Our Tribes And How They Shape Us

“The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.” ― Anne Lamott

Photo by Danny Howe

Welcome!

“To be part of a tribe is at once a refuge and a declaration of faith. It is to be anchored, to be certain that we have a role in the world.“

~ Ligaya Mishan ~

What is tribalism?

This definition explains it well:

Tribalism refers to customs and beliefs transmitted and enacted in groups (tribes) sharing a common identity and in which centralized political organization and authority are absent. Academic and public references to tribalism have been expanded to refer to behaviors and beliefs associated with diverse populations, including those that share any one, or all, of the following: race, ethnicity, language, religion, ways of life, kinship, attitudes, worldview, and generation.

Why we are tribal

From our modern viewpoint it is hard to imagine what life was like in our earliest ancestors societies. Existence was a constant battle of trying to acquire more calories than were expended. The earliest civilizations used rudimentary tools, created from wood, stone, bone, and antlers, to hunt animals and forage for food. The tribes were small and closely related. The duties needed for the tribe to survive were distributed based on skill and proficiency. Young, healthy males would travel the area in search for game to meet the tribe’s need for protein. The women would forage for plant-based foods. Many of those who were older or physically limited often took on the roles of task specialists such as craftsman, spiritual leaders, and community leaders. Children took on duties as they became capable.

To survive, these small communities had to cooperate and watch out for each other. Those who didn’t adequately contribute or harmed the group dynamic would be pushed out of the group to survive on their own, which greatly shortened their lifespan. Survival meant staying in the good graces of your tribe.

The Hadza are a population of hunter-gatherers living in a savannah-woodland environment in Northern Tanzania; their traditional foraging lifestyle has been documented extensively in previous work [17]. While no living population is a perfect model of our species’ past, the Hadza lifestyle is similar in critical ways to those of our Pleistocene ancestors. The Hadza hunt and gather on foot with bows, small axes, and digging sticks, without the aid of modern tools or equipment (e.g., no vehicles or guns). As in many other forager societies [10], there is a sexual division of foraging effort; Hadza men hunt game and gather honey, while Hadza women gather plant foods. Men’s forays are typically longer than women’s, as reflected in their mean daily travel distances (see below). Women typically forage in groups, while men tend to hunt alone [17]. As is typical among traditional-living Hadza, over 95% of their calories during this study came from wild foods, including tubers, berries, small- and large-game, baobab fruit, and honey [17] (Fig. S2).

Early groups of humans were closely related, so they looked alike. Their clothing and adornments were made by the same small group of people. They were nomadic, moving to new areas when local food resources became strained or when the weather dictated a move. Occasionally, they would encounter other tribes who would look different; wearing different clothing and adornments. These chance meetings could turn violent as one tribe would try to take the resources of the other. The tribes that were warier of other tribes were the ones that survived.

“For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”

~ Seth Godin ~

Tribalism today

Humans today are descended from hundreds of generations of ancestors who were the best at protecting their own and guarding against threats, human or otherwise. Even as resources have become more plentiful and today’s tribes rarely attack for resources, our below conscious mental processing still favors our own tribe(s)/in-groups and is more skeptical of opposing tribes/out-groups.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies reveal that symbols associated with our groups, like team logos or political emblems, activate reward centers in the brain. A study conducted at UCLA observed increased activity in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regions associated with reward and value processing. These findings suggest that the brain perceives group identity as rewarding and valuable, shedding light on the neural mechanisms of tribalism. Additionally, the release of oxytocin and vasopressin affects sensory information processing, enhancing social recognition memoryand further linking group identity to pleasurable and rewarding experiences (Dluzen et al., 1998a). …

Mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobule facilitate understanding others' intentions and emotions, promoting empathy. They are vital for social cognition, including imitation, social learning, and predicting behavior. Mirror neurons also foster social bonds, synchronizing our actions and generating shared emotions, enhancing social interaction. …

In their study, Lacoboni's team found that when participants watched a video of someone they perceived as part of their group, there was increased activity in brain regions associated with reward and social cognition, such as the ventral striatum and the right inferior frontal gyrus. This suggests that our brains are wired to reward us for social behavior reinforcing our tribal identity. …

However, Baumgartner, T. et al (2008). have also shown that oxytocin can contribute to bias, leading to favoritism toward one's own group.

Photo by Mark McGregor

What binds us together

“But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.“

~ Jonathan Haidt ~

There are many benefits to belonging to a tribe. They can provide structure, safety, support, education, guidance, and mental health benefits. A group, with its members’ diverse knowledge and skills, is more likely to thrive in a hostile environment.

This is clearly evident in family structures, where the tribe (family) is responsible for the development of children.

In providing a supportive and nurturing relationship, parents play a critical role in promoting their children’s healthy development. They also protect their children from the psychological consequences of significant stress by buffering them from the effects of traumas and helping them to regulate their emotions.

Obviously, separation from parents is traumatic; it both removes children’s most important protection and generates a new trauma. Indeed, in studies of institutionalized children, such separation has been found to disrupt normal child development and to have long-term negative consequences for their psychological and physical health. …

We and others have demonstrated that in response to traumas and adverse experiences similar to separation from parents, children secrete high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This elevated cortisol has negative effects on brain structure and connectivity, slowing neuronal growth and reducing volumes of critical brain structures like the hippocampus and affecting brain regions involved in effective emotion regulation. Not surprisingly, research has also demonstrated adverse effects of early trauma on children’s psychological functioning, including higher rates of depression, anxiety and “externalizing,” or acting-out, behaviors.

What blinds us

“[Tribal] Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

~ Jonathan Haidt ~

While tribes bind groups together around commonalities, those who differ from the group are often seen as inferior. While members of the same tribe see each other in their best light, members of different tribes are seen in a darker light with unknown information filled in with negative assumptions. When multiple members of a tribe share a negative assumption it becomes believed as fact (also known as the illusory truth bias). From there, the tribe becomes blinded to information about the other tribe that doesn’t conform with their assumptions (confirmation bias). Of course, each tribe bristles at the false accusations aimed at their group and becomes hostile toward the other. That hostility then provides seeming evidence of the other group’s unsavoriness and bad intentions. In extreme cases, the results are violent.

Bad tribalism is a group identity that fosters the bullying and scapegoating of others not like you. Bad tribalism joins people out of anger, jealousy, and spite, not for collective well-being. The unfortunate irony is that bad tribalism is easy to provoke, but not healthy to maintain. Staying angry is stressful, and large doses of stress are bad for our health. At the same time, good tribalism is difficult to build, but healthy to maintain. When we connect with others to ensure safety and good health, we lower our own stress.

The land of many tribes

We all belong to many tribes, some more tightly and more seriously than others. They are so commonplace that they are often not recognized as tribes and the associated tribal behavior that affects individual behavior is missed.

Family

Photo by Humphrey Muleba

For most people, their family is their strongest tribe. When it’s at its best, it’s a safe place where you can find support and acceptance. When it’s at its worst, children raised in that environment have skyrocketing risks of dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, mental illness, incarceration, violence, and addiction.

Kinship is one of the most important organizing components of society. From east to west or north to south, you will find this everywhere in society. This social institution ties individuals and groups together and establishes a relationship between them.

Gender/Sex

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

~ Jane Austen ~

Boys and girls differ not only in their plumbing but in how their brains develop. They play differently, have different developmental timelines, have differing communication styles, and have differing levels of aggression and impulsivity. As they develop, children choose to play with those that share the same play and communication styles; which is typically those of the same sex. They also have different experiences growing, especially once puberty hits.

It shouldn’t shock you to hear that even as adults men and women have their own tribal affiliation. And they sometimes clash. You’ve heard phrases such as “the war of the sexes”, “battle of the sexes”, “girls club”, “boys club”, “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”, etc..

You’ve also seen healthy and toxic versions of these same-sex friendship groups. Gender groups have strong influence on their members; establishing their own norms and customs.

Girls and boys not only play differently, they use different social strategies to get what they want (e.g., toys) and to influence other children. More often than not, boys gain access to a desired toy by playfully shoving and pushing other boys out of the way, whereas girls gain access by means of verbal persuasion (e.g., polite suggestions to share) and sometimes verbal commands (e.g., “It’s my turn now!”). Maccoby (1998) concluded that the sex differences in play and social styles contribute to segregated social groups because children are unresponsive to the styles of the opposite sex. Boys sometimes try to initiate rough-and-tumble play or play fighting with girls but most girls withdraw from these initiations, whereas most other boys readily join the fray. Girls often attempt to influence the behavior of boys through verbal requests and suggestions but boys, unlike most other girls, are generally unresponsive; many readers are probably wondering whether boys ever become responsive–they do by adulthood, somewhat. …

The net result of sex segregation is that boys and girls spend much of their childhood in distinct peer cultures. It is in the context of these cultures that differences in the social styles and preferences of girls and boys become larger and congeal into patterns that they will take into adolescence and adulthood.

An example on how gender differences vary in adulthood:

In Experiment 1, only women (not men) showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity, and self-esteem (A. G. Greenwald et al., 2002), revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference. Experiments 2 and 3 found pro-female bias to the extent that participants automatically favored their mothers over their fathers or associated male gender with violence, suggesting that maternal bonding and male intimidation influence gender attitudes. Experiment 4 showed that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women. In concert, the findings help to explain sex differences in automatic in-group bias and underscore the uniqueness of gender for intergroup relations theorists.

Religion

Photo by Pablo Rebolledo

Throughout history, each culture emerged with a religious component. Early on, religion was the societal foundation for law, medicine, political leadership, philosophy, history, and interpersonal dynamics.

As societies grew, and religions passed through their reformation stages, many of these functions were passed on to secular government, educational, and medical institutions. Even so, tribal dynamics within religious groups continue due to shared values and interpersonal relationships. For individuals who reject formal religion, many still create their own spiritual tribes which share values.

In three studies, concepts of religion or God activated different prosociality concerns for the ingroup versus outgroup. Whereas religion primes enhanced prosocial behavior toward the religious ingroup, God primes recast prosocial impulses toward religious outsiders. These results integrate two mechanisms for religious prosociality that have been proposed by other scholars, but also, demonstrate that these are distinct aspects of religious cognition. Discussions of religious cognition sometimes conflate religion and belief in God, and these findings remind us of key differences in their meaning and their behavioral associations.

And

Individuals subliminally primed with religious words showed significantly larger increases in negative attitudes toward value-violating out-groups relative to attitudes toward in-groups than those primed with neutral words. This change in relative attitudes was due to simultaneous increases in in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. These effects remained when statistically controlling for self-reported religiosity and spirituality and preexisting attitudes toward these groups.

Tribes also develop for those who oppose specific religions or all religions. These tribes can exhibit the same positive and negative tribal traits as tribes based around a religious belief system.

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche ~

Location

Our environment binds us together through shared experience, weather, industry, political structure, and shared activities. These areas can be as small as a neighborhood. In Boston you have Southie’s, a once heavily Irish immigrant community that’s since given way to wealthier “townies”. Each of the New York City boroughs have their own identities. And even smaller towns have had their “wrong side the tracks”.

Though it is not to the same extent today as in the past, we still see state and national tribalism that ranges from friendly banter between states to violent conflict between nations.

In a healthy society, a common belief in the nation’s system can soften the edges between the smaller tribes in the country. In their best iteration, they bring together people from all walks of life in response to a natural disaster or national crisis. We saw this effect after 9/11 in America. We also saw this during the Great Depression and World War II when president Franklin Roosevelt used his fireside chats to bring the country together.

In conclusion, we report an experiment testing hypotheses on the prevalence and variation of national parochialism that includes a total of 42 nations. We found national parochialism is a pervasive phenomenon and it occurs around the world with very little variation across nations and cultures. Our findings failed to support prominent hypotheses predicting substantial variation in national parochialism around the world^4,13,14. Rather, national parochialism seems to be a ubiquitous behavior across modern nations, a finding that is in line with an indirect reciprocity perspective, and in general with theories which hypothesize the pervasiveness of ingroup favoritism in humans^4,15,37,38. However, contrary to what was predicted by an indirect reciprocity perspective, we failed to observe that national parochialism only occurred in public (vs. private) situations.

At its best, regional tribalism can bring together differing tribes under a commonality. At its worst, it can override and smother smaller tribes (location based or otherwise).

There are also many unhealthy examples of national tribalism. Throughout history, political leaders have used the shared national experience to overcome resistance to unpopular initiatives, to override the rights of smaller groups, to retain their leadership, and to conquer other nations.

Education

Photo by Emma Dau

Schools have their own shared experiences along with extra-curricular competitions against other schools. In high schools we see this with ‘cross town rivals’. In colleges we see tribalism between Ivy League schools and between those schools and non-ivy league schools. We also see it between state schools, private schools, and religious schools.

Differences were found regarding student perceptions among competition divisions. Specifically, attendance at a Power Five School influenced student's willingness to support rival teams against other teams, the enjoyment from defeating the rival team, perceptions of rival academic prestige and fan behavior, and likelihood of experiencing Glory Out of Reflected Failure (GORFing), or celebrating when the rival experiences indirect failure. Further, students attending DI No Football Schools and DIII Schools chose academic prestige as a way to derogate their rival schools.

Ethnic/Cultural/Race

I’ve lumped ethnicity, race, and culture together here as they heavily overlap and get mixed together in colloquial conversation despite being unique concepts.

Each group often shares similar foods, music, clothing, dialects, and experiences. This binds them as a tribe/in-group, even more so if there is significant conflict with other tribes/out-groups due to a clash in cultures, a fight for limited resources, or beliefs.

In general, a wide body of social cognitive research has demonstrated that perceivers are better at extracting information from their own-race compared to other-race faces and that these differences can be a barrier to positive cross-race relationships.

Professional/Industry

Tribes develop in professions and industries with unique experiences. Farmers and ranchers gravitate toward each other in social situations. Those in the trades have their own schools and apprenticeship programs. On a job site, there can be rivalries and conflicts between the different trades as their work demands sometimes clash.

Within a company, there can be competing tribes as the shop floor clashes with management or the sales department clashes with… everybody.

The above results indicate that both Pilots and Dispatchers may have ingroup-outgroup bias towards other aerospace specializations, but this effect is manifested toward different groups. Pilots exhibit ingroup-outgroup bias towards Maintenance personnel but not Dispatchers who they view very similarly to themselves. On the other hand, Dispatchers exhibit ingroup-outgroup bias towards Pilots but not Maintenance personnel.

Gangs

Photo by Rock Staar

Gangs are criminal tribes. They typically share similar clothing, music, drug tastes, slang, tattoos, signs, and criminal activities. Examples include La Cosa Nostra, MS13, Yakuza, Aryan Brotherhood, Gangster Disciples, Hells Angels, and the Russian Mafia.

Killian spoke with 40 gang members from Greensboro, North Carolina. The men he interviewed reported that they considered fellow gang members to be family and that they took care of each other. Killian found that most of the gang members he interviewed had tattoos to publicly show their allegiance to their particular gang, and to show pride in belonging to the group. Several gang members said that being part of a gang meant you were never alone in the world, which is similar to how many people describe being part of a close-knit family or group of friends. Gangs provide members a sense of belonging and protection they do not receive from other relationships or experiences in life.

Political

“Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.”

~ DaShanne Stokes ~

We are currently in a period of toxic political tribalism. Politics is prone to intense fighting between groups and the current era isn’t as extreme as some times in the past.

When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. When groups feel mistreated and disrespected, they close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.

In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives – all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against.

Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution – but such is political tribalism.

Compared to other examples of tribalism, political tribalism has some of the strongest bonds.

“Our experiment shows that shared partisanship does indeed have a large impact on social tie formation. People on both sides of the political divide were roughly three times more likely to form social ties with strangers who identify with the same party, compared to counter-partisans,” says Rand.

Their study also found that these new social ties were not just based on pre-existing social circles or algorithm-suggested connections. Rather, people in the study were much more likely to connect with total strangers simply because of shared political views.

Economic Level

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”

~ Charles Bukowski ~

If there is research on economic status from the viewpoint of tribalism, it’s buried under a landfill of studies advocating for differing social policies, political paths, and economic palliatives.

Income/wealth based tribalism exists and there is ample evidence for its existence. The poor, middle income, and wealthy each live a different experience. They live in different neighborhoods, have different recreational activities, eat differently, dress differently, socialize differently, attend different schools, and have unique challenges. Politicians base their campaign strategies on economic class resentments and controversies. Each economic class has members that feel they are unfairly affected by members of the other class — that’s tribal behavior.

Sports

Photo by Philippa Rose-Tite

Sports has long been associated with tribalism. It’s been said that sports is what humans do when they can’t war with each other. Fans wear the same clothes, bathe in the same sports culture, share the activities of watching the same games, and celebrating the same victories. Sports provides a (usually) safe outlet for some of our basest instincts. There are enemies and alliances; victory and defeat. At its best, sports brings together a community of splintered tribes under the umbrella of a larger shared tribe that isn’t political. Sports can strengthen bonds within a community. At its worst, sports fanatics can feed hooliganism and violence.

Using survey scales of prejudice and discrimination, we also measure the hostility toward rival fans. Of the five major leagues, the NHL was second to the NFL in the hostility fans exhibited toward rivals.

Managing our tribal instincts

“Tribalism becomes dangerous when it turns rivals into enemies, when it suppresses diverse thinking, and when it pushes individuals to do things they wouldn’t do on their own.“

~ Ozan Varol ~

Our tribal behaviors are driven at the subconscious level by the limbic system. They are not initiated by conscious thought. However, we can manage these impulses with conscious thought.

We can choose to engage in behaviors, habits, and rituals associated with healthy tribal behavior. These include social gatherings, sharing of knowledge, being supportive, and being ethical. This strengthens in-group bonds, but these skills should also should be used to strengthen our out-group bonds. When we mingle, talk, support, and treat kindly those outside of our groups we strengthen our relationships and the community as a whole.

We can manage the undesirable features of our innate tribalism by recognizing our automatic patterns with outsiders. We can check inner suspicions by engaging and communicating. We can avoid false assumptions by recognizing that we develop opinions without evidence and we can correct those assumptions by asking questions and listening fully. All individuals should develop a good understanding of cognitive fallacies, which often have a basis in tribal drives.

We have the ability to consciously decide who is part of our in-groups. A fan of a sports team can consider a fan of another team to be an enemy or they can consider that person a fellow fan of the sport. A member of a demographic group can view others outside of that group as competition or they can consider them as a fellow member of humanity. It’s our choice how we frame our battlefields in life.

A tribe does not define the member

As I mentioned in You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, our brains have a limited capability to process complex information. One of the mental shortcuts we use to manage all this information is to distill individuals down to the perceived belief system of their tribe. This is a problem as we generally have a poor understanding of another tribe’s belief systems and customs. We also do not know how much of that tribe’s belief system is accepted by the individual. In life we belong to many tribes and the belief systems have conflicting elements. Before lumping any individual into a category, we should first confirm whether their personal beliefs align with what we perceive their tribe’s beliefs to be.

Real dangers

In modern life almost all of our interactions are with individuals who are not a threat. While most of our perceived threats don’t actually turn out to be significant threats, there are individuals who are a physically or emotionally damaging. These include the psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists that inhabit all corners of society. Though they are small in number, they have an outsized negative impact on ourselves and our society. In addition, there are a few people with distorted perceptions that can do great damage in the belief that they are performing a greater good.

We often overlook these individuals because they belong to our own tribe and we assume they share our same beliefs and values. Psychologists offices are filled with individuals who didn’t recognize the damage a loved one did to them. We should not keep the damaging people in our lives, regardless of their status in one of our tribes.

“No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

~ James Baldwin ~

Putting this all together

To summarize, we are primed from birth to belong to groups/tribes. The first, and most powerful, group being the family. These groups help form our knowledge, beliefs, morality, and customs. These tribal bonds are strengthened through hormonal signals in the brain. When the tribal system is healthy, it benefits the members. When it is unhealthy, it can be destructive to all. Because these behaviors are driven at the subconscious level, it’s important to consciously recognize our tribal influences and to avoid those that are damaging to ourselves and others. We should not assume that all members of our tribes are safe, nor should we allow damaging people to remain in our lives.

Finale

This is the third foundational essay for this newsletter. Last week we covered the limitations of the brain’s ability to take in information, process it, and then use it. The next foundational essay will discuss how we are influenced by the behaviors of those around us. It’s a fascinating and surprising topic.

Exercises

To be done when you are in a non-distracting environment.

• What tribe has brought you the most benefit in life?

• What tribe has brought you the most misery?

• Name a step that you can take to strengthen your family tribe.

• Name a member of one of your tribes that you should distance yourself from.

In Closing

Thank you for visiting today. This was a large topic so congratulations for making it to the end. If you found this newsletter interesting, subscribe by clicking the button below. Please like, comment, and share to support this newsletter. If you have any friends or family who might find this content interesting please recommend this newsletter to them.

Your friend,

DJ