Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

You and I may not be polyglot pilots or undercover agents, but we all contain multitudes—every person has encoded multiple peer groups. These codes take turns guiding us, activating in situations that cue them.

These social breakthroughs of heidelbergensis reflect a side of human psychology that [5]I call the “hero instinct.” While the peer instinct encodes what most people in the group do and prompts conformity, the hero instinct registers what the most respected people do and stirs aspirations to contribute similarly.

it’s less important to make the right choice than to make the choice right. Optimization is less important than implementation, including coordination.

two identities to be compatible tend to mesh with the cues of a setting (like chameleons), whereas those who feel identity conflict tend to resist the peer cues (like contrarians).

understand diversity dynamics,

After millions of years of achingly slow change, cultural complexity began to expand exponentially. The pools of shared knowledge in human communities began to accumulate across generations and adapt to local ecologies. This tribe-level learning (not heightened individual brainpower) is the secret to how our kind adapted to widely differing climate

Yearning for certainty attracts us to peer codes because we gain a feeling of certainty from consensus.

The primacy of language as a cue helps us understand why language policies can change behavior.

Scholars began to appreciate that it was not simply collective institutions or individual psychologies that determined culture, but the interplay between them. Cultural institutions shape the individual’s mind, and the individual’s mind shapes cultural institutions. [14]Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined.