Modern WisdomWhy Are We More Divided Than Ever? - Michael Morris
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,038 words- 0:00 – 7:45
Why Does Tribalism Exist?
- CWChris Williamson
Why does tribalism exist? Why, why did it evolve?
- MMMichael Morris
Well, tribalism is what, uh, got us out of the Stone Age. It's what, uh, led to our human-specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees. Um, they live in minimally collaborative troops that can never get larger than about 50 individuals, or they turn into a bloodbath. And we evolved, uh, some social quirks that enable us to live in culture sharing groups, and these culture sharing groups allow for a level of collaboration and, um, c- common fate and common concern that, that is not, uh, present in other, uh, in any other social species. And so tribes, uh, tribes are large groups united by shared culture, and our tribal instincts were, you know, adaptations or mutations that changed our psychology slightly to enable us to live in this kind of group, and it just turned out to be the ultimate killer app of evolution, because once we were in these culture sharing groups, uh, it snowballed. You know, the, the cultures started getting more complex and more adapted to the local ecology with each generation, and then humans, without becoming any brainier, were more capable of surviving and thriving because they could tap into these better cultures each generation, and they just left all the other species in their dust, you know, so that's the basic story about tribalism. And we're stuck with it because it's in our wiring.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MMMichael Morris
You know, it doesn't always lead us to do the right thing, but, um, I still believe that it's mostly adaptive, that our tribal instincts enable us to do most of the things that we are proud of and that we benefit from. Uh, we notice it more when it leads us to do things that are dysfunctional, and certainly there are examples of that in the world today.
- CWChris Williamson
That, uh, so tribalism is predicated on culture, that without culture there can be no tribalism. Is that, is that a fair assessment?
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah, that's a fair way to say it, and that's not always, that's not always a prominent theme. I mean, most of the talk about tribalism is by the sort of political pundits, you know, and they're just kind of grasping for a catchall explanation to understand, you know, the red/blue rift, and the record racial protests, and religious conflicts, and, you know, it's, it's an easy, quite facile thing to say, you know. "Oh, it's our resurgent tribalism." You know, "Our tribal instincts have reappeared," you know, and, "We're, we're, uh, we're descending into tribalism and our democracy will never be the same." You know, that's, that's what we've been hearing, and I think it's a... I call it the trope of toxic tribalism, and it, it's, it's a pretty despairing theme because the idea is that somehow, somehow the genie got out of the bottle and there's no way to get it back inside again, and I don't, I don't really think that's what's going on. I think, you know, we have some bad conflicts in the world today, but that's true, that's true every generation. Every generation thinks they're presiding over the, the end times, you know. What's new is this, this way of talking about the conflicts as though they reflect some evolutionary curse, you know, some, some drive to hate other groups that is always going to be, you know, undermining us, and I, I don't think that's true. I think that the tribal instincts are, are, are instincts that evolution sculpted in order to help us be culture sharing animals, and, uh, that enabled us to live in very large, collaborative groups. And a side effect of those tribal instincts is that we sometimes get into conflicts with other groups, but, you know, the- they're not instincts for hostility. They're instincts for solidarity. Uh, all of our instincts will lead us astray in some situations. You know, we, we evolved, we evolved to be attracted to sweet tastes because, you know, fruit has a lot of nutrition. Now, if you live on a block with two donut shops, you know, that, that wiring might lead you to eat in an unhealthy way. It doesn't mean that it's an instinct for gluttony. Uh, it's an instinct for food, and if we understand that, we have a better way of coping with the problem than if we think that we're cursed with some flawed wiring, which is, you know, a way of thinking about human nature that is kind of attractive in a tragic way, you know, like there are-
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think it is? 'Cause I, I, I've noticed this too, and look, I, I'm gonna fight the fight for the it seems like people hate out-groups more than they love in-groups today.
- MMMichael Morris
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna try and s- I'm gonna try and stress test it as much...
- MMMichael Morris
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... as possible.
- MMMichael Morris
Thank you, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, but what do you think is so alluring about this sort of myth of martyrdom, the, the, this w- woe is everything, it's all sort of bro-
- MMMichael Morris
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
W- why is it that that's a tempting, seductive, uh, talking point?
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah. Well, it's this kind of Manichaean message, right, that, you know, the, the world is coming to an end because, you know, along with our evolutionary blessing of intelligence and, you know, familial loyalty has come this, uh, curse of genocide, and you know, it's like, it's, you know, the person delivering the message feels very important, you know, and the people listening are spellbound, at least in the short term.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it gives everybody the opportunity to be Cassandra.
- MMMichael Morris
Exactly, yeah. And, you know, it's, it's, yeah, tr- tragic plays don't always...... don't always talk about the end of the world, but, um, even a tragic play which talks about the end of a particular person's life or success is, is kind of, um, riveting, you know, and always has been riveting. Uh, but yeah, I think, I think that, uh, the problem, the problem in the media, or the problem with thought leaders, you know, and you and I are probably, you know, prone to this, is that, uh, we get rewarded for dramatic statements. Uh, the more dramatic, the more worrisome, the more clicks, you know, the more, you know. So I think that there has been a cascade of Cassandras, you know. (laughs) There have been-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MMMichael Morris
Everybody wants to out-Cassandra the other Cassandras and, uh, become the pundit, uh, du jour. So, I think that, some of that has been going on, and, um ...
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I suppose-
- MMMichael Morris
What makes for good, what makes for good op-eds doesn't necessarily make for good policies. And that's, that's where I think, you know, a little bit more grounding in science when we talk about tribalism-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... would elevate the discussion a little bit.
- CWChris Williamson
The, uh, perverting incentives of clicks, it's, I wish I had a more sexy answer because it just seems so cliché and so obvious for me to say, "Well, people need to get attention, and this is how the attention economy works, and blah, blah, blah."
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And then downstream from what people say, other people believe, because people believe what others say, especially people who have been chosen by the media or, or whoever to be the proselytizers about our current level of culture. So, I think
- 7:45 – 12:00
Is Tribalism An ‘Us’ or ‘Them’ Thing?
- CWChris Williamson
an interesting framing is, is tribalism an us thing or a them thing? Like, how much of tribalism is in-group favoritism versus out-group persecution?
- MMMichael Morris
That's, that's really well put. I would say 95% of our tribal wiring is about us, not about them. Our, our evolutionary forebearers did not have that much contact with other tribes, you know. The, the population density in, in, uh, Stone Age Europe or, you know, Africa before that was very low. There were very few Homo sapiens total, you know. The, the whole, the entire population was like a small city today. So they didn't have that much contact with other, other tribes. What they had a lot of contact with was each other. You know, they had daily contact with each other, and what, what paid off evolutionarily was having traits and having capacities that enabled you to collaborate effectively with the fellow members of your tribe. And, um, evolutionary scholars can, you know, slice the salami very thinly when they talk about these adaptations, it, I, I'm someone who, I've been a, a business school professor and a sort of political consultant, organizational consultant for 20 years, and, and also a researcher of cultural psychology. So I tend to, uh, distinguish tribal instincts in three major waves, because I think it corresponds to three major systems in our group psychology that we can still recognize in ourselves today, and that, you know, effective leaders or activists or managers or coaches draw upon and harness today. Um, so I can go into those, but I think, I w- I would say in answer to your question is that it's 95% us instincts. Uh, they're not them instincts, because them instincts just wouldn't have been adaptive, right? You know, it wouldn't have been adaptive to go looking for other tribes to fight with, you know? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, yeah. Understood. So just to linger on that, I wanna get into, uh, peer, ancestor, et cetera, instinct in a bit, but what, what does it mean to have an us instinct in absence of a them instinct?
- MMMichael Morris
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
What does that mean? Surely only by there being a them can we define an us.
- MMMichael Morris
Well, I'm, uh, I'll agree partly with that. I think that an out-group is often a foil that allows for a more precise definition of the in-group and a stronger feeling of distinctiveness in the in-group. And part of in-group identity is usually trying to find some way to feel slightly better than another group. And it's interesting, when you look at studies all around the world, it's not like every group feels like they're more technologically advanced than everyone else, and it's not that everybody feels like they're better looking or that they are better athletes than everybody else. But almost every group in the world feels that somehow they're more humane, you know. They're, they're sort of more human than the other group. Uh, in a lot of indigenous groups, the name for their own group is also the name for human, you know. (laughs) So like, uh, uh, the implication being that, uh, other people are s- uh, slightly less human than-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... uh, than the in-group. So, um, yeah. So it, it is, once, you know, I, I can imagine that groups that had almost no contact with other human groups, they had contact with animals, they had contact with other kinds of things, they had some basis for a comparison. But, um, in the modern times where we have a lot of contact with other groups, it does become a salient part of how we define the in-group.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it.Interesting.
- 12:00 – 20:10
How the Modern World Encourages Tribalism
- CWChris Williamson
So I'm thinking about, e- again, ancestrally, let's think about some of the stories that would have been told about what the weather is, about the moon being a god or a goddess, about the sun being some sort of either benign or malevolent or assistant force in some way. You know, we have all of these, the- these, uh, personified stories that we have which created them. The them may be different species, different astral plane, different dimension, different whatever, um, but we have a them and an us. Is it your opinion then... I- I'm jumping way ahead, but, uh, this is just too interesting to ask. What has been so perverting about the modern world to cause tribalism to happen in the way that it is? Is it simply our exposure to the number of different ways that we can slice and dice and fracture and fragment society?
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah. Well, I guess, you know, it depends on what we mean by the modern world. Do we mean like contemporary times? I think that's what you mean. Like, why do we have political tribalism so much worse than just a few generations ago? Um, and I think you can tell very clear stories about these particular historical developments. Um, so in the case of the political tribalism in the States, and, and I think in, in many other, you know, Western democracies as well, you have political parties that didn't used to be a, a salient basis of individual identity, you know. Two generations ago, uh, my parents, they didn't know whether their neighbors were Democrats or Republicans, they didn't know if their work colleagues were Democrats or Republicans. You know, there's the occasional zealot who puts out a lawn sign, but that was, that was it. But what has happened in the United States, at least, over the, the last two generations, is you first had an enormous wave of residential sorting, uh, as technology changed and transportation changed. You know, you, you, you were freer to live in any part of the country that you wanted to, and liberals moved to the coasts and to the college towns, conservatives moved to the heartland and to, you know, the exurbs, and, um, that meant that, you know, you weren't going to the Norman Rockwell town meeting and listening to a wide range of opinions and having to reconcile your beliefs to your neighbors' beliefs. You were living in these ideologically inbred communities where when you went to the grocery store or the softball game or whatever, you kinda heard opinions very similar to the ones that you already held. And then starting in, I think, the '90s, you know, you had this fracturing of the media landscape, where previously, there were three network television shows that were required by the FEC to provide very boring, bland, balanced coverage o- of every issue. So everybody was listening to Walter Cronkite, everyone was getting their news from the same place, and everyone knew that everyone else was doing that, which contributes to that sense of common-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... common knowledge, right? Like, I know you watched Walt- Walter Cronkite last night, too, so I feel, uh, a lot of commonality with you. And what happened is you started to have cable news stations that were 24/7 news instead of one hour a night, and they were partisan. You know, you had Fox, you had MSNBC, and then the next generation were websites that were even more partisan, like Talking Points Bulletin or, you know, The Hill, and then you have social media feed, which is even more of an echo chamber for reasons that, you know, we've all talked a lot about in the last years. You know, that it's not just that I am connected to people who share my politics, but that I have ready opportunities to, to spout off on my politics and get massively reinforced for it. Uh, the, the costs of virtue signaling have gone way down and the rewards have gone way up, you know, compared to the old days where you had to actually go to a political rally and shout in someone's face and maybe get shoved, you know (laughs) ? So, um, so, yeah. So we've had this, first, this fracturing or this, this sort of change in our residential landscape, and then a change in our media landscape, where we get our news from, and one of the, th- the fundamental, uh, tribal instincts is what I call the peer instinct, and it's, it's something we all know about. It's our, it's our tendency to conform, it's our tendency to imitate what we see around us, more than we realize. It happens unconsciously. And that's become the primary way that we form political beliefs. We, we sort of learn by osmosis from what we're seeing on TV and what we're hearing f- across the neighbor's fence, and so we, we have these political beliefs that we think are well-informed, but they, they come from a relatively narrow range of the full opinion spectrum. Uh, but because we consume more news than ever before, we, we're confident in our beliefs, and then we, we w- hear a politician from the other party on television and we just, w- we're just dumbfounded. You know, we, we, we're baffled, we don't understand how they could possibly believe what they're saying, and so then, then the attribution is, well, maybe they don't believe it and they're, they're not sincere and they're just-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... saying it 'cause it's in their self-interest, even though they know it's wrong. Or, uh, they have some cognitive problems, you know (laughs) ? There were, the, that accusation was being made about, you know, Biden, about Trump, then about Harris, right? You know, we had so many accusations of, uh, IQ deficiencies.
- CWChris Williamson
Apparently, everybody's got senility or dementia now, you know.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah, of some kind, right? Um, so whether you think that they're being insincere or you think that they lack cognitive acuity, it's, you know, it's not a very charitable, uh, attribution. And so y- there are negative feelings-And, um, so I think that's, that's how this, this, this sort of antipathy for the opposite party-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... and this polarization has become so much more salient in the last two generations than it was in our parents' or grandparents' time. And it's not something that came from an innate drive to hate. It, it came from this conformist instinct, which is, which is an us instinct, you know? It's, it's an affinity for the in-group. It's a, it's a desire to mesh with the in-group that, that operates pretty subconsciously. And we're not aware of how much it drives us, and we, we, we kind of n- naively think that we have an accurate view of reality but in fact, you know, our view of reality is conformist, and the other side's view of reality is conformist, but w- we don't realize our own bias so their bias looks so extreme to us that we then start to attribute all sorts of negative things to them. So that's, that's what I think, and what I think a lot of behavioral scientists think about political tribalism, and then, you know, uh, there is also tribalism ethnically and racially in the United States that has escalated in the last, you know, 10, 20 years after a long period of progress, and, you know, I think that we can explain that in terms of the us instincts, not in terms of hate. And that's an important correction, because there's this enormous, you know, DEI industry that is not exclusively, but it, it largely makes use of bias training workshops where people are told that they have a sort of unconscious hate for the other side, and it makes people feel falsely accused, and there's a lot of evidence that it polarizes groups. It, it, it, it makes people more inhibited about interacting or mentoring or hiring across ethnic lines, so it, it can have counterproductive effects. Um...
- CWChris Williamson
What
- 20:10 – 25:01
Tribalism Vs Polarisation
- CWChris Williamson
... Yeah, I think i- i- it's good to move on from, uh, just focusing on sort of political divides, uh, only a week or so after the election, still in the blast radius of that. Um, but yeah, when I think about, uh, tribalism, and I keep on getting it in my head, it's not just tribalism, it's polarization, and I think that the word is being used interchangeably.
- MMMichael Morris
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
It seems like you maybe have a more sort of scientifically grounded, uh, definition of what tribalism is.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And that what the media is using the word tribalism for is maybe to just highlight polarization, groups that don't agree with each other.
- MMMichael Morris
Sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes, yes, but I think often it's, they're, they're, they're trying to say, "What is the psychology that is driving this?" You know? And so, and then they ha- they s- they have different theories about... It's a funny thing, because they, they wa- uh, they often wanna say, "It's an evolved psychology," and I think they're right about that, that our evolved psychology is contributing to this.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MMMichael Morris
But then they, they sometimes can't really explain why now, why is it worse now, if it's our age-old psychology?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
And I think if you go into the science of tribal instincts, you can, you can start to understand why certain things have become more salient, uh, and at certain points in time.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so I think, you know, the, again, to fight for the... Hang on, I thought everybody hated each other camp.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, yeah, I know.
- CWChris Williamson
Um...
- MMMichael Morris
You're, you're being a good devil's advocate.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying.
- MMMichael Morris
A conversation needs that.
- CWChris Williamson
Trying my best. Um, I, I, you know, thinking about breaking it down, yes, racial lines, you know, we s- we've seen an awful lot of movements. A, a good example of this, BLM, a lot of the time, uh, a, a movement called Black Lives Matter, defining itself around the in-group. But what did much of that, uh, movement, what did much of the communication end up being, it was a demonization of the out-group. A lot of that discussion was around pointing the finger outside. Uh, the Me Too movement, right, was around protecting women. Title IX, around protecting women. But how was the communication? What was the sort of language that was being used? A lot of the time it seems to me, and again, that might be the more nefarious edges, the spiky extremes of these movements, almost certainly will be the newsworthy ones that capture the sort of crazy Twitter reposts and whatnot-
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... but still, um, it seems to me like a lot of even in-group movements, defined around an in-group, communicate themselves as being not an out-group, and I'd, I've seen the, the stats that said in 2012 people stopped voting for the in-party and started voting against the out-party. The messaging that was come around, what was it, 30% of Trump's campaign budget in some states were only spent on that one "Kamala Harris is for they, them, Trump is for you," thing? Like, it's all d-
- MMMichael Morris
Apparently it was the most, apparently it was the most effective ad in this election. Yeah. So I think you're right, and oddly enough, it was about pronouns, (laughs) you know? Or it was about, you know, or at least (laughs) s- sort of about pronouns, so yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- MMMichael Morris
It, it was very effective. It, it was pithy and it captured that, um...
- CWChris Williamson
So do you think you can-
- MMMichael Morris
I think you're right. I would push back, you know, the, the Me Too movement, w- it wasn't just a women's empowerment movement. It was a, it was a m- a movement of saying, "You were sexually abused by your boss? Me too. I was sexually abused by my boss. I kept quiet for a variety of reasons, but now there's strength in numbers because we know it happened to so many people, and so we can all speak out and there's the possibility for change." So I think that movement, it wasn't something that, you know, metastasized from a us movement into a, you know, your bad movement. It was, it kinda started from, (laughs) uh, you know, the other group, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Understandable.
- MMMichael Morris
... other group's misbehavior.
- CWChris Williamson
That's fair.
- MMMichael Morris
Uh, but Black Lives Matter, I think you're, you're right that it, um... But again, it was, it was implicitly about police brutality, um, and, you know, and then people can argue about the statistics, you know, exactly... It is certainly the case that African Americans had a, a higher, um-... statistical likelihood of, of having interactions with police and then of having interactions that, that, um, were harmful, uh, in one way or the other. Um, but so, yeah, so I, I agree with you, uh, that, uh, these movements are, um, uh, these movements, uh, are adversarial or oppositional, uh, at some, at some level. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
I wonder whether that's a natural, uh, outgrowth of just the pushback of anyone disagreeing with your in-group proposition. You make a proposition around us, a group that isn't you pushes back against that, so what do you do? You lean in against the, uh, uh, the argument. So I guess,
- 25:01 – 33:05
What People Become Tribal About
- CWChris Williamson
uh, you know, we've spoken about a number of different ways that people can get split up in terms of tribes, what do people become tribal around mostly? Is it accent, appearance, familiarity, gene pool?
- MMMichael Morris
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, what is it, what, what are the, what are the core characteristics-
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that, uh, uh, compose tribals, tribes?
- MMMichael Morris
It's a very interesting question. So, and again, I think it, um, it, it varies with these three basic tribal instincts, but I'll, I'll start with the ba- the base one that I mentioned, the peer instinct. I think what's really interesting about the peer instinct is that the- many studies show that race is not one of the primary triggers. Uh, it, it becomes a trigger that people learn to use as a m- group marker if they live in a society like the United States where race, wh- where physiognomy is correlated with cultural groups.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
But in places like Israel, you know, you can't always tell from somebody's face whether they're Palestinian or Israeli. In Ukraine, you can't tell whether someone's Russian or Ukrainian from their face. You know, if you get them to talk, then you can tell. You can sometimes tell from their clothing. So the- these, uh, these other cues are, um, th- there's a lot of evidence that we are wired, um, more to use language as our basis of sorting, uh, than to use race.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm so glad, I'm so glad you said that, because I've been spouting this, "People are more racist against accents than they are against skin colors," thing for a wh- it may very well be some of your work from a long time ago that I've been harping on about, um, but if that's true then I'm, uh, I'm-
- MMMichael Morris
No, it's, it's, it's totally true. Like, kids, kids don't use race, they don't, like, preferentially socialize with someone... a stranger of the same race until they're, like, six. But the language thing starts when they're infants, because even when, even in the womb, the kid is hearing their mother's language and even their mother's dialect. So even, like, neonates, they'll have a preference, you know, if you kind of put them in front of, you know, two screens and there's someone talking with their mother's dialect and there's someone talking with a different dialect, they'll reach for the food, you know, f- in front of the screen.
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- MMMichael Morris
It's not their mother, but it's their mother's dialect, so they, so they, you know, the- the mother tongue is a super important and fundamental thing, and, uh, it's, it's al- there's also some funny studies that show that, uh, children are wired to start assuming that, that people who speak the same language as them will prefer the same food as them. And the way they do, the way they do these studies is they, you know, they've got, like, a baby who can't talk yet, but, uh, the baby can listen, right? And the baby sees one adult, you know, maybe speaking French and one adult speaking English, and then there's two kinds of food, uh, and they've seen, you know, the, they've seen like an English speaker eat this food and they've seen a French speaker eat this food. And then if the French person speaks, reaches for the English food, you know, (laughs) the baby shows a surprised reaction, like, startled like, "Oh my God-"
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, wow.
- MMMichael Morris
... "the French person's eating." So what's really interesting is that babies are not racist. They don't judge you based on your race. But they already judge you-
- CWChris Williamson
They will judge you based on your accent. (laughs)
- MMMichael Morris
They already judge you on your accent and on what you eat. You know, they're already watching what you eat, and your accent. So they're, they're not, you know, they're not little Buddhas. You know, they're not racist, but they're not little Buddhas. They, they're judgmental already. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Fantastic. We'll dig into... We've got these three instincts.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Peer instinct, hero instinct, ancestor instinct.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Let's, let's, let's run through those. They seem
- MMMichael Morris
Sure. ... fun. So I, I've, I've mentioned the peer instinct. That, you know, corresponds to what we might call conf- conformist impulses or the herd, the herd instinct. You know, the, the bandwagon instinct. We, uh, we're wired to, to sort of unconsciously learn what, what the people in our group do. You know, we just form, like, a register of what's normal in our group without even trying to. And then we feel a sense of satisfaction when we mesh, when we match, when we fit in with what other people do. And this evolved, it's thought, to enable coordination. You know, even like a million years ago, our, um, our forebearers, Homo erectus, we have evidence now that they started hunting as a, as a sort of collaborative group, you know, a- and gathering as a collaborative group in a way that other species can't do, like working from a common plant. And, uh, that is something deride today, um, but, uh, it does limit independent thinking sometimes, but it is something that enables all of our collective thinking and enables our collective work. And even in fields like art and science-... you know, the, the great contributions build on, you know, they build on the work of other people. It's not, it's not being done, uh, completely in a vacuum by one person. So I think while we are w- wise to be wary of conformity, we should understand that this ability to mind meld with other people and-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... this impulse to mesh actions and this, this ease that we have collaborating with people in our group, it's, uh, it empowers most of what we do.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. What is, what is, uh, peer instinct at its best, peer instinct at its worst?
- MMMichael Morris
The peer instinct at its best is the kind of, um, think of the seamless interaction between a basketball team that plays together, you know, behind the back, no-look passes. You know, like, I, I, or in, in, in football or soccer, you know, like, I know you so well that I know that you know that I'm gonna be here. Like, we can read minds and we can do these amazing things together. Uh, where it's at its worst is when, you know, I'm an engineer and I know that the airbag design is unsafe, but the other 11 people around this boardroom are all saying it's good enough. And so I censor myself and I go along with the group, and then, you know, a customer dies in a, in an airbag explosion, right? That's, that'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, we kind of went along with the group because we didn't want to get in the way of progress, um, but we knew we were right and we should have spoken up, you know? So that's, that's the danger.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MMMichael Morris
Um...
- CWChris Williamson
Which is, uh, one point here, I guess, you've mentioned is 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.
- MMMichael Morris
Yes. But I think part of creativity is having a point of departure, which is often somebody else's work. Um, and, uh, and some creativity, you know, think of a jazz quartet, right? It's, it's not one individual's work, you know? It's, it's playing off of each other because of reading each other's mind and knowing where somebody's gonna go and then doing something that complements it. So there, I agree with you, but I think we, we have a m- we have a kind of stereotype of creativity that it involves the lone genius, and I would submit that most creativity, even in the arts or in the sciences, is, is collaborative creativity.
- 33:05 – 42:36
The Origin of Hero Instinct
- CWChris Williamson
- MMMichael Morris
So hero instinct, it's something that was born about a half a million years ago when our ancestor, homo heidelbergensis, uh, began doing things that no humans had been doing before. Like, uh, at this time we start to see in the fossil record skeletons of people with congenital deformities that survived to the age of adulthood. What does that tell us? Someone was taking care of a person who probably couldn't pay them back, you know? Somebody was doing something pro-social. They were doing something good. We also see around this time they started hunting much larger animals like wooly mammoths and rhinos and stuff, which, you know, in some cases indicates an individual was willing to take some personal risk, you know, be the lead hunter, uh, so that the group could then rush in and take down a much larger prey than, uh, was possible before. Um, you also see at this time the tools, much more sophisticated tools that required a lot more work are, um, 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, to be more respected than the average person in the group. Um...
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MMMichael Morris
And how do you, how do you do that? Well, you, you have to make sacrifices for the group. You kind of take a personal hit to benefit somebody else. Um, but you also have to know what the group values, and that's not always trivial. Uh, and so a cognitive quirk that came along with the hero instinct is this idea of emulating people in the group with status. So we look to the sort of cultural heroes in our community as beacons of what does the group value as a contribution, and we, we look for distinctive quirks or behaviors of those people and we tend to emulate them. And this is also something that we often deride today because it, it's this kind of superficial status seeking. Like I saw, you know, uh, 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, uh, I'm, I'm trying to be like LeBron, right? That, there's, there's a silly side of it. It leads to superstitious learning in some cases, but in general, 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, and, and then that tends to grow well because maybe, maybe the climate changed or maybe the group migrated to a different cl- uh, different, uh, ecology. And, uh...... 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 deride status-seeking, this hero instinct, it was a w- it was a way for individuals to become rewarded by the group, to have-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- MMMichael Morris
... status and tributes, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- MMMichael Morris
And, and 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, and, well-
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone s- everyone starved.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah, yeah. (laughs) And the reason for this, like in the, in the Bushmen, you know, the Bushmen of, uh, which for a while, you weren't supposed to say the word Bushmen. Now you're supposed to say Bushmen again, uh, apparently, from what I-
- CWChris Williamson
What were you briefly supposed to say that you're not supposed to say anymore?
- MMMichael Morris
You're supposed to call them-
- CWChris Williamson
Bush people?
- MMMichael Morris
... like the San people or the Ɣang people, uh, but now, now I've read some things that they actually, that, you know, some people actually think Bushmen is a better word. I don't know. But, uh, so I've said all three words now, so, uh, I should be safe, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Equally, equally safe or equally canceled.
- MMMichael Morris
(laughs) Yeah, yeah. Um, so, uh, they have this wonderful ritual in their group that's called insulting the meat. And the way it works is when the, 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 the 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?" You know, and they, they kinda go on like that, you know, in a way that you could, you could picture uncles in Brooklyn on their stoop-
- CWChris Williamson
Shit talking.
- MMMichael Morris
... you know?
- CWChris Williamson
They're shit talking.
- MMMichael Morris
(laughs) Shit talking, essentially, and they call it insulting the meat. And so anthropologists said, "Oh, look, you know, it's because they obviously don't wanna have any status differentiation."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
But, but sort of modern, modern anthropologists who use more biological methods, what they, they're really into measuring, uh, fertility. So they'll, they'll measure for, you know, over time, you know, living with a group, they'll measure, okay, which hunters were successful most often? Like, what's the batting average of these different hunters? And then ten 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, um, and reproductive, uh, reproductive, uh, success-
- CWChris Williamson
Success, yeah.
- MMMichael Morris
... um, is just as high-
- CWChris Williamson
Left, likely.
- MMMichael Morris
... in the hunter-gatherer group as it is in the kingdoms, you know, in the groups that, that celebrate inequality.
- CWChris Williamson
You can insult the meat all you want, but what can I say? That's a, that's a-
- MMMichael Morris
I'm not gonna complete that sentence for you, but you, you've-
- CWChris Williamson
That's an at- that's an attractive, that's an attractive man carrying a good antelope, and I'm taking to bed.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah, it's, it's, um, there would be a serious incentive problem if the hunters genuinely felt insulted, you know? It's a status leveling thing, right? You don't want the hunter to get too big ahead because we d- we all have to live together.
- 42:36 – 57:44
The Role of Our Inner Conscience
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, well, I mean, that's what the conscience is, right?
- MMMichael Morris
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I've been thinking about this a lot more recently.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I did a ton of, 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.
- MMMichael Morris
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
So, um, 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-
- MMMichael Morris
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... sometimes, uh, just judging you. "You should... Should you have done that?" "Should you have said that?"
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
"Is that a, is that a virtuous behavior? Is that a non-virtuous behavior?" Like, what is that?
- MMMichael Morris
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
If, if not, this sort of sense of social obligation to the rest of the world... Now, if you're religious, maybe, you know, i- i- it's, it's your virtue speaking up on high, it's something a little bit more transcendent than that. But, uh, 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.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah. Yeah, Freud... You know, Freud talks about the superego 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 r- the respected members of the community.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MMMichael Morris
You 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, that's the emotion of... Pride/shame is kind of like a good PR agency. It, it encourages you to do the things that are thought well of, and it encourages you to decline the temptations, uh, to do things that are not thought well of.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MMMichael Morris
And then it also encourages you to, um, publicize when you've done a good thing. So the... In every culture, when Olympic athletes win a gold medal, you know, they go like this. You know, they expand their body, they, they, they speak more loudly. And when people lose, they, you know, they cower.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MMMichael Morris
They, they disappear, they become smaller. So we, we not only have these emotions that are driving us to, to do what the group r- rewards, but we are also wired to showboat when we have done something well, and to hide it-
- CWChris Williamson
Look at me, look at me.
- MMMichael Morris
... when we have not done something well.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, exactly. So, uh, uh, just to kind of round out the hero instinct bit, in a more socially complex group structure where status bestows on certain people, uh, the people that achieve it, benefits-
- MMMichael Morris
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... that requires, uh, a degree of experimentation, adventure, risk-taking, divergence from the peer instinct-
- MMMichael Morris
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... which would be more conformist.
- MMMichael Morris
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
So, someone's gonna go and do this thing, we then have, uh, benefits bestowed to that person which is the reward for them taking the risk effectively and, and well and pulling it off, doing the dance, killing the, the antelope, whatever. And then downstream from that, because you now have this kind of, uh, social capital capitalist system where everybody's 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 and maybe, uh, specifically or maybe even, um, sort of more philosophically, well, he did something different," or, "He was courageous."
- MMMichael Morris
Mm-hmm.
- 57:44 – 1:08:26
Why We Care About Our Ancestors
- CWChris Williamson
instinct.
- MMMichael Morris
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, i- it sounds like the most primitive of them. It's, it's the urge to replicate the ways of past generations to, to maintain traditions. It... We can recognize it in ourselves, it's our, our curiosity about past generations of our family or, you know, the original family recipe for this, you know, this meal. Uh, we, 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, of the organizations that we are a part of. So we have this kind of irrational curiosity, this kind of irresistible curiosity about, um, the past and this impulse to maintain these ways, and we feel really good when we maintain a tradition because, uh, we feel that, we feel connected not just to the current community, but to the past generations of the community. And many, many, uh, 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, uh, 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. We 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. Um, so it's... What you see at this time is you start seeing that 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 Venus figurines and the bone flutes, things that didn't have an immediate instrumental purpose-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MMMichael Morris
... but 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 we're doing it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so yeah, give me the, give me the adaptive reason 'cause this just seems like superfluous archaic bullshit.
- MMMichael Morris
Well, the great thing about it, about, you know, it sort of corresponds to, like, myths and rituals, right? Why did we have this ritual learning m- modality where we, we, we sort of learn something by rote, and then we repeat it even though we don't understand it? Well, it, it allows us to learn things that kind of go beyond our understanding. You know, maybe, um, the past generation figured out some way of making a fishing net, and we don't, we 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, or imagine that, um, imagine that we're a group that lives near the ocean, and there's a tsunami that happens maybe every 60 years, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
Um, if there's a myth about the tsunami, uh, and we repeat that myth, even though generations go, 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. Um, there's a, a group that are sometimes called Sea Gypsies that live pretty much on the water in Thailand, and they were not, um, they did not lose many people in the great tsunami of 2006, even though-
- CWChris Williamson
We don't r-
- MMMichael Morris
... many people in the coastal villages died, because they have all these songs and, and myths about how the ocean looks when there's a tsunami. It's tricky. You know, the ocean actually recedes-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... before a tsunami, which is like a invitation to go look in the tidal pools. But if you have a lore in your culture of, like, "If the ocean ever recedes, head for the hills."
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- MMMichael Morris
You know, that's, that's an adaptive, um, it's an adaptive cultural, uh, lesson.
- CWChris Williamson
Are there, are there any other, uh, seemingly superfluous, uh, cultural artifacts that you've fallen in love with during, uh, research for this that ended up being, uh, quite adaptive or just had a kind of interesting use?
- MMMichael Morris
Uh, well, there are many, like, 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 necessarily, uh, not- not all of them are things that have been adaptive 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? (laughs) You know, like, like, uh, yeah, he, he built a boat just by himself, and then he had all these animal... It doesn't... But, uh, it turns out that groups all around the world have myths about, uh, a primordial flood. And, um, around, around, uh, 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, or something. I can't remember the exact geological details. But the, the ocean level rose all around the world, and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have, they all have myths about a primordial flood. They have different kinds of myths about, like, what the ocean did, and a few years ago, some anthropologists who had collected the, the flood myths all around the country, they teamed up with some geologists who built simulations based on the topography of different parts of Australia. And what they found is that the myths of these groups correspond pretty well to what we can simulate happened 7,000 years ago in that part of Australia. So-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... s- you know, these really traumatic events, they get, they get really well-preserved, uh, by myths because we treat myths in such a sacrosanct way. You know, where you're not, you're not allowed to tell your version of the n- of the, you know, Noah story. You know, you're, you're supposed to tell the exact version that's in the Bible. And, uh, similarly in these Aboriginal groups, you're supposed to tell, you know, the exact story of the primordial flood myth. So, you know, Mo- the Moses story, uh, sorry, I keep saying Moses, I, it's the Noah story. The Noah story is our primordial flood myth, but it likely is the remnant of this event that happened, that really happened, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. To, to, to you, it may just seem like a, a whimsical story, but it's actually geology and meteorology masquerading as, as a, a tale from the past.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah, and it, it lasted in the oral tradition for thousands of years-
- CWChris Williamson
And this is, this, th-
- MMMichael Morris
... before it was written down.
- CWChris Williamson
This is one of the fascinating thing... I had a great conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is a, a atheist skeptic type person out of Oxford, um, 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 the people to let go of the thing that they found most easy to believe, which was story. It was, uh, a, a persona and personification. It was narrative. Uh, and, and to start to believe in the thing which is the least believable, which is data-
- MMMichael Morris
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... and stats. And it's es- you know, it's very sterile.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, and when we have to sort of do, we have to put ourselves into this very different type of, uh, 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," or et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to what we lived through for our entire human history. And yes, the problem with that is that you can't... It- it- it's unfalsifiable. It allows all sorts of fuckery to be s- s- uh, slipped in here and there. Uh, but yeah, I, I always think about that frame. I always think about, uh, things that are, um, figuratively true but literally false, or, uh, 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 may- may be one of those things that's literally not that true, but functionally is, like, perfect.
- MMMichael Morris
Right, right. In the sense that it, you know, it provides a warning, you know? (laughs) The person who lived to tell the story probably had some sort of boat. (laughs) Yeah, um, yeah, so I- I- 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, 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- these wonderful, comfortable civilizations that we live in today are conformity, uh, status seeking, and kind of nostalgia about the past, sentimentality about the ways of the past. And these are the kinds of things I always used to critique my parents for, you know? Like, (laughs) so yeah, I think that I've- I have come to a different understanding of, um, the world, you know, through, uh, thinking a lot about how-
- CWChris Williamson
How the- how the mighty have fallen.
- MMMichael Morris
(laughs)
- 1:08:26 – 1:15:02
What Causes Tribes to Change?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, okay, so what about, um, what are the levers that pull on tribalism? What causes-
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... culture or tribalism to ossify more or for it to-
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... change or become more contagious?
- MMMichael Morris
Great question. You know, 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- the red and the blue party that we see today in the United States will be around forever, and always have been. False. You know, like, I'm old enough to know that it was- it was completely different when I was a kid. The- the- there was as much variation within the Democratic Party as there was between. You know, there was Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats, and- and so cultures are in flux, and the cultures that individuals and 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- 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, you know, uh, church or whatever else you do in your life, you know, I would see a- a different Chris, right? I would see a different person. So, um, 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, uh, tribal motivation, they are- they are triggered by slightly different things. So the peer instinct, this kind of conformity, um, this kind of set of shared habits that we just jump into, um, 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. Um, what we call code-switching is an example of this. So when- when Barack Obama used to speak in a slightly different register when he was in front of an African American group as opposed to, you know, a group of farmers from Kan- 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
... different parts of his life living in each of those communities. And when he's o- 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, um, uh, he clicks into one set of speech habits or another set of speech habits, and some of my research, you know, ha- pushed a little deeper on that and showed that it's- it's not just speech habits. It's your- your basic biases in making sense of the world, making sense of ambiguous events. You know, 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- when I'm around my fellow professors, you know, I'm- I'm thinking in terms of data, you know, I'm thinking in terms of, uh, economic theory, that kind of thing. When I go to my hometown and I'm in- I'm- I'm with my buddies in a dive bar, you know, I'm not... I'm- I'm thinking in terms of different templates, different scripts, you know, 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- at Columbia. So it's- it's audiences, the- the- the tribes that we're 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, um, crusaders followed the cross, you know, they- they took the cross. Um, sports teams, you know, they... the mascot runs out on the field and people go crazy, uh, or-
- CWChris Williamson
Would an anthem be something similar?
- MMMichael Morris
What's that? An a-
- CWChris Williamson
An anthem?
- MMMichael Morris
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
An anthem? A song that they come out to.
- MMMichael Morris
Exactly, an anthem, um, you know, whether it's a national anthem or whether it's, you know, the fans will chant a song in the stadium, so it's...It's a kind of, uh, 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 know, you trigger, you trigger a certain political creed. You know, which is why Martin Luther King, you know, quoted the Declaration of Independence when he was trying to build a broad coalition for civil rights. And, um, so these symbols, these cultural icons are potent triggers of hero instincts. If you want, if you want to get people to be pro-social, uh, to take risks, to make sacrifices, surround them with the symbols of their tribe.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MMMichael Morris
And then the, the one that is maybe least obvious is the ancestor instinct. What is it that causes people to start thinking in terms of tradition and letting tradition guide them? Uh, one of the kinds of, uh, cultural cues that is most important is ceremonies. So ceremonies are public events that involve symbols but that often involve synchronous movement. You know, so you're talking in unison, you're moving in unison, you're often marching, or you're in church, you know, you're getting up and down. In a yoga class you're going through these positions together. And there's even a neuro- neuroscience literature on this, that synchronous behavior, it lulls people into a different mental state where their, their self-concept as an individual is reduced. They become more open to unity experience. Their critical thinking is somewhat reduced. Um, and so they become more, uh, open to this idea of accepting tradition. So if you're, if you have a, 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.
- 1:15:02 – 1:19:14
The Psychology of Cults
- MMMichael Morris
- CWChris Williamson
I, uh, I suppose that's the, uh, one of the vectors of weakness that cults, cult leaders-
- MMMichael Morris
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... take advantage of too.
- MMMichael Morris
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Make people more suggestible. "You are a part-"
- MMMichael Morris
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
"... of this bigger thing. Do you not- do you not feel this sense of connection to the wider world?"
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah. Yeah, in cults, I mean, there are daily ceremonies, you know, where you're, you're kind of made to feel part of a broader system. Uh, your individual self-consciousness gets dampened. Uh, and I think people join cults because this unity experience is a wonderful thing to experience. And so, 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're, 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, it's a wonderful experience, uh, that people get when they start to join a cult. And then I think cults, cults differ from just a strong culture in some of their recruitment techniques. One thing that really characterizes cults is what's called n- network isolation, where they will, you know, they'll, they'll find somebody who maybe is not tightly embedded in a community, like maybe a, a transfer student who is, uh, 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, you know, a volleyball game or a dinner. And they love bomb them.They, they surround them with people who hang on their every word and tell them they have spiritual potential and, you know, g- make them feel wonderful. And if they respond well, then they get an invitation to come to our, our group's retreat. You know, it's in this beautiful mountain setting where cell phones don't work and where there are no newspapers and no television. And then you have long days of getting up early, uh, eating a low protein diet, you know, maybe meditating, chanting, hiking together, uh, listening to charismatic lecturers, 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 to recui- you know, it's, it's nothing ... Cults don't have a monopoly on this set of, uh, recruitment techniques, but basically what you're doing is you're pulling somebody out of the, the mixed social network that they ordinarily live in. And then after the, 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, 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 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, and that, that ends up corroborating what the cult has been saying. And, 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, uh, it's abnormal. You know, in normal life, even if you're a very religious person, you know, you, um, you know, you, you may think the Pope is a wonderful person but you're, you're also a big fan of Messi and you like, you know, the music of, uh, Mick Jagger, and so no, no one of these heroes can dominate you completely. Uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
What
- 1:19:14 – 1:34:34
Tribes in Times of Threat & Peace
- CWChris Williamson
about factors or, or, or, uh, situations in the environment that cause people to focus more on either collaboration or on competition? Um, you know, I, I kind of have it in my head around warfare, peacetime, wartime, a threat, uh, et cetera. Surely, those sorts of things, but there, there must be a, a ton of these.
- MMMichael Morris
You're right. Um, in addition to these sort of social triggers, uh, or, you know, the, the, who you're around or who, who you, like whether you're in a ceremony or you're seeing symbols or you're seeing, you're seeing audiences, particular, uh, emotional states also contribute to these things. And so threat tends to be something, particularly existential threat, like the, the, the fear of death, a brush with death or the, the fear of collective threat, like, you know, there's, 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. So, um, that's, that can be very tricky in terms of setting off dysfunctional traditionalism because, you know, in a corporation when y- you know, there's a tendency to, to think that your own traditions are wonderful and that the competition, that their traditions are silly. Uh, but then imagine it's a time of threat, like your, your business is not doing well. Well, the, the tribal reflex is to cling to your traditions even more, but that's, that's not adaptive because that's really a time when you, you want to be learning from the competition, you want to be open-minded. Um, similarly in, in warfare, uh, if you're trying to negotiate a, a peace treaty, uh, but there's like a risk of death because, you know, there's been some killing, well, that makes it harder for people to, you know, take the perspective of the other side. So threat, uh, leads people to anchor on their own traditions, on their own group.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. How much of that do you think is playing into the, uh, modern world, the, the polarization side of tribalism? Lots of headlines, very scary news out there, threat.
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah. Um, I don't know. You know, like, I mean, when, when COVID happened, you know, a lot of people were dying. Um, and, and, uh, but I don't know that it, it, um... I don't know that it led to partisan polarization. Um, 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, it's sort of like getting into an airport to get into the main campus because the, because there's been, you know, protests that were very disruptive and now there's like really strong, uh, strong management of who can enter the campus. And I think that that was a, that was a conflict that escalated and became very acrimonious because of the, the brutality of not just the people died, but the people just died in, you know, horrible way, both on October 7th and in, in Gaza, you know. Um, so I do think in a case like that, people, um, people start to f- even though they're fe- fellow collea- I, you know, fellow college students are marching and chanting and calling their, their, their, uh, classmates Nazis, and it's, it's bizarre because, you know, yeah, there is a big problem in the world, but your, your fellow Columbia undergraduates are not the problem, but there's this tendency for the c-... You know, i- these, these protests started as vigils, uh, vigils expressing solidarity for vulnerable civilians in Israel and in Gaza. Uh, but then a few months later, the protests were accusations, you know, accusing the, the opposite faction of students of being Nazis and being, um, genocidal. Uh, so I do think in that case because people are aware of the mortality and the bloodshed, uh, there's this way in which people take on this exaggerated sense of being, you know, vulnerable themselves.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
Uh, like a lot of, uh, some of my, some of my, uh, Israeli colleagues who are leaders in the, um, in the protests, they, they, 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." (laughs) And I'm like, "Okay." There's not a lot of threat to physical sa- there's a threat, there's a, there've been a threat to people's, uh, peace of mind because there's been some harassment, but there, there are not people being killed.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, even that, there's, there's, there's threat to your like 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." Yeah, I mean, there's conflation between, uh, emotional or intellectual insults, uh, with physical ones. Uh, and even, you know, the, the ratcheting up of emotional insults as being, uh, as being something that you're never supposed to encounter is, is a really interesting, uh, pivot. So I guess, you know, we've-... laid out a nice paradigm, so I wanna kinda come back to where we started-
- MMMichael Morris
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
... which was, uh, your compelling science that proves that we don't hate outsiders, that it is an us thing, not a them thing. Uh, like I say, you know, the internet, unfortunately, and again, you are, you've, uh, chosen a hell of a time to release a book, given, uh-
- MMMichael Morris
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... (laughs) the, uh, the, the, the recent election. But a lot of people will just think, "This can't be the case. I've heard all of these stories about how people aren't voting for their own side, they're voting against the other. Look at the messaging, look at the fear, look at the-"
- MMMichael Morris
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
"... et cetera."
- MMMichael Morris
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, uh, a drive to derogate and, 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 hairsplitting, but it's not, because the diagnosis that, that, you know, there's this, this discourse that we talked about of people saying, like, uh, "A deeply buried drive to hate outsiders has somehow atavistically reawoken to doom us to a future of internecine..." You know, it's like, very grandiose rhetoric, and it doesn't, it doesn't suggest ameliorati- uh, and it doesn't suggest ameliorative policies, because well, if we're cursed by some drive to, to hate and to be hostile, uh, that is, uh, not something that we can really work with. But if, for example, we believe that the root of the increased partisan conflict, um, has to do with this conformity instinct which got into a feedback loop, because it, it, it created residential sorting and then news media sorting, and then once you're in these inbred environments, then being conformists created, you know, different political worlds. If that's your diagnosis, well, there are things you can do about it. You can, you can break out of your bubble. Uh, you know, I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where there are not a lot (laughs) 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, (laughs) they don't operate in Republican districts. You know, these are, these are blue tribe symbols, blue tribe icons. And, um, I've been quite busy the last couple of days 'cause I'm buying a house Upstate, and Upstate, it's different. You know, Upstate, if I'm going, going to be spending more time up there, I'm not going to be constantly reinforced and constantly triggered to think, uh, about the world through these blue tribe lenses, uh, because I won't be in an ideologically inbred environment all the time. Um, and there are things we can do beyond ourselves personally. You know, there, there's been a lot of efforts to, um, to create dialogue across the red/blue factions of society. Some of it's going on at universities, uh, or, you know, town gown, you know, like, bringing the university students to talk to the people in the university town who may not share their view, or we, we, we bring some of our students to industrial towns in the Midwest that have b- suffered from globalization. Um, the first wave of these programs, very well intentioned, but a lot of them had names like, you know, Red Meets Blue, or, um, 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, (laughs) you know, 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, are, they're named things like Coffee Party USA, uh, Make America Dinner Again, uh, Open Lands Discussions. And these, 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, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MMMichael Morris
To talk about things, passions they have in common, like, they're, they're, they all like coffee, or they're all foodies, uh, or they're all Christian believers, or they're all people who, you know, are outdoorspeople. And the idea is you start talking, and then you move from this conversation or that conversation, and you, uh, maybe eventually get to politics. But the conversation is one that is bonding and o- and one that is more likely to last than if you ask people to discuss global warming, or if you ask people to discuss, you know, abortion (laughs) or something like that. Doesn't, doesn't lead to a, usually a conversation that lasts very long. So-
Episode duration: 1:35:59
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