Ideas - Political tribalism is an existential threat to humanity: evolutionary anthropologist

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

David R. Samson argues that political tribalism is an existential threat to humanity. But the evolutionary anthropologist also sees ‘tribe drive’ as an essential instinct that can be channeled for good. His book Our Tribal Future won the 2023 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy award.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. We have a breach of the Capitol. Tribalism. They're poisoning the blood of our country. It's synonymous with hatred, polarization, conflict, even war. No fascists in the USA! But tribalism is a fundamentally human trait. It enabled trust and cooperation among strangers,

something that was essential to the evolution of our species and civilization. When we talk about belonging to a team or a tribe, identifying as a tribe is a sense of belonging. David Sampson is an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Toronto. He argues that the drive towards tribalism is one of our most powerful pieces of cognitive machinery.

In fact, it's even encoded in our DNA. It's an instinct. It happens unconsciously. And in fact, it doesn't work if it's not unconscious. So one of its adaptive properties is the fact that you don't have any control over it. The fact that it's unconscious and so powerful is precisely what David Sampson excavates in his book,

Our Tribal Future, how to channel our foundational human instincts into a force for good. Turning the tribal drive into a force for good might be essential if humanity is to survive the worst effects of tribalism, xenophobia, racism, and dehumanization, and the suffering and bloodshed they cause. It's the greatest threat of our species in the 21st century. To help understand the history of tribalism, Samson imagines it as a 100-minute movie, the human movie, covering the past 1.8 million years of human evolution. So, in the first minute of the human movie, something really dramatic happens. Our Australopithecine ancestors, they go from the trees and they begin spending a lot

of time on the ground. In fact, habitually spending time on the ground. And within that first minute, we start a completely new social experiment. It's called the camp. Okay. And modern foragers today still dwell in these camps. These are face-to-face king groups. They are basically a group of people that come together for the shared project of survival and reproduction. But the key here is that it's face-to-face and that usually have 20 to 30 adults involved in this project. Pretty small. But bigger than, say, a nuclear family. So that's the first minute of the movie.

And then you fast forward 84 minutes and something pretty radical happens. You fast forward 84 minutes and something pretty radical happens. You start seeing groups of individuals that we can tell through the archaeological record they identified as an us because they had certain signatures on their tools, started trading with them so far away that it was beyond your average typical human group size. This is likely when the first tribes evolved. And so you have a scaling of the population density beyond this camp level, which is 30 individuals, 40 individuals, and you're getting beyond the human mind's ability to process the face-to-face relationships and start cooperating with strangers. And so when I hear the word tribalism, I think of this adaptation, this capacity to be able to extrapolate and to emit signals in your environment that says I'm part of this team. And this is an unconscious process. And when you register someone else as part of your team, you unconsciously privilege them with a host of different benefits. So two really important moral evolutionary traits occurred. At the camp level,

you have for the first time people that dwell within your local environment. You can share calories with them. When you go out and forage and hunt, you bring it back and you share. But the cost of that though is adhering to the social norms of that particular camp. The rules. The rules. And if you break those rules, you risk excommunication. So there was the flip side of this moral coin was that once you evolve tribalism at minute 84, that's a really incredible adaptation. It means that you can cooperate with strangers but only strangers that are signaling your coalitionary alliance this is why when you say the word tribalism it's complicated because it actually was a cheat sheet for trusting at scale with strangers but the flip side of that coin was

if they don't signal your coalitionary alliance then they can be the end of some of humanity's most dangerous traits, like dehumanization and genocide. But I'm wondering what happened at minute 84. Why did that happen? Well, basically, we were victims of our own success. You had our progenitors, our Paleolithic ancestors, reproducing to the point where we started scaling up in larger, larger population densities. And we had to figure out particular mechanisms by which we could coexist. This gets particularly interesting in the human movie once we get all the way to 30 seconds left in the movie. And this is post-agrarian society. So this is when we start becoming much more sedentary. We start becoming much less nomadic. Once we more sedentary. We start becoming much less

nomadic. Once we're sedentary, you start to see this idea of mismatch, evolutionary mismatch, really come into play. That is, we were evolved for how things were, not how things are. Because now we're starting, instead of roaming around and hunting and gathering, we're protecting valuable resources in one spot. And that means you have to figure out how to bootstrap cooperation amongst not just a couple thousand people, but maybe even a few million people. The core adaptation here was we became a symbolic species. And it starts really clearly around 300,000 years ago. And this is the time where tribes evolve. And incidentally, this is when modern Homo sapiens evolve as well. And I don't think that's a coincidence at all. Actually, can we

just stop and talk about that? What is that relationship between the development of Homo sapiens and the development of a tribe? I think a certain level of cognitive evolution that occurred, particularly our capacity to wield symbols. There's no other animal on the planet that wields symbols like we do. So if you were to, say, ask a chimpanzee to create a coalition that had nothing to do with their actual home group, they couldn't do it. Chimpanzees hate strangers. They will kill all strangers on site unless it's potentially a breeding female coming into the group. Humans are the symbolic animal, and that means that we can assign abstracts that link to the symbols and that have very deep, impactful meaning to us almost viscerally. almost viscerally.

So then going to this idea of what we had to overcome to be able to do all of this, talk to me about the trust paradox. What is that exactly? Oh, this is just simply the idea that for 99.9% of all life on this planet, you're trying to figure out who to trust. The oldest solution to this problem goes back half a billion years. Organisms trust those other organisms that share genes. So kin selection, this is one of the foundations of evolutionary biology. Now, in a select handful of species, they have brains enough and they have social organizations complex enough to have true friendship. organization is complex enough to have true friendship. This means that they can actually have reciprocal relationships that transcend just hit for tat and develop true, meaningful, trusting bonds with each other. Chimps, dolphins, whales, humans. It's a very short list of mammals.

Now, 300,000 years ago, that solution to that problem of the trust paradox was tribalism, was if I see a stranger come around the corner and they're wearing the same headdress, they have the same style of tools, they wear that tool on the right hip, not the left hip like those other groups, right? Then I know I can bootstrap trust with that individual. You know, this friendship, this ability to have to make friendship, you call it our species-crowning ethical achievement. How? Yeah. If you think about that statement of 99.9% of all life will choose to divert their energy into themselves, into their offspring, and into individuals proportionally to the degree by which they share genes. That's the answer that evolution has come up with on how to channel

energy. The reason why friendship, I think, is absolutely beautiful is it transcends this. Think of blood brotherhood rituals or blood sisterhood rituals, right? These were relatively universal in many small-scale societies. And the reason why this was is because it literally scaffolds the symbolic meaning of kinship. You're my brother. You're my sister. And it uses that to create a trusting bond

with someone who doesn't share your genes. That's magic. Religions love co-opting the family modality, right? Like brother, sister, you hear preachers, ministers use this terminology and they wield it masterfully. And it's really just base evolutionary theory. Let's go back to this idea of symbols and signals that are essential to the formation of tribes. How quickly do our minds process these signals and determine who can be trusted? And in fact, it doesn't work if it's not unconscious. So one of its adaptive properties is the fact that you don't have any control over it. One of the most powerful ways to take control of an instinct is to elevate it to the neocortex of our brain and let executive function realize what's going on. And when that's elevated to our attention and awareness, it lessens the control.

You know, when you think of meditation, one of the primary goals of meditation is to see that these thoughts, feelings, and sensations in our body and our mind, they're experiences of consciousness. To be aware of them. Absolutely. They're objects of consciousness. So that anger that you feel can be an object of consciousness. And the magic of it is once you get a grasp of that and you realize that anger is an object and you have it in your awareness, that's when the anger no longer controls you.

And you feel less of that anger having a pull over your direct behavior. This is why this understanding of instinct is so crucial. I have one more example of instinct that is pretty shocking. It's chemical signaling via the handshake. Think of this next time you have a handshake with somebody. The likelihood of you smelling your hand after a handshake goes up 100%. What? Yes. So it'll be subtle things, right? You'll shake the hand and within 30 seconds,

you'll do something on the chin, but you're actually inhaling. And you're not conscious. I wasn't conscious of it. But then after I realized what the adaptation was, I started watching people and I started noticing the instinct in myself to do this. And I was totally freaked out. And what's the purpose? The purpose is when you are smelling the chemical signaling of the individual that you're shaking their hand with, you're getting information on their stress level. You're getting information on their immune health. So whether or not they're sick and you get, especially in the context of mating, you can get information on compatibility as a mate. Extraordinary.

Goes all the way down to the genes and it's all unconscious and through scent. Oh my God. We could talk for hours just about that. We could. I just wanted to nail it home how powerful instincts are and how unconscious they are and how important they are because all the stuff we're talking about right now with tribalism, this stuff is primarily unconscious. You mentioned the tribe drive. In the book, you called it a critical piece of cognitive machinery. How did it become essential to humans, not just surviving, but actually flourishing? Yeah. At this point, you've got the first true civilizations emerging in Mesopotamia area.

And at this point, you have, for the first time, a scaling issue that no human society has ever faced before. We're talking millions of people within a very small geographic space. And some of the ways you get around this, well, there are some evolutionary and anthropological hypotheses out there. The moralizing God hypothesis is one of them. That religion, incidentally, you don't see religion coming onto the scene until you see big population densities. The big religions, not the animistic religions, not the local religions, right? Organized religion. Organized religion. And its primary use function under this model

is that it allowed people to cooperate at scale because then they were believing in the same intersubjective stuff. My working operational definition of tribalism in the book is an intersubjective belief network with the function of bootstrapping trust among strangers. So it's a, what do we all believe? Yeah. And how do we leverage that so that we can trust each other? So religion really embodies that definition. It does. And when you think about how religion spreads itself,

you have to become a master interpreter of symbols. And it's projecting symbols in your environment. And the people in the environment are either receiving it or they aren't. And the ones that are receiving it, it's like a secret society almost, right? Once you understand and you can authentically signal, right, those particular signals that are core to that intersubjective belief network, you gain these rights and privileges that no other individual

can. So how did the development, our arrival at this moment when we can become tribes, actually affect human evolution? What you get essentially from this jamming of people into small areas and economic development beyond just exchange of work and sweat equity for a commodity, you get the capacity to have entire classes of individuals, basically subsistence farming is feeding them. And they become part of building these larger and larger and more complex intersubjective belief networks up until the point we get the modern nation state. So it really is kind of essential. It's essential. No modern nation state works without the tribe jive underpinning it and undergirding it. Simply can't work.

the tribe jive underpinning it and undergirding it. Simply can't work. We live in a really individualistic society and we know that. It's something that we might even pride ourselves on today. So how does that fit into the evolution that humans have gone through? Okay, so that's where we got to tackle mismatch head-on. And to reiterate, evolutionary mismatch is this idea that we evolve for how things were, not how things are. And typically, when species undergo mismatch, this is a precursor to extinction. It means that the environment is changing so quickly that they can't adapt. They're sort of smoke signals, right, of what the health of a species is, is whether or not it's in this state of mismatch.

You can look at that moment in the human movie where there was 10 seconds left. And that was the beginning of it because for the first time we were living in sedentary societies and you can see it in the bones of the people who dwelled in these early agrarian societies. These bones look really porous and

unhealthy. Stature is reducing. Infections in their teeth are becoming evident. The human physiology takes a hit because it's designed to hunt and gather in an open territory. So you start seeing evidence of this mismatch physiologically happening then. Also, when we think of diet, that's a really low-hanging fruit. Forgive the pun, because for 99.9% of this whole human story, we evolved in situations where fats, oils, sugars were incredibly rare. Now, at the beginning of the agrarian revolution, up into the point where we have Mickey D's on every corner, you can see how that's going to affect the human physiology. So where I think as it pertains to your question about social mismatch and individualism, we can talk about the invention of the nuclear family. You got a lot of

soldiers coming back from World War II, and the government and FDR was particularly worried about a bunch of men hanging out together and congregating, and it's historically not been good when that happens. So they created Levittown. Five years ago, this was a vast checkerboard of potato farms on New York's Long Island. Today, a community of 60,000 persons living in 15,000 homes, this is Levittown. This was essentially the invention of the suburb and the nuclear family as it was advertised and sold to us back then. They started skyrocketing these cheap, quick-to-build, single-family nuclear-friendly homes.

So it incentivized that kind of life. It incentivized that kind of life. The issue is the nuclear family is kind of like what I like to think of as the McDonald's of social patterns. If you were to and a half minutes of the movie was the camp. Remember, it takes a village to raise a child. Really, I think it takes a camp to raise a child. And that's why you see some of the devastating results of isolation and loneliness on not only the individual level, but also relationships and pair-bonded relationships that are trying to raise a family as well. You say that this evolutionary mismatch is actually responsible for the loneliness epidemic. And you say that living the life of a loner is inherently more dangerous. Can you talk a bit more about how dangerous social isolation is given how our brains have evolved?

Absolutely. It's a really important topic, so much so that the Surgeon General of the United States came out with a statement saying that everyone in the United States is facing an epidemic of loneliness and we need to take remedial action to help solve it. So the fundamental theory here behind this is Jim Cohen's social baseline theory. This is the idea that when you're in a state of isolation, it's an unconsciously monitored assessment of your social network, its strength,

the immediacy of social connections you have in your life, and your subjective experiences. I'm lonely, I'm isolated, and I have the feeling that I'm not connected with other people. And what happens is you're burning hot. So basically at a metabolic level, when you have the experience of being lonely, you're burning significantly more calories than somebody who has a good, high quality social network. Wow.

And the way it basically works is this unconscious measure of, do I have somebody in my environment that if I'm asleep or incapacitated or unavailable or I'm experiencing emergency, is there an extra pair of eyes around? Now, think about it for, again, for 99 and a half minutes of the movie, that was always the case because the nuclear unit was the nuclear camp. But when people are living these increasingly isolated lives, you see this basal metabolic rate increase and the consequences are disastrous. In fact, loneliness, I can say, is deadly. You actually see it produce worse genes. So your protein synthesis and your inflammation markers are higher. Antisocial behavior, rates of cancer, rates of hypertension. Your capacity for your mind to be plastic and learn

new things is even reduced in this state. And there are sex-specific outcomes as well. So in females, the proportion of the strength of their social network is predictive of whether or not they'll have postpartum depression. So one of the most prophylactic things you can do to reduce postpartum depression, get a strong social network, right? With men, men are particularly vulnerable to loss of friendships over lifetime because many friendships for males are done with the psychologist Geoffrey Grief says shoulder to shoulder relationships early on in their life. Robert Waldinger of Harvard had the longest-running longitudinal study of all time, going 80 years. Very famous study. And the number one predictor, it wasn't socioeconomic status.

It wasn't, you know, how hard their lives were. It was how many good friends they had. Friendships, yeah. That was predictive of a man having a good, fulfilling life and a long health span for a majority of their life. It's incredible. You talk about the distinction between belonging to a tribe that's out there in the ether, and then that's right in front of you, face to face. Absolutely.

This is, I would say, one of the most important distinctions to make. So think about it as this. There's a tribe is this dividing line. Beyond that line, you're talking about bootstrapping strangers together. So one example is if we go down to a Jays game, you can say that your family are part of the Blue Jays tribe. They could all be Blue Jays fans, right? You could be sitting with your family, five, six of you in the game. But all Blue Jays cannot be your family. That doesn't inverse, right? All you are is connected

by this concept of being a Blue Jays fan. That's it. That's what a tribe is. Below that though, is face-to-face groups. And this is where we get into the concept of channel capacity of the brain. Dunbar, who's an evolutionary anthropologist, discovered that at around 150 individuals, that is basically the computational limits of the mind of a Homo sapien to really have a deep relationship. At the farthest extension, we can memorize about 5,000 faces. And in fact, it's funny that Aristotle's perfect number for a city was around 5,000. It is interesting. You start seeing these numbers pop up on human scale.

1,500 is the number if you were at small-scale societies, like, for example, the Hadza, who are hunter-gatherers. 1,500 is the size of a tribe. A band is a nested group of camps. So you think of them like neighborhoods. Sure. And a band is about 150 people. Interestingly, this coincides perfectly with Dunbar's number. And then below that, you have true face-to-face relationships that can be deep.

And this brings us to the concept of a sympathy group. The average human has 12 people in their sympathy group. A sympathy group member is defined as someone who, if they died, it would have a devastating impact on your personal psyche. Those closest to you. Correct. Just a quick side note. Just what the effect of the pandemic was. How did it highlight the power of the tribe drive and the dangers of people being cut off from social networks?

Oh, yeah. So when I think of the pandemic, I think of the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't think the pandemic in any way was excruciatingly different from what we had been doing to ourselves in slow drips over 50 years. It was just the most dramatic endpoint, the crunching.

It sped it up. It sped it up, and it accelerated sort of this bowling alone pattern that had been going on for about 50 years in North American culture. David Sampson is the author of Our Tribal Future, How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good. It won the 2023 Balcie Prize for Public Policy. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now.

David Sampson refers to tribalism as a cursed blessing. We're just gaining an understanding of it, and it is likely being manipulated en masse and to very dangerous effect. Tribalism was a driving force behind the evolution of Homo sapiens and our civilization. But it's a mismatch, even maladaptive, for the world we live in today. It's made people identify with their group so strongly that they'll believe untruths, even far-fetched conspiracy theories, over any reality that conflicts with the values of their tribe. The tribe drives development, as an instinct for creating coalitions, belonging, trust, and security has all too often devolved into intolerance,

violence, even genocide. And that instinct is associated with very particular parts of our human brain. So there's a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC. The anterior cingulate cortex is's a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC. The anterior cingulate cortex is essentially that part of the brain that tells us what a social other is. Basically, it's a part of the brain that says, I'm so close to you that when you feel pain, this part of the brain lights up and I too feel pain. Literally just imagine you're in the kitchen with your wife,

your husband, somebody you care about deeply. You're cooking dinner together and they slice open their finger and there's blood everywhere. And I actually have my students evoke this imagery in sort of a state of meditation. And then I have them tell me how it makes them feel. And they say things like, well, I actually felt it in this part of my body, this tensing up in my upper chest and then like a little bit in the back of my head. And the reason I bring this up is if you don't have that sort of sympathy level group status for that individual, which is a learned over time, over exposure, trust, invested in that relationship, this part of the brain doesn't fire.

invested in that relationship, this part of the brain doesn't fire. So those face-to-face relationships are so crucial because it's the magic where the ACC fires. So that's the face-to-face. Now, here's where it gets ugly. The insular cortex has a pathway that goes straight to the amygdala. Our amygdala is basically in the limbic system. It's part of that fear-freeze, fight-or-flight response. And it particularly is associated with fear and even things like disgust. And so when you are exposed to a pathogen, if we were to, say, put a rotten slab of meat right now on this desk in the studio, and it's got flies buzzing around it, cockroaches coming out of it i can see i can see your face instinctually moving right now and i do too i feel like my skin is crawling that's because this pathway in the brain is firing up this is ancient if we were to do this with a chimpanzee or a monkey or any other mammal it's particularly cool with monkeys because they have such human-like

expression you can actually see them stick out their tongue and make the like like the gross you look on their face this means it's a deep evolutionary response to disgust to pathogens to things that we don't like for humans in our current environment unfortunately evolution is very thrifty and it uses ancient parts of the brain and it scaffolds on top of them so even when we get to complex ideas like in-group versus out-group psychology when tribes evolved we began to associate those feelings of ingrudeness the acc that nice stuff to the people just signaling that we're part of the same team. And then on the flip side, and this is always a prerequisite to the worst of human behaviors, and that is genocide. A particular group is vermin, right? They're a disease.

They're a pathogen that needs to be removed. Animals. They're animals. And it's just a one for one. If you look at what groups are saying other groups are unhuman, this is that group literally cognitively bootstrapping each other to do the worst of human behavior. And that is eradicate another group. It's hard to believe that that same drive can have two such different outcomes. Hence the cursed blessing. So there's this really remarkable passage in your book where you write that the worst outcomes of tribalism are not the consequence of moral crisis, but in fact an energy crisis. Can you explain why it's an energy crisis? Yeah. So we just talked about how the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex, determines who to spend a lot of energy on empathizing with. Empathy is so expensive.

There is something along the lines of 150,000 human beings dying every day. dying every day. Now, imagine every day having to experience the emotional pain of all of that human loss as one individual, as one mind, as one neuroendocrine system. It would be catastrophically devastating to our ability to function. So evolution mercifully made it almost impossible to feel that pain. But the cost is, how do we scale cooperation amongst these strangers that we care? Tribalism was the answer. But the issue is, what happens when you've got a bunch of tribes all competing for the same space? So is it possible that the more pernicious manifestations and forms of tribalism that we see today are also the result of an evolutionary mismatch? I mean, that people are looking for belonging while we live in this individualistic society that kind of preaches self-reliance and then finding that belonging in extreme or destructive ideologies.

Self-reliance and then finding that belonging in extreme or destructive ideologies. I love that you're bringing in this word belonging because when we talk about the primary use case of identifying as a tribe is a sense of belonging, a sense of, ironically, distinctiveness because you're not to be confused with another group. Right. Right? And status. group, right? And status. Because if you work within the social norms established with that group, their social norms and their sacred values, and you advertise those and you signal those in your environment effectively, you gain status. So those are the three hallmarks of what people get when they invest their identity into a group. So how does social media feed into this? Oh yeah. Social media, it basically feeds that sense of belonging, but it does so

unfortunately in very toxic ways. Active X users do increase their sense of belonging, but along the pathway to get that sense of belonging, they also increase outrage. They also increase polarization and they also increase anxiety. And what that ends up doing is driving a reduction in overall wellness. It's cheap, fast food belongingness, right? So it's connection, but kind of the worst form of tribalism. That's it. That's it. And it's cheap to kind of scroll through something and to be like, oh, like this person's highly tribalized statement of in-group and out-group sentiment. Oh, and maybe I'll post it too. Oh, gosh, I'm getting likes.

Oh, that's feeding into my instinct as a homo sapien to gain status. Whoa, all of a sudden the dopaminergic feedback system is just on fire. And that's how it becomes an addictive, ultimately unsatisfying, wellness-reducing behavior. ultimately, unsatisfying, wellness-reducing behavior. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country. So I'm wondering how vulnerable all of this makes us to people who know how to use tribal signaling for their own purposes, whether they're religious leaders or political leaders. How vulnerable does all this make us?

Incredibly. Again, remember the best counter to being manipulated by your instinct is to understand it, but we're just gaining an understanding of it. And it's true. It is likely being manipulated en masse and to very dangerous effect. The United States is such a great example. Unlike Canada, there's just two parties. So it's just very binary in that political tribal domain. And they're in a particular state right now where anthropologically, I think something like endogamy is going on. So endogamy is when one tribe forbids the intermarriage and trade with another tribe. It means only us. I mean, this has been happening since tribes existed, right? What's going on right now in the U.S. is I think something akin to endogamy.

You only see intermarriage now between Democrats and Republicans, and it's at 4%. Extraordinary. 4%. Extraordinary. 4%. When you look at the things too that predict a successful marriage, political orientation is more predictive than certain personality traits and educational backgrounds. Seriously. I'm not kidding. I can't make this stuff up. Extraordinary. I'm an evolutionary biologist by trade, and that to me looks like a speciation event, right? Like two populations are no longer intermingling. If you just add time, that means you get not only different tribes, you get like different people. So different organisms, I'll say. You know what I mean? Like if you just look at it from population genetics level. leaders of political or religious movements have like an instinctive gift for sending the right messages or right signals, like how to deploy these signals on people who crave connection

and belonging at a time when we are all kind of living our own lives. Oh, absolutely. It's a playbook that's been used probably since for 300,000 years. But when you have things like modern communication capacity, the internet and the scale at which these signals can be distributed at ease into the environment those with an instinctual gift are given these essentially these power tools to amplify their capacity to to create coalitionary alliances in their environment and to signal to theirs and oftentimes it's done at the expense and defining a very clear out group, what somebody is not. And so that is a very powerful effect. Not to point fingers at one particular camp, but I am curious how much you think Donald Trump's polarizing effect, the fierce loyalty of his base and the repulsion of his opponents, how much would you put down to tribalism? Yeah. With Donald Trump, it's almost low-hanging fruit. I'll say this,

the New Apostolic Reformation churches, these are churches that their leaders of that group believe they have a direct line of communication with God. And he has done a very effective job at signaling to those groups, and they are very good at mobilizing at the grassroots, which I think is to a certain extent one of the reasons why you have such success with Donald Trump in signaling to those groups. But that being said, the more and more I study this, the more and more I look at myself in the mirror and say, how valuable is it actually to identify as one of these political groups? Because the playbook is being used at scale by everyone. And the value that I get from identifying with, and when we talk about certain pitfalls in human cognition, my side biases and certain cognitive blind spots, the most powerful modulator of that is identity. So I've tried my best to de-identify with most tribal affiliations.

You personally. Me personally. And to invest all that energy into face-to-face groups. And to invest all that energy into face-to-face groups. I did it because of the science, but just speaking about meaning and purpose and sense of holistic meditative calm about my state in the universe, it has drastically improved since I have reduced my reliance of identity on tribal identities and more focused on pro-social face-to-face identities. How much of a threat do you think political tribalism is? Yeah, it's the greatest threat of our species in the 21st century. It's something we have to figure out. We've been using the term tribe drive that David Samson used to describe the primal urge

we humans have to identify with specific groups. David's book also features another term, tribe virus. So I'm using tribe virus as a metaphor, but my friend and associate and colleague Andy Norman actually is leading a movement of cognitive immunology. So it's thinking about how ideas that can harm individuals can spread rapidly in a social ecosystem. cognition on steroids. So what identity protective cognition is this extremely robust psychological phenomena where if you identify with a group, you will extrapolate from any data set in your environment, a way to avoid any attack on your group and your sense of identity. So you'll work your way around it and it will manipulate your senses to do so. Like you'll literally, you won't see a thing. It could be as simple as I identify as a Miller Lite beer drinker, right? Versus a Budweiser beer drinker. You will say experientially that Miller Lite tastes better. And then in a double blind test, you won't be able to tell the difference, right? That's what we're talking

about here. Wow. It's powerful. It is. It literally shapes our sense of reality. This was really important for me as an evolutionary biologist to wrap my head around. It was this concept of it doesn't have to be true to have adaptive value. So let's take global warming as an example. If the members of your community don't believe in global warming the use function of saying i don't believe in global warming too is really well-functioning parent teacher meetings right um a church where you everybody gets along where everybody's family goes to potlucks together where each parent can take care of other parents' children and offspring, so alloparenting. The use function value of just saying something scientifically

incorrect to show that you're part of the team, that is very, very valuable. And in fact, there's a line of thinking where the more radical the statement, the higher you're signaling your allegiance to that particular group. This happens in religion all the time. One example is this concept of the Trinity, right? How can one thing be three things? And it's this great paradox. And religions love paradox because if somebody says, I buy it, I love it, I believe it, and I have faith in it, that is such an honest signal of coalitionary alliance. That's the value. It's not whether or not it's real. It's not veridical truth. Doesn't matter. So that was really big for me to understand as an evolutionary biologist of why people didn't believe in evolution. Because to me, reality didn't make sense unless I looked

at it from an evolutionary standpoint. But then once I realized, oh, this is an honest signal of their coalitionary alliance to the group of people that they care about most, that was a very epistemically humbling event, right? I was thinking, okay, there's a rationality to this, even though it's not true. Yeah. So how much is our identity or sense of self determined by that perception of the truth? I'd say actually truth is much less important than the strength of the identity to the individual. You can actually measure this strength by asking somebody, what is the group? What is the identity that you prize the most, that you're most proud to belong to? And typically people will very easily come up with a couple. And that is the identity we have to be most careful with when it comes to whether

or not we're actually perceiving the truth about that identity. And that's what the tribe virus is. Identity protective cognition is the capacity for my identity to override any veridical truth if it's attacking my identity. I've got a great example of this. Ken Ham debating Bill Nye the Science Guy. Ken Ham is a young earth creationist. Bill Nye is a popular riser of science. And the interviewer asked, is there anything that would help you change your mind?

This is actually, in cognitive immunology, this is the most powerful things you can do if you're in an intractable debate. Right. You actually create the conditions by which this could potentially change. It's a very powerful technique. It also tells you if you're dealing with somebody whose identity is at stake. Because Bill said, well, I would have to see some evidence in the fossil record, geological strata, the rate of expansion of the universe.

He listed several things. Yeah. He needed to see evidence. Evidence was things. Yeah, he needed to see evidence. Evidence was the answer. I would need to see evidence. And what Ken Ham said was, I'm a Christian. And as a Christian, I can't prove it to you.

But the Bible is the word of God. No one's ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true. And full stop. You see, his answer was his identity. There was no tier or body of evidence that would ever change it because it was his identity. That is the tribe virus at its greatest, when you cannot change your ideas in light of evidence because your identity is in the way. I think you just helped me understand why conspiracy theories stick so forcefully in today's world. Yes. Not only that, I mean, historically, some conspiracies have turned out to be quite true. Now, the issue is, we call this a type one error, where it's very inexpensive

to see snakes in the grass, right? So what is the cost of me, evolutionarily speaking, right? If I'm walking through the savanna and I think I see a snake, I'm just going to jump back. Because it's like, what, cost me three calories to just jump back? What would be the cost if that was an actual snake? Right. Maybe my life. So you're going to see snakes everywhere. And it's relatively cheap.

snakes everywhere and it's relatively cheap and this is why conspiracy theories are so explosive in terms of how they are spread throughout a population as a vector because it's very inexpensive to believe in them but costly to be subject to the negative end of one. Does the fact that your belief is attached to your identity lead people to becoming seen as traitors or evil or even subhuman if they subscribe to the opposite view? Well, it depends on the nature of the relationship between the groups. So there's a very easy way to figure this out. It's called the contempt test. So evoke your political tribe, your political team, and then evoke the leader of the opposing political team. Really imagine them. Imagine them right up close face to face. Imagine their face. Imagine their posture. Imagine how they move. Imagine how they speak. Do you feel a sense of contempt? If you feel contempt, then you are experiencing the precursors to the insular cortex activating and wanting to dehumanize them. And you probably have a unhealthy and toxic relationship with that tribe because you're gearing up to wanting to eliminate them. The program's been running pretty intensively for decades.

I mean, we're seeing the results of it in sort of live time right now. We're seeing an unraveling of particular super tribes. These are coalitions of multiple tribes. We're seeing posturing by other super tribes. And this is actually, when I say super tribe, by other super tribes. And this is actually when I say super tribe, what I mean is a classic playbook in sort of the game of geopolitical power struggles.

So Alexander is often cited as the first person to create a super tribe. It's actually Sirius the Great. Alexander stole Sirius' playbook. Before that, the only moves that empires ever made was it's us or we will literally melt your gods and kill all of you sirius came along and he was like a geopolitical genius of that original persian empire because what he says is even he would rescue people's gods for them he went to babylon

and the king had absconded right outside of baby, took the statue that was their physical god. And Cyrus was like, I'm going to kill that guy. And I'm going to bring you back your god. And the Babylonians loved him, right? Because it's just an honest deference to their tribal intersubjective belief network. And so sometimes you get masterful, super tribal coalitions that can glue together and just shape the geopolitical world for either the better or the worse. When there is lack of faith in the capacity for that super tribe to provide for the individual tribes within its super tribal intersubjective belief network, that's when a

decentralization process occurs. What we are seeing right now is what happens in live time when there is greater forces decentralizing us rather than centralizing us under the auspices of super tribes. So that's, in today's parlance, that's the liberal world order, the post-war. Yes, Bretton Woods post-war order, correct. Bretton Woods post-war order, correct. If we are hardwired to have a tribal or a tribe drive, how can we circumvent it from making us self-destructive as a species?

Yeah, that's the billion-dollar question. So when we talk about the tribe virus, we can conceive of why these metaphors are valuable is because we could potentially conceive of a vaccine for it. My proposal is something as modest as taking the benign part of the tribe virus, which is identity protective cognition, and linking it with something that is almost like an adjuvant in a vaccine to where it actually repairs and defends against that virus itself. So the key, I think, is linking identity to something that can ward us from the worst outcomes of the tribe virus. In the recent science on my side bias and blind spots and the propensity for people to fall for conspiracy theory and a whole host of things.

This thing called active open thinking or shorthand meta belief is one of the most powerful vaccines we can possibly give to people who are thinking through very complex and tribal concepts. It's the belief that beliefs can change. It's the understanding that if evidence is put forward that challenges my understanding of something, I'm willing to change that belief. And if you connect that with identity, oh, I identify as someone whose beliefs can change. That is perhaps one of the most powerful tools we could have pedagogically to inoculate, perhaps not the entire human species, but maybe here's something as, as bold enough as maybe 20 or 30%, which is actually what you need for social norms to spread. You don't need a lot you only need about 25 percent right there was a lot of opposition culturally to gay marriage and then all of a sudden there wasn't you notice that yes that was a cultural norm hitting that threshold

so that's a demonstrable it's a demonstrable example of how these norms can change and if you get just enough people identifying metatribally as part of this sort of metatribe at the species level, it would be my hope that it would at least probabilistically increase the odds that we survive the 21st century. How big a cognitive effort would it require to overcome that drive that is so embedded, as you say, in our DNA? Yes. So it's not easy especially if your identity is very salient and you prize it and it is prone to you rejecting evidence kind of like

your ken ham right unchangeable unchangeable that's why i say we're probably not going to get the full population right it is possible though and in fact i'll give you an example from my personal life my father was a fundamentalist minister, Christian minister for 30 years. And he was a leader in this fundamentalist environment. His very identity, his worldview, the way he saw himself was so intimately linked with this identity as being a pastor in this fundamentalist Christian organization and tribe. It was truly a tribe. Somewhere around about 15 years ago, he had a prospective member of the church who was a geology graduate student. And that student asked him some hard-hitting questions about the age of the earth, evolution. And my dad gave him the stock answers that the

church had taught him to give in retort to my dad's credit. He was like, I'm going to read a couple of books and I'm going to disprove this whole evolutionary theory thing in about a month. And it was actually a personal journey for me because he couldn't talk to anybody in the church about it. And so I was sort of his guinea pig where he'd bring me up to his office and he'd say, in the island of Galapagos, there's these finches. And he would run the thought experiment. How old were you? Maybe like nine, 10, 11. Oh my God 10 11 yeah and so i was definitely his foil we went through this process where we kind of went through it together and eventually it convinced him so much so that he began de-identifying as someone who was a member

of that particular intersubjective belief network i asked was it, dad, that you can link back to being like that germ of why you ended up going on the road to challenge that identity? And he said, it was a philosophy teacher I had in high school that just had embedded enough skepticism in me that I was willing to challenge stuff that didn't make sense. And that's meta-belief. That's meta-belief. So it came back to meta-belief. He had had an early injection, an early vaccine as a kid with just enough antibodies that even as an adult, it helped him change that identity. Whose job is it to inoculate all of us to ensure that we don't let the tribal drive drive us? Well, the beautiful answer, and I think the scientifically accurate answer is Homo sapiens.

Remember, this idea of identity, it's not real. It's not a real thing. We make it up. it's not a real thing. We make it up. And so that to me is actually incredibly encouraging because that means humans can identify as humans, which is, I think, going to be the key. We're doing it right now, right? I mean, we're having the conversations right now. I think it's just having the conversations because it's once the conversation stops that you have to be the most worried think about it from pure summing of human watts it's much cheaper to have this conversation even if we were to vehemently disagree on something much cheaper than to say decide we're going to solve it by throwing fists at each other right that's actually very expensive thank you so

much thank you for your time and for explaining all of this. Oh, this was an absolute blast. Thank you so much. Totally fun. Thank you. I learned so much. revolutionary anthropologist at the University of Toronto, and the author of Our Tribal Future, How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good. It won the 2023 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.