Episode 531: Michael Morris
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Cultural Engineering: Reclaiming Tribalism for Collective Growth
What does it mean to belong to a tribe? How does cultural psychology offer insight into politics, organizational behavior, and leadership? How does tribalism distinguish humans from other animals?
Michael Morris is the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School and also serves as Professor in the Psychology Department of Columbia University. Michael is also the author of the new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.
Greg and Michael discuss the concept of tribalism, its historical and modern connotations, and how our evolved group psychology can both contribute to and resolve contemporary social conflicts. Michael emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural instincts like the peer instinct, hero instinct, and ancestor instinct, and how leaders can harness these to steer cultural evolution in organizations and societies. The conversation also explores real-world examples of cultural change, the pitfalls of top-down and bottom-up change strategies, and the critical role of managing cultural identities in fostering cooperation and successful adaptation.
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Episode Quotes:
What makes us human is our tribal nature
14:22: We are the tribal animal. If we want to understand what distinguishes us, our brains are not that much bigger than chimpanzees'. Our brains are not bigger than Neanderthals'; they're smaller than Neanderthal brains. But what distinguishes us is that we have these adaptations for sharing culture that enable tribal living, and this wonderful force of tribal inheritance, of wisdom accumulating like a snowball across the generations. And it can be the generations of a nation, but it can also be the generations of a corporation or the generations of a motorcycle club. Generations don't have to be referring to the human lifespan. And so, that's our killer app. That's what makes us who we are. That's what made us the top of the food chain and the dominant species of the planet and solar system. So, we should not renounce our tribal nature. We shouldn't pretend that what makes us human is rationality, or ethics, or poetry, or something like that.
Why tradition is actually a change maker's secret weapon
19:02: Tradition can seem like an obstacle to change. And the traditionalism in our mind can seem like an obstacle to cultural change, but it's a change-maker's secret weapon.
How we learn from our community through peer, hero, and ancestor instincts
16:39 There are social learning heuristics, and I kind of label them in a way to try to make them more concrete and more accessible. I label them the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. But I'm aggregating decades of research from evolutionary anthropologists and from a cultural psychologist about the fact that we tend to learn the culture that nurtures us, in part by paying attention to what's widespread. And that's peer instinct learning, by paying attention to what carries prestige. That's hero instinct learning. And by paying attention to what seems like it's always been the distinctive mark of our community, traditions, and that's ancestor instinct learning. And so we're sort of wired to form maps of our community in those three ways.