In Tribal, Michael Morris outlines how our psychology equips us with “tribal instincts” for peer interaction, learning from authority, and respecting the past, which, he argues, are our greatest tools for group co-operation and even offer hope to save us from ourselves.
In Morris’s telling, human cultures arise from social learning. “If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree,” he writes, “you would learn by watching and soon the whole group would share the skill.” Different groups learn in different ways, of course, and so they develop different pools of common knowledge: different cultures.
Human thinking is not isolated and individual, therefore. It is inextricably social and collective. Our ability to participate in group activities, whether hunting, cooking, work, or play, is possible only because our thought processes are influenced by, and co-ordinate with, the minds of others. We are cognitively intertwined, and cultures are a reflection, at scale, of that interconnection.
The social learning that constitutes cultures, however, Morris continues, is shaped by three biases. Conformity bias means that widespread customs accepted by our peers are more likely to be learned and accepted than new ideas. Prestige bias means that we are more likely to listen to those with status and success. Continuity bias means that we have a bias towards accepting the old and established over the new.
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Morris warns, however, that these tribal instincts can lead us astray, especially when they are manipulated by toxic leaders preaching tribalism in its violent and scapegoating forms. Our survival, he argues, now depends on where we get our cues for cultural conformity, who we recognise and valorise as heroes to emulate, and what stories from the past we choose as guidance for the future.
Tribal presents a potentially powerful framework for thinking about how we might bring about positive cultural change to address the myriad global challenges we face. However, by applying it both to movements for progressive social change for the common good, such as Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement and Gandhi’s non-violent independence movement in India, and to changes in corporate culture aimed at profit maximisation, in firms such as Microsoft and Merrill Lynch, the book’s theory of social change ultimately fails to convince.
- Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
