WEBVTT - The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris 0:00:02.400 --> 0:00:06.720 Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. 0:00:09.520 --> 0:00:13.520 This is Master's in Business with Barry red Holds on 0:00:13.720 --> 0:00:14.680 Bloomberg Radio. 0:00:16.480 --> 0:00:19.920 This week on the podcast, I have another extra special guest. 0:00:20.440 --> 0:00:26.160 Professor Michael Morris is a fascinating instructor of social psychology 0:00:26.320 --> 0:00:30.920 and the way tribalism affects us and the way we 0:00:31.000 --> 0:00:35.360 affect tribes. His book, Tribal How the cultural instincts that 0:00:35.360 --> 0:00:37.839 divide us can help bring Us Together is really a 0:00:37.920 --> 0:00:44.560 fascinating discussion of various ways that tribes are not etched 0:00:44.600 --> 0:00:48.200 in stone, they're not part of our DNA. Tribes vary 0:00:48.240 --> 0:00:51.760 from culture to culture, from company to company, and that 0:00:52.400 --> 0:00:57.040 using tribes can be a very effective way to turn 0:00:57.080 --> 0:01:02.640 a company around that's struggling to change, that's facing all 0:01:02.680 --> 0:01:09.440 sorts of challenges, and essentially to become the best organization 0:01:09.640 --> 0:01:13.280 we can be. Full disclosure, The professor has consulted for 0:01:13.440 --> 0:01:17.639 Bloomberg LP, that's the parent company of Bloomberg Radio, where 0:01:17.680 --> 0:01:22.920 he led classes teaching corporate culture and tribalism. I thought 0:01:22.920 --> 0:01:25.360 the book was really interesting, and I found our conversation 0:01:25.480 --> 0:01:28.920 to be absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also, 0:01:29.319 --> 0:01:34.480 with no further ado, My conversation with Professor Michael Morris, author. 0:01:34.440 --> 0:01:37.039 Of Tribal Thank you so much for having me here. 0:01:37.280 --> 0:01:39.880 Well, thanks for coming. Let's start out with your background. 0:01:40.120 --> 0:01:45.360 Undergraduate cognitive science and English literature at Brown and then 0:01:45.400 --> 0:01:49.480 a PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan, Go Blue. 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:51.720 What was the original career plan. 0:01:52.080 --> 0:01:55.160 Well, the original career plan was I wanted to stay 0:01:55.200 --> 0:01:57.560 in school for a little while, right I went to 0:01:57.600 --> 0:02:00.400 do a PhD. I had actually gone to four different 0:02:00.520 --> 0:02:04.480 three different universities in my four years as an undergraduate, 0:02:05.000 --> 0:02:09.840 and so my feet had been moving, and I thought 0:02:09.880 --> 0:02:12.720 I could benefit from going to graduate school, and I 0:02:12.800 --> 0:02:15.560 chose something sort of in the middle of the two 0:02:15.639 --> 0:02:18.560 topics that I studied as an undergraduate. You know, cognitive 0:02:18.600 --> 0:02:22.320 science is a computer science and sort of nom Chomsky 0:02:22.360 --> 0:02:26.200 style linguistics. It's sort of a more mathy, formal approach 0:02:26.320 --> 0:02:30.079 to the mind. And then comparative literature is obviously all 0:02:30.120 --> 0:02:37.240 about tradition and the collective, the collective representations that shape 0:02:37.320 --> 0:02:42.520 the discourse in a community over the centuries, and so 0:02:42.919 --> 0:02:44.800 I think it was kind of natural for me to 0:02:45.280 --> 0:02:50.800 be interested in how the received culture shapes the thought 0:02:50.880 --> 0:02:54.360 processes that a group of people have and I had 0:02:54.400 --> 0:02:57.600 grown up, you know, around people from different parts of 0:02:57.639 --> 0:03:00.040 the world and didn't seem to me like every but 0:03:00.200 --> 0:03:03.480 he thought the same way that everybody didn't seem to 0:03:03.560 --> 0:03:09.200 have the same common sense. So I started working with 0:03:09.320 --> 0:03:14.200 people who were rebuilding a field called cultural psychology, which 0:03:14.280 --> 0:03:18.800 had had existed briefly in Moscow and the twenties but 0:03:18.840 --> 0:03:21.880 then kind of got shot down by Stalin, and you know, 0:03:21.960 --> 0:03:27.160 it resurfaced in the mid nineties as people were trying 0:03:27.160 --> 0:03:30.880 to understand the rise of the Four Tigers in China 0:03:30.960 --> 0:03:33.080 and Japan and how was it that you could have 0:03:33.200 --> 0:03:37.920 multiple modernities, you know, not everyone was becoming Western. And 0:03:38.000 --> 0:03:40.280 that's sort of the time and place in which my 0:03:40.920 --> 0:03:41.720 career started. 0:03:42.120 --> 0:03:45.960 It sounds like, based on exactly how you're describing this, 0:03:46.360 --> 0:03:49.320 it was almost inevitable that you would end up focusing 0:03:49.400 --> 0:03:54.880 on psychology, tribes and management. Tell us a little bit about, 0:03:55.240 --> 0:03:58.840 you know, how you came to focus on this area. 0:03:58.920 --> 0:04:02.839 I started doing work that you can think of as 0:04:02.840 --> 0:04:05.520 sort of East West comparisons. You know, often it was 0:04:06.280 --> 0:04:11.120 comparing college students in China to college students in the US, 0:04:11.440 --> 0:04:15.920 or bank employees in Hong Kong to bank employees in 0:04:15.960 --> 0:04:19.320 New York. When I was doing that, it was considered 0:04:19.360 --> 0:04:23.239 to be sort of fringe, fringe research in psychology, because 0:04:23.279 --> 0:04:25.719 psychologists at the time liked to think of themselves as 0:04:26.839 --> 0:04:29.840 natural scientists, you know, part of the natural sciences, and 0:04:29.960 --> 0:04:33.680 they thought that most of the biases they observed were 0:04:34.320 --> 0:04:38.920 you know, rooted in a brain structure in one way 0:04:39.000 --> 0:04:42.479 or another, and they were part of universal human nature. 0:04:42.520 --> 0:04:44.360 And so what I was doing was a little bit 0:04:45.120 --> 0:04:50.800 considered to be critical of that. But at the same time, 0:04:51.600 --> 0:04:53.640 the business schools of the world, at least the top 0:04:53.640 --> 0:04:57.440 business schools of the world, were becoming very, very interested 0:04:57.880 --> 0:05:01.800 in cultural differences, and in particular interested in research on 0:05:01.839 --> 0:05:05.560 cultural differences that was somewhat objective, you know, that used 0:05:05.920 --> 0:05:10.120 you know, precise measurements, rather than anthropological field work, which 0:05:10.120 --> 0:05:13.760 has a more subjective feeling. Although it's valuable in many 0:05:13.800 --> 0:05:16.599 ways to the to the economists, you know, running the 0:05:16.600 --> 0:05:20.680 top business schools, it felt a little vague and impressionistic. 0:05:21.200 --> 0:05:26.880 And so I was running experiments and precise surveys, comparing 0:05:27.279 --> 0:05:30.720 you know, professionals and students in these different parts of 0:05:30.760 --> 0:05:34.840 the world and observing regular differences in some of the 0:05:34.880 --> 0:05:38.839 cognitive biases, and that led three of the top business 0:05:38.839 --> 0:05:41.320 schools in the world to all make me job offers. 0:05:41.360 --> 0:05:44.280 And so I had not foreseen that this research would 0:05:44.279 --> 0:05:47.000 carry me into the world of business schools. You know, 0:05:47.160 --> 0:05:49.239 Brown is not a place that has a business school. 0:05:49.240 --> 0:05:52.240 You don't have much exposure to it. It seemed like 0:05:52.279 --> 0:05:54.359 the universe was telling me that what I was doing 0:05:54.520 --> 0:05:57.920 was of great interest to people in business schools. So 0:05:58.000 --> 0:06:00.200 my career turned a corner at that point. And then 0:06:00.240 --> 0:06:03.640 I started at Stanford Business School at age twenty six, 0:06:03.760 --> 0:06:06.760 you know, before I had even finished my dissertation, and 0:06:07.279 --> 0:06:10.599 it was our learning experience. You know, I wasn't the 0:06:10.640 --> 0:06:13.280 greatest teacher in my first couple of years, but you learn, 0:06:13.560 --> 0:06:16.640 you know, you learn from teaching. And then I did 0:06:16.680 --> 0:06:19.880 well there and got promoted early there and then decided 0:06:19.880 --> 0:06:22.280 to come back to New York where I grew up 0:06:22.279 --> 0:06:25.680 in the New York area, and that brought me to Columbia. 0:06:25.800 --> 0:06:28.120 I came back to Columbia in two thousand and one. 0:06:29.080 --> 0:06:32.160 My first day of teaching at Columbia University was actually 0:06:32.320 --> 0:06:37.000 nine to eleven. Oh, so that was an interesting introduction. 0:06:37.520 --> 0:06:41.440 But you know, I've enjoyed living and working in New 0:06:41.520 --> 0:06:43.320 York quite a lot. I never thought I would still 0:06:43.360 --> 0:06:45.960 be living here because I had been in a pattern 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:50.160 of moving every five years, you know, But it's an 0:06:50.160 --> 0:06:52.680 easy solution to life. I take a lot of sabbatical 0:06:52.800 --> 0:06:58.080 years in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, so I sustain deep 0:06:58.120 --> 0:07:02.200 collaborations and laboratories there, as well as in some other 0:07:02.200 --> 0:07:06.040 parts of the world like India and sometimes in Europe. 0:07:06.120 --> 0:07:09.520 So you are not the first person, both academic and 0:07:09.640 --> 0:07:14.920 people working in finance who have said, my original research 0:07:15.040 --> 0:07:17.600 was thought of as fringe twenty years ago and then 0:07:17.680 --> 0:07:22.760 suddenly not fringe. So it just goes to show you 0:07:23.360 --> 0:07:27.320 that if you're outside of the mainstream, outside of the consensus, 0:07:27.920 --> 0:07:31.520 that's where you know, all of the undiscovered veins of 0:07:31.560 --> 0:07:34.520 gold are. Or so it seems. You talk about the 0:07:34.520 --> 0:07:38.760 difference between how Chinese students behave versus American students, and 0:07:38.840 --> 0:07:41.920 even when Chinese students are in the US, when they're 0:07:41.960 --> 0:07:45.320 speaking Chinese, it's a different set of culture, a different 0:07:45.320 --> 0:07:49.160 set of behaviors, versus when they're same group of people 0:07:49.200 --> 0:07:53.680 speaking English. It seems like the norms change and the 0:07:53.760 --> 0:07:58.440 various behaviors change. You've published two hundred articles on behavioral science. 0:07:58.760 --> 0:08:02.440 Tell us what you're rea research finds about these various 0:08:03.000 --> 0:08:05.840 behavioral I don't even want to call them texts, behavioral 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:11.200 or just behaviors. The switches when when a cultural factor 0:08:11.280 --> 0:08:13.280 is impacting people's thinking. 0:08:13.480 --> 0:08:17.360 Right, Well, let me start by saying this touches on 0:08:17.680 --> 0:08:21.360 the core theme of the book, which is that culture changes. 0:08:21.560 --> 0:08:26.440 There's this myth out there that culture is unchanging and unchangeable, 0:08:26.600 --> 0:08:29.360 that the cultures of the world are permanent fixtures, and 0:08:29.400 --> 0:08:32.800 that the Americans of two centuries ago were the same 0:08:32.840 --> 0:08:35.480 as us. And that's that's an illusion that we kind 0:08:35.480 --> 0:08:37.920 of enjoy, but it's a it's an illusion. You know, 0:08:37.960 --> 0:08:40.760 what the founding Fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness 0:08:40.800 --> 0:08:42.640 is not what you and I think of as the 0:08:42.679 --> 0:08:47.840 pursuit of happiness and what we know today in the 0:08:47.880 --> 0:08:51.560 pop culture as code switching. It sort of came into 0:08:51.600 --> 0:08:55.040 the popular discourse when Obama was president, and we've seen 0:08:55.080 --> 0:08:59.599 it again this year, as Kamala Harris campaigned. Is this 0:08:59.760 --> 0:09:03.360 notion that people who've grown up in more than one 0:09:03.559 --> 0:09:10.520 ethnic subculture that have corresponding dialects will make switches depending 0:09:10.559 --> 0:09:11.720 on the audience that they're in. 0:09:11.720 --> 0:09:17.960 Front of you have a reference to Korean pilots with 0:09:18.080 --> 0:09:20.680 South Korean pilots, where there is a history and a 0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:25.280 culture of deference to seniority, And it reminded me, and 0:09:25.320 --> 0:09:28.560 that leads to problems and airplane crashes, and it reminds 0:09:28.600 --> 0:09:31.200 me of I want to say it was Matthew Sayed 0:09:31.400 --> 0:09:35.119 the book Black Box Thinking, who talked about a similar 0:09:35.520 --> 0:09:40.440 cultural phenomena with South American pilots and it ultimately led 0:09:40.480 --> 0:09:46.240 to them changing their ways. Pilots interact because literally planes 0:09:46.240 --> 0:09:49.960 were flying into mountains because the copilot didn't want to 0:09:50.040 --> 0:09:53.360 disrespect the senior pilot and say, hey, we're all about 0:09:53.360 --> 0:09:57.360 to die. Like its amazing. Cultural norms are so strong 0:09:57.800 --> 0:10:01.840 that rather than risk offending the popot, you lose the plane. 0:10:01.880 --> 0:10:07.720 It seems bananas, but apparently that's how important culture is. 0:10:08.080 --> 0:10:11.720 Well. A lot of this is unconscious automatic behavior, right. 0:10:11.800 --> 0:10:15.960 I mean, I'm I'm a copilot, socialize my whole life 0:10:16.040 --> 0:10:19.959 to speak in a deferential way to those of senior rank, 0:10:20.559 --> 0:10:25.560 and so I'm speaking that way. I'm not calculating that 0:10:25.760 --> 0:10:29.920 if I spoke more assertively that might change the pilot's 0:10:30.679 --> 0:10:34.760 comprehension of the urgency of the situation. Yeah, so I 0:10:34.800 --> 0:10:37.440 think that a lot of accidents are caused by automatic 0:10:37.520 --> 0:10:42.679 behavior and a lot of you know, cultural behaviors. The 0:10:43.520 --> 0:10:49.679 situation with Korean pilots, it was something that was discovered 0:10:49.720 --> 0:10:53.360 first by Boeing. Boeing researchers, you know, who made the 0:10:53.400 --> 0:10:57.720 seven forty seven class jet, which requires equal collaboration among 0:10:57.760 --> 0:11:00.760 copilots and pilots, which wasn't the case with smaller jets. 0:11:01.559 --> 0:11:05.600 They noticed that there was enormous variants across the world's 0:11:05.720 --> 0:11:10.520 flagship airlines in safety rates, and the countries that were 0:11:10.520 --> 0:11:12.240 having the most problems were not the ones that you 0:11:12.320 --> 0:11:15.760 might think they were. Taiwan and South Korea. Those were 0:11:15.760 --> 0:11:18.800 the countries with the worst safety record. And those are 0:11:18.840 --> 0:11:22.800 not poor countries in particular, or countries with particularly bad weather, 0:11:23.600 --> 0:11:26.200 but they are countries that are among the highest in 0:11:26.240 --> 0:11:30.720 the world when you look at hierarchical values what researchers 0:11:30.720 --> 0:11:34.680 called power distance, and in those societies, if someone is 0:11:34.720 --> 0:11:38.000 of senior rank, you're not supposed to equally, you're not 0:11:38.000 --> 0:11:41.720 supposed to interact with them equally. And it was sufficiently 0:11:42.120 --> 0:11:47.439 worrying that Boeing actually considered designing a different plane wow 0:11:48.360 --> 0:11:51.000 for those parts of the world. But then at the 0:11:51.000 --> 0:11:55.240 same time, this study of cockpit black boxes that are 0:11:55.240 --> 0:11:59.720 recovered after accidents and have recordings of the cockpit dialogue 0:12:00.240 --> 0:12:03.480 that came out around the same time and pointed to 0:12:03.520 --> 0:12:06.920 a very similar conclusion. And Malcolm Gladwell and his book 0:12:06.920 --> 0:12:10.840 Outliars wrote about the confluence of these these two things, 0:12:11.320 --> 0:12:12.840 and I think brought it to a lot of people's 0:12:12.880 --> 0:12:15.880 attention at that time. But what I found even more 0:12:15.920 --> 0:12:19.440 interesting than the paradox that, you know, a country like 0:12:19.480 --> 0:12:22.520 South Korea, which is high in technology, high in wealth, etc. 0:12:22.880 --> 0:12:25.200 Was having problems, was that they managed to get rid 0:12:25.280 --> 0:12:28.000 of the problems. They made some very simple changes in 0:12:28.080 --> 0:12:31.079 Korean airlines and they haven't crashed since. So they went 0:12:31.120 --> 0:12:34.400 from the world's worst safety record to an unblemish safety record. 0:12:34.640 --> 0:12:37.480 And the change they made was not firing a bunch 0:12:37.480 --> 0:12:40.400 of people, was not changing all their procedures. It was 0:12:40.520 --> 0:12:44.000 changing the official language of the country and the official 0:12:44.080 --> 0:12:47.880 language of the cockpit from Korean to English. Now, all 0:12:47.920 --> 0:12:50.439 pilots already spoke English because it's the language of air 0:12:50.480 --> 0:12:53.600 traffic control around the world. But when people were speaking 0:12:54.000 --> 0:12:59.200 to the same colleagues in English, they weren't cued to 0:12:59.280 --> 0:13:02.160 be deferential because just like in Japan, where you have 0:13:02.240 --> 0:13:05.640 to call your boss, you know, sato san or something, 0:13:05.720 --> 0:13:08.160 you know, you have to use certain suffixes in Korea, 0:13:08.200 --> 0:13:12.439 and there are these complex honorific declensions that you have 0:13:12.520 --> 0:13:16.880 to use that are constant reminders of the status relative 0:13:16.920 --> 0:13:19.160 status level, and of course in English we don't have 0:13:19.240 --> 0:13:23.480 those things. So it's a remarkable story about the you know, 0:13:23.880 --> 0:13:28.360 the cultural patterns are not essentialistic or inherents. You know, 0:13:28.440 --> 0:13:32.679 sometimes if you can just change the environment slightly so 0:13:32.720 --> 0:13:36.319 that they're not triggered, the same people are totally unencumbered 0:13:36.320 --> 0:13:36.720 by them. 0:13:36.840 --> 0:13:41.240 And that's fascinating that they went from the worst safety 0:13:41.280 --> 0:13:44.960 record to one of the best simply by changing the 0:13:45.120 --> 0:13:47.640 language in the cockpit. That's just amazing. 0:13:47.960 --> 0:13:52.640 It is, it is striking, and it really goes against 0:13:52.640 --> 0:13:56.920 this notion of cultures as permanent fixtures or people. You know, 0:13:56.960 --> 0:13:59.480 there are ways of talking about culture like this is 0:13:59.480 --> 0:14:02.520 in our cultural DNA, you know, And it's this equation 0:14:02.720 --> 0:14:07.240 of culture with genetics in a way that I think, 0:14:07.559 --> 0:14:09.640 you know, is a bit of a fallacy because it 0:14:09.720 --> 0:14:12.920 leads us to think of culture as a set of traits, 0:14:13.000 --> 0:14:16.120 whereas culture is a set of lenses that we look through, 0:14:16.120 --> 0:14:19.000 but the lenses are shifting and the lenses change over time. 0:14:19.160 --> 0:14:22.040 I want to stay with this topic because it's so fascinating. 0:14:22.240 --> 0:14:24.960 You've been researching this area for decades. You've been at 0:14:24.960 --> 0:14:28.640 Columbia almost twenty five years. What led you to say, Hey, 0:14:28.680 --> 0:14:31.560 I can triangulate on all these different aspects and turned 0:14:31.520 --> 0:14:38.400 it into a comprehensive book on humanity and tribalism? What 0:14:38.760 --> 0:14:40.000 led you to that path? 0:14:40.560 --> 0:14:44.640 Well? As a business school professor, I do a lot 0:14:44.680 --> 0:14:49.000 of teaching to executives. I also do a lot of consulting. 0:14:49.040 --> 0:14:52.720 As you mentioned, I consult to political campaigns every election season. 0:14:53.480 --> 0:14:56.080 Doesn't always work out the way I wish, you know, 0:14:56.760 --> 0:14:59.680 but I also consult to companies. So ten years ago 0:14:59.800 --> 0:15:01.600 I I ran a course for a couple of years 0:15:01.600 --> 0:15:07.080 at Bloomberg about decision making, biases, culture and leadership to 0:15:07.160 --> 0:15:11.440 the top executives here. And through that process, I've developed 0:15:11.840 --> 0:15:15.880 a playbook or a toolkit for thinking about how to 0:15:15.960 --> 0:15:19.560 lead through culture, how to use what I know about 0:15:19.600 --> 0:15:23.800 the malleability of culture and the manageability of culture, so 0:15:23.840 --> 0:15:26.280 that as a leader you're not thinking of culture as 0:15:26.280 --> 0:15:28.560 an obstacle to what you want to get done. But 0:15:28.600 --> 0:15:31.200 it's a force that you can harness, that you can 0:15:31.600 --> 0:15:34.840 dial up or dial down, and that you can mount 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:38.280 slow campaigns to evolve the culture in a way that 0:15:38.320 --> 0:15:41.880 you think will support the needed strategy in the future. 0:15:42.440 --> 0:15:46.480 So I started to write a book sharing that playbook. 0:15:46.480 --> 0:15:48.600 But then over the course of the last five years, 0:15:48.600 --> 0:15:51.000 and I've been writing the book for about five years, 0:15:51.160 --> 0:15:54.800 there have been a series of conflicts in the world 0:15:55.040 --> 0:15:58.640 that have evoked people to start using the word tribal 0:15:58.680 --> 0:16:01.280 and tribalism much more than they ever did before. And 0:16:01.320 --> 0:16:04.320 I'm talking about the Red Blue Rift, the you know, 0:16:04.360 --> 0:16:08.080 the record racial protests in the streets, and the religious 0:16:08.080 --> 0:16:11.040 strife you know, both at home and around the world, 0:16:11.080 --> 0:16:15.560 where you start to hear this new discourse about tribalism 0:16:15.880 --> 0:16:20.200 as a curse, you know, an evolutionary curse, that we 0:16:20.280 --> 0:16:25.320 are somehow genetically predisposed to hate or to fear and 0:16:25.360 --> 0:16:29.040 loathing of some other group, and that this will always 0:16:29.160 --> 0:16:32.360 hinder us and hold us back from the nice things 0:16:32.400 --> 0:16:36.000 that we would like to have, like international cooperation or 0:16:36.360 --> 0:16:45.080 you know, ethnic harmony, harmony, you know, political functioning. So 0:16:46.040 --> 0:16:50.400 I think that this way of talking about tribalism is 0:16:50.480 --> 0:16:53.760 part right but part wrong. It is the case that 0:16:53.800 --> 0:16:58.280 our tribal psychology plays a role in these escalating conflicts. 0:16:58.840 --> 0:17:03.480 But where the pundits get it wrong is that we 0:17:03.560 --> 0:17:08.360 don't have a tribal instinct to hate other groups. That 0:17:08.520 --> 0:17:12.960 wouldn't have been a particularly adaptive instinct, right, like a 0:17:13.080 --> 0:17:17.200 warning instinct. You know, there was an archaic human species 0:17:17.240 --> 0:17:20.840 called Neanderthals that kind of did have that sort of 0:17:20.840 --> 0:17:25.919 orientation towards neighboring tribes. They practiced cannibalism and warfare, and 0:17:26.240 --> 0:17:29.479 they went extinct in part because our kind, you know, 0:17:29.920 --> 0:17:33.880 had a different foreign policy. We made it and traded 0:17:33.960 --> 0:17:37.720 with other groups and formed these larger networks called tribes 0:17:38.119 --> 0:17:40.639 that proved to be a lot more adaptive, proved to 0:17:40.680 --> 0:17:44.360 be a more winning strategy over time. So there's this 0:17:44.520 --> 0:17:49.720 kind of fallacy that just because these conflicts involve hostility, 0:17:49.800 --> 0:17:55.360 that somehow they start from a drive for hostility, and 0:17:55.440 --> 0:17:59.520 that's just a false diagnosis. That doesn't it doesn't help 0:17:59.600 --> 0:18:02.600 us under stand ways to ameliorate these conflicts. It makes 0:18:02.600 --> 0:18:06.000 for riveting articles about how we're doomed, you know, and 0:18:06.359 --> 0:18:08.960 the end times are here, but it doesn't make for 0:18:09.040 --> 0:18:13.240 good policies, and so I as a secondary purpose of 0:18:13.280 --> 0:18:16.680 the book, I've tried to argue that, hey, we really 0:18:16.720 --> 0:18:19.600 need to if we want to talk about tribal psychology 0:18:19.600 --> 0:18:24.000 and tribalism, let's have a science informed view of what 0:18:24.040 --> 0:18:28.959 tribal instincts are and understand how they do figure in conflicts, 0:18:29.280 --> 0:18:33.520 but not in a way that curses us to eternal 0:18:33.760 --> 0:18:38.600 internestine conflict. It's it's you know, it's a manageable side 0:18:38.600 --> 0:18:42.800 of human nature that wise leaders have always found their 0:18:42.840 --> 0:18:43.359 way around. 0:18:43.680 --> 0:18:48.560 The Neanderthal approach versus the Homo sapiens approach, I believe, 0:18:48.760 --> 0:18:51.400 and correct me if I'm getting this wrong. Our DNA 0:18:51.480 --> 0:18:54.440 is about one to two percent Neanderthal. So the idea 0:18:54.560 --> 0:19:00.159 of trade and cooperation and mating was obviously well a 0:19:00.200 --> 0:19:03.800 little hindsight bias, but we're the survivors, so that seems 0:19:03.840 --> 0:19:07.119 to have been the approach that worked. But before I 0:19:07.200 --> 0:19:11.400 read the book, I was under the assumption that humans 0:19:12.119 --> 0:19:15.880 were very similar from culture to culture, country to country, 0:19:16.359 --> 0:19:22.280 and that DNA was determinative. But what the book really 0:19:22.320 --> 0:19:25.560 shows you is we really vary from region to region, 0:19:25.600 --> 0:19:29.400 from country to country. Cultures are very different and very 0:19:29.440 --> 0:19:32.240 malleable and they have a big impact on society. 0:19:32.520 --> 0:19:38.360 Fair statement, fair statement. Yeah, it's a position that kind 0:19:38.400 --> 0:19:43.399 of falls in between the traditional nature versus nurture framework 0:19:43.520 --> 0:19:46.320 that you know, people of our age, you know got 0:19:46.400 --> 0:19:49.959 in school what the new consensus is. And there's a 0:19:49.960 --> 0:19:53.439 field of evolutionary anthropology that has had a lot of 0:19:53.480 --> 0:19:59.360 the key insights is that human nature is nurture. That 0:19:59.680 --> 0:20:04.359 we are the species that became wired by evolution to 0:20:04.600 --> 0:20:09.080 internalize the patterns of communities that nurture us. And what 0:20:09.119 --> 0:20:12.600 that means is that we can operate as a coordinated 0:20:12.720 --> 0:20:17.199 group that functions seamlessly and that meshes together based on 0:20:17.359 --> 0:20:22.439 cultural patterns because we all internalize them unconsciously and we 0:20:22.480 --> 0:20:25.480 are motivated to follow them, and hence we can have 0:20:25.600 --> 0:20:29.520 large organizations and cities and things like that that other 0:20:29.560 --> 0:20:32.879 primates would be completely incapable of. But it's not like 0:20:32.960 --> 0:20:37.320 we're ants or bees who are wired by their DNA 0:20:37.760 --> 0:20:41.439 to behave socially in a particular way. If you go 0:20:41.520 --> 0:20:46.040 around the world, ant hills are always conical and beehives 0:20:46.119 --> 0:20:51.520 are always hexagonal because that's genetically programmed. We're not genetically 0:20:51.560 --> 0:20:55.320 programmed to build our shelters in any particular style. But 0:20:55.520 --> 0:20:58.399 we do learn culturally, you know, to build a yurt 0:20:58.480 --> 0:21:01.080 if we're in Kyrgyzstan, or to build to TP if 0:21:01.080 --> 0:21:02.920 we're planes Native American. 0:21:03.359 --> 0:21:07.199 Huh. Really fascinating. So let's get a little basic and 0:21:07.480 --> 0:21:11.520 delve into some fundamentals of your research. And I want 0:21:11.520 --> 0:21:14.480 to start with what is a tribe. 0:21:13.920 --> 0:21:20.400 From the broad evolutionary anthropology perspective, is the distinctively human 0:21:20.600 --> 0:21:25.120 form of social organization. Our nearest neighbors chimpanzees. They can 0:21:25.200 --> 0:21:28.879 form troops of up to about fifty sixty individuals. If 0:21:28.920 --> 0:21:34.199 it gets any larger, it breaks apart into clashing factions 0:21:34.320 --> 0:21:39.720 and bloodshed. We obviously can form much larger groups and 0:21:39.960 --> 0:21:45.639 collaborate in much more sophisticated and adaptive ways. And the 0:21:45.680 --> 0:21:48.800 way that we can do that is that we can 0:21:48.920 --> 0:21:54.720 form groups that transcend kith and kin. We can form 0:21:54.800 --> 0:22:00.200 groups where we are connected to total strangers who share 0:22:00.200 --> 0:22:04.360 the same cultural heritage as us. So culture is a 0:22:04.400 --> 0:22:09.080 glue that holds together large human groups and enables us 0:22:09.080 --> 0:22:12.240 to trust each other in a way that no other 0:22:12.320 --> 0:22:17.040 animal can. And that was the rubicon that we crossed 0:22:17.040 --> 0:22:21.359 as a species. That after that we left the rest 0:22:21.400 --> 0:22:24.840 of the primate pack in our dust, because once we 0:22:24.840 --> 0:22:30.000 were forming these rich cultures that were shared by large groups, 0:22:30.600 --> 0:22:34.439 it was like a collective brain. It was this pool 0:22:34.520 --> 0:22:39.760 of knowledge that started accumulating across the generations and that 0:22:40.000 --> 0:22:45.679 individuals could tap into to become more capable than the 0:22:45.720 --> 0:22:50.320 individuals from prior generations because the cultures became richer and richer. 0:22:50.920 --> 0:22:53.360 One of the things I was kind of fascinated by 0:22:53.400 --> 0:22:57.600 in the book and you mention chimps is that if 0:22:57.640 --> 0:23:03.040 you take a human toddler and an adult chimp and 0:23:03.080 --> 0:23:07.560 an adult and rangutang and you use a tool or 0:23:07.600 --> 0:23:12.160 show them a technique to get something, the five year 0:23:12.160 --> 0:23:15.280 old figures it out pretty quickly can imitate it, but 0:23:15.760 --> 0:23:19.040 the chimps and the rangutangs, you know, not so much. 0:23:19.680 --> 0:23:22.720 Why is that so? The exposition in the book about 0:23:23.320 --> 0:23:26.640 just being able to follow each other's gaze because our 0:23:27.040 --> 0:23:31.200 eyes are white and our corny and irises are dark, 0:23:31.680 --> 0:23:34.919 which other primates don't have, tell us a little bit 0:23:34.960 --> 0:23:37.200 about just some of these evolutionary differences. 0:23:37.320 --> 0:23:41.040 Yeah. Well, you know, evolution works in funny ways. Evolution 0:23:41.200 --> 0:23:43.600 is kind of a tinkerer. And one of the things 0:23:43.640 --> 0:23:47.199 that evolution came up with or a mutation came up 0:23:47.240 --> 0:23:51.879 with that then became harnessed by Our social intelligence is 0:23:51.920 --> 0:23:56.480 the whites of our eyes. Other primates don't have white sclare, 0:23:57.200 --> 0:24:01.240 and so they can't track each other. There's gaze as easily, 0:24:01.280 --> 0:24:04.080 and that means they can't read each other's minds as easily. 0:24:04.680 --> 0:24:06.520 You know, there's this old idea the eyes of the 0:24:06.560 --> 0:24:10.000 window to the soul, and the research on this has 0:24:10.119 --> 0:24:14.880 found a new scientific understanding of what that means, and 0:24:14.960 --> 0:24:19.399 so our ability to mind read enables us to imitate 0:24:19.520 --> 0:24:24.680 each other's behavior at a much richer level than other 0:24:24.760 --> 0:24:30.040 primates can do. It's more like mimicry when one chips 0:24:30.040 --> 0:24:32.840 are very inventive but not very collaborative. So if one 0:24:32.880 --> 0:24:35.560 of them develops a new way to use a stick 0:24:35.640 --> 0:24:38.280 to get termites, or to use a stick to get 0:24:38.359 --> 0:24:42.240 fruit from a tree, others may see it, and they may, 0:24:42.520 --> 0:24:45.239 you know, they may do something that's crudely similar to it, 0:24:45.280 --> 0:24:48.080 but they don't catch what the method is and what 0:24:48.119 --> 0:24:52.960 the intention is. Whereas humans, you know, if somebody invents 0:24:53.000 --> 0:24:58.280 something new that people around them immediately can replicate it 0:24:58.640 --> 0:25:02.320 and start doing it, and innovations spread very you know, 0:25:02.400 --> 0:25:05.040 we all know about fads, right, you know, innovations spread 0:25:05.359 --> 0:25:09.679 really rapidly. And it's funny because we we say monkey, 0:25:09.720 --> 0:25:12.080 see monkey, do we have this notion from going to 0:25:12.119 --> 0:25:15.439 the zoo that that that they are this they are 0:25:15.440 --> 0:25:20.080 such copycats, such such imitative, But we are far more 0:25:20.080 --> 0:25:24.439 imitative than they are. And there's this psychologist named Michael 0:25:24.480 --> 0:25:27.320 Thomassello who's done this wonderful work because he's a he's 0:25:27.359 --> 0:25:30.600 one of the world's experts at child cognition, but he's 0:25:30.600 --> 0:25:33.800 also one of the world's experts at primate cognition, so 0:25:33.840 --> 0:25:37.280 he can kind of do these comparative experiments between children 0:25:37.320 --> 0:25:41.520 and and orangutans and chimpanzees. And what he's found is 0:25:41.560 --> 0:25:44.320 that if you teach a child how to solve a 0:25:44.359 --> 0:25:47.359 puzzle to get a treat, you know, through one method, 0:25:47.400 --> 0:25:49.560 say pushing the yellow button and you get some M 0:25:49.560 --> 0:25:54.160 and ms. But then you show that child four other 0:25:54.280 --> 0:25:57.400 children who all work with the same puzzle and hit 0:25:57.440 --> 0:26:00.119 the red button and get m and ms. Then when 0:26:00.160 --> 0:26:02.840