“Tribalism” has a generally negative reputation these days. It’s often used to refer to an us-versus-them mentality, or a culture that’s divisive and exclusionary. But that perception, according to cultural psychologist Michael Morris, “could not be more inaccurate as a description of what human tribal instincts are. They're instincts for solidarity, not for hostility.” On this episode of The Culture Kit, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srviastava interview Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School, about his new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. Jenny, Sameer, and Michael discuss how tribal instincts allowed humans to break away from the primate back, and how these deeply ingrained instincts show up in organizations today. They also delve into modern and historical examples of leaders utilizing tribalism to adapt culture and even heal rifts.
“Tribalism” has a generally negative reputation these days. It’s often used to refer to an us-versus-them mentality, or a culture that’s divisive and exclusionary. But that perception, according to cultural psychologist Michael Morris, “could not be more inaccurate as a description of what human tribal instincts are. They're instincts for solidarity, not for hostility.”
On this episode of The Culture Kit, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srviastava interview Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School, about his new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.
Jenny, Sameer, and Michael discuss how tribal instincts allowed humans to break away from the primate back, and how these deeply ingrained instincts show up in organizations today. They also delve into modern and historical examples of leaders utilizing tribalism to adapt culture and even heal rifts.
Leaders can recognize and harness the three main types of tribal psychology:
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Jenny: Hi, I’m Jenny Chatman.
[00:00:03] Sameer: And I’m Sameer Srivastava.
[00:00:06] Jenny: We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. And we’ve dedicated our careers to studying and advancing effective workplace cultures.
[00:00:15] Sameer: Jenny is a psychologist who helped create the field of organizational culture research.
[00:00:20] Jenny: And Sameer is a sociologist who is pioneering new ways to use big data, AI, and deep learning to uncover insights about what happens inside organizations.
[00:00:33] Sameer: Together, we founded the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation to help business leaders create and cultivate healthy and effective workplace cultures.
[00:00:42] Jenny: In this podcast, we’ll tackle hard-to-fix issues that your organization is facing as we look to the future of work.
[00:00:51] Sameer: We’ll take your questions about culture and give you practical advice that you can put to work right away. Join us for The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer and start building your culture toolkit.
[00:01:04] Sameer: Hey, Jenny.
[00:01:05] Jenny: Hey Sameer.
[00:01:06] Sameer: So, we've spent our last couple of episodes talking to practitioners about some of the current challenges organizations are facing around polarization, navigating political and social issues, and how to build a culture that's inclusive and psychologically safe amidst all of this polarization.
[00:01:23] Jenny: Yeah, these are really hot issues now, but they're not exactly new. So, today, we're going to take a step back. Actually, we're going to take a step way back to the earliest of human organizations — tribes. We'll be hearing from an expert about what our tribal instincts can teach us about ourselves and the dynamics of organizations.
So, our question today is, given how deeply ingrained these instincts are, how can leaders harness them to bring people together around unified, inclusive culture? And I'd like to welcome our esteemed guest, cultural psychologist, Michael Morris, who's a professor at Columbia Business School and a great friend of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.
Welcome, Michael.
[00:02:11] Michael: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:13] Sameer: We also want to congratulate you, Michael, on your new book, which is hot off the presses. It's called Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.
[00:02:23] Jenny: So, Michael, your book title is so intriguing. Tribalism has this kind of negative reputation. It's often used to refer to a culture that's, like, divisive, exclusionary, a kind of us-versus-them orientation. And so, I think it's important for us to start off by really defining what we're talking about. What is a tribe?
[00:02:44] Michael: Well, I use the definition of tribe that comes out of evolutionary anthropology, which is just that it's a large community bound together by shared culture. And that is the distinctively human form of social organization. There's lots of other social animals out there, but the way that we broke away from the rest of the primate pack was by being able to form larger communities, communities that transcend kith and kin, so that we can trust total strangers and collaborate with total strangers. So, that is the original meaning of the word “tribe” and the one that I'm trying to reclaim.
[00:03:26] Sameer: Well, you mentioned the phrase “cultural anthropology,” and it reminds me that your own training is as that of a cultural psychologist, but your work, really, is very broad and engages with anthropology, sociology, psychology, and really brings them all together. So, from that perspective, how did you do the work that you did for this book? And what have we learned about why humans tend to form tribes? What do they do for early humans, and how has that evolved over time?
[00:03:53] Michael: You know, one of the life-changing insights for me in some of the reading that I've done for the book, but also, reading that I've done for a decade or so before I started writing the book, just as part of my research as a cultural scholar, was coming across the concept of cumulative cultural evolution. And the idea is that early humans had to evolve certain kinds of cognitive and psychological capacities so that they could share culture efficiently and they could hang on to the wisdom of the past generation.
And once that was in place, what happened is that the culture in early human groups started snowballing. It started accumulating across the generations and, sort of, tuning itself to the needs of the local ecology. And that's how humans became humans. That's how we ended up in these communities with rich legacies of shared knowledge, shared ideals, shared traditions, and distinctive cultures in distinctive groups.
You know, we used to... when I was in school, we used to talk about nature versus nurture. And I think that, in evolutionary anthropology, at least, they don't ask that question anymore, because they've decided that human nature is nurture, that we are wired to internalize the patterns of the communities that nurture us. And that's how we internalize lots of different cultures throughout our lives, the culture of our family, the culture of our religion, the culture of our community, our residential community, and then we join organizations as an employee. We may convert to a different religion. We may join the army. All of these times a new community is enveloping us and nurturing us, and we internalize the ways of that community. And then we end up with many different cultures inside of us, many tribes inside of us. And that's why cultural psychology is so dynamic, because they can't all operate at once. We have to switch between them.
We talk about code-switching a lot these days because of Kamala Harris. And code-switching is simply the effect that, when we get in front of a different audience, different codes come to mind and take control and help us bond with that audience. And we all code-switch.
[00:06:17] Sameer: The idea of code-switching relates to a paper of mine that we've talked about in a prior podcast where, in post-merger integration, you can look at how people code-switch between the legacy organization they came from and the new one they're joining to and measure the degree to which they're integrating based on that code-switching and you would develop a method for, doing that. But I want to go back, Michael, to the idea of tribalism. And you said that it's been with us since the very, very beginning of humankind. So, what do you hope to change about the way we think about and talk about tribalism?
[00:06:49] Michael: Well, I think that, over the past 10 years, and I've been writing this book for almost 10 years, a new way of talking about tribalism has cropped up in the pundit class and started to spread to politicians and to some business leaders. And I call this the trope of toxic tribalism. And, you know, I can trace it to Thomas Friedman and Andrew Sullivan, a lot of these people who wrote really riveting essays. And the essays claimed that some deeply evolved and long-buried instinct has atavistically reawakened and taken possession of our minds so that we no longer see reality clearly. We can no longer talk to the other side. And we, sort of, hate each other and we're, sort of, animated by this hate for the other, for the out… for outsiders.
And I think this makes for riveting articles, but it doesn't make for very good policies. It couldn't be more unhelpful because it's, sort of, fatalistic and despairing. And it couldn't be more inaccurate as a description of what human tribal instincts are. They're instincts for solidarity, not for hostility. Our forebears didn't have that much contact with other tribes. What they had contact with day to day was the fellow members of their own tribe. And the instincts are instincts that help us collaborate with and think collectively with the other members of our tribe. Do they sometimes contribute to misunderstandings and mistrust? Yes, they do, but it's a big mistake to think that these intergroup conflicts start from hostility. That's a diagnosis that is not very helpful. And I think it's become widespread and it's something I would really like to debunk.
[00:08:40] Jenny: So, Michael, it sounds like you're saying that we're wired for tribalism and that there could potentially be some huge benefits for humanity. In your book, you break down tribal psychology in these three distinct categories — the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. I wonder if we could walk through those briefly and if you could talk about how each works in modern contexts, like companies and organizations. So, maybe, you could start with the peer instinct.
[00:09:13] Michael: The peer instinct is the, sort of, sideways glances at our classmates, our coworkers, our neighbors, and the impulse to match their behavior, to mesh with what they're doing, to take their behavior as an indicator of what I should do.
So, we form norms, we form a sense of what's normal in our group, and that is, kind of, a default, an autopilot for a lot of our behavior. And in organizations, this is as simple as, ‘what time of day do we take a coffee break? Do we use first-name basis, or do we not use first-name basis? If not, everybody gets the norms, you have these awkward collisions, but if people get the norms, then there's a, sort of, smooth functioning of human interaction. So, conformity is something we often deride, but conformity is the basis of human culture and the basis of human collaboration. It reduces independent thinking, sure, but it increases the creativity that we accomplish collectively as groups.
[00:10:18] Jenny: I mean, what's interesting about that is you say it can dampen innovation, but it's also the case that people could be coalescing around norms and behaviors that are not particularly functional. Because that's a built-in norm or ritual, people will still do that anyway.
[00:10:37] Michael: Yeah, we all know that the culture is sticky and something that was once adaptive may continue through inertia, right, or through conformity. They continue because they kept us safe once and they get us through the day. But that doesn't mean that there aren't fallibilities related to each of these tribal instincts. And I think those are important to understand. And when we talk about tribalism as a destructive thing, it usually means that one of these three instincts has gotten out of control, that has got caught in some kind of feedback loop where it's dominating us more than it should.
[00:11:13] Sameer: Yeah, one other quick comment on the peer instinct is that it very much relates to a recent paper that Jenny and I co-authored, along with Amir Goldberg and others, on what we call perceptual congruence, which is the ability to read those norms, look over your shoulder and accurately decipher what those norms are. And we show, basically, that you can not only measure this instinct, but also show that people can conform, even when they don't feel a deep sense of values alignment with those around them.
So, anyway, thank you for that explanation, Michael. I wanted to switch to our second instinct, the hero instinct, which makes sense, trying to emulate those we respect and those with status. But I wanted to ask you, what about the dark side of that? We've seen hero worship of different forms in some corporations and the corrosive effects of that. What are your comments on that?
[00:12:01] Michael: I think that's a very interesting question. And the hero instinct is this emulation of those with prestige. I think, to your question about, can it go awry, I would point to Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos. You know, she was not the first tech executive to emulate Steve Jobs's lifestyle characteristics — his black turtlenecks, his diet, his meditation. And we, sort of, when in doubt, emulate. We don't know what exactly it is about LeBron James that makes him so great. So, we eat what he eats for breakfast. We dribble the ball twice before shooting, like he does. And this emulation doesn't perfectly help us be successful, but it is thought to be generally adaptive for individuals and particularly adaptive for collectivities. Because the way that emulation works is that we're not just concerned with what the average person is doing with being normal, but we also have this independent motivation to be normative, to be exemplary. So, we look to those in the community, who's more successful lately? Who is gaining status lately? What are they doing differently than other people? And we have an impulse to try that or to try to do something like that to gain that same prestige and tribute. So, this emulation of those people who are getting notoriety and getting success is not only something that can bring an individual social rewards, but it can help a community evolve towards what suits the current environment or what's adaptive in the current environment.
[00:13:42] Jenny: And so, the ancestor instinct, it must be responsible for the stickiness. On the other hand, it probably helps us learn from history and learn from mistakes.
[00:13:54] Michael: Yeah, you're right. I mean you could think of the hero instinct as a more progressive force because it's pulling my attention to people who are innovating and being successful. Whereas, the ancestor instinct is a more conservative force, in the sense that it's making me listen to the elders and making me very curious about any artifacts from past generations. You know, about 50,000 years ago, you start to see people, they would discover cave paintings that were done by generations thousands of years before. They would study these cave paintings with reverence and then replicate the style of painting. So, even though the cave painting wasn't really serving a practical purpose, it was something from the past, and some sort of mutation made us reverential and inclined to maintain things from the past.
And now, that is regarded as something that helped individuals learn things that, kind of, went beyond their understanding. And for the group, what it did is it created tribal memory and tribal memory that's robust, because you can imagine a group might have discovered how to build canoes, but then there's a mini ice age for a couple generations and there's no need for canoes. But they would still hang on to the knowledge. Even if they weren't building canoes, they might be doing some ritual about canoes because it was thought to be valuable because generations past had done it. And that was just a good way to be wired, it prevented us from backsliding, from losing expertise. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel every generation. And then the hero instinct energies could be devoted to building on the past rather than recreating these tools and technologies.
[00:15:45] Sameer: So, I want to take us back to the big provocative message of your book, which is that you describe tribalism as our “misunderstood superpower.” And you've already started to share a couple of examples of how that might be the case. But I wonder if you could give us, maybe, one or two more concrete examples or any illustrations from your own research on this question.
[00:16:04] Michael: Well, I think that what I mean by this is that our capacity for culture and our capacity for cultural changes, both short-term changes and longer-term evolution of culture, is our superpower because it enables us to live in ways that are adaptive. I think that one of the big problems in corporations is always transformational change. You know, an organization that's highly inertial, that's been successful for a long time, it finds itself in a new world, the leaders realize that change is needed, but can they effect that deliberate change?
And there are all these change models, but I think most of these frameworks, they come back to Kurt Lewin's idea that you have to, sort of, unfreeze the old order before you can create and freeze the new order. It's breaking the old system before you build the new system. And I think that these tribal instincts are really essential parts of that. And I think that some leaders have a knack for this.
One that is, I think, super impressive right now on the stage is Mary Barra at GM. You know, GM, for most of the 20th century, was the world's largest corporation. They took a lot of pride in selling the most cars. They, kind of, had a model that was all based on scale. And it wasn't very profitable. And at a certain point they became bankrupt. And around the same time, she was moving up the organization. And she came from a GM family. She had started working there at age 18, inspecting the fenders out of Pontiac plant. She knew that organization top to bottom. And she became the head of human resources. She made a really brilliant decision as one of her first major acts in that role, which was to throw away the dress code that every new employee at GM was handed.
And it was like this ad hoc accumulation of rules, mostly in outdated language, mostly about how women should dress, but clearly written by men. And it was something that was widely regarded as symptomatic of the inertial GM culture and the, sort of, over-controlling top-down culture. She said, “Let's just replace it with two words — dress appropriately.” And then every division will sit down and talk about what dress appropriately means for them. It might be different for the corporate counsel's office than for an assembly line or for some designers doing CAD/CAM, right? It might be different.
But she wanted to drive decision-making downward because she knew that GM had to become a more nimble organization. And this was a great target for, sort of, breaking the old system because it was something that affected everyone, but it didn't affect operations in an important way. Nobody was too invested in it, but everybody was affected by it. And it produced an immediate visible change, which is that people were coming into work wearing leather jackets and jeans and dressing like people of contemporary decades instead of wearing gray suits. And it told people, more than any mission statement could, that we can change. Dramatic change can happen at GM.
I think she understands the tribal psychology and the signals and the triggers that you can use, and also the order in which things must be done, which is that you have to break the old system, but break it in a way that's not trampling on sacred values. You know, there's a long history of people trying to do transformational change, especially outsiders. They come in and they offend everybody. And then they just harden the resistance against themselves. But she knew what was the right kind of target that signified the change that was coming but that didn't terrify people. And that created visible change. So, it was like a small win could create momentum. And so, I think she's a really great example of a contemporary leader who’s doing this stuff well. And it's because she knows the culture inside out that she can do it so well.
[00:20:31] Jenny: Well, I really like this idea of tribalism as a superpower. You argue that tribal instincts can elevate performance and even heal rifts. So, what are some examples of using tribalism for healing?
[00:20:44] Michael: Well, one example that I talk about in the book is the example of Abraham Lincoln. I also like this example because, in this political moment, we often hear people saying, Americans have never been more divided. It's absolute nonsense, maybe not in the last 20 years, but we've been way more divided.
And the example that I like to point to is, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president with less than 40% of the popular vote, less than 40% of the electoral college. Seven states seceded before he was even inaugurated. The Civil War broke out a few weeks later. Four more states seceded. Now, that's a legitimacy crisis. That's a president with contested legitimacy. And that's a real division, where we're actually killing each other, where we have a civil war. But Lincoln, in his first inaugural, he had this poetic and somewhat mysterious line where he said, “the mystic chords of memory shall yet swell the chorus of the union,” and then something about the better angels of our nature. And so, what was he saying there? He was saying that our collective history, the mystic chords of memory — our traditions, our myths — are a resource that we can come to, to bring out our hearts and make us feel the connection that exists in a latent way, even though, at this moment, we seem so separate from each other.
Something that we don't give him credit for is that he founded the holiday of Thanksgiving. Now, like every American school child, I don't know, Jenny, you grew up in Berkeley, right? So, you might have gotten a different story. But I grew up in, like, a normal public high school in the middle of nowhere. And so, I was told that it's an unbroken tradition since 1621 to sit down and eat turkey, cranberry, and pumpkin pie with people of other groups. And it's a way of celebrating, intergroup harmony and thanks, etc.
And that is complete fabrication. The pilgrims did have a feast in 1621 after their first successful harvest, but it was, kind of, a rowdy celebration with drinking and shooting off rifles. And the local Native Americans came over to see what was going on because they heard the rifles. They weren't invited.
But there was a Puritan ritual of Thanksgiving that was a more solemn, prayer-oriented festival. And there were occasional harvest feasts. And then there was a movement around early 1850s, 1860s involving some of the thought leaders of the time. A woman named Sarah Josepha Hale, who was a leading publisher and poet, she's the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb. She lobbied several presidents in a row that we need to have a national holiday in the autumn to celebrate our unity that, sort of, looks back to our common ancestors. And she had written to a number of presidents, and none had responded. But then, the poet president, Abraham Lincoln, said, “Yeah, this could work.” And so, he unveiled it with a proclamation, and he made reference to the pilgrim themes of Thanksgiving and their traditions. And he made reference to that George Washington held prayer-oriented Thanksgiving after the revolutionary war. It was a one-off event, not a holiday, but just a one-off celebration. But he made reference to these precedents. And he, sort of, created something that became an instant institution and a sacred tradition very, very quickly, like, within a few decades.
And that is an example of using the ancestor instinct, this deep thirst we have for tradition, especially in times of threat. That's when we most cling to traditions to unify people by making us think about our common ancestors and feel a sense of obligation to them and putting aside our current differences, et cetera. Nowadays, Thanksgiving is a time when we tend to argue with our relatives. But, you know, it's supposed to be a holiday of reconciliation and gratitude. And I think Lincoln knew that he had a real challenge and that tribal forces were part of the solution, not just part of the problem.
[00:25:06] Jenny: So, Michael, we've covered a lot of ground. And I know you talked about the toolkit you've developed. So, can you break down for us the specific strategies that leaders could put into work in their organizations? Like, how can they build a unified culture that aligns with the company's values, and more importantly, with its strategic goals?
[00:25:26] Michael: Well, in this book, I talk about these three kinds of cultural codes — peer codes, hero codes, and ancestor codes. And the triggers for those three are different. You know, the peer codes are triggered by audiences. That's what we talk about when we talk about code-switching with politicians. The hero codes tend to be triggered by symbols. And I think good leaders understand that organizations need symbols and that symbols can be particular people, the symbols can be phrases, the signals can be logos.
And then the most mysterious of these is that ancestor codes, traditions, they tend to be triggered by ceremonies. So, when we have a commencement at a university, those rituals are really powerful, and we may think of them as hokey, but there's a whole neuroscience literature about how rituals affect people.
And then there's a playbook about signals. Peer codes tend to evolve through prevalence signals, through seeing that a lot of people are doing something different and then adopting it. And that hero codes tend to evolve through prestige signals, which is like seeing that people are getting attention… a new kind of role model is being elevated, and so I'm going to start doing what they do.
And then ancestor codes evolve through precedent signals. So, the leader is telling a story about our founders. “Oh, who knew that Hewlett and Packard were really interested in something? So, I guess Hewlett-Packard today should be interested in that new thing.” So, the past is always multiplex. There's many versions of the past. And good leaders are… have selective memory. They're strategic about telling a story about the past that rationalizes the present strategy and makes people feel that the present strategy is aligned and is a matter of identity. That's the basic playbook.
[00:27:19] Sameer: Really fantastic, Michael. And one of the reasons that Jenny and I really love talking to you is because the conversation is always so wide-ranging. Everything from the beginnings of humankind to Abraham Lincoln and Thanksgiving all in one conversation. It's terrific. We're also really looking forward to welcoming you to Berkeley in January for our seventh annual Berkeley Culture Connect Conference, where you're going to be going into even more depth on some of this work. And we hope some of our listeners are also able to join us for the conference. Thanks very much.
[00:27:48] Michael: I'm very excited about that.
[00:27:51] Jenny: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Do you have a vexing question about work that you want us to answer? Go to haas.org/culture-kit to submit your fix-it ticket today.
[00:28:05] Sameer: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business, and it's produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that Subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online, so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too.
[00:28:25] Jenny: I'm Jenny.
[00:28:26] Sameer: And I'm Sameer.
[00:28:27] Jenny: We'll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.