The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris

32:30And so it's become evident from fossilized footprints that even a million and a half years ago, Homo erectus was capable of that sort of thing. And it's also become evident from other kinds of microscopic particles of burnt stone that they were cooking. And so they were coordinating both with regard to hunting and with regard to gathering. and that suggests that they were sophisticated with regard to social intelligence in ways that that goes way beyond the picture of them that archaeology presented you know in prior generations the first evidence for stone-tipped spears is about a half a million years ago I think because the technology for building spears is that you have to first straighten if it's a throne spear You have to straighten the shaft of it and then you have to sharpen the point of it into a needle sharp point.

33:31And then you have to somehow haft the spear tip onto the thing. So there's a pretty elaborate process of making a spear. But that is one of the hallmark innovations of the next big wave of human social evolution, which happened about a half a million years ago. And that involves what I call the hero instinct, which is if the peer instinct was an instinct to be normal, to do what most people are doing, the hero instinct was this new impulse to be normative, to be exemplary, to go beyond what other people are doing, to be a key contributor and gain the status and the tribute that the community accords to those who are the key contributors.

34:17And it was an interesting thing to evolve because it was rewarding for the individuals who had the ambition to be a contributor. They got socially rewarded. But it also was very adaptive for the group because it incentivized individuals to build tools that required toiling alone for a long period of time. it's also around the time when when archaeologists start to see the skeletons of people with congenital deformities that survived to the age of adulthood and that suggests that someone was taking care of a person in their group who probably couldn't reciprocate and so you know I'm doing something pro-social I'm not going to get paid back by the person that I'm helping but I'm going to get paid back by the group because I'm doing something noble or something good or something exemplary.

35:14I'm a hero. So let's put this into historical context. Peer instinct, hero instinct, and ancestor instinct. Peer instinct, two million years ago, that begins to develop. And it is useful because conformity and coordination allows smooth social interaction and collaboration, and that leads to a more successful group as a species. Working as a united front, and there's all these economic analyses of foraging, both by biologists and by—and foraging collectively is more efficient and risk-reducing than each individual for themselves, right? If we're working as a group, there's less likelihood of any of us starving.

36:00And you mentioned the hero instinct, and that was about half a million years ago. Tell us about the ancestor instinct. Well, the ancestor instinct to a lot of people, when I describe it, it sounds like the most primitive of all of these instincts, but it's actually the crowning touch that enabled us to live in tribes and accrue all the advantages of it. And the ancestor instinct, just like the other two, we can still recognize it in ourselves today. The peer instinct corresponds to the sideways glances at our neighbors and our co-workers and the impulse to do what they're doing. The hero instinct corresponds to our upward curiosity about MVPs and CEOs and celebrities and the weird impulse we have to emulate their quirks, you know, to kind of eat what LeBron James eats for breakfast or to, you know, use the same hand gestures that Barack Obama uses.

36:57The ancestor instinct corresponds to the curiosity that we feel about past generations. You know, when we hear about the founder, you know, when I used to teach at Bloomberg, I would tell them, you know, when Mike Bloomberg started the company on the first terminal they leased, he put it in the trunk of his car and he drove down to Wall Street. And people just hang on every word when you're talking about those formative legends, you know, what the founder did at the beginning of the organization. People are very curious to hear about prior generations of their family. They're curious about the original family recipe, and they take a deep satisfaction in following those recipes on a holiday.

37:39We fetishize antiques, you know, these artifacts from the past. And so all of this is the psychology of nostalgia for the past or sentimentality for the past. And it comes with it a capacity for rote learning. You know, so when we're learning religious things from our grandparents, we're not supposed to ask questions. You know, we're supposed to repeat the Seder dinner exactly the way the Seder dinner was done, you know, by prior generations. And that is what I call the ancestor instinct, is this impulse to learn by rote about things that the past generations did and then replicate almost compulsively those things in exactly the way that we've learned them.

38:23And it can lead to superstitious learning and hanging on to ways of the past that are no longer adaptive. But it was very adaptive for our evolutionary forebearers because it contributed to memory, both as an individual, I could learn some technique, like a spear-making technique, that might go beyond my understanding. You know, I don't understand why this way of straightening wood by soaking it in water works, but it works. So if I just trust and, you know, take it on faith and learn by rote, then I can continue that expertise and pass it on to the the next generations. And for the group, it created a kind of tribal memory.

39:10Before that, in the archaeological record, what you'd see is that a group in a particular area would develop, you know, the throwing spear and have it for 10 generations and then lose it for 30 generations. And then someone would invent it again. So they were reinventing the wheel a lot. And after the ancestor instinct was also in place, then you had these three instincts. You had the ancestor instinct, which allowed you to hang on to the lessons of the past. You had the hero instinct, which made people want to go beyond what's already in place. So it turned into building on the expertise of the past.

39:46And then the peer instinct was this mechanism, this engine for kind of spreading and distributing the knowledge. We want to conform to what the others around us are doing. And the end result of this was cumulative cultural evolution, that the shared knowledge in a group became richer and more tuned to what works in the environment with each generation. And that collective level learning, more than anything about our brains as individuals, is what enabled our species to become the dominant species of the planet. And it's still a very powerful resource for us today. So let's talk a little bit about some of the examples you use of corporate America adapting some of the strategies.

40:35And full disclosure, you consult for a lot of these companies. You've consulted for Bloomberg and other entities. So there's all sorts of fascinating examples of how companies either use or don't use the lessons of tribalism. But I have to start again in South Korea talking about their terrible soccer team. Tell us a little bit about the Hiddink syndrome. Who was Coach Hiddink and why did the South Koreans bring him to fix their soccer team? Well, South Korea is a country that had a very difficult 20th century of civil war and colonization and political turmoil. And then everything was finally coming together in the 90s when they reached the elite tier of nations and they successfully bid on hosting the World Cup with their arch rival Japan.

41:36And it really looked like they were ascendant. And then the Asia crisis in, I think, 98, you know, brought down their politicians, brought down some of their banks, brought embarrassing bailouts from the West and accusations of crony capitalism. and at the same time their national soccer team the Reds was starting to flounder they're usually a regional power but in the 2000 Asia Cup they they couldn't even beat Kuwait which is a fairly small country not known for its soccer prowess and so this was a moment of panic for the soccer overlords of South Korea because they were about to co-host the World Cup and the soccer odds makers were betting that they would be the first ever host nation to not advance from group play to tournament rounds.

42:38Not a distinction that they were hoping would be associated with their a country being the first host not to advance. So they made a gamble, which is that they called, made a long distance call to the Netherlands and called a fellow named Hoos Hiddink, who was a football or soccer coach in the Netherlands who had found a lot of success turning teams around and doing so despite what might be considered an obstacle, which is cultural differences. And let me jump in right here because in the book you describe a very similar set of deferral, like co-pilot to pilot, where you would have rookies or young teammates who would have open shots and defer to the more senior experienced players and pass on taking the good shot instead forward the ball to the senior player.

43:40How did Hiddink resolve this? How did he deal with this? Well, he was a very down-to-earth, egalitarian Dutchman and also not terribly knowledgeable about the legends of South Korean soccer. He didn't know who their Beckham and who their Messi were. And he had watched the game tapes and noticed that their style of play was a little bit slower and more predictable than what was needed to play with the world's best at this time. And so he thought, okay, I'm going to have to just change the way things are done there. So he held open tryouts, which was a first way of ruffling feathers because, you know, the custom there had been that the legends of Korean soccer would automatically be given their standard positions on the team.

44:35And he then started noticing that when they would scrimmage that the players were not taking every shot or passing as fluidly as he would like. And so he announced a set of changed policies that were a bit mysterious to the players. He said, OK, the next phase of our training camp is not going to be here in South Korea. It's going to be in the United Arab Emirates at an international soccer facility. And the honorific declensions of Korean, which he had heard from his assistant coaches were being used on the field, are henceforth banned. He justified it as the need for speed. But it was obvious that some of these things were also changing the cultural cues around the players.

45:31He also didn't allow the South Korean sports press to follow them to the Emirates so that players wouldn't be interviewed by their compatriots after every scrimmage about what they did wrong and what they did right. And what he was trying to do was sort of remove the daily reminders of these Korean cultural habits that he suspected were getting in the way of learning what he was trying to teach, which was this Dutch style of football where players swap positions on the field to throw off defenders. but it means that a 20-year-old rookie who is playing next to the legendary midfielder would take that person's position and then that person takes the winger position or whatever the other position is and that just felt wrong to players when they were thinking through the lens of their Korean social habits but when they were in the Emirates surrounded by professional football players from various countries, their identity as professional football players came to the fore of their minds rather than their identity as Koreans.

46:51And they became more open, both the rookies and the veterans, to learning this new tactical system, which was necessary to raise their game to the level where they could compete against the World's Ports. And spoiler alert, how did the South Koreans do as the host country in the World Cup? Well, amazingly, they made it out of the group rounds to tournament play. And then in tournament play, they were paired with the teams like Italy and Spain, who were sort of defending champions. And they made it all the way to the semifinals. And it was one of the few times that a team that was not either from South America or Europe made it to the semifinals.

47:36It was the first Asian team to ever make it to the semifinals. And it was not just an unlikely run for a soccer team, but it set off a jubilation that was nationwide, a celebration of what South Korea was capable of if they opened themselves up to, you know to outside influences and outside ideas and i think it's partly responsible for the south korea that we know today which is a you know cultural exporter and a much more open society than what was the case then they they even changed their citizenship law so that they could make who's hitting an honorary citizen it was and had been for a time immemorial a a blood standard of citizenship where you had to prove that you were Korean to be a citizen.

48:30And instead, they changed it to one where if you had lived there and done work there, you could become a Korean citizen. So literally and figuratively, they opened themselves up to the world. And the South Korea we know today with K-pop bands topping the charts and, you know, movies that are winning Oscars and, you know, soap operas that are played all around the world. That's the South Korea that has come from the openness that this event helped to create. So I want to temporarily leave Asia and talk a little bit about Microsoft and a little bit about Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Let's start with Sadia Nadella and Microsoft.

49:13So long thought of as a monopoly for good reason. They come out of a decade where their stock went nowhere, went to all of their peers. Apple, Amazon, Go Down the List, Nvidia, all did really well. Microsoft kind of wandered in the desert for a decade under their prior CEO. Nadella comes in, does a listening tour you describe in the book, and essentially completely changes the culture of Microsoft from a take it or leave it ideology to more, we're listening. Tell us a little bit about what made Nadella special and what changes did he effect. Well, the first two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, were strong personalities and, you know, sort of intellectually dominant sort of figures and sort of the smartest guy in the room type of people and led that way.

50:07And then that worked really well when, you know, Microsoft had a virtual monopoly and could just load more and more technical features on each generation of software and people didn't really have a choice because the switching costs were high. But then we enter the cloud computing era where switching costs are much lower and there's this new norm of just paying for the features that you use. And that created a premium on knowing your customer, knowing what your customer needed, which was not, you know, Microsoft wasn't an extroverted organization. It was introverted. It was a cult of technical expertise.

50:49And Satya Nadella had been succeeding in the cloud division, but that was a relatively small division within Microsoft. And he was tapped to be CEO. And he realized that what he had to do was to use the hero instinct, the tendency to follow role models as a way of reshaping the culture. but it was tricky because he couldn't use his bully pulpit as CEO to, you know, shout at people to become better listeners. You know, that would be an oxymoron, right? He had to instead lead by example and show people what were the set of behaviors that the organization needed and that would carry prestige in the new era and so he embarked on a listening tour you know words that had never been uttered by the prior ceos um and went all through the microsoft ecosystem you know to their to their developers to their sales people to their customers and you know listened uh listened and made a few changes based on what they said so one of the things that microsoft was famous for was a stack rank performance evaluation system where everybody, you know, you have a fixed curve and the lower 10 or 20 percent are fired each year.

52:15And that was considered to be something that was inhibiting the collaboration that was needed in the new era. And the employees were quite vocal about that. And he made that change. So listening works better if you're also taking some actions that shows that you've heard what was said. And then one particular event, I think very notable, he went to a conference on women in technology. I think it's called the Grace Hopper Conference, after one of the founders of computer scientists who was a woman who was under-recognized until recently. And in it, he was asked during a Q &A about gender differences in tech salaries.

53:02And we know that these gender differences are in part caused by the fact that companies don't regard it as a credible threat when women get an outside offer because they don't think the woman's husband and family will move to another city in the way that they do when a man gets an outside. So women don't get the same raises when you have a star system. It happens in academia. It happens in tech companies. and um but uh nadella you know was tired and he had answered a lot of questions and he got the question and he said well he said a lot of these inequalities they even out over time and so maybe it's just a good idea to let the trust the process and let the process make its corrections which you know might be the right answer if a junior employee is asking whether he should negotiate hard or you know but it wasn't considered to be the best answer about this issue you know sort of a structural issue related to gender and so there was some some chatter in the blogosphere about this and instead of ignoring it which he could have easily done he actively publicized the fact that he made this error and then actively went to meet with women in technology groups and labor economists and people who are experts on this issue and actively showed that he was taking steps to avoid this structural problem at Microsoft.

54:35And by sort of enthusiastically owning his mistake and apologizing for it, he was role modeling this set of behaviors, which is, you know, okay, you're a customer and Microsoft hasn't been listening to you very well and is trying to sell you software with a lot of features that you don't need. So let's instead apologize for not knowing better. And let's take corrective steps of let's send a salesperson to, you know, shadow your people, you know, for a few weeks and really get to know the day to day at your company. And then we'll come up with, you know, a cloud product that really dovetails with your needs instead of, you know, the way that we've been doing it.

55:19And it's considered to be, you know, the instrumental, you know, the critical behaviors that changed Microsoft's culture from a know-it-all culture to a learn-it-all culture. You know, Satya Nadella is also very taken by the research in psychology by Carol Dweck and others about learning orientations and growth orientations as well. So, you know, there are some orientations of, you know, thinking I'm smart, you know, and I have high intelligence as a fixed entity. And then other people have this mindset that I have the ability to get smarter. And Satya Nadella is a big advocate of trying to create this growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset about ability.

56:09And Microsoft has really resumed its position on the top of the technology hierarchy. It's made really adaptive moves in the AI space and it's become a very happening place in quantum computing as well. So it's not just in the cloud computing area. You know, the organization got its mojo back, and I think it got its mojo back by leaving behind an organizational culture that worked in the early era of the industry but didn't work once you're competing with lots of very adaptive organizations and you need to partner better and you need to know your customers better. Really interesting. So Nadella was able to change the culture of a single organization.

56:58How difficult is it to merge the culture of two different organizations? And I'm thinking about the financial crisis shotgun wedding of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. Tell us a little bit about how that merger worked out. Well, that's a fascinating case. It's a case that we teach at Columbia to our students in their very first weeks. You have as a background Peter Lewis, who had built Bank of America starting from a very small regional North Carolina bank and swallowing up banks even larger than itself to become this bank that had one in five Americans as a customer. It was the largest consumer bank.

57:42But he wanted one more victory at the end of his career, which was to acquire a Wall Street bank, an investment bank, and move into the fast lane of finance. And the financial crisis presented an opportunity because these investment banks had really troubled balance sheets and a consumer bank was considered to be something that could balance that. FDIC regulated, plenty of reserve capital and not in the same risk category that all the Wall Street banks were in during the financial crisis. And he actually came up to New York and started talking to other banks, I think maybe banks that were too far gone.

58:27And partially through government intervention, he became, you know, in conversation with Merrill Lynch. And Merrill Lynch was this century-old, you know, esteemed brand. It was in the collective imagination synonymous with Wall Street. It had the most famous logo in banking, you know, the charging bull. And slogans like, you know, Merrill Lynch is bullish on America. So very strong culture, very strong brand. And it needed a rescuer. So it looked like a masterstroke of strategy where Merrill was saving itself and Bank of America had gotten a prize at discount. But then the full depth of the troubles related to the financial crisis became apparent with each quarter where there were lots of bad loans on the books at Merrill.

59:29And then Bank of America's acquisition of Countrywide in L.A. brought it into the problematic mortgage crisis. and as a result there was a lot of strain. There was some resentment of the Bank of America, the more plebeian consumer bankers who weren't getting a bonus because of the expensive investment bank that had been purchased. And what Lewis and others at Bank of America tried to do was to assimilate Merrill into its Bank of America culture. They regarded some of the Merrill culture as the problem that created the crisis, this excessive risk taking. And so they would hold workshops to try to Bank of Americanize the Merrill bankers.

1:00:28But you probably know a lot of former Merrill bankers, as I do. They were people who didn't think they had that much in common with the person at the bank branch on the corner. You know, they thought they were in a very different industry and that the Bank of America culture had very few lessons relevant to them. Even the so-called thundering herd of Merrill investment advisors at offices around the country and abroad didn't think that it served their business to suddenly have a sign in front saying Bank of America that looked the same as the standard bank branch or to call themselves Bank of America.

1:01:10You can imagine a career Merrill person in Paris or Tokyo suddenly having to call themselves Bank of America. It's not the brand that worked particularly well in those environments. And so it was failing and you had a hemorrhaging of talent where brokers can often take their whole portfolio of clients and go across the street to the competition. And just to put a little flesh on how bad this merger was, one banking analyst called it the merger from hell. So were they able to realign the cultures in any positive way? Well, what Lewis did that was a saving grace was that he hired a person named Sally Krawcheck, who was already a sort of legend on Wall Street at a young age because she called out some conflicts of interest at Bernstein when she was freshly out of her Columbia MBA and got fired in the process but became a bit of a hero.

1:02:17The journal called her the last honest analyst on Wall Street. And then she was hired at Citibank when they had some problems in their private wealth division. And she stood up for the rights of investors who had been sold certain products that she thought, you know, had some hidden problems. And got fired again, but was lauded once again as being a person with integrity. And so she was brought in to restore trust as somebody that had Wall Street credentials. It didn't seem like she was just this consumer bank person who didn't get what a Merrill broker or a Merrill investment banker needed. and fortunately she was also from North Carolina so she could be a translator a natural bicultural person who could go down to Charlotte and talk to the Bank of America executives and explain to them what the Wall Street people did and they ultimately after a lot of negotiation allowed her to do the largest ever rebranding which was called the Bull is Back and they they brought back the Merrill Lynch name and they brought back the bull logo for the private wealth division so that it was once again Merrill Lynch.

1:03:31And almost immediately, it restored confidence and it restored collaboration and citizenship within an organization that had always been, you know, it was called Mother Merrill. It had always been a very communitarian organization. But when its name was taken away and people were told, you're just a Bank of America employee and nobody identified with Bank of America. It all just kind of fell apart. And then you see the most successful people leaving for the competition. It was very demoralizing. But when she gave them their group boundary back and she gave them their symbol, the bull back, and she gave them their name and their tradition, Merrill Lynch back, suddenly you had this just renaissance of collaboration and people working overtime to help each other succeed and to convince investors that the post-crash era was a buying opportunity, and suddenly Merrill Lynch was the bright spot on Bank of America's books.

1:04:34And that went on for a few years. Now, ultimately, Sally got removed in a political shift. I think that she is widely regarded as having saved the private wealth division through cultural leadership, through understanding how important this sense of group identity and these logos and these slogans. These are very important conduits for collaboration. And when you take them away, people are alienated and anomic and they don't know how to collaborate. We're about to head into Thanksgiving. What should family members keep in mind about their tribe and tribalism in order to have a peaceful Thanksgiving dinner?

1:05:21Well, there's an economist at UCLA named Keith Chen who works with cell phone location data. So he has these massive data sets that's basically just tracking the location of everyone's cell phone. And what he has been able to discover through very complex statistics is that in the last election season, you know, 2020, 2016, families that are politically divided have cut short their Thanksgiving dinners during these election years because of the conversations that start to happen, you know, after the second glass of wine. So I wish Americans not just peaceful but lengthy Thanksgiving celebrations.

1:06:07And one of the things I would suggest is to not believe the hype that Americans are more divided now than they ever have been. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became president with less than 40 % of the popular vote. Seven states seceded from the Union before his inauguration. the civil war broke out you know a week or so afterwards um that's what i would call a real rift that's what i would call a challenge a legitimacy challenge right and so what's interesting is what did lincoln think was the solution to that in his first inaugural he said the mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the union now that's a bit poetic and cryptic.

1:07:01But what he was suggesting is that collective memory, you know, thinking of our common ancestors and the gratitude and the obligation that we feel and the reverence that we feel when we think of ancestors can get us beyond our current differences. Our current differences seem large, but when we think in terms of the hundreds of years of the American experiment since the first settlers on these shores, we can think of this disagreement between the North and the South as one that we can possibly get beyond. And right around the same time as his more famous Gettysburg Address when he talked about our fathers came to this land, he made reference to ancestors, he did something that he's not often given credit for, which was the proclamation of the Thanksgiving holiday.

1:07:52I learned in school that Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving holidays since 1621 in an unbroken tradition. That's not true. But a lot of the national folklore of every country is fake lore. It's created retrospectively and projected onto the past. So the pilgrims did not have a Thanksgiving in 1621. They had a feast that they called a rejoicing where they shot guns in the air and drank whiskey. and Thanksgiving for them was a religious ceremony. So it was something very different. But there was a concept of Thanksgiving among the Puritans, this kind of religious ceremony. And George Washington held one of those religious ceremonies after the Revolutionary War.

1:08:34And Lincoln was influenced by some of the thought leaders of the era who thought a national holiday, a sort of autumn harvest feast that we all do at the same time would be a unifying thing at a time when the country is sort of divided. And Lincoln thought, oh, that makes sense. But how can I get people to accept a new holiday? Well, I can portray it as something that's already a time-honored American tradition. So he described it with reference to the Puritan themes and customs. And he made reference to George Washington's Thanksgiving, a one-off event that wasn't meant to be a holiday. And within a few years, Americans had embraced it as a sacred national tradition.

1:09:19So Thanksgiving itself is an example of how culture is mutable. It's not, you know, the differences that we have now are not set in stone. They're not necessarily going to last forever. And we can use our cultural capacities for ritual to move beyond differences. And so by celebrating Thanksgiving, we should remember that we can get beyond much worse political crises than the one we have today. Really fascinating. All right. So let's go back to Asia. You describe Singapore at one point in time as a poor, backwards, very corrupt, impoverished island. How did they manage to turn that around? Singapore is now thought of as one of the most successful countries in the world.

1:10:05Yeah, Singapore is healthier, wealthier, and less corrupt than the United States by a substantial margin. That's not to say everything about it is great. I lived there a couple of years ago for a year, and it's got many virtues. Very strict, right? New York has its virtues as well. Right. No famously spinning gum on the caning and that sort of stuff, but by and large, a very successful society. Yeah. And it was a British colony. And then during World War II, the Japanese occupied it and shut down the port, which the British had a tradition there of a free port. So it was a free port for a trading, open trading zone.

1:10:53and the Japanese kind of shut that down. And that led to a sort of darker period in Singapore where you had black markets and you had a lot of corruption instead of an open port that was treating everyone the same and prospering due to the high traffic of business. Singapore, after getting free of the Japanese, it joined the Federation of Malaysia, with its northern neighbors. It continued to be less of a free port than it had been under British rule. And some of the local traditions of sort of relationship-based business where you do business with my family, so I give you preferential access to somebody else, that's kind of how business works in that area.

1:11:47There are lots of words for it, guanxi, you know, sort of network-based business. And that was the dominant mode of how the port operated. But then a leader named Lee Kuan Yew, who was Singaporean, but who studied law in the UK, returned to Singapore to kind of try to help its government during the Malaysian period. But then in the mid-60s, Singapore gained its independence by being ejected from the Malaysian Federation, in part because of the ethnic strife between the primarily Chinese Singaporeans and the Malaysians. At the time, it had no source of drinking water. It had a very high unemployment rate.

1:12:41It had a huge malaria problem. And its port had been completely dysfunctional for decades since the Japanese occupation during World War II. A young leader named Lee Kuan Yew, who had grown up in Singapore, but then studied law and practiced law in the UK for a while before returning, became elected as the first prime minister and knew that he needed to do something special in order to help Singapore survive as an independent country. And what he did was largely opposite to what most independence leaders do. Independence leaders tend to eliminate any trace of the prior colonial influence. They pull down statues and they change the names of things back to the local language and they eliminate Western dress and put on the ethnic garb.

1:13:45Lee Kuan Yew did largely the opposite of that. His political party adopted white uniforms reminiscent of the British Navy that had ensured the operation of the port for many decades in Singapore. He made English the official language rather than Malay or Chinese or many of the other dialects spoken in the area. He thought a lingua franca that was not connected to any of the local ethnicities and that was associated with this prior period in history when the port was functioning in an adaptive way would be the right kind of cultural cue. He even put up a statue of Sir Raffles, who was the British founder of the Singaporean colony, Sir Thomas Raffles, in case somebody didn't get the point.

1:14:43So he didn't try to eliminate all of the traces of the sort of British paradigms for running the port. He tried to restore that by creating an environment that reminded people of that time and brought those habits to the surface. And it was in combination with a few other procedures like very strong anti-graft laws and sort of role modeling the austerity and the uncorruptibility that he wanted. Through role modeling and through these legal changes and through this cultural queuing, he set in motion a new culture of Singapore that proved to be very successful in attracting trade to Singapore rather than to other local ports and snowballed to become the culture not just of the port in Singapore but of all of its industries and created the Singapore that we know today.

1:15:52So using cultural cues and the right approach to tribal norms, you can affect change in countries, in companies, in sports teams. Am I missing anything there? Because the book really covers a wide range of ways that tribalism influences organizations. Yes, all of those are tribes in the sense that they are communities with an enduring identity across generations. What a generation means is different in a sports team than in a society, but there's transmission of culture across generations and the culture is a kind of glue that enables people to coordinate, cooperate and have a sense of continuity.

1:16:40but we also have levers for activating cultures and we have levers for altering cultures and leaders like Lee Kuan Yew are adept at this he didn't regard culture as sacred he was a bit of a cultural engineer at a time when that was regarded as you know an impossible thing to do that you can't change the culture of a nation. You can't create a new culture. You can't ask a newly liberated people to appropriate aspects of the culture from the former colonial era. But he is somebody who felt like people are a little bit more flexible than they've been given credit for. And he knew that he himself personally was bicultural.

1:17:29He was very much Chinese, but also very much English. And he thought that a lot of the Singaporeans of his generation were also bicultural, and that was a resource that he could draw upon to shape the new culture of independent Singapore. Huh. So, fascinatingly, the former president of Singapore had both a Chinese and an English identity. How do babies cognitively develop an identity? What is their focus? Do they see family members? Do they see race? What affects babies' cultural identities? Well, race is very salient in this country because race happens to map on to cultural communities that are different from each other.

1:18:20But that's not the case in most of the world. In Russia and the Ukraine, you can't tell from somebody's face which side they're on. And in Gaza, you can't tell who's Israeli and who's Palestinian based on faces necessarily. And our evolutionary ancestors rarely encountered anybody who was physiognomically different from themselves. So we're not wired to use race as the basis of categorization. It's something that even in this culture, children only learn later at like age six to pay attention to race. But there are certain cues that we seem to be wired to pay attention to in order to recognize who's in what group and in order to recognize when we're around tribe mates and thus should engage in our tribal norms as a way of coordinating with them.

1:19:17And the number one thing is language. Babies learn not only their mother's language, but even their mother's dialect. when they're in the womb. So when they're born, they will already, if you play tape recordings to newborns of their mother's language or another language, they will turn to look at their mother's language. They don't speak yet. They can't understand anything, but they know the patterns of the language. Even dialect is that way. They will turn to a dialect. And the same kinds of experiments are done where you have two adult strangers in front of a baby and both of them are offering a toy to the baby.

1:20:05Which toy does the baby take? Well, they will preferentially interact and take a toy from a stranger who speaks with their mother's language or even their mother's dialect as opposed to a stranger who speaks with a different language or a different dialect. So their brains have recognized languages and dialects as markers of in-group and they preferentially interact with those people and learn from those people. What's fascinating is that babies also seem to be wired to expect that food choices or cuisines will also be aligned with languages. So if you put babies in an experiment where there is one adult stranger who is speaking one language, say English, and another one who is speaking another language, let's say Hindi, and then they see the person who's speaking English eating one kind of food and they see the person who's speaking Hindi eating a different kind of food.

1:21:13and then a third person comes in, say, speaking English, and starts eating the food that the Hindi-speaking person has been eating, the baby will be startled and look like, oh my God, what's going on here? You're eating the wrong food. So what this tells us is that babies are not wired to be racist, but they are already judging us based on how we speak and what we eat. Who knew babies were foodies? I would never have guessed that. That's fascinating. All right. So our speed round. Tell us what you're keeping you entertained. What are you either listening or watching? Well, ironically enough, what I'm watching is Ken Burns' Civil War series, which I never saw the first time.

1:21:59And I'd written about the Civil War in the book, and then I wanted to watch it. Let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career. Yeah. As an undergraduate, I had a mentor named Michael Harper, who was an African-American poet at Brown. And he sort of, I wasn't African-American, obviously, but I liked poetry and kind of came from a background similar to his and unlike most of the people at Brown. And, you know, he was a great mentor, a warm figure and someone who, you know, paid attention to me when I needed it. And then when I went to graduate school, a guy named Richard Nisbet, who was a leading social psychologist.

1:22:36And then when I started at Stanford, I had a colleague named Hazel Marcus, who was a wonderful guide to understanding a profession that I had not much introduction to and helped me avoid making lots of mistakes. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now? I just got yesterday a book called Co-Intelligence by Ethan Malik. It's a book about AI, but not a dystopian book about AI taking over, but it's about how to use AI as your co-pilot, how to recognize what AI is good at and what you're good at and how to use it, which I think I need to start teaching my students because I think it's the new reality.

1:23:16And our final question, what sort of advice would you give to a college grad interested in a career in either academia, social psychology, or anything related? Well, I say this to my nephews who are that age. Learn what AI is good at and also learn AI's limitations because I think that the facility in using AI well and not using it poorly is really going to be a distinguishing factor in the knowledge economy careers going forward. Thank you, Professor, for being so generous with your time. This has really been absolutely intriguing. We have been speaking with Professor Michael Morris of Columbia Graduate School of Business and author of the book Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.

1:24:07If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the previous 550 we've done over the past 10 plus years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcast. And check out my new podcast, At The Money, short 10-minute conversations with experts about issues that affect your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing it. At The Money, wherever you find your favorite podcasts and in the Masters in Business feed. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Steve Gonzalez.

1:24:47My producer is Anna Luke. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

1:25:15Thank you.