#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?

31:33That's where conformity is at its worst. And I think all of us have probably had an incident in our life like that where we kind I went along with the group because we didn't want to get in the way of progress, but we knew we were right and we should have spoken up. That's the danger. It is one point here, I guess you mentioned as this sort of taxonomy, this breakup of different types of instincts. But I can see a world in which peer instinct would be restricting because conformity limits creativity. If you're sort of following a lot of the time, I imagine that breaking out of the box is something that then becomes more difficult.

32:17Yes, but I think part of creativity is having a point of departure, which is often somebody else's work. And some creativity, you know, think of a jazz quartet, right? It's not one individual's work, you know, it's playing off of each other because of reading each other's mind and knowing where somebody is going to go and then doing something that compliments it. So I agree with you, but I think we have a kind of stereotype of creativity that involves the lone genius. And I would submit that most creativity, even in the arts or in the sciences, is collaborative creativity. Yeah, that's interesting.

33:03Okay. Hero instinct. So the heroine's thing, it's something that was born about a half a million years ago when our ancestor, Homo Heidelberg -Gensis, began doing things that no humans had been doing before. Like, at this time we start to see in the fossil record skeletons of people with congenital deformities that survive to the age of adulthood. What does that tell us? Someone was taking care of a person who probably couldn't pay them back. Somebody was doing something pro -social. They were doing something good. We also see around this time, they started hunting much larger animals, like willy mammoths and rhinos and stuff, which in some cases indicates an individual was willing to take some personal risk, be the lead hunter so that the group could then rush in and take down a much larger prey than was possible before.

34:06You also see at this time the tools, much more sophisticated tools that required a lot more work are showing up at this time. And the idea is that people started to have a new motivation, not just a motivation to be normal, which is the peer instinct, but a motivation to be normative, to be a contributor, to be more respected than the average person in the group. And how do you do that? Well, you have to make sacrifices for the group. You kind of take a personal hit to benefit somebody else. But you also have to know what the group values, and that's not always trivial. And so a cognitive quirk that came along with the hero instinct is this idea of emulating people in the group with status.

35:00So we look to the sort of cultural heroes in our community as beacons of what does the group value as a contribution and we look for distinctive quirks or behaviors of those people and we tend to emulate them. And this is also something that we often derived today because it is this kind of superficial state is seeking. Like I saw, you know, LeBron James wears these sneakers. So I'm wearing these sneakers. It doesn't, I still can't dunk, you know, it doesn't really help. You know, but I'm trying to be like LeBron, right? There's a silly side of it.

35:44It It provided a sort of engine of innovation and adaptive cultural change because imagine, you know, an early agricultural group where everybody was planting, you know, one kind of peas and then somebody starts to plant corn or something, you know, or yams and then that tends to grow well because maybe the climate changed or maybe the group migrated to a different different ecology. And the younger generation sees that and they will emulate that. And then you'll have a sort of gradual shift of the culture towards what's working, you know, currently or working in the new new environment. So while we can derive status seeking this hero instinct, it was a way for individuals to become rewarded by the group to have status and tribute, you know?

36:41And it's funny, you know, anthropologists, there's a certain, you know, group of anthropologists who are really invested in the idea that in hunter -gatherer groups, there was absolutely no hierarchy. That everybody was totally equal and that it was like classical communism. You know, like food was distributed according to need and everyone's stoved. Yeah, and there are reason for this like in the in the bushman, you know, the bushman of which for a while You weren't supposed to say the word bushman now you're supposed to say bushman again I apparently from what I what would you briefly supposed to say that you're not supposed to anymore You're supposed to call them like the the sun people or the kung people But now now I've read some things that they actually that you know some people actually think bushman is a better word I don't know but so I've sent all three words now so I should be safe equally safe or equally cancelled.

37:37Yeah. Yeah.

37:41So they have this wonderful ritual in their group that's called insulting the meat. And the way it works is when the young hunters come back from hunting, you know, like one, you know, most of them probably got nothing and one of them got like a little rabbit and then one of them got an antelope. And so the old men and women of the village, when hunters come back, they start insulting the hunter who got the antelope. And they're like, look at that scrawny thing. There's practically no meat on it. What is that a mouse? And they kind of go on like that in the way that you could picture uncles in Brooklyn on their stoop.

38:20They're shit talking. Yeah, shit talking essentially. And they call it insulting the meat. And so anthropology said, oh, look, you know, it's because they obviously don't want to have any status differentiation But but sort of modern modern anthropologists who use more biological methods what they they're really into measuring fertility so they'll they'll measure for you know over time, you know living with a group they'll measure okay, which hunters We're successful most often like what's the batting average of these different hunters and then 10 years later Okay, which of these hunters has the most children, you know, and surprise surprise the correlation between status measured by successful hunts and and reproductive reproductive success is just as high in a hunter -gatherer group as it is in the kingdoms, you know in the groups that that celebrate inequality.

39:19You can insult the meat all you want, but what can I say? That's a complete, that sentence for you. That's an attractive man carrying a good antelope and taking the bed. It's, there would be a serious incentive problem if the hunter's genuinely felt insulted. It's a status leveling thing, right? You don't want the hunter to get too big ahead because we all have to live together. But also if there was, think about it this way, if there was no reward for working that hard beyond the caloric input that you get, like you're working, you have this excess output, this additional risk, you know, if you're the one that takes down the antelope or the whatever, it's you, that's the one that's potentially going to be killed by it, you've got to drag it back presumably you're carrying it for a good chunk of the way, if not all of the way.

40:09Why? Why are you doing that? Is it just because you want to bestow your caloric excess surplus onto the group? Or is it because you think you're going to get laid? Or is it because you think that you're going to be your children are going to be better protected? Or that people are going to review you? Or that all of the downstream benefits that come from status are going to be bestowed on you? Obviously, that's going to be the case. Yeah, I think that what's really interesting about it is that pro -social behavior is socially rewarded, right? We can see in this group it's it's rewarded through social opportunities.

40:42In other groups that are hunter gatherer groups, like the Ache, they distribute food in a completely socialist way, but the productive hunters get better medical care. Like, if they're injured, the chief sees to it that they get the medical... The prayer retires the person that's providing all the food. Exactly, right? I mean, it's not surprising. But what's interesting is that evolution didn't just wire us to be calculating and to be revenue maximizing. Even though my economist colleagues tend to think that the world works that way, it also wired us to care about esteem as an end in itself, you know, the standing in which we are held and the internal esteem that we feel when we know that we've done the right thing.

41:38I think one of the reasons that we became wired with that sort of pride, shame system is because social rewards tend to come probabilistically and with considerable delay. So if I was a person who was only going to be social. Like I was only going to try to hunt hard if I was sure that there was a reward waiting for me. I wouldn't do it very often, you know. But if I'm wired that I want the feeling, you know, I want the feeling of being celebrated and the feeling of knowing I'm the contributor, then I probably will get more rewards because I'll do the pro -social thing more often. So I think we're wired for both.

42:28We're wired to contribute in order to be rewarded and we're wired to contribute as an end in itself. You know what I mean, that's what the conscience is, right? I've been thinking about this a lot more recently. I did a ton of therapy over the last year and if you do tons of psychotherapy and you're talking to someone face to face, your conscience apparently just the volume gets turned up and you can't hide things from yourself anymore. So yeah, I've been really thinking about that. You have this sort of, I don't know, It's like a representative of the group sat on your shoulder, your better self, sometimes just judging you.

43:03Should you have done that? Should you have said that? Is that a virtuous behavior? Is that a non -virtuous behavior? Like, what is that? If not, this sort of sense of social obligation to the rest of the world. Now, if you're religious, maybe it's your virtue speaking up on high, it's something a little bit more transcendent than that. But at least functionally, adaptively, why would it work? Well, it's to ensure that you know what other people would have thought about the thing that you just did or said or thought about doing. Yeah. Yeah, Freud, you know, Freud talks about the super ego as your sort of internalized voice of authority, but I really think it's more like it's the internalized voice of the, of the respected members of the community.

43:49You know, it's like your board of advisors, your internal board of advisors is suggesting that what you're about to do is unwise. And that's the emotion of pride shame is kind of like a good PR agency. It encourages you to do the things that are thought well of and it encourages you to decline the temptations to do things that are not thought well of. And then it also encourages you to publicize when you've done a good thing. So in every culture, when Olympic athletes win a gold medal, they go like this. They expand their body. They speak more loudly. And when people lose, they power. They disappear.

44:34They become smaller. So we not only have these emotions that are driving us to do what the group rewards, but we are also wired to showboat when we have done something well and to hide it when we have not done something. I just kind of round out the hero instinct bit. In a more socially complex group structure, where status bestows on certain people, the people that achieve it, benefits. That requires a degree of experimentation, adventure, risk -taking, divergence from the peer instinct, which would be more conformist. So someone's going to go and do this thing. We then have benefits bestowed to that person, which is the reward for them taking the risk effectively and well and pulling it off, doing the dance, killing me the antelope, whatever.

45:31And then downstream from that, because you now have this kind of social capital capitalist system where everybody is trying to accrue as much social equity as they can, I look at the person that's done really well and I think, okay, well, he did that. What are some of the principles that I can take from that? Maybe specifically or maybe even sort of more philosophically? Well, he did something different, or he was courageous, or he was, you know, honorable, or whatever it might is that a good framing for heroine state? Yeah, and I think, I don't know, when I was writing about this, and obviously I've been reading a lot, and I do research in the area, but I often reflect back on when I was an adolescent, like when I was in high school.

46:17And I feel like a lot of my mental life in those days when I was unfolding as a person was these Walter Mitty -like fantasies fantasies of heroic action and glory, you know, like, oh, the high school caught on fire. Oh, I'm going to save the pretty girl, you know, or, oh, you know, my parents are in a car crash. Well, I'm going to, you know, go run and get, get medical attention. You know, it was all this constant scenarios about things that I might do, which, you know, I would regard as, you know, I think a lot of our fantasies, whether they're sexual fantasies are fantasies about achievement, they reflect, you know, these programs that are partially evolved programs and then take on a particular cultural, you know, instantiation, but they're programs for action.

47:09And so I think that probably these hero scripts, you know, that go through our heads are gendered and they may take a different form and different subcultures, but they they certainly seem to be things that are essential parts of your mental life, especially when you're young. When you get older, then you're actually doing things. But you don't have time to dream. You're too busy with tasks. Yeah. Yeah. And then there are people like, I don't know, Walter Midi might be a reference where I'm aging myself, but it's a story by James Thurber about this guy who goes through his life, fantasizing about acting heroically, but never doing it.

47:53And it was sort of a commentary on modernity. But I think that there's also some interesting studies that help us understand who are the Walter Middies and who are the people who actually step forward and do contribute to groups at a sacrifice to their own safety or a sacrifice to their own comfort, and then gain the actual glory rather than just the fantasized glory. Yeah, I'm gonna have to ask you if I imagine that you do know, I want to have a conversation with someone about the psychology of courage and bravery. Yeah, I'm sure that there's somebody out there that's done it, but it's something I've been pretty fascinated by recently, and it sounds like that, you know, you posit an ideal, you find yourself falling short from that ideal, and it's all, it's not due to something structural, it's simply due to your own commission, your own lack of willingness of effort.

48:51Yeah, well, in my book, Tribal, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to mention it, but I write about this one study that I found fascinating. There was this program called the freedom summer, which was designed to help register African -American voters in the state of Mississippi in the 1960s when a very small percentage of African -Americans were registered to vote because, you know, arbitrary inconveniences were put in place to stop them. So this group said, okay, we will train Idealistic college students to go for the summer to Mississippi and they'll go to every community and they'll sort of build trust with people and then help people Thought out the paperwork so that we have a much higher rate of registered African -American voters and applications were taken and all different colleges across the country and people answered all sorts of questions and sent in their applications and then the best people were selected.

50:02And they were brought to a university in Ohio, not in the South, for some initial training. And then just when the first volunteers were sent down to Mississippi, several of them were murdered in a very brutal way by the KKK. And that created a crisis in the program, as you might expect, where people thought this was going to be a difficult summer, but they didn't they didn't think they were going to get murdered. And so a third of the people, I'm trying to remember, I think a third of the people stayed and two -thirds of the people decided probably don't want to do this in the end. And then you know they ran the program at a slightly smaller scale than they expected and there were no more killings but there were or some difficult circumstances.

50:55And after the fact, this sociologist realized all those applications are still on record. So I wanna go back and look at those applications and see if I can distinguish who were the stares and who were the quitters, right? Who were the people who stayed even though suddenly it was looking like a much tougher gig, you know, it was looking like something that was going to be dangerous. And what was interesting is that these people had written essays about their political values and they had talked about their experience being involved in political activism and that sort of thing. And none of those things mattered.

51:39None of those things differed between the stares and the quitters. The only thing that differed was that the stares were people who happened to have close personal friends who were also in the program and were people who were part of organizations that were involved with the program. Like they belonged to a political organization that was one of the sponsors of the program. So the conclusion was that these people were embedded in relationships where they couldn't quit without really disappointing some people that they they definitely were gonna see again, right? They were definitely gonna see the political club that they were a part of back in their hometown.

52:25And they definitely were gonna see their friends who are also a part of this group. So these being in a network of people who are committed to a cause, it sort of anchors you to that cause. So that you stay with it, even when the going gets tough. saying that the key to bravery and courage is social pressure. Social pressure and social incentives, right? It's a sense of support if you do it well and a sense of studies of military has found that, why do people risk their life on the battlefield? Is it for their country? Is it because they care about democracy? No, it's because of their buddies from boot camp.

53:09Is their buddies from boot camp who are out there and they're not gonna run, if their body's out there. Even in insurgent groups, or you might call them terrorist groups, there was a theory that terrorists were mentally ill, crazy people, but then when people actually did studies, they typically found the inconvenience finding that these terrorists were above average in mental health and were not these weird, deviant loners. they were popular people well connected. And so it's because for the same reason the people who are central members of the community like the mosque or whatever if the mosque gets radicalized, radicalized those are the people who are going to throw stones or throw mollus of cocktails.

53:58I had Edward Stlingland on the show. Oh yeah, he's one of the researchers of this material. It's phenomenal. So he did that book about alcohol over time. And he told me this really great story about how it's very common Initiation slash bonding ritual for armies troops to drink together. Maybe not the night before the battle but at some point not too far off and it's The impact of alcohol fascinating. It makes you worse at lying because it down regulates your PFC, but it makes you better as a lying detector. So it's this sort of a truth -see -remill you that gets thrown through everything. But even more important than all of that is the fact that you're going to feel like shit the next day.

54:46It's the suffering, the shed suffering that you go through. So when you're on the battlefield with your buddies in a week's time, and there's a ton of horses charging at you and you've got your pikes in the ground or whatever, There is this sense of shared camaraderie because you were being through something already that was difficult, albeit maybe just a rough hangover. But yeah, I just really love that idea. I love, you know, we often, and I think this is something that's potentially robbed from modern generations who get too coddled, too cotton wool, helicopters, no -plop herented, that if you don't, not only do people not create the ability to be anti -Fragile and resilient against life individually, but they don't get the opportunity to go through the really important formative bonding processes of sharing in that suffering, sharing in that discomfort with other people too.

55:38And you know, as somebody who, I spent a lot of time in solitude, I'm an only child, this business, and everything that I've done is in one form or another being on my own, the more that I'm able to let other people in, the guys that work with me now on the podcast, the people that I worked with in my events company previously, the more that I can do that, the more I feel like I've got sort of stabilizing wheels to sort of weather the ups and downs, the turbulence that comes along with stuff. Because I'm like, fuck, we're in it together. We're in it together. They're doing it for me. I'm doing it for them.

56:11Isn't this cool? And yeah, it's good. It's noble. It's definitely functional as well. Yeah, I'm in a pretty solitary profession myself, you know, being a behavioral scientist and a professor. And I found that even I tend to like courses that are team taught, you know, the core courses where we have to have a team of professors who all go and deliver the same material in the same day to different groups. Even though there are more work, there's something wonderful about that experience of being in a shared battle. Then you regroup at the end of the day and how did it go? Oh, yeah, my afternoon session was a nightmare.

56:53Oh, good to have been worse than mine. The commiseration and working together. Yeah, it's a wonderful bonding experience. In a lot of traditional cultures, particularly ones that are cultures where people have to hunt or people are in battles where people are warriors, you have rights of passage that adolescents go through that are really dysphoric, that involve painful and frightening experiences that you typically go through with your age mates, you know, with the group of people within one or two years of you, And you are for the rest of your life bonded with those people because you've you've gone through this terrifying painful experience with them.

57:41Okay, and then we've got the ancestor instinct. Yes, the ancestor instinct is the most recently evolved wave of adaptations that contributes to our ability to live in tribes. And in some ways, it sounds like the most primitive of them. It's the urge to replicate the ways of past generations to maintain traditions. It, we can recognize it in ourselves. It's our curiosity about past generations of our family or the original family recipe for this meal. We sort of fetishize antiques, you know, objects that come from the past. We want to hear about founders, not just the founders of our nations, but the founders of religions, the founders of the organizations that we are a part of.

58:38So we have this kind of irrational curiosity, this kind of irresistible curiosity about the past and this impulse to maintain these ways. And we feel really good when we maintain a tradition because we feel that we feel connected not just to the current community but to the past generations of the community. And many anthropologists think that it has something to do with our fundamental fear of mortality, that because we are the animal that knows that we will die, we have a sort of latent terror about our mortality. But if we feel like we are part of this enduring tradition, then we can feel that we are part of something that will also endure for many generations into the future so that it's less terrifying.

59:37We have a kind of indirect immortality from our membership in a culture. So the ancestor instinct, the reason it was adaptive is that it allowed early human groups to hang on to the discoveries and the inventions of past generations, even ones that weren't immediately needed. So it's what you see at this time is you start seeing that But not just like the, it was not just the case that people were replicating the tools like the spears that were being made by the prior generation. But they were also replicating the cave art and the, you know, the little venous figurines and the bone flutes, things that didn't have an immediate instrumental purpose.

1:00:26But it was something the past generation was doing. So therefore, let's treat it with reverence. Let's continue it. We're not sure why we're doing it, but give me the adaptive reason because this just seems like superfluous archaic bullshit. Well, the great thing about it about, you know, it's sort of corresponds to like myths and rituals, right? Why did we have this ritual learning modality where we sort of learn something by root and then we repeat it even though we don't understand it? Well, it allows us to learn things that kind of go beyond our understanding. Maybe the past generation figured out some way of making a fishing net.

1:01:06We don't really understand why it works. But if we have this kind of sacrosanct attitude toward it, we will just copy it the same way it was, and then it allows us to benefit from the technology even if we wouldn't be able to invent it. Or imagine that we're a group that lives near the ocean, and there's a tsunami that happens maybe every 60 years. If there's a myth about the tsunami and we repeat that myth, even though generations go by without a tsunami, but we still repeat the myth, the myth is there to protect us when the tsunami does come. And it's not a hypothetical example. There's a group that are sometimes called sea gypsies that live pretty much on the water in Thailand and they were not, they did not lose many people in the great tsunami of 2006.

1:02:05We don't remember though many people in the coastal villages died because they have all these songs and myths about how the ocean looks when there's a tsunami. It's tricky. You know, the ocean actually recedes before a tsunami, which is like an invitation to go look the title pools, but if you have a lore in your culture of like if the ocean ever recedes head for the hills, you know, that's an adaptive, it's an adaptive cultural lesson. Are there any other seemingly superfluous cultural artifacts that you've fallen in love with during research for this that ended up being quite adaptive or just had a kind of interesting use?

1:02:53Well, there are many examples where I, you know, like I was like, oh my God, you know, I didn't know that. I wouldn't have suspected that. They're not necessary. Not all of them are things that have been adapted for me personally, but like, you know, we have this, we have this myth about a primordial flood, you know, the Moses story, right? And many things about the story, even as a child, when you hear it, you're like, this is made up nonsense, right? like, like, yeah, he built a boat just by himself. And then he had all these animals. It doesn't, but it turns out that groups all around the world have myths about a primordial flood.

1:03:32And around, I guess around 8 ,000 years ago, there was a major rise in the oceans that corresponded to the end of some kind of mini -ice age or something. I can't remember the exact geological details, but the ocean level rows all around the world and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have, they all have myths about a primordial flood. They have different kinds of myths about like what the ocean did. And a few years ago, some anthropologists who had collected the flood myths all around the country, they teamed up with some geologists who built simulations based on the topography of different parts of Australia.

1:04:24And what they found is that the myths of these groups correspond pretty well to what we can simulate happen 7 ,000 years ago in that part of Australia. So, you know, these really traumatic events, they get really well preserved by myths because we treat myths in such a sacrosanct way, you know, where you're not allowed to tell your version of the, you know, Noah's story. You know, you're supposed to tell the exact version that's in the Bible and similarly in these Aboriginal groups, you're supposed to tell, you know, the exact story of the primordial flood myth. So, you know, the Moses story, sorry, I keep saying Moses, it's the Noah story.

1:05:11The Noah story is our primordial flood myth, but it likely is the remnant of this event that happened, that really happened. Yeah, to you, it may just seem like a whimsical story, but it's actually geology and meteorology masquerading as a tale from the past. Yeah, and it lasted in the oral tradition for thousands of years. This is written down. This is one of the fascinating things. I had a great conversation with Alex O 'Connor, who is a atheist skeptic type person out of Oxford, but very open to the idea of religion. And he was arguing for the side of religion and saying that basically in the modern world what we told was for people to let go of the thing that they found most easy to believe, which was story, it was a persona and personification, it was narrative, and to start to believe in the thing, which is the least believable, which is data and stats.

1:06:08And it's very sterile. And when we have to sort of do, we have to put ourselves into this very different type of world, this very different type of mindset in order to be able to go. And this, many people will be saved by a mosquito net, etc etc as opposed to what we lived through for our entire human history and yes the problem with that is that you can't it's unfalseifiable it allows all sorts of fuckery to be slipped in here and there but yeah I always think about that frame I always think about things that are figuratively true but literally false or things that are functionally true but literally false and things that are literally true but functionally false and that myth story you know very well be maybe one of those things that's literally not that true, but functionally is like perfect.

1:06:58Right. Right. In the sense that it, you know, it provides a warning, you know, the person who lived to tell the story probably had some sort of boat. Yeah. So I was someone who grew up as a very individualistic and very rationalistic person when I was young and I studied the humanities and I was told that what distinguished humans from the beasts was our rationality, our morality and maybe our aesthetics, right? That's the glorified notion of what makes humans humans. And in the process of doing the research for this book, I came to see that as very incomplete, that some of the things that make us human and that enabled us to build these wonderful, comfortable civilizations that we live in today are conformity, status seeking, and kind of nostalgia about the past, sentimentality about the ways of the past.

1:08:05And these are the kinds of things I always used to critique my parents for, you know, like, So yeah, I think that I have come to a different understanding of the world, you know, through thinking a lot about how the mighty have fallen. Okay, so what about what are the levers that pull on tribalism? What causes culture or tribalism to ossify more, offer it to change or become more contagious? Great question. One of the themes that I try to express is that there's a myth that cultures are kind of like permanent fixtures. You know, that the red and the blue party that we see today in the United States will be around forever.

1:08:54I always have that false. You know, like I'm old enough to know that it was completely different when I was a kid. There was as much variation within the Democratic Party as there was between, you know, there was Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. And so cultures are in flux. And the cultures that individuals in small groups express are in flux in an even more rapid way, because we all internalize multiple cultures and the situations that we go into trigger different cultures. So I'm meeting you in your podcast self, but I'm sure if I knew you from the gym or if I knew you from church or whatever else you do in your life, I would see a different Chris, I would see a different person.

1:09:43So we have short term fluctuations based on situations, and then we have long term evolution of cultures, and there are levers of those short term changes and levers of the long term changes. So in the short term, these three instincts, these three levels of tribal motivation, they are triggered by slightly different things. So the peer instinct, this kind of conformity, this kind of a set of shared habits that we just jump into, it's triggered by the more than anything else by the audiences around us, by the ways that they speak, by the ways that they dress. What we call code switching is an example of this.

1:10:32So when Barack Obama used to speak on a slightly different register when he was in front of an African American group, as opposed to a group of farmers from Kansas, that wasn't something that he was doing intentionally. That was just a reflex that came from the fact that he grew up with a mixed family and with different parts of his life living in each of those communities. And when he's in front of people who look a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and yes, you know, have certain ethnic characteristics, although that is less fundamental to it. He clicks into one set of speech habits or another set of speech habits.

1:11:15And some of my research, you know, pushed a little deeper on that and showed that it's It's not just speech habits, it's your basic biases in making sense of the world, making sense of ambiguous events. Cultures have different biases. And when you are around an audience from one of your cultures, you start thinking with that worldview and when you're around people from another one. So when I'm around my fellow professors, I'm thinking in terms of data. I'm thinking in terms of economic theory, that kind of thing. When I go to my hometown and I'm with my buddies and a dive bar, I'm thinking in terms of different templates, different scripts, ones that help me bond with them and help me be understood by them, but that wouldn't work as well with my colleagues at Columbia.

1:12:09So it's audiences, the tribes that were around that trigger those peer instincts. And then for hero instincts, the impulses to contribute, the impulses to sacrifice and do something exemplary for the group. Some very potent triggers of that are cultural symbols. So for the longest time, armies would follow a national flag into battle. Crusaders followed the cross. you know, they took the cross. Sports teams, you know, they, the mascot runs out on the field and people go crazy. And then be something similar. Was that an anthem? Exactly. Exactly. An anthem. You know, whether it's a national anthem or whether it's, you know, the fans will chant a song in the stadium.

1:13:01So it's a kind of set of images or a set of words or, you know, phrases like, you know, in the United States, if you say, all men are created equal. You trigger a certain political creed, which is why Martin Luther King quoted the Declaration of Independence when he was trying to build a broad coalition for civil rights. These symbols, these cultural icons are potent triggers of hero instincts. If you want to get people to be pro -social, to take risks, to make sacrifices, surround them with the symbols of their tribe. And then the one that is maybe least obvious is the ancestry instinct. What is it that causes people to start thinking in terms of tradition and letting tradition guide them?

1:13:54One of the kinds of cultural cues that is most important is ceremonies. So ceremonies are public events that involve symbols, but that often involve synchronous movement. So you're talking in unison, you're moving in unison, you're often marching or you're in church, you're getting up and down in a yoga class, you're going through these positions together. And there's even a neuroscience literature on this that synchronous behavior, it loals people into a different mental state where their self -concept as an individual is reduced. They become more open to unity experience. Their critical thinking is somewhat reduced.

1:14:41And so they become more open to this idea of accepting tradition. So if you have a moment in a yoga class or in a religious service where suddenly you feel part of a tradition, you know, that's because you've been in a ceremony and ceremonies bring that out in us. I suppose that's the one of the vectors of weakness that cults, cult leaders, you take advantage of too. Make people more suggestible. You are a part of a bigger thing. Do you not feel this sense of connection to the wider world? Yeah. Yeah. In cults, I mean, there are daily ceremonies, you know, where you're kind of made to feel part of a broader system.

1:15:25Your individual self -consciousness gets dampened. And I think people join cults because this unity experience is a wonderful thing to experience. It's a, you know, a lot of us will experience it on a sports team or, you know, if you're part of a political campaign and you're throwing yourself into it, you feel part of something larger and you're making sacrifices for that group and you feel connected to prior generations of people in the same community. So it's a wonderful experience that people get when they start to join a cult. And then I think cults differ from just a strong culture in some of their recruitment techniques.

1:16:09One thing that really characterizes cults is what's called network isolation, where they will find somebody who maybe is not tightly embedded in a community, like maybe a transfer student who is new on a large campus or someone who's recently gotten out of the army and hasn't really started work yet, and they will invite that person to some social activity, it may be a volleyball game or a dinner, and they love bomb them. They surround them with people who hang on their every word and tell them they have spiritual potential and make them feel wonderful. And if they respond well, then they get an invitation to come to our groups retreat.

1:16:55It's in this beautiful mountain setting where cell phones don't work and where there are there are no newspapers and no television. And then you have long days of getting up early, eating a low protein diet, maybe meditating, chanting, hiking together, listening to charismatic lectures, having sort of confession sessions. And this is the same routine that seminaries use to recruit priests. It's the same routine that the Muslim brotherhood uses is to recruit, it's nothing, Colts don't have a monopoly on this set of recruitment techniques, but basically what you're doing is you're pulling somebody out of the mixed social network that they ordinarily live in.

1:17:37And then after the retreat, usually 10 or 20 % of the people are willing to move into a cult residence. And then once they're in the cult residence, then they're told, you know, you should probably cut off some of these old friends because they don't really get it about the important work we're doing here in the cult or at least give them a break. And maybe you don't talk to your family so much because a lot of families, they may seem like good people, but they're a little bit hostile to the church, you know. And then of course the family gets angry because they haven't heard from you and they do things like trying to kidnap you or trying to convince you that the cult is bad.

1:18:16And that ends up corroborating what the cult has been saying. And then you get into a world where you're living in a day -to -day routine where you're completely surrounded by fellow cult members and they look up to the cult leaders and the cult leaders basically have this monopoly on status. Nobody else in your world has status. You're not seeing deference to anybody else and that's when it gets really dangerous because it's abnormal, you know, in normal life. Even if you're wonderful person, but you're also a big fan of Messi and you like the music of Mick Jagger. So no one of these heroes can dominate you completely, but when you're in a cult and you're not allowed to listen to Mick Jagger, you're not allowed to watch Messi and it's all day long ceremonies involving the cult leader, that gets dangerous.

1:19:12What about factors or situations in the environment that cause people to focus more on either collaboration or on competition? You know, I kind of have it in my head around warfare, peacetime, wartime threat, etc. Surely those sorts of things, but there must be a ton of these. You're right. In addition to these sort of social triggers, or who you're around, or who, like whether you're in a ceremony or you're seeing symbols or you're seeing audiences, particular emotional states also contribute to these things. And so, threat tends to be something particularly existential threat, like the fear of death, a brush with death, or the fear of collective threat, like, you know, there's some sort of threat to your organization or threat to your country, that leads people to cling to traditions in ways that they don't do otherwise.

1:20:18So that can be very tricky in terms of setting off dysfunctional traditionalism, because in a corporation, when there's a tendency to think that your own traditions are wonderful and that the competition, their traditions are silly, but then imagine it's a time of threat. Like your business is not doing well. Well, the tribal reflex is to cling to your traditions even more, but that's not adaptive because that's really a time when you want to be learning from the competition. You want to be open -minded. Similarly, in warfare, if you're trying to negotiate a peace treaty, but there's a risk of death because there's been some killing, well, that makes it harder for people to take the perspective of the other side.

1:21:21So, threat leads people to anchor on their own traditions, on their own group. How much of that, do you think, is playing into the modern world, the polarization side of tribalism? Lots of headlines, very scary news out there, threat. Yeah.

1:21:44I don't know. So, you know, like, I mean, when COVID happened, you know, a lot of people were dying. And, but I don't know that it, it, I don't know that it led to partisan polarization. I do think that in the, you know, in, we see a lot of tribalism with regard to the Israel Gaza conflict, you know, the campus that I teach in has been, it's sort of like getting into an airport to get into the main campus because there's been protests that were very disruptive and now there's like really strong management of who can enter the campus. And I think that that was a conflict that escalated and became a very acrimonious because of the brutality of not just that people died, but that people just died in a horrible way, both on October 7th and in Gaza.

1:22:55So I do think in a case like that, people start to even though their fellow college students are marching and chanting and calling their, their classmates, Nazis. And it's bizarre because, yeah, there is a big problem in the world, but your fellow Columbia undergraduates are not the problem. But there's this tendency for the, these protests started as vigils, vigils expressing solidarity for vulnerable civilians in Israel and in Gaza. But then a few months later, where the protests were accusations, you know, accusing the opposite faction of students of being Nazis and being genocidal. So I do think in that case, because people are aware of the mortality and the bloodshed, there's this way in which people take on this exaggerated sense of being, you know, vulnerable themselves.

1:24:07like some of my, some of my Israeli colleagues who are leaders in the, in the protests, they would say things like, you know, my children would be more safe, you know, in Israel or in the Gaza Strip than they are at the Columbia campus. And I'm like, okay, there's not a lot of threat to physical, there's a threat to people's peace of mind because there's been some harassment, but there are not people being killed. Well, even that is the threat to your ideological mental model purity, because you're going to brush up against and push up against other people that say you're wrong. That thing's not right.

1:24:51This conflation between emotional or intellectual insults with physical ones, and even And the ratcheting up of emotional insults is being something that you're never supposed to encounter is a really interesting pivot. So I guess we've laid out a nice paradigm. So I want to kind of come back to where we started, which was your compelling science that proves that we don't hate outsiders, that it is an us thing, not a them thing. Like I say, the internet, unfortunately, and again, you are, you've chosen a hell of a time to release a book given the recent election. But a lot of people will just think, this can't be the case.

1:25:36I've heard all of these stories about how people aren't voting for their own side, the voting against the other, look at the messaging, look at the fear, look at the, etc. There is hostility. I'm not arguing that there's no hostility in these conflicts. I'm just saying it doesn't start from hostility. It doesn't start from a drive to derogate and fear outsiders and that solidarity within one's group does not imply or necessitate antagonism towards other groups. And now that may sound like semantic hair splitting, but it's not because the diagnosis that this discourse that we talked about of people saying like a deeply buried drive to hate outsiders has somehow, atavistically, reawoken to doom us to a future of interness on, you know, it's like very grandiose rhetoric and it doesn't suggest a mealier, it doesn't suggest ameliorative policies because, well, if we're cursed by some drive to hate and to be hostile, that is not something that we can really work with.

1:26:55But if, for example, we believe that the root of the increased partisan conflict has to do with this conformity instinct, which got into a feedback loop because it created residential sorting and then news media sorting. And then once you're in these inbred environments, then being conformist created different political worlds. If that's your diagnosis, well, there are things you can do about it. you can break out of your bubble. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where there are not a lot of Trump signs and there are a lot of Harris signs and then even the businesses are like Lululemon and Whole Foods which basically don't operate in Republican districts.

1:27:48These are blue tribe symbols, blue tribe icons. And I've been quite busy the last couple days because I'm buying a house upstate and upstate. It's different, you know, upstate. If I'm going to be spending more time up there, I'm not going to be constantly reinforced and constantly triggered to think about the world through these blue -trod lenses because I won't be in an ideologically inbred environment all the time. And there are things we can do beyond ourselves personally. You know, there's been a lot of efforts to create dialogue dialogue across the red, blue factions of society. Some of it's going on at universities or town, gown, bringing the university students to talk to the people in the university town who may not share their view or we bring some of our students to industrial towns in the Midwest that have suffered from globalization.

1:28:51The first wave of these programs, very well intentioned, But a lot of them had names like Red Meets Blue or Town Gown Encounter or Hello from the other side. And it sort of accentuated that you are about to be confronted with one of them, one of these people from the other side. And that raises defenses. That's not a form of interaction that people tend to learn more moderate views from. And the kinds of programs that the research suggests are more effective are their named things like Coffee Party USA, Make America Dinner Again, Open Lands Discussions. And the logic here is you bring together, you deliberately bring together people that you know are registered Republicans and Democrats, but not to talk about divisive political issues.

1:29:49You know, to talk about things, passions that have in common, like they're all like coffee, or they're all foodies, or they're all Christian believers, or they're all people who, you know, are outdoors people. And the idea is you start talking, and then you move from this conversation to that conversation, and you maybe eventually get to politics, but the conversation is one that is bonding and one that is more likely to last than if you ask people to discuss global warming or if you ask people to discuss abortion or something like that doesn't lead to usually a conversation that lasts very long.

1:30:27So I think the diagnosis does matter when it comes to trying to think about what can we do to get ourselves out of this bind that we're in. that it's not like we've always been in this bind, it's something that happened in the last couple generations for particular reasons that involve the interaction of some of our tribal psychology with some technological changes and demographic changes. And we can find our way out of it. And we're not, the doomsayers often will say things like America has never been more divided politically. That is absolutely nonsense if you know your history You know, Abraham Lincoln took over with less than 40 % of the popular vote.

1:31:12Seven states seceded before his inauguration. Civil war started, you know, a few weeks afterwards. And you know, that's what we call a political rift, you know, where your country is in a civil war. You are not considered to be a legitimate president by a lot of people. And that's a real struggle. But it's really interesting to me what he thought was the answer to that in his first inauguration. He said, you know, he talked about the daunting prospect of what the country faced. And then he said, I'm not going to get this perfect, but something like the mystic cords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the union.

1:31:58And what he meant by that is that the best resource we have for healing the rift is our common heritage, our common history, our common ancestors. And if we think about them, we will feel like our current divide is not such a big deal. And the other thing that Abraham Lincoln did, which is kind of a seasonally topical point, is that he is the one who instituted the holiday of Thanksgiving. Most Americans have the notion that Thanksgiving has been practiced ever since the pilgrims landed on these shores. That's a myth that was created in part by Abraham Lincoln and the people around the thought leaders of the day who believed that this holiday would be an effective way to unify the country.

1:32:50They made reference to the precedents of the pilgrims and the precedents of George Washington holding a Thanksgiving event. In order to make people feel like this new holiday was not some alien thing, but was something that was already a time honored tradition, already something that was part of the American tradition. and it became an instant tradition within a decade or so of Abraham Lincoln announcing that we're going to have this new holiday Thanksgiving. It was a sacred national tradition and it's something that helped bring the country back together. So I think we talk a lot about references to the past involved in divisive populism, like talking about the good old days as a way to blame immigrants for a problem.

1:33:39But talking about history has also been useful for inclusive populism, for creating a broader group identity, for reminding people that we all share certain ancestors. So I'm someone who I don't believe that we're seeing the end of democracy. I think that the problems that we face are not larger than the problems that our country has come through before, or that other democracies have come through before. And that, you know, it's helpful to have a diagnosis that is realistic rather than a diagnosis that is You know, Manakayan that talks about sort of, you know, good versus evil. The end of the world You know, this kind of really grandiose grandiose ways of talking about our situation

1:34:26Yes, maybe less sexy, but hopefully a lot more inspiring and And more accurate as well Dr. Michael Morris, ladies and gentlemen, I really love this orthogonal approach to tribalism. I think that we need to try and draw back some of that. And it's so interesting to think about the positive outcomes that you get from having this, from having access to teamwork, from having access to aiming up, from having access to your history trends, archetypes from the past. It's a... It's cool. It's a travel, travel psychology is what made us human and underlies all of our proudest accomplishments. It goes awry sometimes, yes, like every instinct does, you know, but if we understand the instinct, then we can, we can manage that.

1:35:20Michael, where should people go to keep up to date with all of your work? Well, I have a book website that's called tribalbook .org that is a good place to go to learn more about my book. I also have a site called MichaelWMorris .com where you can learn a lot about my research and the kind of courses that I teach as well as learning about the book and other things that I've written. Time right Michael. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.