Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 2: Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. Okay, Carol, you know, I was
Speaker 2: out in Colorado. I was biking last month with my dad.
Speaker 2: I went all over the state. I saw in some
Speaker 2: situations neighbors dueling with each other when it came to
Speaker 2: political signs across the street, next door, neighbors literally calling
Speaker 2: each other out depending on where I was. A few times.
Speaker 2: It was kind of funny out there, but it reminded
Speaker 2: me of the deep divide that we see in the
Speaker 2: American political landscape. Not that I need to be reminded
Speaker 2: of it, because out there in the media, it's there
Speaker 2: each and every day. It's not just our imaginations though.
Speaker 2: A report from the Pew Research Center this summer said, quote,
Speaker 2: Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines and
Speaker 2: partis antipathy is deeper and more extensive than at any
Speaker 2: point in the last two decades.
Speaker 1: Well, we feel it, right. We talk about it constantly.
Speaker 1: This division that we're seeing, whether it's a party, lines
Speaker 1: are elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Oftentimes folks out there use division and the word tribes
Speaker 2: to sort of describe division. It's often looked at in
Speaker 2: a pejorative way, just another thing that kind of pushes
Speaker 2: us apart, and it makes us separate from one another. Yet,
Speaker 2: Michael Morris argues in a new book that perhaps, rather paradoxically,
Speaker 2: what keeps us apart can actually bring us closer together.
Speaker 1: Kind of love that idea.
Speaker 2: Michael Morris is Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School.
Speaker 2: His new book is out today, Tribal How the cultural
Speaker 2: instincts that divide us can help bring us together. He
Speaker 2: joins us from New York.
Speaker 1: Michael, so great to have you here with us, so
Speaker 1: relevant in terms of here we are in an election year.
Speaker 1: So talk to us a little bit about first of all,
Speaker 1: that this just kind of general concept of what divides
Speaker 1: us can bring us together. Why did you think we
Speaker 1: needed you needed to write this book and bring it
Speaker 1: bring it to people.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you for having me. This is a book
Speaker 3: that I've been working on for almost ten years. I'm
Speaker 3: a behavioral scientist, you know, a re search psychologist, and
Speaker 3: my specialty is cultural psychology, which is the study of
Speaker 3: the cultural frames in our heads that guide our thinking,
Speaker 3: guide our actions and decisions, and what activates them and
Speaker 3: how they change. And I've been teaching at top business
Speaker 3: schools for decades at Columbia Business School, formerly at Stanford
Speaker 3: Business School, So I've developed a toolkit for thinking about
Speaker 3: how to use the cultural forces that shape people's thinking
Speaker 3: to create unity in a group, or to create change
Speaker 3: in a society or in an organization. And that's the
Speaker 3: reason that I started writing this book sort of to
Speaker 3: create a playbook for activists, leaders, managers, high school teachers, coaches,
Speaker 3: anybody who has to orchestrate a group into a productive direction.
Speaker 1: Well, and what's interesting is you hear the word tribe
Speaker 1: or tribalism, and you might get a little i don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe put off a little bit or think one way.
Speaker 1: But you say, when we think of tribes, it's countries,
Speaker 1: it's churches, it's political parties, it's companies, it could be families,
Speaker 1: right like, it's it's you know, groups that we deal
Speaker 1: with all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, tribes, you know, from a from an evolutionary standpoint
Speaker 3: or from a you know, classic anthropology standpoint, it just
Speaker 3: refers to the distinctively human form of social organization, which
Speaker 3: is large communities that are united by shared culture as
Speaker 3: opposed to being united by blood relations or being united
Speaker 3: by you know, diadic bonds between people. And that's you know,
Speaker 3: that's how we differ from other primates. We can you
Speaker 3: could never have a Chimpanzee Manhattan. You know, once, once
Speaker 3: they get more than fifty individuals in a group, it
Speaker 3: starts to break apart because they depend on either being
Speaker 3: related or having a direct personal bond of trust. We
Speaker 3: can trust total strangers because we share culture with them,
Speaker 3: so we can understand them, and we can predict their movements,
Speaker 3: and we can predict what they will do, so we
Speaker 3: can trust them. So, yeah, tribalism is mostly a good thing.
Speaker 3: It's what made us human, It's what got us where
Speaker 3: we are now. I think what's really interesting is, you know,
Speaker 3: over the past ten years while I've been writing this book,
Speaker 3: there's been kind of a trope of toxic tribalism that
Speaker 3: has emerged among the pundit class and has been picked
Speaker 3: up by politicians and business leaders. And the idea is
Speaker 3: that somehow, a deeply evolved drive to hate each other
Speaker 3: has somehow reawakened, and now we're screwed because we don't
Speaker 3: talk to each other anymore. And there's no way to
Speaker 3: get the genie back into the bottle anymore. And this
Speaker 3: makes for colorful articles, and maybe it makes for you know,
Speaker 3: riveting speeches, but it's a kind of despairing, fatalistic take
Speaker 3: on the conflicts of our time. I don't think it's
Speaker 3: a helpful way to think, and I don't think it's
Speaker 3: an accurate way to think. It's not a way of
Speaker 3: talking about tribal instincts that any evolutionary scholar or any
Speaker 3: behavioral scientists would recognize. So I think we've kind of
Speaker 3: talked ourselves into this take on tribalism that's not scientifically
Speaker 3: founded and not helpful.
Speaker 2: Would you dispute the idea in the book.
Speaker 3: Is to try to debunk that way of thinking about tribalism.
Speaker 2: Well, professor Morris, would you? Would you dispute the idea
Speaker 2: that we're more divided now, like the Pew research says,
Speaker 2: than we are at least politically, and then we have
Speaker 2: been in previous decades, for the last twenty years. Does
Speaker 2: that seem miss like it's not necessarily accurate to you.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, perhaps in the last twenty years, but
Speaker 3: certainly not the claim that I hear more often, which
Speaker 3: is that the American people have never been this divided.
Speaker 3: You know, if you if you read history. In eighteen
Speaker 3: sixty Abraham Lincoln became president, he had less than forty
Speaker 3: percent of the popular vote. Seven states seceded before he
Speaker 3: was even inaugurated. The Civil War breaks out. A few
Speaker 3: weeks afterwards, four more states secede. Now that's that's a crisis.
Speaker 3: That's that's a legitimacy crisis for a president, and that's
Speaker 3: a that's a big rift to heal. But Lincoln was
Speaker 3: one of the leaders, and there are many throughout history
Speaker 3: political and business leaders who they had faith that the
Speaker 3: best way to heal a divide was tribal memory. It
Speaker 3: was it was appealing to our common ancestors, appealing to
Speaker 3: our common past. You know, Lincoln had that famous, mysterious
Speaker 3: line in his first inauguration that the mystic cords of
Speaker 3: men shall yet swell the chorus of the Union. You
Speaker 3: know what was he talking about. Well, he he thought
Speaker 3: of himself as a storyteller in chief, and he made
Speaker 3: all of these wonderful speeches like the Gettysburg Address that
Speaker 3: you know, made reference to the sacrifices of our common
Speaker 3: ancestors and the common ideals that you know, even people
Speaker 3: in the South were moved by that speech. One holiday
Speaker 3: we have coming up as Thanksgiving, and we we often
Speaker 3: associate Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, but it was really Abraham
Speaker 3: Lincoln who started Thanksgiving as a national holiday. And he
Speaker 3: did it because he thought that we need we needed
Speaker 3: a national ritual of gratitude and memory. Uh and that
Speaker 3: and that, more than anything else, could bring people together. So,
Speaker 3: you know, we may think of nostalgia and sentimentality about
Speaker 3: the past as a you know, as a silly, irrational
Speaker 3: way of thinking, but it's a deep part of our
Speaker 3: tribal wiring and one that can be used for inclusiveness,
Speaker 3: not just for divisiveness. You know, we see, you know,
Speaker 3: we see a brand of populist politics nowadays where the
Speaker 3: story is, you know, things used to be great, but
Speaker 3: now we have all these immigrants and things are going
Speaker 3: to hell. Well that's a divisive form of populism. But
Speaker 3: there have been many leaders who practiced inclusive forms of populism.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, we need to we need
Speaker 3: to understand tribalism and understand all the ways that we
Speaker 3: can use it at a time like this.
Speaker 1: Well, when we come back. We want to continue. We
Speaker 1: have to do a little bit of news, but we
Speaker 1: want to come back with you, Professor Morris, and continue
Speaker 1: this conversation. And because you've also advised political campaigns that
Speaker 1: we know, whether it was Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: and Joe Biden, we wanted to do a little bit
Speaker 1: more deeper into politics, but also maybe tools that we
Speaker 1: can all use so that when we have kind of
Speaker 1: the division aspect of our society out there, maybe how
Speaker 1: we can get to a better, better place that actually
Speaker 1: brings us together, what we can all do to get
Speaker 1: to that point.
Speaker 2: Also full disclosure. Professor Morris was my professor at business
Speaker 2: school as I was doing research and saw his name
Speaker 2: for this segment. Oh yeah, my first class in business school.
Speaker 2: We're gonna Professor Morris. It's an intensive sort of social
Speaker 2: psychology class that you take what for two and a
Speaker 2: half weeks? Is that right?
Speaker 1: Professor? We can go in your files and check out
Speaker 1: what grade Tim goes.
Speaker 2: We can like grade non disclosure is a great thing
Speaker 2: about business school.
Speaker 1: Professor Morris, Michael Morris, Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School.
Speaker 3: We're gonna come back.
Speaker 1: We're talking about his book Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts
Speaker 1: that divide Us Can Help bring Us together? More to
Speaker 1: come on the other side, Carol Master along with Tim Stenowick.
Speaker 1: As we mentioned, we're talking with Michael Morris, Professor of
Speaker 1: Leadership at the Columbia Business School. We're talking about his
Speaker 1: new book, Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts that divide Us
Speaker 1: Can Help Bring Us Together? And at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the book, he notes that he has advised political campaigns
Speaker 1: about cultural about culture relevant policies and messaging, and that
Speaker 1: include the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, also
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, which made us want to ask him about
Speaker 1: kind of that political environment. We've talked about politics already
Speaker 1: a little bit, but I do wonder, I don't know,
Speaker 1: do campaigns want to hear about culture relevant policies With
Speaker 1: everything that's going on, how do they think about messaging
Speaker 1: and getting to people who in a world where it's
Speaker 1: like you're either in one camp or the other and
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily want to hear about the other camp.
Speaker 3: Well, I think you know, we're in for a treat
Speaker 3: tonight in this debate between two you know, very articulate,
Speaker 3: talented communicators, and I happen to be part of a
Speaker 3: team advising one of the one of the sides of
Speaker 3: the of the debate, and I think that there are
Speaker 3: there are really important issues related to tribal identities that
Speaker 3: that the sides have to work on. For example, Kamala
Speaker 3: Harris is a person who has multiple social identities, and
Speaker 3: she's been sort of lambasted by Trump. I don't think
Speaker 3: very effectively for claiming to be you know, both African
Speaker 3: American and South Asian American. And I think that what
Speaker 3: she has to do and has to do well is
Speaker 3: is code switching of you know, showing an African American
Speaker 3: audience that she understands them and that they can trust her,
Speaker 3: and showing a legal audience that she's as tough a
Speaker 3: prosecutors as any, and showing you know, other other audiences
Speaker 3: that she connects with them. You know, she has a
Speaker 3: Jewish husband, she was raised by Indian American mother, So
Speaker 3: she's a person who can have a legitimate, authentic connection
Speaker 3: with a really broad swath of the society. Now, Tim
Speaker 3: Walls is a perfect compliment to her. I've heard him
Speaker 3: described as an RII candidate. You know, he's he's the
Speaker 3: only candidate who looks like he's actually been camping in
Speaker 3: his life. You know that you could you could go
Speaker 3: fishing with him and he would know, you know how
Speaker 3: to bit a hook. And I think he, you know,
Speaker 3: he needs to leverage that. He needs to show people
Speaker 3: that he knows how to fix a car. He knows
Speaker 3: how he could help you, you know, jump your your
Speaker 3: battery on a cold winter night. He's that kind of guy,
Speaker 3: and there are relatively few of them in the elite
Speaker 3: levels of politics, and I think he has to show
Speaker 3: that to us. One of the things that's not talked
Speaker 3: about so much is that there's a huge gender discrepancy
Speaker 3: in support for the two sides. Young men are twelve
Speaker 3: percent less likely to support Harris Walls than women, and
Speaker 3: among young men it's even even sharper, and it could
Speaker 3: really make a difference in some of the swing states
Speaker 3: like Arizona. So I think I think Tim has to,
Speaker 3: you know, he has to step up and show show
Speaker 3: that he's coach Walls and he can be kind of
Speaker 3: a man's man tonight in the way that sorry.
Speaker 1: No, this is fascinating. I guess I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about what's going on in our culture where so
Speaker 1: many younger white men are pretty angry and feel left behind.
Speaker 3: What's happened, Well, they used to have a not automatic,
Speaker 3: but a relatively easy path to success in social standing
Speaker 3: because they were from the favored group, the group that
Speaker 3: was sort of the prototype of who should have positions
Speaker 3: of power and responsibility and affluence. And that is declining.
Speaker 3: It's certainly not over, but it's it's it's diminishing, and
Speaker 3: so they feel like people are cutting ahead in line,
Speaker 3: you know, people are taking the places that should be theirs.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's not completely new. I mean, there's
Speaker 3: been resentments about affirmative action for decades, but I think
Speaker 3: now it's not just affirmative action. It's it's that we've
Speaker 3: had waves of very talented immigrants coming into the country,
Speaker 3: you know, for the past twenty years, and that means
Speaker 3: that a lot of our you know, native born white
Speaker 3: male good old boys are not you know, are not
Speaker 3: getting those promotions. You know, it's it's it's Russians and
Speaker 3: you know, Brazilians and you know Nigerians who are getting
Speaker 3: those promotions. Uh and and not necessarily because of any
Speaker 3: dee E policies, just because we have so many talented
Speaker 3: people from all around the world who've arrived.
Speaker 2: Have you seen anecdotally have you seen anecdotally that show
Speaker 2: up in your business school classes in the decades that
Speaker 2: you've been teaching, have they become more diverse?
Speaker 3: Very much so. The MBA population compared to when you
Speaker 3: were in it has changed dramatically. And you know, I
Speaker 3: had a class last spring, a class of fifty people,
Speaker 3: and I had seven Nigerian students, you know, some of
Speaker 3: them Nigerian Americans, but they were all, you know, students
Speaker 3: who were Nigerian, you know, by identity, and that's you know,
Speaker 3: Nigeria is one of the most populous countries in the world.
Speaker 3: So we shouldn't be surprised. But it wasn't the case
Speaker 3: when you were in the business school classroom. We weren't
Speaker 3: We weren't recruiting from Africa and the African diaspora in
Speaker 3: the same way. It's good for the world that we are.
Speaker 1: Listen, we've just got about Professor Morris about a minute left,
Speaker 1: your advice to folks who where we see so much division,
Speaker 1: but you say in your book it can bring us together.
Speaker 1: What are tools we can do? Piece of advice. Again,
Speaker 1: we've only got about a minute left.
Speaker 3: Well, what we need to do is understand what tribal
Speaker 3: psychology really is. And there are three parts to it,
Speaker 3: what I call the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and
Speaker 3: the ancestor instinct. The idea that we were driven to
Speaker 3: kind of imitate our peer group. We're driven to emulate
Speaker 3: our heroes, and we're driven to perpetuate the ways of
Speaker 3: our ancestors and maintain traditions, and all of those things
Speaker 3: can be positive forces for unity. And what we need
Speaker 3: to do is understand the levers for invoking these forces.
Speaker 3: They're inside every person, but there are triggers that bring
Speaker 3: them to the four that are invisible to us because
Speaker 3: they operate unconsciously. And so I've tried to explain what
Speaker 3: we've learned from lots of research about what those triggers
Speaker 3: are that a teacher or a manager or a politician
Speaker 3: can use. And then over the longer term, cultures are
Speaker 3: malleable and we have to understand what are the signals
Speaker 3: that we can send to help evolve the culture. Culture
Speaker 3: is not a fixed thing that we're stuck with. It's
Speaker 3: something that we can mold good.
Speaker 1: That's a great way to wrap it up. Michael Morris,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much of Columbia Business School. His new
Speaker 1: book out today, Tribal, How the cultural instincts that divide
Speaker 1: us can help bring us together. You're listening and watching
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Business Week.