3 Takeaways - Yale Professor, Amy Chua: On How Group Identity and a Failure to Realize Its Importance Has Caused the Rise of Partisanship and the Failure of U.S. Foreign Policy (#12)

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Find out how group identity has caused bitter partisanship in the U.S. and the failure of U.S. policies in Vietnam and other countries, from an original thinker who has received support from across the political spectrum. Learn how children as young as 4 years old identify with groups and consistently display systematic, unconscious bias toward other groups. Learn how America can move forward.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. I'm delighted to be here today with Amy Chua. She's a professor at Yale, a leading original thinker. She's been named one of Time Magazine's most influential people, one of The Atlantic's brave thinkers, and also one of Foreign Policy's global thinkers.

She's the author of five books, including international and New York Times bestsellers. And unusually, her ideas have received overwhelming positive reviews and support from across the political spectrum. She will talk about how group identity and a failure to realize its importance has played a role in both the failure of US foreign policy

and in the rise of Donald Trump. She will also provide a way forward. Welcome, Amy. It's so nice to be with you again. Thanks so much, Lynn. It's great to be with you. So, Amy, your unconventional ideas center around how loyalty to groups, or what you call tribes, often outweighs ideological considerations. Can you explain what you mean when you write, quote, humans are tribal animals, unquote? Yeah, basically, we are exactly like our fellow primates. We need to belong to groups. We're hardwired that way. And if you try to think how many hermits you know, there are so few in the entire world. Humans need to belong to groups. And once we connect with a group, we tend to want to cling to it and defend it and see it as better in every way.

One of the fun things about writing this book was I had a chance to review the latest psychological and sociological and neurological studies out there. And it's fascinating. So just to give you one recent example, in a fascinating study, children between the ages of four and eight, which is really young, were randomly assigned to either the red team or the blue team, which you wouldn't think would be a very important distinction. But these kids were then given a t-shirt of corresponding color. So they were either wearing a red t-shirt or a blue t-shirt. These young subjects were then shown computer edited images of a whole bunch of other kids, half of whom were wearing red t-shirts, the other half wearing blue t-shirts. And then they were asked

questions about these children in the computer. The results then were fascinating. Even though these kids knew absolutely nothing about the children in the computer edited images, they consistently said that they liked the kids wearing their color better, wanted to allocate more resources to them, and most disturbingly, consistently displayed systematic unconscious bias. That is, when they were told stories about all these kids, they systematically tended to remember all the positive things about the kids wearing their color and all the negative things about the kids wearing the other color. Humans aren't just a little tribal, we are very tribal. And once we identify with a group, our identities basically become sort of bound up with

it. And the effect is like a drug. There are these amazing studies that show that we experience pleasure when members of our in-group do well, even if we personally aren't actually gaining anything. And more troublingly, we experience pleasure when members of the opposite group fail or suffer a misfortune. There are studies that show that the pleasure centers of our brain actually light up when we stick it to the other side. Yeah, it's very, very stark. That's amazing that it's almost hardwired into us. So is tribalism always bad? No. I know I made it sound kind of negative, but no, there are all these godly accounts of why we evolved to be tribal animals. And I think you intuitively guessed the reason. It's a lot safer to travel in bands.

But tribalism can be absolutely harmless or fun. I think sports is a great example. The most tribal phenomenon I could think of, but relaxing and entertaining. Family can be very tribal. I will be the first to say that I am a very tribal person. I'm kind of proud of that. The problem, though, is when tribalism takes over a political system. That's when things get dangerous. Because then suddenly, facts and studies and data and policy and empirical research, none of that matters. You basically just see everything through your group's lens.

You just want your team to win, and you follow your team leader, and you try to take down the other side, no matter what. Before we turn to American politics, can I ask you about Vietnam? Did the U.S. mistake Vietnam for an ideological conflict over communism, where it was really a tribal fight? Well, they basically missed a huge dimension of it. You know, it was also at one level, yes, of course, it was partly about communism versus capitalism. But because we were so blind to the most important ethnic and group dynamics on the ground, we missed the fact that there was also a huge ethnic dimension that in a way may have been even more important. And that is that all of the capitalists

or the vast majority of them in Vietnam were actually not ethnic Vietnamese, but ethnic Chinese. So Vietnam has what I call, I coined this term, a market dominant minority. That is a tiny minority, only about 2% of Vietnam's entire population. And yet this tiny minority controlled about 60% of Vietnam's private economy. So here we come in the United States. We think that we're saving the world. We're championing capitalism. And we don't see that basically in the eyes of the very poor, largely farming, indigenous Vietnamese, we're basically championing policies that only tend to benefit all the bankers and the retailers that in their eyes are all this hated outsider group, this ethnic minority. And that was a major mistake, which we've repeated subsequently in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Was it also the case in Venezuela with the rise of Hugo Chavez?

Were we again mistaken in attributing his rise to the attractiveness of socialist communist ideas? Yes, again, yeah, it's not that we were totally wrong, but we just, through this blindness and optimism, we missed this ethnic side of the Venezuelan conflict, which is much more subtle than in Southeast Asia. It's not black or white. In the countries of Latin America, they call it a pigmentocracy, with generally speaking, all the wealthy and powerful people being lighter skinned, blue eyed, with European features, especially in a country like Venezuela, the vast majority of the people being darker skinned with indigenous and African features.

Hugo Chavez, yeah, he came in with a lot of kind of socialist stuff. But he also said, look at me, you know, I am the first leader or person trying to be your leader who looks like all of you. He called himself up. I think it was a Pardo. He said, he even said, I'm the Indian from Barinas. And he basically flipped it, something that was considered so degrading that nobody would want to admit that you look like an Indian. He turned it around and he made it a source of pride. So many Americans are like, how could people possibly support him? Look what he's done. They're absolutely right. He ran that country into the ground. The policies didn't work. But what they missed was people identified with him. They said, you know what? He's elevating us. He's giving us a voice. And also, he's finally sticking it to all these white oligarchs out there. And that feeling of group identification, finally, it's our turn for revenge, is very powerful.

And how, again, did the U.S. misread the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq? Again, very different dynamic because there it's not just one religion or not a pygmatocracy, but they had incredibly entrenched and important tribal structures. The most complicated in the world, actually, we just kind of said, you know what, it's fundamentalist Islam versus the good guys. And we missed that the way we developed our policies looked like sort of the largest and most powerful ethnic group there are the Pashtuns. And the way we devised our policies, a lot of the Pashtuns there thought that we were kind of helping other groups like the Tajiks and the Uzbeks. A lot of people don't even know this, but the Taliban

is a largely Pashtun organization. So there's an ethnic dimension to the Taliban that we just kind of missed. And because we missed it, we kept doing things that like in Vietnam, we're basically shooting ourselves in the foot. So let's turn to America. How do you see tribalism in the United States? Is it tribalism that's taken over our politics? Absolutely. You know, I said that that's when things get dangerous. And this is a moment where tribalism has taken over our political system. You can see it used to be Republicans and Democrats could be friends. You could talk at dinner parties. There are these crazy studies now that show it's almost like an ethnic divide or a racial divide. Some vast number of Democrats

say they would be incredibly upset if their child married a Republican and vice versa, you know, which is much more, I mean, it's really something relatively new. So what I really try to do in the book is answer why. Why now? Why are we seeing all this bitter division at this moment? And one of the major factors is the massive demographic transformation that we've been going through. So to put it really bluntly, for 200 years, this country was dominated economically, politically, culturally, by a white majority. You know, when a one group is so overwhelmingly dominant, obviously a lot of terrible things can happen. They can abuse that power. That's how we got slavery and the wiping out of our Native American populations.

But when a group is so dominant, it can also afford to be more generous, which is exactly what the white Protestants did in the 60s and 70s, when basically they kind of voluntarily opened up the Ivy League to African Americans, Jews, Asian Americans, kind of because they just thought it would be a right thing to do. Today, that is absolutely not the case. And that is because for the first time in US history, whites are about to lose their majority status at the national level. The Pew Foundation says it will happen around 2044. I think the US census says 2050, but it's going to happen. We don't know exactly says it will happen around 2044. I think the U.S. Census says 2050. But it's going to happen.

We don't know exactly what it will look like. And it's already started to happen in many major states. You know, Texas, California, D.C., non-Hispanic whites are already a minority. So why is this important? It's important because it's now the case that not just minorities feel threatened, but whites feel threatened. There's a fascinating study that shows that I think 65% of white Americans believe that they are subject to more discrimination than minorities. And this is not just a Republican phenomenon. I believe, you know, because of affirmative action, competition for

university spots, and also the right to define the nation's identity. I think 30% of Democrats believe that there was significant discrimination against whites. So not just African Americans feel discriminated against, whites feel under threat. Not just religious minorities like Jews and Muslims feel threatened. Christians feel threatened. You hear about the war on the Bible. Asians, Latinos, straights, gays, women, men, everybody feels threatened. And the studies show that it's when people feel threatened, that's when they retreat into tribalism, when they become much more insular and defensive and much more us versus them. That is why we are now seeing sort of both the left and the right fracturing into ever smaller and smaller groups that are fighting against each other. And also a very

disturbing kind of explicit identity politics on both sides of the political spectrum. What do you think is the most serious tribal or political divisions today? Well, because of our original sin of slavery, race will always be one of the major problems, and that's just not going to go away anytime soon. But equally, or at least very important, is something new. And that is the, roughly speaking, the division between cosmopolitan elites, you know, many of them living on the coast, and what you might call, well, President Trump's base, Heartland or rural or Southern America, blue collar white America, that divide is really stark now in a way that it wasn't before. So I do ethnic studies. And one of the ways that people define an ethnic difference is how much intermarriage and interaction is there.

The difference between coastal or cosmopolitan whites, you know, probably the viewers of this podcast, it's certainly the people I teach, the difference between those whites and whites in Appalachia, or, you know, again, in President Trump's space, is so bitter now that there was almost no intermarriage or no interaction between those two groups. And it's almost what social scientists would call an ethnic divide. It is much more likely that a white person who attends Columbia would marry someone from Nigeria or a South Asian background of comparable educational status than somebody from rural Kentucky. When did this coastal versus heartland or elite versus non-elite divide emerge?

Very gradually over the last, you know, I don't know, 30 years or so, you know, education is something I also have written about in my tiger mom mode. Our system is really broke. You know, education used to be a source of rubber mobility. It wasn't perfect. Obviously, we excluded huge populations like all African-Americans. But generally speaking, you could grow up in a small town in the Midwest, go to state college. If you're smart, get lucky, work hard, make to study for the SETs, the price of these private schools, the head start that the coastal elites have, how expensive it is to buy real estate in California and New York. You just don't have that upward mobility now. So, you know, going back to your question about Vietnam and Iraq, what I say is that for the first time in U.S. history, we are starting to demonstrate dynamics that formerly were much more common in developing countries. You know, we were like, we're not like Vietnam, my goodness, or Syria, goodness,

or Indonesia. But what's happened is that because of this decline in upward mobility, and this emergence of this divide between these two sets of whites, we are seeing, I think, our own idiosyncratic version of a market dominant minority, that it is this hated minority that is viewed by much of the country as this arrogant outsider group that doesn't care about real Americans. And by that, I'm referring to the cosmopolitan elites. And, you know, of course, cosmopolitan elites are not a racial or ethnic group. I mean, they include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But there are these similarities.

It is, in fact, true that cosmopolitan elites share a lot of the similar tastes. We dress similarly. We send our kids to the same kinds of schools. We even have our own vocabulary. We police that vocabulary. Much of this country's wealth is held on the coast, whether Wall Street or Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Washington. So you can see in a way how President Trump mobilized his base. It was through something that was actually very familiar

to me. I was, believe it or not, one of the few people that called the 2016 election correctly. And I think that's because I had seen this pattern in the developing world before, what happened in November 2016 was exactly what I would have predicted in a developing country where you had this resented outsider minority viewed as controlling the levers of power from afar. And that's the swamp that President Trump would talk about, these technocrats, these experts that care more about the poor in Africa than they do about the poor in our own country. And what I would have predicted, what we actually got was the rise of demagogic populist voices that say, you know what, it's time for us to take back our country, make America great again. And he actually said, you know, we have's time for us to take back our country, make America great again. And he

actually said, you know, we have to take it back from the Chinese and the Mexicans. We need to reclaim our country. And that pattern of we need to take back our country is something that I would study in Zimbabwe. You know, we need to take back Zimbabwe for black Zimbabweans, Indonesia for real Indonesians, not the Chinese. Malaysia for Malaysians. And Kazakhstan for Kazakhs. And so on and so on. So Amy, what is the way forward? Believe it or not, I'm an optimist. And I think the way forward lies in remembering what makes America special. It is so easy to become disillusioned. And I will be the first to say that we have this incredible constitution that we have repeatedly failed to live up to.

But here's something really special that we forget. Our national identity is ethnically and religiously neutral. We didn't originate in the idea of blood. And even countries like France and Germany that are now Western democracies, they did originate as ethnic nations, as obviously China did. So we have our identity centers and is built on the values in our constitution. Now, we have, again, repeatedly failed and shamelessly failed to live up to those ideals. But what I always tell my

students is, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'll hear my students say, America is a country based on, you know, rooted in, built on white supremacy. Our values are genocide. And I will say, be careful. Let's not forget what makes this country special. There's a huge difference between saying we have this very, very valuable constitution with important ideals that we cherish, which we have shamefully failed to live up to. There's a huge difference between that and saying, you know what, all of the ideals that are in our constitution, they're just all lies and fraud, just an excuse for white supremacy. Because if this country really is built on nothing more than white supremacy, then it's hard to know why it's worth fighting for. I think that the first thing to realize is that we have a lot of work to be done because

in order for the constitutional values to resonate for everybody, including the descendants of slaves, as well as the descendants of slave owners, old and young, rural and urban, we have to work to make those values a reality. I mean, we can't keep saying we have these great principles if people are like, they don't even apply to the people I know. To my neighborhood, absolutely not. So there's a lot of work to be done. And I think that the right needs to see that, that patriotism isn't just waving a flag. But on the left, I think progressives also need to say, I But I worry that we are overcorrecting. I think we have to find a way to teach our children about America's history in an honest, painful way, while also preserving in them the idea of America as a special nation. And do you have practical suggestions on how to do that?

I have one that I love, you know, and I think this is a policy proposal whose time actually might have come because everywhere I go, people seem to be talking about it. And that is the idea of a national service program. So hear me out. The idea is, I don't think you'd be that different. Because if you have children, you know, after high school, a lot of our young people on the coast take a gap year anyway. And often they go to Europe or Australia or Guatemala and they do wonderful things, Lynn, but often they're still in that same bubble. You know, they're kind of with other friends from the coast. So what if after high school, young Americans from New York or California or Chicago were either required or incentivized to go to another part of the country that they would ordinarily never go to, Ohio or rural South, and work side by side on some project with young Americans from a totally different socioeconomic background. I think that would be a phenomenal way to begin to bridge the gap between the cosmopolitan elites and the rest of the country and to kind of start to alleviate this deep mutual suspicion and disdain between, again, the coast and President Trump's base.

Really interesting idea, Amy. What are the three key takeaways or insights that you'd like to leave the audience with today? Okay, I'll try to be pithy. Takeaway one, tribalism has taken over America's political system. Takeaway two, as much as we don't like to admit it, cosmopolitan elites are part of the problem. Finally, and more optimistically, takeaway number three, America is unique. We are a special nation, but we've forgotten why, and we need to remember. Amy, thank you for a really interesting discussion today. This has been terrific. Thank you so much, Lynn, for having me.

You're a terrific interviewer. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can listen or subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. If you would like to receive information on upcoming episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number 3.

3 is not spelled out. For all social media and podcast links, go to 3takeaways.com.