mold players
and you and so he was asked relatively relatively at
the last minute, just just a year and a half
before the World Cup to coach the South Korean team
in two thousand and two when they were the host
of the World Cup and they had bid to be
(35:02):
host at a time when their economy was doing great
and their team was doing great, you know, in the
in the mid to late nineties, and then they hit
the you know, the Korea Crisis of the late nineties,
which was very humiliating and kind of brought down their economy.
And then around the same time, their soccer team started,
you know, bombing out of the Asia Cup, and you know,
(35:23):
they were usually a regional power and they weren't even winning,
you know, in their local competitions, and so they were
desperate and they're like Okay, well, let's try to bring
in this Dutch wonder kind and maybe he can work
his magic. And at first it looked like a terrible
decision because he didn't even know who the stars were
in Korea. He he didn't make much effort to kind
(35:47):
of learn about the soccer culture of Korea, which was
very well established, and he arranged that they He negotiated
for three things when he took the job. He asked
for complete control over the roster, which wasn't traditional there
because usually the soccer officials, you know, would choose some
(36:12):
of the roster and choose it based on social considerations
rather than strictly play considerations. He asked for the Korean
soccer club season to be suspended so that he could
have his players for much longer than any of the
other World Cup coaches. And he asked for a budget
(36:34):
to bring the world's best teams to Korea for exhibition games.
And so they lost all of those exhibition games by
big scores. He sort of cloistered away his team in
these training camps, cut off communication to the outside. The
Korean sports press was in a panic, you know that
(36:54):
the only thing they saw of their team was like
losing six nothing, losing five to nothing, you know, and
they weren't able to watch what was going on in
the practices. But what he thought he needed to do
was to first break the old culture that existed. So
his first training camps, instead of holding them in Korea,
where people are constantly reminded of Korean social norms like
(37:17):
to be deferential to people who are senior to you,
he held them in the United Emirates at an international
soccer facility, where players professional identities as soccer players came
to the fore rather than their Korean identities as being
you know, differential, polite, you know, members of the Korean quality.
(37:42):
And then he worked really hard to kind of build
the team culture, to remold the team culture around sort
of egalitarian norms among teammates, which was different from what
the team culture has had been. The team culture had
been that the veterans eat dinner at one table and
(38:04):
the rookies eat dinner at a separate table. And so
in the short term he did things to kind of
de emphasize the norms so that people could learn new tactics,
and then he slowly built these new social routines that
ultimately led to new relationships and the new ways of
interacting on the field. And then when the Korean team
(38:27):
was unveiled at the World Cup, they were extraordinary because
they were able to play this cutting edge soccer strategy
that nobody expected and they made it to the semi
finals and it was unprecedented and you know, a great
inflection point for the country because it was an emotional
moment of we are capable, we can beat the world's best.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, so deep cultural change is possible, and like, what
can we do about changing the culture surrounding politics right now?
Because it just it feels like the culture right now
is that Democrats and Republicans are more polarized. It's almost
like the culture is like they must be polarized. You know,
(39:14):
we can't even imagine a world where they're not extremely polarized.
So I'm just wondering what can we do to kind
of change that culture. Yeah, use tribalism for our advantage,
my friends.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yes, yes, no, I know in the spirit of your book,
I know what you're asking, and I've been I do
work in the political campaigns. I am part of a
group that for many elections has advised the democratic side
and some of the tools of tribalism or the levers
of tribalism are symbols and ceremonies and symbols are really important.
(39:51):
So one of the ways that Trump built this Maga
coalition was they read Maga hat. You know, people could
go to a rally, everyone wear their hat. He kind
of tapped into a blue collar, very middle American thing
of wearing baseball caps and it, you know, it gave
(40:12):
people a sense of our group is similar, even though
you know, the Republican coalition is odd bedfellows. It's these
Wall Street people and these main street people, and they
don't have that much in common. Trump doesn't have that
much in common personally with most of his followers. But
the red cap brought them together. And so I think
one really adept move recently was the the Harris Walls
(40:36):
Camo cap. You know, and Tim Walls as a selection
was very adept because he's he's a person who looks
like he's actually gone hunting in his life rather than
just claiming to be a hunter. I've heard him described
as an RAI candidate because he he looks like a
guy who's gone camping, and so I think he he
(41:00):
looks like a member of the sort of middle American
blue collar tribe. There are people who are going to
be drawn to that coalition just because he looks like
one of them, he talks like one of them, and
then the cap is a kind of symbol that can
be effective.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
So what can we do to change the culture.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Well, we need to We need to recognize that every
individual is a member of many tribes and not all
of those identities are salient at any given moment. And
we need to look at community memberships that cross cut
(41:43):
the red blue divide and find ways to activate those identities.
So I think teachers of America, right, Tim Wallas is
a teacher, sports, coaches of America, hunters of America, parents
(42:05):
of America. You know, these are these are the kinds
of identities that can bring some people to the fore.
The redeeming factor about tribalism is that there are many
tribes inside each of us, and we must not forget
that and think that we are only red and blue.
You know, the red and blue identities. It's a relatively
(42:26):
new thing. And you know, two generations ago, there was
as much diversity within the Democratic Party and Republican Party
as there was between them, because there were the Southern
Democrats and the Northern Democrats, and you know, people at
that time didn't know what party their colleagues and their
neighbors were, aside from the occasional xilot who puts a
(42:48):
long sign up every couple of years. And it has
become this mega identity only only in the last generation,
as as some other salient identities have faded. You know,
we don't live in ethnic neighborhoods so much anymore, mostly
for the good. Most people are not members of religious
congregations anymore, which you know, I don't know if that's
(43:10):
good or bad, but those were the kinds of local,
like minded tribes that gave people a sense of epistemic
security a few generations ago. And with the residential sorting
and then the sorting into online communities, the political tribes
(43:30):
are serving a function that they never did before, which was,
you know, shoring up your daily sense of identity. And
so that's something that hopefully will shift and hopefully people
will just grow tired of it, or enough people will
parody it that people will want to have more creative
(43:51):
identities rather than just I'm a blue tribe member, I'm
a red tribe member.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah, blending, yeah, really big into transcendence and universalism values.
You know, the Schwartz circumplex imbly into universalism values. And
so I'm always trying to think of, well, how can
we transcend tribalism? So it was very interesting to read
(44:17):
your book, and it well, I love reading books like
yours that make me think, that make me even rethink
my own You know, I don't have rigid anything ideas
about anything, and you know I had really prior reading
your book, really been raw. Raw. We need to transcend tribalism.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Yeah, I can see that, because tribalism is usually associated
with parochialism as an opposite of universalism. Right, And the
whole spirit of universalism is let's leave behind these primitive
reflexes of ethnic affinity and religious affinity and let's be
more abstract and think about what we value and or say,
(44:59):
I identify with huge in kind, and I think that,
you know, we have to recognize that our deepest motivations
and our deepest feelings of meaning come from thick identities,
come from identities of people that we that we interact
with and that we know a lot about that. But
that doesn't have to be parochial. The when we think
(45:25):
about cosmopolitanism, when we think about a city that's cosmopolitan,
like New York or Paris, it is composed of neighborhoods
that are very different from each other. And that is
part of the magic of cosmopolitanism that I can I
can go to Korea Town and then i can go
a few steps and I'm in the East village, you know,
(45:47):
and it's a very different vibe. You know, it's a
different tribe vibe here and a different trib vibe there.
But there is a spirit of curiosity and mutual learning
between the groups. And that's what cosmopolitanism is. So cosmopolitanism
is not the absence of tribalism. It's not the absence
of you know, it's not people just shedding tradition. It's
(46:11):
a selective retention of tradition combined with curiosity and openness.
There's a form of universalism like you know Esperanto. You know,
the Esperanto movement in the mid twentieth century. They invented
an artificial language that had sort of the least common
denominator of all the languages of the world, and they said,
(46:33):
we really need need to get beyond this tower of
babble of people speaking different languages. We've invented the perfect language, Esperanto.
It doesn't have any tradition of poetry, and it doesn't
have a tradition of you know, family memories or anything.
But it would be a lot more efficient. Maybe we
could get the un behind it, and then you know,
basically it may take a generation, but we'll all speak esperanto.
(46:54):
The world would be a better place. Right didn't happen?
We can't even use the metric system. I don't think
we can go sweak esperanto. And so there is there
is a kind of you know, there's a kind of
inefficiency and hanging on to things, not all of which
are adaptive. That is an inherent part of tradition. But
(47:17):
I think that we shouldn't we shouldn't be an enemy
of tradition, you know, like or like when Mao, when
Mao tried to have a cultural revolution to destroy all
the olds. You know that we're holding society back. A
lot of a lot of good things get thrown out
with the bad things when you try to when you
try to throw away tradition. So no conservative, well, I
(47:40):
think that the conservatives have a point. They do agree.
I agree, you know, I mean, these things that have
been around for a long time, we don't know, we
can't always immediately see the value of them, and especially
when we're young, we can't always see it. But many
of these things that have been around for a long
time serve institutional purposes that are not so obvious on
(48:01):
the on the surface. So you know, yeah, I just
think we shouldn't approach tradition with a wrecking ball, you know,
we should approach it with skepticism and humor, you know.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah. So last question I have for interview how how
should we re how should we rethink workplace discrimination in
light of your ideas in the book? Are you right
about that in the books?
Speaker 1 (48:29):
I do? I do. I think that, you know, one
of the major conflicts of our time that has been
frustrating is is the inequality Ethnically, there is inequality that
is undeniable, and then then there's a question about what's
(48:49):
what motive is driving this inequality, and there's often a
presumption that the motive is hostility towards the outgroup that
is trying to, like, you know, I'm trying to keep
the non whites down, and that's why the non whites
have not moved up in an organization. And I think
that that certainly used to be the case, you know,
(49:11):
it was overt. But the best survey evidence we have,
you know, from anonymous surveys, you know, suggests that outgroup hostility,
racial animis is not dead. But it's a it's a
small it's a fringe for most people. It's a small
(49:31):
group of people. Yet the inequality is not going away.
It's it's it's it's in many ways as present as
it was a generation or two ago. Interesting, So it's
time to think, Okay, maybe there's a different motivation that's
contributing to that inequality or that discrimination. And what I
argue is is that the tribal motivation, that maybe the
(49:52):
biggest cause of it is in group love rather than
outgroom hate. We have impulsive, uncon conscious drives to be
generous to people who are similar to us, you know, ethnically, religiously,
and that is something that reproduces inequality. And a lot
(50:13):
of organizational procedures like hiring for cultural fit or building
referral systems into recruiting, they've turbocharged this in group favoritism.
So I would say that you know, we we we're
looking at the problem wrong. You know, we we put
so much. You know, Google spends a billion dollars a
(50:36):
year on these anti bias workshops, and yet two percent
of their technical employees are people of color. So it's
obviously not working, and I think it's it's not really
addressing the real problem. The real problem is that you
have people hiring people just like themselves because they're similar.
(50:56):
It's not because of animist towards people who are different.
So we need to take a really close look at
our policies and the policies that are enabling in group favoritism,
because that's the mechanism for most of this discrimination. Inequality,
not the kind that makes everybody feel bad because you're
you feel falsely accused of being a racist, right because
(51:17):
most most of these people are not racists.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
You know, isn't an implication of that that if we
did manage to get rid of the inequalities, and let's say,
even it when in the opposite direction where those who
are considered minorities are the majority, Now, wouldn't they when
the same thing had recreate itselves, and then we certainly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
Certainly would happen, and it does happen. You know, for
every ethnic group there's a country in the world where
they are the majority. Yea, there is the same kind
of discrimination. What happens in those.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Weed to be wary of that? Yeah, yeah, every in
any direction.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
Right, And it just doesn't It doesn't intuitively look like
the problem because it doesn't involve any negative intent or
negative feelings. It looks like generosity, right. You know, It's
like I interview you and you remind me of a
younger version of myself, and so I give you an
extra fifteen minutes and then I have more good things
to say about you, and it all feels like it's
(52:12):
coming out of good heartedness. But it can be just
as much of a problem as malice or hostility.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
Well, it's a great point. It's a really great point, Michael.
And might a wow to call you, but your first
name doctor, doctor.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
I think we know each other.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
We're a first name basis for each other. You are
a legend in the field and have done so much
at Columbia and the Business School, and you've been thinking
about these topics longer than maybe I've been born.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
So I don't know how old you are, but you're
definitely younger.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Than for a long time, and I really want to
give you a hearty congratulations on this book, which really
allowed you to put all these ideas you've been thinking
of for so many years into a single book and
really got me thinking, maybe even rethink thinking some of
my old ideas about self transcendence. And so I must
thank you very much and also thank you for being
on my podcast.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
Well, thank you, Scott. I mean, I've been wanting to
write a book that translates these ideas for some time.
I think I talked with you about it, probably a
decade ago. And maybe you're one of my role models
for someone who's been a top researcher and also invested
a lot of work. And it is a lot of
work to become a translator of the ideas, and there's
(53:27):
too few of those, and too many of the ideas
never reach a broad audience because there aren't people who
know how to articulate them. So thank you for having
me on the show, and thank you for being an example.
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Thank you
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