What is a tribe? Anthropologists use the term very cautiously, for it has lost its earlier meanings of ethnicity and bounded social groups and taken on connotations of primitivity or blind adherence to custom. “Tribalism” has thus come to viewed as an undesirable and divisive force. Loyalty to one’s social group — its language, ideologies, religious beliefs or cultural values — can be a source of hostility, even violence, towards other social groups.
In Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, psychologist Michael Morris uses the term unusually broadly, encompassing football teams, political parties, corporations, armies, religious cults and even the population of New York. He maintains that “tribal” attitudes and behaviour are “distinguishing features of our kind that enabled its evolutionary ascent” but his notion of tribal entities is so broad that any group of people with a shared interest can be described as “tribal.”
In this quest to show how we can harness this “superpower” to help fight deep social and environmental problems, Morris has already won high-profile admirers: Arianna Huffington calls his book “a vision for collective change,” Forbes magazine’s Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic considers it “brilliant,” and the Financial Times shortlisted this “bracing and hopeful” work for its Business Book of the Year award. Organisational psychologist Adam Grant says it will “will challenge you to rethink your core beliefs.”
Morris describes how the Dutch soccer coach, Guus Hiddink, changed the fortunes of the South Korean team by insisting that hierarchical deference be abandoned on the football field. He attributes Lee Kwan Yew’s reduction of corruption in Singapore to the “biculturalism” Lee experienced as a product of Chinese and British cultures. He argues that the National Rifle Association has been successful because it “is grounded in its members’ everyday lives.”
But is it as simple as that? Morris acknowledges, correctly, that “cultural transmission hinges on learning processes,” but quickly smuggles in an overriding biological determinism. We are governed by three “instincts,” he says: “peer instinct,” “hero instinct” and “ancestor instinct.” His own invention, these instincts depart from the usual distinction between instinctive responses and behaviours — congenital, inherent and not learned — and those that are socially or culturally acquired after birth. A “cultural instinct” is not only oxymoronic, it also oversimplifies the complex emotional and mental processes crucial to human learning, reasoning and judgement-making.
Using metaphors from computing, Morris says that tribal “peer instincts” are “coded” or “hardwired.” They ensure that individuals exhibit consistent, automatic responses imitative of those they see as valued within a peer group. He moves back and forth between examples that clearly demonstrate the complicated observational, psychological or haptic processes involved in learned behaviour and examples that highlight overly simple and supposedly “instinctual” reactions. He favours monocausal explanations that emphasise unconscious impulsivity.
So, for instance, he recounts how Guus Hiddink took the South Korean football team to success. Having observed that younger players, raised to respect strict hierarchies, deferred to veteran teammates and thereby limited their effectiveness in play, Hiddink set about changing their interactions in ways that challenged established hierarchies. Morris attributes Hiddink’s success as a coach to his ability to pinpoint and eliminate aspects of a team’s “culture” that hampered their success.
Deference might well have been one factor, but this account ignores Hiddink’s gruelling training regimes, his skill at motivating individual players, and his changes in on-field tactics that altered the flow of games. In reducing the success to a single behaviour Morris excludes the numerous, complex elements involved in changed group behaviour.
Lee Kwan Yew’s reduction of corruption in Singapore in the 1960s receives similar treatment. During childhood and early adulthood Lee experienced both Chinese and British cultures. As prime minister he insisted that education should be bilingual and English the language of government and business. He also required government officials to wear white suits reminiscent of British naval uniforms.
Morris sees these reintroduced aspects of British colonial rule as “tribal triggers” that mobilised social change. People recalled the discipline of colonial subjugation, so speaking English made them more law-abiding. He lauds Lee’s prescience and disregards his autocratic methods and the city-state’s draconian legislation designed to discourage corruption. The Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, for example, was given extensive powers and reported directly and exclusively to the prime minister. A zero-tolerance policy prohibited people convicted of bribe-taking from ever again working in a government agency. Elected representatives were paid higher salaries to deter bribe-taking. Lee’s biculturism was one relatively small element in a range of policies aimed at abolishing corruption.
Caricatures and stereotypes abound in Morris’s case studies. Members of the “Chinese tribe” are prone to corruption because their familial loyalties override adherence to external laws. The “British tribe” is recognisable in Oxford because the “signs” that “trigger” people — “plummy accents, tweed jackets, dreaming spires” — are immediately observable. People can switch cultural settings, but the process whereby “signs” become automatic involves “tribal triggers.”
In effect, Morris’s argument about “peer instincts” is not cultural at all. It is simply a term for the impulsive psychological or mental factors that encourage cultural conformity. The social and anthropological explanations of behavioural norms offered almost a century ago by Marcel Mauss, in his essay on techniques of the body, offer a more comprehensive account. And although Morris refers to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, he ignores its import for his argument — and seems oblivious to the fact that Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus” deals precisely with how social and cultural norms shape individual and group behaviour.
Morris presents his “hero instinct” as an evolutionary adaptation that accounts for pro-social behaviours. He suggests that behaviours that “involve individual sacrifices to help the group — valorous hunting, sedulous toolmaking, shelter-building, care for the infirm” are fundamental attributes that emerged in the Stone Age. People who displayed these skills, especially if they performed acts of bravery or self-sacrifice, were highly valued within their tribe. A reputation as a hero ensured higher status within a group, and “prosociality help[ed] reproductive prospects and would be selected for.” But we simply have no evidence about the motivations of Stone Age ancestors: as with much evolutionary speculation, the “just-so stories” are conjecture based on reverse-teleological arguments.
For Morris, the hero instinct is “a suite of status-related motivations and learning heuristics” that shifted attention to heroic, high-status individuals and evoked imitative behaviour. He draws his heroic examples from a wide range of sources — Achilles, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs and the chief executive of the Bank of America all get guernseys. But there is a decidedly masculine slant to this “instinct” and to the social behaviours it is meant to “trigger.” Soldiers marching into battle, the male heads of large corporations, insurgents throwing stones in street fights, all allegedly appeal to the “peer instincts” of their tribe, provoking responses of adulation and tribal unity.
Do we really need psychological experiments to “prove” that “people feel pride or shame for actions that their society values or devalues, respectively”? The various and diverse social actions that Morris gives as evidence for a “peer instinct” are complex responses to historical and political circumstances, or cultural ideologies and religious beliefs, that have emerged in specific environments.
The third element of “evolved tribal psychology” that Morris proposes is the “ancestor instinct”: a “compulsion to maintain ways of the past.” Ancestor instinct is responsible for a vast array of social actions — religious rituals, holiday festivities, communal building construction and co-operative labour — and the institutions that enshrine them. Following inherited family recipes, admiring antique furniture, choosing to have acupuncture because of its ancient tradition — all are attributed to this instinct. Even the high sales of Gwyneth Paltrow’s vaginal jade eggs rested on the (incorrect) assumption that they had long been used by Chinese concubines to enhance their sexual performance. Morris offers no explanation for their continued popularity after they were revealed to have been falsely advertised.
While the evolution of the three instincts has been successive and cumulative, “the real magic happened,” according to Morris, “when all three instincts began to function together.” So, for example, the fifty Japanese men who volunteered to risk their lives reducing the temperature in the Fukushima nuclear plant after the tsunami hit were responding to their ancestor instinct. They were modelling their self-sacrifice on samurai traditions and the mindset of kamikaze pilots who were willing to die for their nation.
Sometimes the stories that Morris employs to support his arguments are not only oversimplified but overly optimistic. In his discussion of the “abject failure” of gun control groups, for instance, he suggests that organisations like The Brady Campaign fail because — unlike the National Rifle Association — they direct their activities at elite, national politics. He makes no mention of the fact that the NRA receives tens of millions of dollars from the same weapons manufacturers who give large donations to political parties. Given that the issue is often framed in terms of “the constitutional right to bear arms,” lobbying national government would appear to be a necessary, rational tactic by anti-gun organisations.
Nor is Morris’s claim that “[g]un rights has been a stronger movement because of its grassroots foundation” borne out by the facts. Everytown for Gun Safety, a classic grassroots organisation, has almost eleven million members, many of whom are ordinary citizens motivated by some experience of gun violence; the NRA has fewer than five million. Both use similar tactics; both lobby local and national political representatives. In a country where the majority of citizens actually support stricter restrictions on gun ownership, the failure of anti-gun organisations to influence constitutional change is more complicated than the form of its lobbying.
What has obviously appealed to some readers of Tribal is its emphasis on the positive, prosocial aspects of tribalism. In the final chapter, “Toxic Tribalism and Its Antidotes,” Morris confronts the agonistic aspect of tribal loyalty and the conflicts generated by “Us/Them” social division.
Unsurprisingly, he discusses the intensification of anti-Muslim sentiment among Americans following the 9/11 attacks. Drawing on the results of an experiment involving a sample of American Christians, he suggests that one way of reducing this antagonism is to have people read sections of the Bible that emphasise forgiveness. A similar exercise with Muslims apparently found that they became less hostile after reading sections of the Koran on peace and mercy. Tribal is full of references to such experiments, but Morris doesn’t reflect on the artificiality of psychological experiments in general.
All the major world religions preach peace, love, tolerance and mercy, yet for centuries religious persecution and conflicts have been among the most vicious. Morris attributes the ferocity of religious wars to the way the “ancestor instinct… propels some of humanity’s noblest endeavours” while potentially being the “worst instinct.” Old traditions evoke the most positive feelings and so, according to Morris, the traditions of a nearby group seem more threatening and are more likely to provoke sectarian violence.
This instinct, he claims, is the source of antagonism towards Syrian Muslims in places as disparate as Sweden, the United States and New Zealand. Xenophobia is a combination of “peer instinct” and “tradition instinct” responses to globalisation, which has brought “disparate tribes into uncomfortable proximity.” Civil war, persecution, emigration and the global refugee crisis are collapsed into a single entity, “globalisation.”
Breaking down the barriers between opposing political groups entails processes of mutual recognition and accommodation of differences. Morris cites the Catalonia Carnivale organisers’ incorporation of minority ethnic groups into street celebrations by offering cheese alternatives to traditional meat dishes. While this might be a small triumph for multiculturism at a provincial level, Catalonia’s longstanding insistence on separation from Spain is surely of greater cultural and political significance.
At one point Morris cautions against “tribal rage” and other reductionist psychological explanations and suggests that we should avoid sweeping claims about an instinct that “few evolutionists would recognise.” This warning is particularly ironic given that few evolutionists would recognise the three instincts that Morris insists underpin all human social interaction.
In his acknowledgements Morris notes his admiration for the work of Jared Diamond, Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Like them, he emphasises human evolution as the prime agent in social and cultural behaviour. Yet it’s two decades since biologist Patrick Bateson published his devastating critique of Stephen Pinker’s reductionism and misuse of the concept “instinct.” Bateson pointed out that there are several different scientific meanings of the term; Morris appears to see it simply as an inherent impulse shared by all members of a species. Why, I kept wondering, is a cultural psychologist offering evolutionary, biologically based explanations for social and cultural behaviour?
Like many popular psychology books, Tribal is full of anecdotes, references to scientific reports, example after example of laboratory experiments, a jumble of scientific material, unverifiable assertions and entertaining instances of behaviour that Morris insists prove his point. It is not an unscholarly work, although some of the conclusions it draws from others’ research are questionable. The title promises ways of resolving the tribal divisions that cause conflict, especially in the United States, but in the end it boils down to simplistic nostrums — “People need to find new peers to develop better habits, find new heroes to develop better aspirations or find new ancestors to develop better traditions.” Class relations are barely mentioned. Racial discrimination in employment hiring is reinterpreted as “ethnic in-group generosity” rather than white prejudice against Blacks and immigrants.
Morris describes his disappointment and astonishment when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016. His believes his failure to predict this electoral result simply reflects his lack of social relationships with people in the opposing tribe. An optimist, he places his hopes for peaceful coexistence and social harmony in the strangely intangible human impulses that he considers instinctive. But his “three instincts” are really hermeneutic devices around which he constructs his model of human behaviour. They are inventions to serve a reductionist argument about human evolution and biological determinism. •
Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
By Michael Morris | Swift Press | $45 | 336 pages
