Michael Morris
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 across the neighbor's fence. And so we have these political beliefs that we think are well-informed, but they come from a relatively narrow range of the full opinion spectrum.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But because we consume more news than ever before, we're confident in our beliefs. And then we hear...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
politician from the other party on television and we just we're just dumbfounded you know 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 saying it because it's in their self-interest even though they know it's wrong
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Or they have some cognitive problems. That accusation was being made about Biden, about Trump, then about Harris. We had so many accusations of IQ deficiencies.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, of some kind. 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 attribution. And so there are negative feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And so I think that's, that's how this, this, this sort of antipathy for the opposite party 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 came from this conformist instinct, which is, which is an us instinct.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, it's, it's an affinity for the end group. It's a, it's a desire to mesh with the end group that, that operates pretty subconsciously. And we're not aware of how much it drives us. And we, we, we kind of naively think that we have an accurate view of reality, but in fact, you know, our view of reality is conformist and, and,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It doesn't always lead us to do the right thing. But 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. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
The other side's view of reality is conformist, but 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 what I think and what I think a lot of behavioral scientists think about
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
the political tribalism, and then there is also tribalism ethnically and racially in the United States that has escalated in the last 10, 20 years after a long period of progress. And I think that we can explain that in terms of the us instincts, not in terms of hate. And that's an important...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
because there's this enormous, you know, DEI industry that is not exclusively, but 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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It makes people more inhibited about interacting or mentoring or hiring across ethnic lines. So it can have counterproductive effects.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah. Sometimes. Yes. But I think often it's, They're trying to say, what is the psychology that is driving this? And then they have different theories about, it's a funny thing because they often want to say it's an evolved psychology. And I think they're right about that, that our evolved psychology is contributing to this.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But then they sometimes can't really explain why now, why is it worse now if it's our age old psychology? And I think if you go into the science of tribal instincts, you can start to understand that. why certain things have become more salient at certain points in time.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, you're being a good devil's advocate. A conversation needs that.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Apparently it was the most effective ad in this election. Yeah. So I think you're right. And Oddly enough, it was about pronouns, you know, or it was about, you know, or at least sort of about pronouns. So, yeah, it was very effective. It was pithy and it captured that. I think you're right. I would push back, you know, the Me Too movement. It wasn't just a woman's empowerment movement.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It was 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 kind of started from, you know, the other group, other groups misbehavior. But Black Lives Matter, I think you're you're right that it. But again, it was it was implicitly about police brutality and violence.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then people can argue about the statistics exactly. It is certainly the case that African Americans had a higher statistical likelihood of having interactions with police and then of having interactions that were harmful in one way or the other. But so, yeah. So I agree with you that these movements are... These movements are adversarial or oppositional at some level.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It's a very interesting question. And again, I think it varies... with these three basic tribal instincts, but I'll start with the base one that I've mentioned, the peer instinct. I think what's really interesting about the peer instinct is that many studies show that race is not one of the primary triggers of
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
is by the sort of political pundits, you know, and they're just kind of grasping for a catch all 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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It becomes a trigger that people learn to use as a group marker if they live in a society like the United States where race, where physiognomy is correlated with cultural groups. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, if you get them to talk, then you can tell. You can sometimes tell from their clothing. So these other cues are – there's a lot of evidence that we are wired more – to use language as our basis of sorting.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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, in front of the screen. No way. It's not their mother, but it's their mother's dialect. So they, you know, the mother tongue is a super important and fundamental thing.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And there's also some funny studies that show that 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 these studies is that, you know, they've got like a baby who can't talk yet, but the baby can listen, right? And the baby sees one adult, you know, maybe speaking French and one adult speaking English.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then there's two kinds of food. 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, the baby shows a surprise reaction, like startled, like, oh my God. So what's really interesting is that babies are not racist.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They don't judge you based on your race. but they already judge you on your accent and on what you eat. They're already watching what you eat and your accent. So they're not little Buddhas. They're not racist, but they're not little Buddhas. They're judgmental already.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Sure. So I've mentioned the peer instinct. That corresponds to what we might call conformist impulses or the herd instinct, you know, the bandwagon instinct, we're wired to sort of unconsciously learn what the people in our group do. We just form like a register of what's normal in our group without even trying to.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 its thought to enable coordination. Even like a million years ago,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
our, um, our forebearers, Homo erectus, we have evidence now that they started hunting as a, as a sort of collaborative group, you know, and gathering as a collaborative group in a way that other species can't do like working from a common plant. And, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
we're descending into tribalism and our democracy will never be the same. That's what we've been hearing. And I think it's, I call it the trope of toxic tribalism. And it's a pretty despairing theme because the idea is that somehow the genie got out of the bottle and there's no way to get it back inside again. And I don't really think that's what's going on. I think
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
that is something we deride today, but 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 completely in a vacuum by one person.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So I think while we are, we, wise to be wary of conformity we should understand that this ability to mind meld with other people and this impulse to mesh actions and this this ease that we have at collaborating with people in our group is it empowers most of what we do yeah where's where's a peer instinct at its best peer instinct at its worst the peer instinct at its best is the kind of um
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 going to be here. Like we can read minds and we can do these amazing things together. Where it's at its worst is when you,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 a customer dies in an airbag explosion. 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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
We kind of went along with the group because we didn't want to get in the way of progress, but we knew we were right and we should have spoken up. So that's the danger.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yes, but I think part of creativity is having a point of departure, which is often somebody else's work. and some creativity. Think of a jazz quartet. It's not one individual's work. It's playing off of each other because of reading each other's mind and knowing where somebody is going to go and then doing something that complements it.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So there, I agree with you, but I think we, we have a, we have a kind of stereotype of creativity that involves the lone genius. And I would submit that most creativity, even in the arts or in the sciences is, is collaborative creativity.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Okay. Hero instinct. So the hero instinct is, It's something that was born about a half a million years ago when our ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, began doing things that no humans had been doing before. 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?
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Someone was taking care of a person who probably couldn't pay them back. Somebody was doing something pro-social. They were doing something good.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
We also see around this time they started hunting much larger animals like woolly mammoths and rhinos and stuff, which in some cases indicates an individual was willing to take some personal risk, be the lead hunter, so that the group could then rush in and take down a much larger group. pray than was possible before.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 end times. What's new is this way of talking about the conflicts as though they reflect
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You also see at this time the tools, much more sophisticated tools that required a lot more work are showing up at this time. And the idea is that people started to have a new motivation, not just a motivation to be normal, which is the peer instinct, but a motivation to be normative, to be a contributor to be more respected than the average person in the group. And how do you do that?
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well, you have to make sacrifices for the group. You kind of take a personal hit to benefit somebody else. But you also have to know what the group values, and that's not always trivial. And so a cognitive quirk that came along with the hero instinct is this idea of emulating people in the group with status.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 is this kind of superficial status-seeking, like I saw... You know, LeBron James wears these sneakers.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So I'm wearing these sneakers. It doesn't I still can't dunk. You know, it doesn't really help, you know, but I'm trying to be like LeBron. Right. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Because imagine an early agricultural group where everybody was planting one kind of peas and then somebody starts to plant corn or something or yams. And then that tends to grow well because maybe the climate changed or maybe the group migrated to a different
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
different ecology and the younger generation sees that and they will emulate that and then you'll have a sort of gradual shift of the culture towards what's working you know currently or working in the new
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
new environment so while we can deride status seeking this hero instinct it was a it was a way for individuals to become rewarded by the group to have status and tributes you know 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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
some evolutionary curse you know some some drive to hate other groups that is always going to be you know undermining us and i don't think that's true i think that the tribal instincts are are instincts that evolution sculpted in order to help us be culture sharing animals And that enabled us to live in very large collaborative groups.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
that everybody was totally equal and that it was like classical communism. You know, like food was distributed according to need. Everyone's starved. And the reason for this, like in the Bushmen, you know, the Bushmen of, which for a while you weren't supposed to say the word Bushmen. Now you're supposed to say Bushmen again, apparently.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You're supposed to call them like the San people or the Kung people. But now I've read some things that some people actually think Bushman is a better word. I don't know. So I've said all three words now, so I should be safe.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, yeah. So... They have this wonderful ritual in their group that's called insulting the meat. And the way it works is when the young hunters come back from hunting, you know, like one, you know, most of them probably got nothing and one of them got like a little rabbit and then one of them got an antelope.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And so the old men and women of the village, when hunters come back, they start insulting the hunter who got the antelope. And they're like, look at that scrawny thing. There's practically no meat on it. What is that, a mouse? And they kind of go on like that in the way that you could picture uncles in Brooklyn on their stoop.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They're shit-talking, essentially. And they call it insulting the meat. And so anthropologists said, oh, look, they obviously don't.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
want to have any status differentiation but but sort of modern modern anthropologists who use more biological methods what they they're really into measuring 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 10 years later okay which of these hunters has the most children you know
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And surprise, surprise the correlation between status measured by successful hunts and, um, And reproductive success is just as high in the hunter-gatherer group as it is in the kingdoms, in the groups that celebrate inequality.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I'm not going to complete that sentence for you.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
There would be a serious incentive problem. if the hunters genuinely felt insulted. It's a status leveling thing, right? You don't want the hunter to get too big a head because we all have to live together.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, I think that what's really interesting about it is that Pro-social behavior is socially rewarded, right? We can see in this group, it's rewarded through social opportunities. In other groups that are hunter-gatherer groups, like the Aceh, they distribute food in a completely socialist way, but the productive hunters get better medical care.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And a side effect of those tribal instincts is that we sometimes get into conflicts with other groups. But they're not instincts for hostility. They're instincts for solidarity. All of our instincts will lead us astray in some situations. We evolved to be attracted to sweet tastes because fruit has a lot of nutrition. Now, if you live...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Like, you know, if they're injured, the chief sees to it that they get like the medicine.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Exactly, right? I mean, it's not surprising. But what's interesting is that evolution – didn't just wire us to be calculating and to be revenue maximizing, even though my economist colleagues tend to think that the world works that way.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It also wired us to care about esteem as an end in itself, the standing in which we are held and the internal esteem that we feel when we know that we've done the right thing. And I think one of the reasons that we became wired with that sort of pride shame system is because social rewards tend to come probabilistically and with considerable delay.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So if I was a person who was only going to be pro-social, like I was only going to try to hunt hard if I was sure that there was a reward waiting for me, I wouldn't do it very often. But if I'm wired that I want the feeling, I want the feeling of being celebrated and the feeling of knowing I'm the contributor, then I probably will get more rewards because I'll do the pro-social thing more often.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So I think we're wired for both. We're wired to contribute in order to be rewarded, and we're wired to contribute as an end in itself.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah. 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, the respected members of the community. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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, the temptations to do things that are not thought well of. And then it also encourages you to publicize when you've done a good thing.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
they you know they cower they they disappear they become smaller so we we not only have these emotions that are driving us to to do what the group rewards but we are also wired to showboat when we have done something well and to hide it when we have not done something yeah exactly so i just to kind of round out the hero instinct bit
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
on a block with two donut shops, that wiring might lead you to eat in an unhealthy way. It doesn't mean that it's an instinct for gluttony. It's an instinct for fruit. 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 a way of thinking about human nature that is kind of in a tragic way.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, I don't know, when I was writing about this, and obviously I've been reading a lot and I do research in the area, but I often reflect back on when I was an adolescent, like when I was in high school. And I feel like a lot of my mental life in those days when I was unfolding as a person changed.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
was these Walter Mitty-like fantasies of heroic action and glory. Like, oh, the high school caught on fire. Oh, I'm going to save the pretty girl. Or, oh, my parents are in a car crash. Well, I'm going to go run and get... get medical attention.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, it was all this constant scenarios about things that I might do, which, you know, I would regard as, you know, I think a lot of our fantasies, whether they're sexual fantasies or fantasies about achievement, they reflect, you know, these programs that are partially evolved programs and then take on a particular cultural, you know, instantiation, but they're, they're, they're programs for action.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And so I, I think that probably these hero scripts that go through our heads are gendered, and they may take a different form in different subcultures, but they certainly seem to be things that are essential parts of your mental life, especially when you're young. When you get older, then you're actually doing things.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, yeah. And then there are people like, you know, I don't know, Walter Mitty might be a reference where I'm aging myself, but it's a story by James Thurber about this guy who goes through his life fantasizing about acting heroically but never doing it. And it was sort of a commentary on modernity. But I think that there's also some interesting –
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Interesting studies that help us understand who are the Walter Mitty's and who are the people who actually step forward and do contribute to groups at a sacrifice to their own safety or at a sacrifice to their own comfort and then gain the actual glory rather than just the fantasized glory.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah. Well, in my book, Tribal, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to mention it, but I write about this one study that I found fascinating. There was this program called the Freedom Summer, which was designed to help register African-American voters in the state of Mississippi in the 1960s when a very small percentage of African-Americans were registered to vote because, you know, arbitrary
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
inconveniences were put in place to stop them. So this group said, okay, we will train idealistic college students to go for the summer, uh, to Mississippi and they'll go to every community and they'll sort of build trust with people and then help people fill out the paperwork so that we have a much higher rate of registered African-American voters. And, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
applications were taken at all different colleges across the country, and people answered all sorts of questions and sent in their applications. And then the best people were selected, and they were brought to a university in Ohio, not in the South, for some initial training.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then just when the first volunteers were sent down to Mississippi, several of them were murdered in a very brutal way by the KKK. That created a crisis in the program, as you might expect, where people thought this was going to be a difficult summer, but they didn't think they were going to get murdered. A third of the people stayed, and two-thirds of the people decided not
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
probably don't want to do this in the end. And then, you know, they ran the program at a slightly smaller scale than they expected. And there were no more killings, but there were some difficult circumstances. And after the fact, this sociologist realized, well, all those applications, all those applications are still on record.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So I want to go back and look at those applications and see if I can distinguish who were the stayers and who were the quitters, right? Who are the people who stayed even though suddenly it was looking like a much tougher gig? It was looking like something that was going to be dangerous.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And what was interesting is that these people had written essays about their political values and they had talked about their experience being involved in political activism and that sort of thing. And none of those things mattered. None of those things differed between the stayers and the quitters.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
The only thing that differed was that the stayers were people who happened to have close personal friends who were also in the program and And were people who were part of organizations that were involved with the program. Like they belonged to a political organization that was one of the sponsors of the program.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So the conclusion was that these people were embedded in relationships where they couldn't quit. without really disappointing some people that they definitely were going to see again. They were definitely going to see the political club that they were a part of back in their hometown, and they definitely were going to see their friends who were also part of this group. So these being...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
in a network of people who are committed to a cause, it sort of anchors you to that cause so that you stay with it even when the going gets tough.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well, social... Social pressure and social incentives, right? Correct. A sense of support if you do it well and a sense of... Studies of militaries have found that, you know, why do people risk their life on the battlefield? Is it for their country? Is it because they care about democracy? No, it's because of their buddies from boot camp, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It's their buddies from boot camp who are out there and they're not going to run if their buddy's out there. Even in... even in insurgent groups, or you might call them terrorist groups, there was a theory that terrorists were mentally ill, crazy people.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But then when people actually did studies, they typically found the inconvenient finding that these terrorists were above average in mental health and were not these weird deviant loners. They were popular people, well-connected. And so
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It's because for the same reason, the people who are central members of the community, like the mosque or whatever, if the mosque gets radicalized, those are the people who are going to Throw stones or throw Molotov cocktails.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Oh, yeah. He's one of the researchers of this material.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well, it's this kind of Manichaean message, right, that, you know, The world is coming to an end because along with our evolutionary blessing of intelligence and familial loyalty has come this curse of genocide. The person delivering the message feels very important, and the people listening are spellbound, at least in the short term. It gives everybody the opportunity to be Cassandra. Exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, I'm in a pretty solitary profession myself, you know, being a behavioral scientist and a professor. And I found that even I tend to like courses that are team taught, you know, the core courses where we have to have a team of professors who all go and deliver the same material on the same day to different groups, even though they're more work.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
some social quirks that enable us to live in culture sharing groups and these culture sharing groups allow for a level of collaboration and common fate and common concern that that is not present in other in any other social species and so
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
there's something wonderful about that experience of being in, in a shared battle, you know, then you regroup at the end of the day and how did it go? Oh yeah. My afternoon session was a nightmare. Oh, couldn't have been worse than mine. You know, the commiseration and, and working together. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It's, it's a, it's a wonderful bonding experience in, in a lot of traditional cultures, particularly ones that are, um, cultures where people have to hunt or people are in battles where people are warriors, you have rites of passage that adolescents go through that are really dysphoric, that involve painful and frightening experiences that you typically go through with your age-mates.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
you know, with the group of people within one or two years of you. And you are, for the rest of your life, bonded with those people because you've gone through this terrifying, painful experience with them.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yes. The ancestor instinct is the most recently evolved wave of adaptations that contributes to our ability to live in tribes. And in some ways, it sounds like the most primitive of them. It's the urge to replicate the ways of past generations, to maintain traditions. We can recognize it in ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It's our curiosity about past generations of our family or the original family recipe for this meal. We sort of fetishize antiques, you know, objects that come from the past. We want to hear about founders, not just the founders of our nations, but the founders of religions, the founders of the organizations that we are a part of.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So we have this kind of irrational curiosity, this kind of irresistible curiosity about the past and this impulse to maintain these ways. And We feel really good when we maintain a tradition because we feel connected, not just to the current community, but to the past generations of the community.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And many anthropologists think that it has something to do with our fundamental fear of mortality that because we are the animal that knows that we will die, we have a sort of latent terror about our mortality.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
The reason it was adaptive is that it allowed early human groups to hang on to the discoveries and the inventions of past generations, even ones that weren't immediately needed. So what you see at this time is you start seeing that it was not just the case that people were replicating the tools like the spears that were being made by the prior generation.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But they were also replicating the cave art and the little Venus figurines and the bone flutes, things that didn't have an immediate instrumental purpose, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah. And you know, it's, it's yeah. Tragic plays don't always, don't always talk about the end of the world, but even a tragic play, which talks about the end of a particular person's life or success is, is kind of riveting, you know, and always has been riveting. But yeah, I think, I think that the problem is,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 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 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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And 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 imagine that... Imagine that we're a group that lives near the ocean and there's a tsunami that happens maybe every 60 years.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
If there's a myth about the tsunami and we repeat that myth, even though generations go by without a tsunami, but we still repeat the myth, the myth is there to protect us when the tsunami does come. And it's not a hypothetical example. There's a group that are sometimes called sea gypsies that live pretty much on the water in Thailand.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And they did not lose many people in the great tsunami of 2006, even though many people in the coastal villages died, because they have all these songs and myths about how the ocean looks when there's a tsunami. It's tricky. The ocean actually recedes. Before a tsunami, which is like an invitation to go look in the tidal pools.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But if you have a lore in your culture of like, if the ocean ever recedes, head for the hills. You know, that's an adaptive cultural...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well... There are many examples where I was like, oh my God, I didn't know that. I wouldn't have suspected that. Not all of them are things that have been adopted for me personally, but we have this myth about a primordial flood, 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?
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Like, yeah, he built a boat just by himself and then he had all these animals. It doesn't, but it turns out that groups all around the world have myths about a primordial flood. And around, I guess around 8,000 years ago, there was a major rise in the oceans that corresponded to the end of some kind of mini ice age or something.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I can't remember the exact geological details, but 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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
some anthropologists who had collected the flood myths all around the country, they teamed up with some geologists who built simulations based on the topography of different parts of Australia. 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 these really traumatic events
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 we get rewarded for dramatic statements. The more dramatic, the more worrisome, the more clicks, you know, the more, you know, so I think that.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 of the you know noah story you know 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 the exact story of the primordial flood myth.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So the Moses story, sorry, I keep saying Moses, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah, and it lasted in the oral tradition for thousands of years before it was written down.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Right. Right. In the sense that it, you know, it provides a warning, you know, the person who lived to tell the story probably had some sort of boat. Yeah. Yeah. So 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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
our morality, and maybe our aesthetics, right? That's the glorified notion of what makes humans humans. And in the process of doing the research for this book, I came to see that as very incomplete, that some of the things that make us human and that enabled us to build these wonderful, comfortable civilizations that we live in today are things
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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, uh, So yeah, I think that I have come to a different understanding of the world through thinking a lot about how- How the mighty have fallen.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
there has been a cascade of Cassandras, you know, everybody wants to out Cassandra, the other Cassandras and become the pundit du jour. So I think that some of that has been going on and what makes for good, what makes for good op-eds doesn't necessarily make for good policies.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Great question. One of the themes that I try to express is that there's a myth that cultures are kind of like permanent fixtures, that 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 I, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 different Chris, right? I would see a different person. So we have short-term fluctuations based on situations, and then we have long-term evolution of cultures.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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, and, What we call code switching is an example of this.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So when Barack Obama used to speak in a slightly different register when he was in front of an African-American group, as opposed to a group of farmers from Kansas, that wasn't something that he was doing intentionally. That was just a reflex that came from the fact that he grew up with a mixed family and with different parts of his life living in each of those communities.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
and when he's in front of people who look a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and yes, you know, have certain ethnic characteristics, although that is less fundamental to it. Um, he clicks into one set of speech habits or another set of speech habits. And some of my research, you know, have pushed a little deeper on that and showed that it's not just speech habits.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It's 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'm around my fellow professors, I'm thinking in terms of data.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And that's, that's where I think, you know, a little bit more grounding in science when we talk about tribalism would elevate the discussion a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I'm thinking in terms of economic theory, that kind of thing. When I go to my hometown and I'm with my buddies in a dive bar, I'm thinking in terms of different templates, different scripts, ones that help me bond with them and help me be understood by them, but that wouldn't work as well with my colleagues at Columbia.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So it's audiences, 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. Crusaders followed the cross. They took the cross.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Sports teams, the mascot runs out on the field and people go crazy.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
What's that? Would an anthem be a song that they come out to? Exactly, an anthem. Whether it's a national anthem or whether the fans will chant a song in the stadium. So it's a kind of set of images or a set of words or...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 so these symbols, these cultural icons are potent triggers of hero instincts.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
If you want to get people to be pro-social, to take risks, to make sacrifices, surround them with the symbols of their tribe. And then the one that is maybe least obvious is
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 neuroscience literature on this, that synchronous behavior, it lulls people into a different mental state where they're, they're, Self-concept as an individual is reduced.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They become more open to unity experience. Their critical thinking is somewhat reduced. And so they become more open to this idea of accepting tradition. So if you have a moment in a yoga class or in a religious service where suddenly you feel part of a tradition, that's because you've been in a ceremony and ceremonies bring that out in us.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah. In cults, I mean, there are daily ceremonies where you're kind of made to feel part of a broader system. Your individual self-consciousness gets dampened. And I think people join cults because... This unity experience is a wonderful thing to experience.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
A lot of us will experience it on a sports team or if you're part of a political campaign and you're throwing yourself into it, you feel part of something larger and you're making sacrifices for that group and you feel connected to prior generations of people in the same community. So it's a wonderful experience. experience that people get when they start to join a cult.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then I think cults differ from just a strong culture in some of their recruitment techniques. One thing that really characterizes cults is what's called network isolation, where they will
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They'll find somebody who maybe is not tightly embedded in a community, like maybe a transfer student who is new on a large campus or someone who's recently gotten out of the army and hasn't really started work yet, and they will invite that person to some social activity, maybe a a volleyball game or a dinner, and they love bomb them.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They surround them with people who hang on their every word and tell them they have spiritual potential and make them feel wonderful. And if they respond well, then they get an invitation to come to our group's retreat. It's in this beautiful mountain setting where cell phones don't work and where there are no newspapers and no television.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then you have long days of getting up early, eating a low-protein diet, you know, maybe meditating, chanting, hiking together, listening to charismatic lectures, having sort of confession sessions. And this is the same routine that seminaries use to recruit priests. It's the same routine that the Muslim Brotherhood uses to recruit. You know, it's nothing...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
cults don't have a monopoly on this set of recruitment techniques. But basically what you're doing is you're pulling somebody out of the mixed social network that they ordinarily live in. And then after the retreat, usually 10% or 20% of the people are willing to move into a cult residence. And then once they're in the cult residence, then they're told –
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, you should probably cut off some of these old friends because they don't really get it about the important work we're doing here in the cult, or at least give them a break. And maybe 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. And then, of course, the family gets angry.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 then you get into a world where you're living in a day-to-day routine where you're
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
you're completely surrounded by fellow cult members and they look up to the cult leaders and the cult leaders basically have this monopoly on status. Nobody else in your world has status. You're not seeing deference to anybody else. And that's when it gets really dangerous because it's abnormal, you know, in normal life, even if you're a very religious person, you know, you, um,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You may think the Pope is a wonderful person, but you're also a big fan of Messi and you like the music of Mick Jagger. And so no one of these heroes can dominate you completely. But when you're in a cult and you're not allowed to listen to Mick Jagger, you're not allowed to watch Messi, and it's all day long ceremonies involving the cult leader, that gets dangerous.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You're right. In addition to these sort of social triggers or who you're around or whether you're in a ceremony or you're seeing symbols or you're seeing audiences, particular emotional states also contribute to these things. And so threat tends to be something particularly existential threat, like the, the, the fear of death, a brush with death or the, the fear of collective threat.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
That's really well put. I would say... 95% of our tribal wiring is about us, not about them. Our evolutionary forebearers did not have that much contact with other tribes. The population density in Stone Age Europe or Africa before that was very low. There were very few Homo sapiens there.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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, you know, there's a tendency to, to,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
think that your own traditions are wonderful and that the competition, that their traditions are silly, but then imagine it's a time of threat, like your business is not doing well. Well, the tribal reflex is to cling to your traditions even more, but that's not adaptive because that's really a time when you want to be learning from the competition. You want to be open-minded.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Similarly, in warfare, if you're trying to negotiate a peace treaty, 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 leads people to anchor on their own traditions, on their own group.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, when COVID happened, a lot of people were dying. But I don't know that it... I don't know that it led to partisan polarization. I do think that in the... We see a lot of tribalism with regard to the Israel-Gaza conflict. The campus that I teach in has been... It's sort of like getting into an airport to get into the main campus because there's been...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
protests that were very disruptive. And now there's really strong management of who can enter the campus. And I think that that was a conflict that escalated and became very acrimonious because of the, the brutality of not just that people died, but that people just died in, in a horrible way, both on October 7th and in, in Gaza, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So I do think in a case like that, people, people start to, even though their fellow college, you know, fellow college students are, marching and chanting and calling their classmates Nazis. And it's bizarre because, you know, yeah, there is a big problem in the world, but your fellow Columbia undergraduates are not the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 ever get larger than about 50 individuals or they turn into a blood bath. And we evolved, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
But there's this tendency for the, you know, these protests started as vigils, vigils expressing solidarity for vulnerable civilians in Israel and in Gaza. But then a few months later, the protests were accusations, you know, accusing the opposite faction of students of being Nazis and being genocidal. So
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I do think in that case, because people are aware of the mortality and the bloodshed, there's this way in which people take on this exaggerated sense of being vulnerable themselves. Some of my Israeli colleagues who are leaders in the protests, they would say things like, my children would be more safe you know, in Israel or in the Gaza Strip than they are at the Columbia campus.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And I'm like, okay, there's not a lot of threat to physical safety. There's been a threat to people's peace of mind because there's been some harassment, but there are not people being killed.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
total you know 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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
There is hostility. I'm not arguing that there's no hostility in these conflicts. I'm just saying it doesn't start from hostility. It doesn't start from a drive to derogate and fear outsiders and that solidarity within one's group does not imply or necessitate antagonism towards other groups. And now that may sound like,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
semantic hair splitting, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, it's like very grandiose rhetoric and it doesn't, it doesn't suggest ameliorative, it doesn't suggest ameliorative policies because, well, if we're cursed by some drive to, to hate and to be hostile and, that is not something that we can really work with. But if, for example, we believe that the root of the increased partisan conflict has to do with
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 conformist 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where, you know, there are not a lot of Trump signs and there are a lot of Harris signs. And then even the businesses are like Lululemon and Whole Foods, which basically don't, they don't operate in Republican districts. You know, these are, these are blue tribe symbols, blue tribe icons. And, um,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I've been quite busy the last couple of days because I'm buying a house upstate and upstate is different. You know, upstate, if I'm going to be spending more time up there, I'm not going to be constantly reinforced and constantly triggered to think about the world through these blue tribe lenses because I won't be in an ideologically inbred environment all the time. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And there are things we can do beyond ourselves personally. There's been a lot of efforts to create dialogue across... red-blue factions of society.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Some of it's going on at universities or town gown, bringing the university students to talk to the people in the university town who may not share their view, or we bring some of our students to industrial towns in the Midwest that have suffered from globalization. The first wave of these programs, very well-intentioned, but a lot of them had names like
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
you know, red meets blue or a town gown encounter or hello from the other side. And it, sort of accentuated that you are about to be confronted with one of them, one of these people from the other side. And that raises defenses. That's not a form of interaction that people tend to learn more moderate views from.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And the kinds of programs that the research suggests are more effective, they're named things like Coffee Party USA, Make America Dinner Again, open lands discussions. And the logic here is you bring together
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
you deliberately bring together people that you know are registered Republicans and Democrats, but not to talk about divisive political issues, you know, to talk about things, passions they have in common, like they all like coffee, or they're all foodies, or they're all Christian believers, or they're all people who, you know, are outdoors people.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Evolutionary scholars can slice the salami very thinly when they talk about these adaptations. I'm someone who – I've been a business school professor and a sort of political consultant, organizational consultant for 20 years and also a researcher of cultural psychology. So I tend to –
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And the idea is you start talking, and then you move from this conversation to that conversation. And You maybe eventually get to politics, but the conversation is one that is bonding and one that is more likely to last than if you ask people to discuss global warming or if you ask people to discuss abortion or something like that. It doesn't lead to usually a conversation that lasts very long.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So I think the diagnosis does matter when it comes to trying to think about what can we do to get ourselves out of this bind that we're in. It's not like we've always been in this bind. It's something that happened in the last couple of generations for particular reasons that involve the interaction of some of our tribal psychology with some technological changes and things.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
demographic changes, and we can find our way out of it. The doomsayers often will say things like, America has never been more divided politically. That is absolute nonsense if you know your history. Abraham Lincoln took over with less than 40% of the popular vote. Seven states seceded before his inauguration. The Civil War started a few weeks afterwards.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And that's what we call a political rift, where your country is in a civil war. You are not considered to be a legitimate president by a lot of people. And that's a real struggle. But it's really interesting to me what he thought was the answer to that. In his first inauguration, he talked about the daunting prospect of what the country faced. And then he said...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I'm not going to get this perfect, but something like, the mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the union. And what he meant by that is that the best resource we have for healing the rift is our common heritage, our common history, our common ancestors. And if we think about them, we will feel like our current divide is not such a big deal.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And the other thing that Abraham Lincoln did, which is kind of a seasonally topical thing, point, is that he is the one who instituted the holiday of Thanksgiving. Most Americans have the notion that Thanksgiving has been practiced ever since the pilgrims landed on these shores.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
That's a myth that was created in part by Abraham Lincoln and the people around, the thought leaders of the day who believed that this holiday would be an effective way to unify the country. They made reference to the precedence of the pilgrims and the precedence
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
of George Washington holding a Thanksgiving event in order to make people feel like this new holiday was not some alien thing, but was something that was already a time-honored tradition, already something that was part of the American tradition. And it became an instant tradition within a decade or so of Abraham Lincoln announcing that we're going to have this new holiday, Thanksgiving.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
It was a sacred national tradition and it's something that helped bring the country back together. So I think we talk a lot about references to the past involved in divisive populism, like talking about the good old days as a way to blame immigrants for a problem. But talking about history has also been
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 effective leaders or activists or managers or coaches
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
useful for inclusive populism, for creating a broader group identity, for reminding people that we all share certain ancestors. So I'm someone who I don't believe that we're seeing the end of democracy. I think that the problems that we face are are not larger than the problems that, you know, our country has come through before or that other democracies have come through before.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And that, you know, it's helpful to have a diagnosis that is realistic rather than a diagnosis that is, you know, Manichaean that talks about sort of, you know, good versus evil, the end of the world, you know, this kind of really grandiose, grandiose ways of talking about our situation.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Tribal psychology is what made us human and underlies all of our proudest accomplishments. It goes awry sometimes, yes, like every instinct does. But if we understand the instinct, then we can manage that.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well, I have a book website that's called tribalbook.org that is a good place to go to learn more about my book. I also have a site called michaelwmorris.com where you can learn a lot about my research and the kind of courses that I teach as well as learning about the book and other things that I've written.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Thanks so much for having me.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
draw upon and harness today um so i can go into those but i think i i would say an 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? It wouldn't have been adaptive to go looking for other tribes to fight with.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
Well, I'm... I'll agree partly with that. I think that an outgroup 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, they're sort of more human than the other group. In a lot of indigenous groups, the name for their own group is also the name for human, you know? So like the implication being that, uh, other people are slightly less human than, uh, than the end group. So, um, yeah, so it, it is once, you know, I can imagine that groups that had almost no contact with other human groups are
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
They had contact with animals. They had contact with other kinds of things. They had some basis for a comparison. But 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 individual.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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,
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
So in the case of the political tribalism in the States, and I think in many other Western democracies as well, you have political parties that didn't used to be a salient basis of individual identity. Two generations ago, my parents, they didn't know whether their neighbors were Democrats or Republicans. They didn't know if their work colleagues were Republicans. Democrats or Republicans.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
You know, there's the occasional zealot who puts out a lawn sign, but that was it. But what has happened in the United States, at least over the last two generations, is you first had an enormous wave of residential sorting. As technology changed and transportation changed, you were freer to live in any part of the country that you wanted to.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And liberals moved to the coasts and to the college towns. Conservatives moved to the heartland and to the exurbs. And that meant that you weren't going to the Norman Rockwell town meeting and listening to a wide range of...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
opinions and having to reconcile your beliefs to your neighbor's beliefs you were living in these ideologically inbred communities where when you went to the grocery store or the softball game or whatever you kind of 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
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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. So that's the basic story about tribalism. And we're stuck with it because it's in our wiring.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
where previously there were three network television shows that were required by the FEC to provide very specific boring, bland, balanced coverage 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 knowledge.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
I know you watched Walter Cronkite last night too. So I feel a lot of commonality with you. And what happened is you started to have Cable news stations that were 24 seven 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.
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
And then you have social media feed, which is even more of an echo chamber for reasons that we've all talked a lot about in the last years, that it's not just that I am connected to people who share my politics, but that I have...
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
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 so um so yeah so we've had this
Modern Wisdom
#874 - Michael Morris - Why Are We More Divided Than Ever?
First, this fracturing or 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 fundamental changes tribal instincts is what I call the peer instinct. And it's something we all know about. It's our tendency to conform. It's our tendency to imitate what we see around us more than we realize. It happens unconsciously.