From Big Think, this is a brief meditation on the ways that tribalism and in-group alliance can generate behaviors that are otherwise unthinkable. Perhaps the most outstanding example is the Nazi atrocities of the last century. But we can be incredibly insular in our allegiance to religions (as this article highlights), sports teams (Tucson has a lot of team bars, as I'm sure other cities do as well), and quite obviously in this election year, political parties (see Jonathan Haidt's work).
Here is an example of how this works in the climate debates:
Anyway, here is the Big Think article - this is a topic I want to explore more in the coming weeks and months. By the way, the image at the top is David Berreby's Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (clearance priced at this Amazon link) is one of the best non-academic books I have read on this subject.Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study, published in the Journal of Risk Research, presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.
How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous
When I was a kid, my synagogue was right across the street from a Catholic church. Bellevue Avenue made such a clear dividing line between us – The Chosen People – and them…the enemy. No doubt the view from the other side of the street was the same. I had no idea at the time what a powerful metaphor those few lanes of asphalt made for one of the most significant aspects of human behavior…the powerful instinct of tribalism. It’s everywhere, protecting us by readily overriding reason, and morality, and pretty much anything else that could dim our chances of survival. And it's threatening us at the same time.
Maybe you read about one recent manifestation in The New York Times, about the Orthodox Jews of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn who shunned a neighbor after he told police about a man – a fellow Jew - who was sexually abusing his son. You’d think that a father protecting his son would be the sort of behavior that would be honored. Nope. Not if it is disloyal to the tribe.
That’s the synagogue side of the street. How about the long loathsome record of Catholic Church authorities abandoning their morals and forfeiting the safety of vulnerable children by covering up, ignoring, or denying extensive evidence of child abuse by a small number of priests. Same thing. Tribe first. Morals second.
It’s not just religion, of course. We identify ourselves as members of all sorts of tribes; our families, political parties, race, gender, social organizations. We even identify tribally just based on where we live. Go Celtics, go Red Sox, go U.S. Olympic team! One study asked people whether, if they had a fatal disease, would they prefer a life-saving diagnosis from a computer that was 1,000 miles away, or the exact same diagnosis from a computer in their town, and a large majority preferred the same information if the source…a machine…was local.
Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically, tribalism. Genocides are tribalism - wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different faith or color, denial of evolution or climate change or other basic scientific truths when they challenge tribal beliefs. What stunning evidence of the power of tribalism! (By the way, it wasn’t just geocentrist Catholics in the 16 and 1700s who denied evidence that the earth travels around the sun. Some Christian biblical literalists still do. So do a handful of ultra orthodox Jews and Muslims.)
Yet another example is the polarized way we argue about so many issues, and the incredible irony that as we make these arguments we claim to be intelligent (smart, therefore right) yet we ignorantly close our minds to views that conflict with ours. Dan Kahan, principal researcher into the phenomenon of Cultural Cognition, has found that our views are powerfully shaped so they agree with beliefs of the groups with which we most strongly identify. His research, along with the work of others, has also found that the more challenged our views are, the more we defend them…the more dogmatic and closed-minded we become...an intellectual form of ‘circle-the-wagons, we’re under attack’ tribal unity. Talk about tribalism overruling reason.
As irrational as genocide and science denial and immorality may be, it makes absolute sense that tribalism can produce such behaviors. We are social animals. We have evolved to depend on our tribes, literally, for our safety and survival. As Jane Howard, biographer of anthropologist Margaret Mead, put it “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” We may not be aware at the conscious level of the influence tribalism has on us, but then, most of human cognition happens below the radar of consciousness, and is driven not so much by the goal of getting good grades or winning Nobel Prizes as it is, first, to survive. Small wonder that this ultimate imperative dominates so much of how we behave, how we think and act, and how we treat each other. And it’s hardly surprising that the more unsettled and uncertain we feel and the less we feel we have control over how things are going - feelings that make us feel threatened - the more we circle the wagons and fiercely fight for tribal success, looking to the tribe to keep us safe.
It’s a sobering reflection on this inherent but potentially destructive aspect of human nature, in these unsettled and threateningly uncertain times.
3 comments:
Expanding on the theme of tribalism: Jonathan Haidt has identified six values or “moral modules” that he believes distinguishes liberals and conservatives: liberty, fairness, care, which according to him are more oriented towards individuals; and loyalty, authority and sanctity, which are expressions of our “groupishness”. He further argues that conservatives put more value on the group modules (though not neglecting the individual modules), while liberals favor the individual ones (and according to Haidt, do tend to ignore the group modules).
I think there’s a simpler way to understand the Left and Right, however, that better accounts for their views. The evolution of our species has been characterized by the appearance of progressively larger and more complex groups, beginning with families, then tribes, nation states and now an emerging world or planetary community. The Left, as one would expect for a group often referred to as progressive, identifies with the largest, most complex, and most recently-evolved social organizations, the nation and now the world community. The Right, often characterized as more respecting of tradition, identifies more closely with the smaller, simpler and much older social organizations that we originated from, the family, tribe and local community.
When we view the Left and Right in this manner, we can see that it simply is not true, as Haidt claims, that “conservatives tend to place more of an emphasis on the moral modules that focus in on the importance of group cohesion such as loyalty, authority and sanctity, while liberals tend to eschew these modules in favor of the modules that focus in on the individual, such as care, fairness and liberty.” In fact, liberals and conservatives both respect all of these moral modules. The differences between them result from these moral values being applied to different levels of groups or social organizations.
The respect of liberals for authority is shown, for example, in political correctness, and also in the endless governmental regulations that conservatives detest for encroaching upon every aspect of our daily lives. Liberal examples of loyalty include solidarity in labor unions, and in protests like OWS. Liberals regard the environment as sacred. In all these cases, the social organization involved—in formulating the rules, in demanding our loyalty, or in attracting our devotion--is national or even international
Conversely, conservatives express care favoring strong laws against crime involving individuals or their property. These laws are designed to protect the integrity of individuals, their families and local communities. Conservatives favor individual liberty in the form of free markets governing interactions between individuals and local communities (and are much less inclined to extend the concept to larger social organizations, as in trade with other nations). Their view of fairness is expressed in their opposition to high taxes and social welfare, which they view as cheating individuals, their families and sometimes their communities out of the fruits of their individual labor.
Another often-noted difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals tend to be more optimistic about human nature, regarding it as highly plastic, capable of changing for the better. Conservatives, in contrast, tend to believe that human nature is largely fixed. Haidt expresses this idea when he says that, “conservatives generally… believe that people need external constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions… Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay”. Liberals in contrast, believe that “people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed.”
But again, from an alternative perspective, both sides recognize the necessity of constraints. The key difference, again, is their origin. Conservatives believe in constraints that emerge from the levels of society they most closely identify with—strict rules in the family, strict morals in the local church, strong police force in the local community. Liberals believe in constraints emerging at the larger, more complex social levels they identify with—again, political correctness and federal regulations are highly illustrative examples.
Why, then, do liberals have a more optimistic view of human nature than conservatives? The larger, more complex social organizations that liberals identify more closely with are still evolving, and hence constantly changing. To identify with these organizations, then, is to see oneself as capable of constant change. Families, in the traditional sense, have changed very little. Of course, many kinds of non-traditional families have evolved in recent decades, but their emergence has been closely associated with the development of the larger national and international society. Conservatives tend to have less acceptance of non-traditional families because they are associated with liberal values—liberty, care, and fairness as they are understood at the larger social levels.
This view of Left vs. Right, I think, is preferable to the strict vs. nurturing parent model that George Lakoff has proposed. The problem with Lakoff’s model, like the problem with Haidt’s view that liberals lack certain moral modules, is that it is inconsistent with the facts. To repeat, liberals are capable of being just as strict and authoritarian as conservatives, and conservatives are just as capable of being caring and nurturing as liberals. I think that an enormous amount of hypocrisy that each side in this endless debates accuses the other of is rooted in a lack of understanding that it is the level of the group, not a particular value itself, that distinguishes the two sides.
Thanks for sharing your insights, Andy.
On Haidt in particular, I think I am in much agreement with you. The difference is NOT in the moral values we embrace, as Hadit would have it, but in the application of those values to different levels of cultural and social organization, as you said above.
The difference between Lakoff and Haidt is an interesting distinction. I see Lakoff's parental model coming out of his embodied metaphor work - so for him, government takes on the cultural associations of the good parent (nurturing) vs the bad parent (strict) - it reminds me of Melanie Klein's good breast vs bad breast (the split object in object relations theory). Government is seen through one lens or the other for Lakoff, rather than as both nurturing in its social programs and safety net features and strict in its need to create and enforce laws and support some traditional norms in the culture.
From my perspective, Lakoff is looking at a lower developmental stage view (perhaps egoic) and applying it to higher stages (perhaps traditional and rational) - but his model of the citizen voter is of a child relating to government as the parent. Very problematic, even when he gets some things correct, like the power the right has in using emotional language to appeal to voters and why the left fails when it relies on philosophical ideas to appeal to voters.
Haidt on the other hand has that part nailed - we vote with our emotions not with our brains. But his view of the citizen/voter is still limited in the ways that you outline above. He applies a rational lens to both conventional and post-conventional perspectives and gets them both wrong.
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