We spend all of our lives in a kind of detect-and-connect mode, on a restless mission to seek people-like-us with whom we can successfully cooperate. When we discover fellow people-like-us, who seem to share our inner story-world, we feel a kind of magnetic joy. People-like-us provide us with existential comfort. They reassure us that our distorted

Simply telling someone a story in which they can see something of themselves can be enough to create a powerfully rewarding moment of identification, and that identification can lead to persuasion.

If successful groups are status-generating machines, it follows that successful leaders are those that win status for its members. ‘They must not only be in-group prototypes; they must also be in-group champions’,

a phenomenon I called ‘active belief’, in which a person doesn’t just passively accept some idea about the world, but acts that belief out, arguing for it and living by its instruction as if controlled by a parasite.

What kind of people-like-us do we want to attract? Exactly what behaviours and beliefs will be incentivised, by being rewarded with status?

Groups can define their overall mission in two different ways: competence and virtue.

it’s not possible to remove hierarchies from human societies: because humans make hierarchies wherever they go.

Writes the psychologist Professor Carol Tavris, ‘Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles floating in a random universe. We will do all it takes to preserve these attachments.’

Whenever we’re telling stories, then, we should use concrete, specific and sensory language to allow our audience to imagine properly the world we’re creating and transport them into it.