Instant Genius - How belonging to tribes shapes our culture

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Be it down to our professions, taste in music or favourite sports teams we all belong to several different tribes. But what drives this instinct and what purpose does it serve? In this episode, we speak to cultural psychologist Prof Michael Morris about his latest book: Tribal – How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. He breaks down the influence our peers have on us, explains why we look up to hero figures and why tradition has such a huge impact on our beliefs, lifestyles and identities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-tized master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you're here will-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Be it down to our professions, taste in music, or favourite sports teams. We all belong to several different tribes. But what drives this instinct and what purpose does it?

it serve. In this episode, we speak to cultural psychologist Professor Michael Morris about his latest book, Tribal, how the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together. He breaks down the influence our peers have on us, explains why we look up to hero figures and why tradition has such a huge impact on our beliefs, lifestyles and identities. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Jason. It's a real privilege, a real pleasure. So today we're talking about your book, Tribal, How the Cultural Instincts that Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. So let's start with the basics.

What is tribalism? Well, tribalism is a word that is most typically used to describe acting and thinking on the basis of our tribal instincts, the instincts that connect humans to groups. and it's usually used when there's an intention to express a negative connotation. And I am in this book trying to remind people that these tribal instincts, the human-specific instincts for living in groups, underlie everything positive that humans have ever done. So they can go awry at times, yes, but let's understand how they go awry by understanding that they are essentially functional instincts rather than imagining that there's some sort of

evolutionary curse or some sort of nefarious streak in human nature. So let's go right back to the beginning then. So you're talking about evolution there. So what is the crucible of the tribal instinct or its tendency? And what can we say about that? Well, there are many adaptations that make up the tribal instincts. And if an evolutionary anthropologist or psychologist were writing an academic article, they might slice the salami very thinly and tell you about the 150 tribal adaptations. But I am a person who, though I work in, I'm a behavioral scientist, and I published in the basic science journals, I tend to work teaching,

undergraduates and teaching business students and teaching business executives. And so I find it most useful to speak in broader categories. The evolution of these human-specific social instincts can be broken down into three major waves. And I call them the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. And they correspond to systems in our psychology that we can still recognizing ourselves today. And in the Stone Age, they corresponded to enormous breakthroughs in the social organization and the level of collaboration with which our forbearers live. Yeah. So that was going to be my next question then. Let's break down these three categories. So let's start with the peer instinct. So, you know, what is that? Well, it corresponds to our sideways glances at

classmates and coworkers and neighbors are urge to mesh with their behavior, to match what they are doing, and our enormous facility for learning what the normal behavior in any of the groups that we live in is. So we have a kind of radar for what the people around us are doing. We register that, and then it feels good to act on that. We tend to call that conformity and to worry about it. And yes, it does limit our independent thinking at times. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the greatest human creativity and, you know, all of the breakthroughs of science and law and art come from collective thinking, come from

building on the ideas of other people. And the peer instinct is what enables us to melt minds and mesh actions with, the other people around us. So it does limit individual creativity at times, but it enables collective creativity, which is the more important kind. So you've sort of touched on the third category there, but let's stick with the first. Okay. So you mentioned there it could be a problem. So could there be an issue from this effect whereby we surround ourselves with people who think in the same way as we do, and we end up losing the bigger picture? Well, Jason, that's not a hypothetical. That happens quite a bit, for example, in our party politics, you know, in the United States. The same set of motivations, and just to be a little more academic, each of these instincts is a suite of cognitive capacities and motivations that operate largely unconsciously to direct us in a particular way. And it's directing us towards coordinating with those around us,

through sharing knowledge, through sharing knowledge of norms, you know, what is normal in a group, what do most people do, what do most people think. Now, in the United States, for example, I won't speak more generally. This motivation underlies a lot of the great sorting, which is over the last two generations, liberals have moved to the coasts and the college towns, and conservatives have moved to the heartland and to the excerpts. And then with the fragmentation of the media, it used to be we had a few channels that were sort of like BBC that were, you know, governmently mandated to be balanced.

And then we started to get very edgy partisan cable channels and then even more partisan websites than even more partisan blogs and then social media sites that basically just reflect back your own views. And so both our residential environments and our media environments have become ideologically ingrown as a result of this selection for sameness, you know, this quest to be like the people around us or to feel this sense of agreement. But then once we found ourselves in these ideologically inbred communities, the conformist instinct became somewhat. dangerous because it meant that Republicans and Democrats are forming their political beliefs, largely unconsciously, by internalizing separate environments. And so they're living cognitively in different worlds. And they don't realize that they're forming their beliefs through

conformity. So they can understand how can the other side disagree with us? Because we're just being realistic and they think the other side is either insincere or insane. And they also expect that the center will agree with them. And so they're shocked on election night that the center didn't come their way. And so a lot of the troubles in our democracy come from this conformist tendency that has gotten caught in a feedback loop of sorts because it first drove us to create homogenous communities and then those homogenous communities lead to sharply different beliefs. So let's have a look inside those homogenous communities then. So there are some people that feel like they just don't fit in. They don't feel included and they're outliers. So they don't belong

to the tribe that they've grown up in. What can we say about that? Well, those are the people who are from a tribe that doesn't think it's a tribe. You know, the sort of non-conformists in every high school that are equally homogenous, but to a different set of rules than the mainstream. So every culture, whether we're going to speak at the level of a high school or a country or a city, will have a mainstream culture, and then it will have different subcultures, some of which are more oppositional spirited, and some of which are simply different because of people who are more newly arrived or people who are appropriating some other culture or who are

borrowing or bringing in a culture from a previous life experience. So it's a kind of fallacy about, there's two fallacies about culture that I try to take on in this book. And I think they're both sort of simplifying assumptions. that have sort of outlived their usefulness. The first is that we all live in one culture, that there's sort of a one person to one culture, that we each have one cultural identity.

And that's never been true. You know, even in the Stone Age, people lived in bands that were embedded in clans, that were embedded in tribes. And these nested groups corresponded to different kinds of shared information. and when people were coordinating with their band on a hunt, they were using different culture, different shared knowledge than when they were meeting with their clan

for some sort of large-scale, seasonal gathering or feast. Or when they were meeting with other groups that were part of their tribe but were complete strangers, they would call on different parts of their culture to establish trust. So we have always, always, to be cultural means to be living with multiple cultures, to be living. And what we call code switching, it's an old concept in linguistics that has become a big idea in popular culture, at least in the U.S., I think ever since the Obama presidency, when it became salient, that Obama was speaking in a different register, went in front of an African-American audience, then went in front of a white audience, because he became salient. that Obama was speaking in a different register went in front of an African-American audience than went in front of a white audience because he had grown up in multiple cultural environments

and he just impulsively switched based on what he saw in front of him. This is something that linguists have talked about in bilingual communities for a long time. And the research that I've done and others in my field of cultural psychology, we've found that the switching is much deeper than just the surface linguistic codes that we follow. It's also our cognitive codes. So different national or ethnic cultures have different cognitive biases

and different motivational targets. And when I'm surrounded by a group of people, you know, I used to be a distance runner. So when I'm surrounded by a group of distance runners, it brings to the fore a set of ideals and a set of assumptions that are different than when I'm around a group of scientists, you know, another tribe that I, you know, have been embedded in and that I've internalized. Yeah, that's fascinating, like sticking with the linguistics, because oddly enough, I used to live in Japan. Okay. So I learned to speak Japanese, but when I was speaking Japanese, my personality was completely different from a nice speaking English. That's absolutely

fascinating. I always wondered why that was, and now you've just sort of explained that. Well, with every tribe that you've lived in, you've internalized a cluster of scripts and norms and values, and it comes up, it gets activated by situational cues, because the immutability, of our cultural patterns is a byproduct of the multiplicity of our cultural patterns. The great New York City poet Walt Whitman said, I am large, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes. And it was this kind of expression of early, perhaps an early expression of the postmodern condition that we all have multiple selves and no one of them is the authentic self. You know, they're all legitimate. But they can't all draw.

at once because, you know, we would be hamstrung by conflicting instructions. So they take turns and they come to the fore based on the environment that we're in through largely spontaneous unconscious processes. And that's, for the most part, adaptive. It can lead to comical errors sometimes. And that, you know, that was a subject that many comedians, you know, drew upon when talking about Obama. I've done some research showing that Chinese immigrants, recent Chinese immigrants,

to the states, they have trouble speaking English fluently to American-born Chinese audiences, because the Chinese face triggers their Chinese linguistic codes. And I've found that in particular, when they're trying to find a word where the direct translation between Chinese and English is not a cognate, you know, so pistachios, I don't know if you in England call them pistachios as well. We use the word obviously comes from Italian, right? But the word in Chinese is happy nuts. You know, if we expose them to a Chinese face or even to Chinese imagery, you know,

like a Chinese dragon or something like that, they are much slower to come up with the word pistachios from seeing a picture of a pistachio than if we have exposed them to an American Eagle, you know, or U.S. imagery, you know. So we all code switch all the time. And it's largely adaptive, but in some cases like this, when trying to, you know, you would think the one person that a recent Chinese immigrant should be relaxed around and able to speak fluently to is a fellow Chinese. But no, these are the people that they, their English breaks down when they are speaking to an American-born Chinese, more so than when they're speaking to, you know, an African-American or a Caucasian American. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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Copyright 2026, the Coca-Cola Company. Sprite is a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Company. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology, and acoustic.

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It's fascinating as well. The hero worship instinct. So it makes sense in a lot of ways evolutionary. Like, you know, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. But, you know, what can we say about this? You know, where did it originate? Yeah. The peer instinct, you know, started a million and a half, two million years ago with Homo erectus,

but they were a very successful species. They lived for like a million years, a lot longer than our species has lived thus far and probably will live. But they weren't very creative. They only developed one tool in their million years on the earth, which is the hand axe. And the problem is that they were conformist, but that's kind of all they were. They knew how to conform. They knew how to coordinate. They could use persistence hunting to chase down an antelope,

but they couldn't do sort of more creative things or more things that required more advanced cooperation. And then about a half a million years ago, Homo Heidelbergensis, who was 90% as tall as us and had a brain 90% as big as us, was getting very close to where we were biologically. What shows up in the archaeological record from that time is you start to see a new set of social behaviors,

a new set of breakthroughs. So you start to see the skeletons of people with congenital deformities who survived to the age of adulthood. That never existed before. What does that tell us? It tells us that someone was exerting energy to take care of another person who probably couldn't reciprocate the favor.

They were doing it because it was the right thing to do. It was a good thing to do. Around this time, we also see much more advanced tools like we see stone point throwing spears, which allowed for a real breakthrough in hunting. It allowed for the hunting of really large game, like Willie Mammoth, that kind of thing, things that were really dangerous to get close to. But still, you know, we can see when the carcasses of mammoths, you know, unfreeze in the tundra, and we can examine how they died, we see that sometimes,

a stone point spear was delivered directly into the snout of one of these 16-foot packaderms, you know, and it had to be thrown from a very close distance. And that suggests it's not just that they were able to work as a team, but somebody took one for the team. You know, somebody got right in the face of this enormous beast to stun it so that it would be safe for everyone else to run in. And in social science, we talk a lot about the free rider problem, being something that limits cooperation in large groups. You know, in large groups, it's easy to slack and let other people do the dangerous work. And then that becomes dangerous for everyone because nobody's, everyone's, you know,

trying to hang to the back of the group. But what happened at this time is that a new set of motivations evolved, a motivation to not just be normal, but to be normative, you know, to do something exemplary, to be a hero, to gain the esteem and possibly the tribute of the other members of the community. And when that existed, there was an incentive for individuals to do things that were pro-social, to do things that were for the good of the group. And obviously, it also benefited the group because, you know, when the group really needed something, individuals were looking for ways to provide it in order to gain renown and notoriety. It wasn't just the motivation. It was also

the cognitive capacity to learn from the members of the community with the most prestige or status, because those are people who must be doing something right. We don't know exactly what they're doing right. So our learning heuristic is flawed and can lead to superstitious learning, but we have this wiring to emulate, you know, the MVPs and CEOs and celebrities of our community. And we look to see if there's something distinctive about them, what they eat for breakfast, which athletic shoes they wear, you know, little routines. And we instinctively emulate them. And that can lead to a lot of silliness in a lot of industries, the aspirational leaders, ape, you know, irrelevant behaviors of the leaders. You know, so Steve Jobs

was a legend in the tech industry of the U.S. and he wore these black turtlenecks every day, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos also adopted the same black turtlenecks that didn't lead her to the same strategic brilliance that Steve Jobs had, but it might have led other people to think that she had that brilliance for a short period of time. So it can lead to superstitious learning, but in general, it's adaptive because it means that in an early human group, once they were developing these tribal instincts, they started migrating all across the face of the earth. So you have a that leaves Africa and heads to the Arctic Step or leads Africa and then heads to the Indonesian rainforest, different kinds of hunting and gathering were adoptive in these different environments

and that meant that different kinds of strategies were getting rewarded. And through the hero instinct, the rising generation would differentially attend to what people who had status and success were doing and emulate those behaviors. and then at a collective level, the general tendency of hunting and gathering in the tribe would evolve through the mechanism of this learning heuristic. So it's adaptive both for individuals and for groups. So I find this concept of hero worship really interesting

because I never really followed it. So, for example, I play guitar, but I never wanted a Stratocaster because Jimmy Hendricks played one. It's obviously not going to make me play like him. Yes. the same guitar. But so many people think that, don't they? They'd like to emulate these people. Why do they do that? But you did play the guitar and not the harpsichord. I will point that out. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. I blame that on Jimmy Hendricks.

Yeah. When I was in college, my female friends had this rule, which is that every boy becomes 40% sexier with a guitar, you know, like playing a guitar. It doesn't work for me. Well, 40% sex here doesn't mean that you became, you know, I think it works for everyone, but it's, you know, it doesn't get us all to where we want to be, unfortunately. So let's go on to another really fascinating thing, which is related, what you call the ancestor instinct. Yes. So let's stick with guitar. So now I play classical guitar.

Okay. And every day I play a set of studies by Maro Giuliani called 120. studies for right-hand development. And I know people have played that, same thing, for 200 years. And I'm somehow weirdly proud of being part of that tradition. So, you know, where's that coming from? Well, the ancestor instinct was the crowning touch of this evolutionary system. And if the peer instinct is sideways glances and the hero instinct is our upward curiosity about, out these people who are on top, the ancestor instinct corresponds to our sort of backward glances at our ancestors and past generations, not just our biological ancestors, but the ancestors in our

tribes, like the tribe of guitar players and these, you know, seminal figures who, you know, developed the body of knowledge that others draw upon. And it corresponds to motivations like nostalgia and the sense of meaning and connectedness that you're referring to. I think it's a great example. And what's interesting about the learning that's attached to the ancestor instinct is that it particularly corresponds to a kind of rote learning or ritual learning where we may be taught certain things, whether it's an original family recipe from grandmother or a way of fishing at the local river by grandfather or, you know, a way of playing this. particular set of exercises by your guitar teacher. And the idea is that you should replicate it

exactly. You shouldn't put your own spin on it. You know, that part of the point is to maintain this tradition and to carry it forward. And anthropologists have a lot of ideas about why rituals are so profoundly affecting, you know, why they are deeply calming in the face of anxiety. And one idea is just that rituals like funerals, you know, they give us a feeling of control over things that we don't have control over. In the desert where food poisoning is a big issue, you have things like halal and kosher, you know, which are a set of rituals around food preparation. In India, where infectious diseases are a big risk, you have all sorts of washing and cleansing rituals, you know. So it's sort of ritualizing, you know, the aspects of life that are potentially out of. of control to give a larger sense of control. Some psychologists and anthropologists think that

it's related to our unconscious terror about our mortality that because we know our lives are brief and could end at any time, if we feel that we are part of some enduring tradition, we feel a sense of indirect immortality that allows us to, you know, keep going through the day and not feel a sense of meaninglessness. So the ancestor instinct, in some ways, it seems like the most primitive, this rote repetition of the ways of the past, but it gave late Stone Age humans. This is, you know, in the last 100,000 years, homo sapiens.

It gave us tribal memory. It gave us this mechanism for hanging on to the lessons of the prior generation. We are enormously attracted to artifacts from the time. past, whether it's paintings on a cave wall or arrowheads that we discover in the dirt, the fetishistic interest we have in antiques, you know, is the same same sort of thing that helped our forebears learn from these artifacts. And it also kept certain knowledge alive through periods where it may not have been needed. So in Southeast Asia, tsunamis are a big threat, a sort of existential threat to groups that live seaside. And during the 2006 tsunami, there's a group called

the Mokin that are sometimes referred to as sea gypsies because they have a lifestyle of living on boats primarily and they dive for fish and pearls and that sort of thing. They have a tradition in their wood carving and in their song of talking about tsunamis as this sort of malevolent god that comes out of the ocean every once in a while. And in that tradition, they refer to the fact that the sea retracts, you know, before it in a tsunami, the first thing you see is a sea retracting and particular patterns of currents, a kind of criss-cross pattern of currents. And so they saw that before other groups of people, including people with a lot of technology, saw it. And they retreated to the hills and they had very few people injured or hurt, you know, in a tsunami where,

you know, tens of thousands of people died. So this ancestral tradition can keep people alive. And it keeps people alive because because it's repeated in this compulsive replication manner, you keep the knowledge alive through many generations. And so knowledge that doesn't get used to every generation can still stay alive because of this compulsive motivation to preserve it that we feel about ancestral knowledge. So off the back of that, what do you think about when strictly sticking to traditions can become harmful, you know, everything's moving so quickly now compared to how it did? Yeah. No, every one of these instincts, you know, evolution doesn't design perfect, forward-looking systems. You know, it designs good enough mechanisms at a particular point in time to be adaptive. And then we're stuck with them. And they're good most of the time and not in every situation. So, yeah, we often stick with whether we're talking about a nation or, say, a corporation or a team, you know, we often stick.

often stick with a strategy that has outlived its usefulness because it worked in the past. And that's why it's good that we don't just have the ancestor instinct. You know, these three instincts, once they were all present, they sort of work as a larger system. The ancestor instinct, you can think of it as a conservative instinct. It's this whole, you know, all things equal. Let's try to keep alive the ways of the past. The hero instinct is a little bit more of a progressive or an innovative instinct because people want to go beyond what has been done by others. They want to meet the needs of the group in a way that is exemplary and heroic.

And once we had the ancestor instinct, we didn't have to reinvent the wheel every generation. And by the wheel, I mean the spear point or the hand axe. And once we didn't have to reinvent it every generation, then the hero instinct energy went into building upon the lessons of the past rather than just, you know, recreating them. And the peer instinct, once these other things were present, operated so that, you know, early adopters would see a technique and then other people would imitate what they do and other people would imitate what they would do. And so things could spread through the community and then be a basis for coordination.

And so once all three of those things were present, human beings are our forebears, archaic humans, they crossed a Rubicon that's called cultural accumulation, which is a point where groups started having cultures that were more complex, that were richer, and that were more adaptive to their local ecology than the generation before, because there's sort of a Darwinian selection in the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. You know, not everything gets passed on. So the culture becomes richer, and it becomes tuned to the particular survival needs of the ecology.

And then what happened is that there was collective level learning, learning at the level of the tribe. And without individuals having to become any brainier, they became more capable because they could tap into a richer pool of inherited cultural wisdom, of collective wisdom. So, you know, at a certain point, the real action of evolution was no longer, you know, the brains of individuals becoming bigger, but the brains of collectivity is becoming bigger, or the knowledge base of collectivity is becoming bigger. Absolutely. So we've talked about all the good things about tribalism,

but I would wager if you said tribalism, as a word to some people, they'd say, well, that means difference. And from difference, that means perhaps extreme opinions. So how do we reconcile that? Yes, the word, when it's tribalism, is generally used to lament or to accuse, you know, often the other faction for being irrational, perhaps monolithic in their thinking. And I think each of these instincts can get caught in

feedback loops like we spoke about the peer instinct getting caught in a feedback loop and leading to a problem in our politics. The hero instinct can get caught in a feedback loop and lead to sort of injustice because people are wired to be generous to their in-group, but not to all humanity, and that can undermine justice in an organization or in a society. And the ancestor instinct can go awry, and I think that happens in a lot of sectarian conflict. You know, it's a puzzle why religions, which for the most part preach peace, tend to create the bloodiest conflicts around the world, whether it's somebody shooting up a mosque or a synagogue

or conflicts across religious lines in Sudan or in Gaza. And part of what's going on there, there are many things going on, but part of what's going on there is that religions are our oldest traditions, the ones that we feel most, impelled to defend, and the other tribe's religion is threatening in its age and in its complexity. So part of what goes on is we sort of detribalize the other group by arguing that their traditions aren't real and they don't really have a claim to the land and their scriptures are nonsense.

So that goes on in these bloody religious situations. this kind of fear, this sort of existential tribalism, this fear that one tribe is going to eliminate the continuity of one's own tribe. But what is true in all of these forms of negative tribalism, and in my book tribal, I label them epistemic tribalism, the tribalism of conformity, ethical tribalism, which is the tribalism of in-group favoritism, and then existential tribalism, which is the tribalism of, you know, defending one's tribal continuity so forcefully that you are erasing another group's tribal continuity. None of those things comes out of hostility. And there's sort of a trope of toxic tribalism that we have an innate animosity to other groups and that we're

wired to hate. And this, at least in the States, in the last five years or so, has become a go-to theme for our political pundits that somehow toxic tribalism has adivistically reawakened to destroy our politics and to destroy the workplace and to destroy our religious pluralism. And I think that is not only unhelpful, but extremely inaccurate. You know, it's not a picture that any evolutionist or behavioral scientists would recognize. the tribal instincts are primarily us instincts. They are not them instincts. They evolved for solidarity, not for hostility.

Our forbearers didn't have that much contact with other tribes. You know, the population density was low. The people that they had daily contact with was the fellow members of their tribe. And their survival hinged on being really good cooperators with those fellow members of their own tribe. In fact, there was a human species that was more wired to make war with other groups, and that was Neanderthals. We know from the fossil record that Neanderthals had a higher rate of combat

because the bones are more scarred, and some of the scars on the bones are of human teeth, which tells us that there was also more cannibalism among Neanderthals. Whereas we know from sapiens of the same vintage that we can do ancient DNA analysis now. And we can see that sapiens of 30,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, in their settlements, they were no more inbred than people from a remote European village today. So there was a lot of outmating with other groups that were strangers, but they were part, you know, we shared some language or some greeting rituals or some religious rituals with them. That could be a basis for trust. And mates were traded and materials were traded and ideas were exchanged.

So essentially, in short, you know, Sapiens mated and traded with neighboring groups. And Neanderthals combated with them and ate them. And the mating and trading turned out to be a better foreign policy in the long term. You know, it was a winning strategy. So let's have a final question. And so the subtitle of your book is cultural instincts that divide us and help bring us together. So how can they? Okay.

Well, this brings me to, at an earlier point, I talked about there being two fallacies about culture that I think are not only in the academic world, but also in the practical world, you know, in national policies and in organizational policies. and the first was that one person to one culture, you know, and instead we all have multiple cultures. The second one is that cultures are unchanging and unchangeable, that cultures are somehow permanent fixtures that may change at a glacial pace only, you know, that's absolutely false. You know, you and I have lived through extraordinary, dramatic cultural changes. You know, in the United States, same-sex marriage 30 years ago was, considered to be anathema, and now it's completely taken for granted. A decade ago, it wasn't common, at least in the United States, to use they as a pronoun for a single person. Now you're

considered to be obstinate if you don't do that. Now, how did such things change? Well, they changed by a committed minority of people consistently acting differently and politely requesting that other people do the same or accept it and maybe support it. And eventually, if you do that, the convention flips. And you don't need a majority to start it. If you have a critical mass of like 25%, it tends to expand and eventually become the dominant convention. So culture is very changeable. And if we understand the tribal instincts that underpin culture and cultural transmission, we have a toolkit for changing culture and for managing culture. So don't despair is the message of the book.

You know, yes, we are cultural beings. Yes, we are tribal animals. But that doesn't mean that we are somehow cursed. You know, identity is not destiny. We are capable of molding and managing the cultures around us. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Michael Morris.

To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Tribal, how the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines

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