Michael Morris (2:56)

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Dan Harris (2:59)

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Michael Morris (4:32)

Michael Morris, welcome to the show.

Michael Morris (4:35)

Thanks for having me, Dan.

Michael Morris (4:37)

It's a pleasure. I'd be curious to start with some of your backstory here, like how and why did you get interested in tribalism?

Michael Morris (4:46)

Well, I'm a behavioral scientist and my subfield is cultural psychology. And what cultural psychologists study is the frames and the scripts that float around inside people's heads that are conferred by their cultures, cultures of all kinds, national cultures, religious cultures, organizational cultures, professional cultures. And one of the things that we bring to the table, as opposed to anthropologists and many other kinds of scientists who study culture, is that we have the tools of experimental psychology so we can study the dynamics of these cultural frames, what triggers them to come to the fore in a given situation, and what over the longer term precipitates change in them. So it's the activation and the alteration of cultural assumptions that we contribute a lot of distinctive insight about and so I've been doing that kind of research for a couple decades now, and at the same time, I've been teaching at top business schools at Columbia and in the past at Stanford. And so I've been teaching practical people about why it's relevant that people have cultural frames that are activating and evolving over time. And it's relevant because that's an important way to lead people. And wise leaders have always intuited that there are ways of calling on people's identities to rally motivation or to selectively refer to traditions in order to get people used to a new idea that may be consistent with one part of their tradition, but not consistent with another part of their tradition. So wise leaders have always led through culture. But because these triggers and the signals that change culture operate kind of unconsciously, they're not so visible to us all. And the behavioral science helps because it's identified these things more clearly so that we can all see what the levers are now. So, in short, I was trying to write a playbook for leading people through culture, and that's how I started writing this book.

Michael Morris (7:11)

So it's not like you started by honing in on tribalism and saying, I want to write a book about it. You actually started from the standpoint of leadership and then realized, oh, there's this much maligned aspect of the human psyche that maybe we should harness in a constructive way.

Michael Morris (7:29)

True. Yes, very true. In a sense. I always was going to write a book about leadership through culture. I think the original title of this book was Tribe Mind, and it was about the fact that we are a tribal species and that our brain only works through inherited cultural representations. So it was always a book about culture and harnessing culture. And I had always talked about that in terms of tribes because I have a sort of evolutionary psychology side, and I think about the instincts that evolved to make tribes possible are the same instincts that affect the way culture plays out in our heads today.

Michael Morris (8:11)

I think your basic argument, and you'll tell me if I'm wrong here, is that tribalism gets a bad rap, but it shouldn't be denigrated so much as understood and harnessed in a constructive way. So I guess just before we learn about what tribalism really is and through the lens of evolution, et cetera, et cetera, just on a high level, what's the point? Like, how can this help us to understand tribalism? Is it if we're in a leadership position? Can it help if we're not in a leadership position in our workplace or in a Family or what are the contexts in which we can apply these learnings?

Michael Morris (8:46)

Like a lot of business school professors, I use the word leadership in a very broad way. I sometimes call it small L leadership, and it refers to all of the ways that you deliberately affect other people. And that can be something done by the boss, but it can also be done by the middle manager or even the entry level employee. Everybody contributes some leadership to the organization. And it can also be done by external stakeholders, people who own stock in a company, customers of the company, activists who are concerned about what the company is doing. And a company is just one example of a community that can be led. There are also civic communities, there are also professional communities. There are also national communities, transnational communities of different kinds based on interests and avocations. So we all live in many tribes, and we can play a role in guiding those tribes and guiding the fellow members of those tribes.

Dan Harris (9:53)

That's great.

Michael Morris (9:54)

That's really helpful. Okay, so let's talk about evolution and how we evolved to have these tribal instincts. Can you hold forth on that?

Michael Morris (10:05)

In the social sciences, we used to talk about nature versus nurture. Probably when you and I were in school, that was the way the debate was framed. And the sociologists would come down on one side and the biologists would come down on another side. But that debate has pretty much been transcended by some really important insights in the field of evolutionary anthropology. And what they have come to believe is that human nature is nurture, meaning that we are the primate who became wired by evolution to internalize the patterns of the communities that nurture us, whatever those patterns happen to be. We are like sponges for the cultures of the communities that nurture us. And we also became wired to express or enact those patterns as a way of connecting with the fellow members of the community. And this set of adaptations is referred to as tribal instincts. And they enable the sort of human distinct form of social organization, which is. Which can be called the tribe, which is a large community united by shared ideas and shared practices. And unlike the groups of other primates, which cannot grow very large because they are held together by kin relationships or held together by direct dyadic bonds between each member, a tribe can grow much, much larger because it's bound together by the trust that comes from shared ideas, shared habits, shared practices. So you may have been a stranger to me before today, but I can trust you and you can trust me, because we are fellow inheritors of a culture of many cultures. The culture of psychology is something that we both partake of American culture, many other probably subcultures we have in common. So that enables trust and collaboration among much broader groups of people, and it allows us to be part of many different communities that collaborate and that develop richer and richer pools of knowledge. So I can go into detail about the specific waves of evolution that progressively enabled tribal living, but roughly stated, that's what I mean by tribal instincts. It's the human specific instincts that evolved to enable this different kind of social animal that we are, the tribal animal.

Michael Morris (13:02)

I love hearing about evolution, so I would be interested in hearing that. And just to sum up what you just said, tribalism, which is often denigrated, is actually a key part of human evolution because, and I'm not the first person to note this, but we don't have tusks or fangs, we can't fly, we're not the biggest animal. So what allowed us to go from the middle of the food chain, a prey animal, to the top of the food chain was that we could work together. And tribalism is part of that.

Michael Morris (13:31)

That's exactly right. And it can get confusing because I think tribalism as a word is more frequently used when someone is bemoaning something, and usually when they're also accusing the other side of being irrational. We tend to use tribalism to reference kind of dysfunctional conflict between groups. But tribal instincts are what contributes to tribalism, and tribal instincts are what got us out of the Stone Age and what helped us break away from the rest of the primate pack In. In evolution, at a certain point, we were developing bigger brains than the other simians, but what really set us apart was not the genetic evolution of bigger brains, but the cultural evolution that these particular adaptations made possible. Human groups started sharing richer and richer pools of expertise, and that just made them more able to survive and thrive and grow.

Michael Morris (14:39)

Well, I take your deftly delivered note there about the difference between tribalism and tribal instincts. So I will bear that in mind for the rest of this conversation. So thank you for that. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear a brief explanation of the rolling waves of evolution that honed these tribal instincts.

Michael Morris (14:57)

Sure. A caveat would be that in the scientific literature, someone might distinguish 30 different adaptations that distinguish humans from bonobos and chimpanzees, et cetera. But I've found it helpful over my years of teaching about this to the practical world to distinguish the three major phases that happened at different points in the Stone Age that are different, sort of the three major suites of adaptations that enabled social breakthroughs to get us from being almost like chimpanzees to being the cultural creature that, you know, that we are today. And just as an overview, I call these the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. And we can recognize these things in us today on a day to day basis. The peer instinct is this sideways glance at classmates, neighbors, co workers, and this kind of urge to match their behaviors to mesh with what they're doing. The hero instinct is this upward attention that kind of grips us involuntarily towards CEOs, MVPs, VIPs. It's why we find ourselves reading human interest articles about whether a politician wears boxers or briefs. And we want to know what LeBron James eats for breakfast. It's kind of this drive to focus on the people who have the most success and status and to emulate the things that they are doing, the distinctive things that they are doing. And then the last wave, which may seem like the most primitive of all, but it's the crowning touch that completed the package, is the ancestor instinct. And that corresponds to our curiosity about past generations, our deep interest in the founders of our professions and organizations and nations, the way that we listen to elders, the way that we want to learn a traditional family recipe or understand what we have in common with the ways of the past. What are the traditions that are continuous and that connect us to our ancestors. And those are all different systems of psychology. And they all enabled certain breakthroughs. I can step through those breakthroughs, if that's helpful. So the first wave of tribal instincts, the peer instinct, caused a breakthrough in the ability of our forebearers to work in concert, to hunt in a hunting party, to forage collectively rather than each person for himself or herself. And biologists who kind of study subsistence peoples, they see very clearly that the economic return to coordinated foraging, whether it's hunting or gathering, is higher than the return to each person doing it individually. And so that was a major breakthrough that came, and it allowed this conformist instinct to sort of mesh with what your peers are doing. It enabled our forebearers to start working as a united front, rather than just being a collection of people. They were an organized group working with a common goal or a common plan. It involves adaptations for sharing intentions and sharing beliefs and acquiring shared habits. And we often deride this side of ourselves. We worry a lot about conformity is something that can reduce independent thinking and can contribute to the spread of incorrect ideas. But we should not forget that the great human accomplishments, whether it's in artistic creativity or Scientific creativity, they come usually from multiple people working together and multiple people building on the ideas of others in their community. And so our conformist side does occasionally inhibit our independent thinking and creativity, but it fosters most of the innovation we do, which is collective thinking, thinking as a group. Even people like Isaac Newton said, if I saw far, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants, that there were many other people's ideas that he built upon. So that's the peer instinct, and it's the foundation of human culture and the foundation of human collaboration. We worry about it, as we should, but we should also recognize that this lemming like quality, that we tend to meld minds and mesh actions with the people around us, is a superpower that enables us to do things that other species can't. And that helped us move up the food chain, as you pointed out. Yeah. Now the next wave happened more like a half a million years ago, when our forebearer, Homo heidelberiensis, was the main species of human on the planet. And this is what we call the hero instinct. And the social breakthroughs that happen at this point that we can see in the evolutionary record appearing at this time and not appearing before this, are pro social acts. So this is when they started to be able to hunt really large game, like a woolly mammoth, where it required a lead hunter to take a personal risk for the good of the group, to get right in the face and land a glancing blow so that then others could rush in and finish the job. It's when tools took a step forward, tools that took much, much longer to build appeared. And that's because you had an individual delaying gratification, sitting in a cave for months, whittling to make a spear that would fly straight so that probably other people could be a star as a hunter. And it's also around the time when we start to see skeletons of congenitally deformed people who lived to adulthood, which didn't happen before. And that's an indicator of caring of somebody giving to another person who probably wasn't able to reciprocate directly. But pro social behavior doesn't require direct reciprocation. It's I give to other members of the community and I gain a reputation for being a hero, a good person for doing that. And then I do get rewarded by the group with social opportunities and with tribute for being a contributor. And so the hero instinct, I call it that because it causes us to want to be a hero by contributing what the group needs, even if it involves personal sacrifice. But we also have to learn what it is that the group values. And some things are pretty trivial, like if the group is starving, they would value somebody killing an antelope. But as societies became more complex, it becomes sort of non trivial to know what the group values and what the group doesn't value. And so we developed a mechanism for learning that, which is often called prestige learning, which is that we look to the people with status and success and we infer that they must be doing something right, that the group values these people because status is sort of the accumulation of positive attention from the whole community. And we can read status very easily, even from people's nonverbal behavior. Scientists who study juries claim that within an hour of interacting, there's a very clear status hierarchy on the jury that is recognized by all. And you can see it in the deference that they give each other and who gets elected foremen and that kind of thing. So we look to heroes as beacons of what the group values. And then we try to be like them, we try to contribute like they do, so that we will share in that positive esteem and in the tribute that comes with it. And it's good for individuals because it's a way of getting those social rewards, and it's good for groups because it incentivizes people to adapt the new behaviors that are causing success. And in a changing climate and in a changing social environment, you need innovations. The crop that people were planting two generations ago may not be the optimal crop to plant now. Our forebearers lived through periods of global warming way beyond what were worried about today. The ice age involved 10 degree variations, and so there was great variation in the ecology that they had to deal with. And so what you want is adaptive change. You want many members of the group to move in the direction of what's working for a few. And the hero instinct gives that to the group. And then the final wave of genetic evolution that kind of made us fully human didn't come until the last 100,000 years, in my view and in the view of most current evolutionists. And that is a new system of psychology that instead of if the peer instinct caused us to want to be normal, to do what most people are doing, and the hero instinct caused us to want to be normative, to do what the standout people are doing, this final wave caused us to have this strange sentimentality about past generations that caused us to want to perpetuate the ways of past generations, to maintain traditions, to keep alive the wisdom of the past. So the ancestor instinct created tribal memory. It created a collective level memory. And then human groups didn't have to reinvent the wheel every generation. And the hero instinct energy towards contributing to the group could go into building on the knowledge of past generations rather than recreating it. And when that happened and you had all three of these instincts working together, we crossed a Rubicon in evolution, which is usually referred to as cultural accumulation. And what that meant is that our early human groups started accumulating more and more shared knowledge with each generation, while hanging on to most, not all, but most of the inherited knowledge from prior generations. And so the pool of shared knowledge that any individual could tap into was richer and richer. And so human groups became wiser and wiser over time without individuals becoming any brains stopped getting bigger. You know, our brains are no bigger than Neanderthals, but our communities are so much richer in knowledge than Neanderthal communities were. And it's that cultural accumulation that's really the secret weapon that propelled humans, and in particular Homo sapiens, our species of humans, into the stratosphere in terms of our survival ability and our ability to dominate other species and dominate the planet to the point where the only threat to us is ourselves. And so that's where we are today.

Michael Morris (27:01)

Interesting, the ancestor instinct as a kind of precursor to cloud computing.

Michael Morris (27:07)

Yeah, it's a very useful metaphor. I think the shared knowledge that individuals with their brains tap into is much like software that exists on a cloud that, you know, my small device can tap into.

Dan Harris (27:24)

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Michael Morris (30:16)

So we have these three tribal instincts and you have done a great job of kind of setting the table and giving the intellectual framework here or your argument, I think now would be great to pivot into the practical. So how can I as an individual, within my work culture or my family life or friend group or civic organization, how can I harness these three tribal instincts? Again, peer, hero, ancestor, in order to, I'll put it crassly, get people to do what I want?

Michael Morris (30:49)

That's a great question. And that's where I think the payoff to the reader in my book comes. Because everybody's got their academic side curious about how did humans get to be humans? But we want some news we can use. Eventually people ask the so what? Question. And I would start by saying that there is a myth that academics probably contributed to that cultures are permanent fixtures, that they are relatively unchanging and unchangeable. And one of the reasons we we have this illusion Is the ancestor instinct. Because we sort of want to believe that the way things are now is the way that our ancestors lived. So that we can feel that strong sense of continuity and connection. But cultures are constantly evolving. And the cultures that are foremost for individuals and that are guiding individuals thoughts and actions are constantly switching. Because every individual internalizes multiple cultures. They internalize a tribe with every community that nurtures them. Starting with the neighborhood where they grew up, their family, the part of the country they live in, maybe the school they went to, maybe the sport they played, the profession they got socialized into, the organization they went to work for, the avocations they picked up in midlife, and the traditions associated with those. And so we internalize lots of tribes. And tribes are cultures, Tribes are groups defined by a shared culture. Cultures are dynamic in two important ways. One is the situational triggering of cultures. And the second one, over the longer term, is the evolution of cultures. So we can play a role in both of those things. We can help by creating a situation we can trigger ourselves or trigger a team we work on, or a team that we coach, or an organization that we're advising, Whatever the group might be. We can help architect a situation that will bring certain cultural frames to the fore and to the driver's seat and help other cultural frames recede. And smart managers and leaders and coaches have always intuited ways of doing this. And my book, I think, explains in more detail how it works and makes it easier for everyone to engage in that kind of triggering approach to managing. And then there's a second half to it, which is the more long term project of trying to change a culture. And I can get into that, but I probably should talk about them one at a time.

Dan Harris (33:56)

That sounds right.

Michael Morris (33:57)

So let's do the first.

Michael Morris (33:58)

The message of the book is that these three tribal instincts are still the engines involved in the cultural knowledge that we acquire and act on today. And the key to understanding what the triggers are that bring culture to the fore in other moments. And there are slightly different triggers for the layers of culture that are created by the peer instinct and by the hero instinct and by the ancestor instinct. So you can think of the peer instinct, this tendency to watch what the people around you are doing and form conceptions of the in group norm, to form a sense of the shared habits that are characteristic of your group. That is the culture that affects a lot of our day to day behaviors. And I think we've all become a little bit more aware of the triggering involved there because we talk a lot these Days about code switching. And when Barack Obama was president, it became something that people noticed. Comedians like Key and Peele did dozens of great comic sketches about the fact that Barack Obama had a slightly different lexicon and a slightly different register of speech that would come out when he was in front of an African American audience or that would come out when he was in front of a white audience. And that's because he grew up in both of those communities and learned slightly different ways of speaking in those slightly different communities. And at first people thought, oh, he's putting on this accent for political gain. But then people came up with YouTube videos of Obama in a casual situation, like ordering food in a restaurant, and they saw that he does the same thing, that he just sort of naturally shifts based on the audience in front of him in some of the words that he uses, some of the ways that he speaks. And this is called code switching. And I think when we see that someone is doing it spontaneously, then we regard it to be authentic. When Hillary Clinton spoke in a southern accent when she was in the south, people were not so sure that it was spontaneous. In her defense, she lived in Arkansas for quite a number of years. But I think people were more suspicious that it was an instrumental move on her part. But I think that we recognize that this code switching happens and that it happens automatically in the sense that it's not intentional and the person doing it may not even be aware of doing it. But it is adaptive because it, it helps the group that's in front of you, the audience that's in front of you. It helps them understand you better, and it helps them trust you better because it, it demonstrates to them that you have shared experience with them. Ways of talking are recognizable to the members of an in group. The triggering of hero instincts. It happens a lot through symbols and icons. So this again is not exactly news. Armies have always followed flags into battles. Sports teams get psyched up by seeing their mascot. Primitive indigenous, even the earliest human groups had what were called totems, which were animal symbols that were equivalent with one clan or with one tribe. So having symbols that stand for the group and displaying these symbols is a sort of age old way of rallying the drive to contribute to the group and to live up to its standards and to act like a hero. And then the final layer of culture that comes from the ancestor instinct is what we might label traditions. And a very, very powerful situational cue to get people to start thinking in terms of traditions and acting on trad is ceremonies. And by ceremonies, I mean Group events where there is synchronous movement, usually synchronous vocalization, and usually references to the collective history of the group. So a vigil like we have on campuses is a ceremony, A political convention is a ceremony, A wedding is a ceremony. And ceremonies affect us very much. You know, certain kinds of meditation sessions are ceremonies. And you may have had experience of this because I know that you're a big practitioner of different kinds of meditation, that you gain access to a different psychological experience, a kind of unity experience. And what goes away is this experience of yourself as an individual, sharply defined as an individual. And also the critical thinking, the critical voice in your head, which can be excessive, it goes away. And that enables unity and mobilization at a level that can never happen otherwise.

Michael Morris (39:14)

How would we use ritual around the office or around our house, et cetera? How would we appeal to the ancestor tribal instinct effectively in our day to day?

Michael Morris (39:26)

Well, there are many corporations and teams around the world that have a traditional song, whether it's the traditional song of Manchester United or the chant the Minnesota Vikings fans will go into at a certain point, like a purple power chant. Many corporations have employee off site meetings where they're trying to rally the enthusiasm of salespeople to beat their targets. And they may engage in almost pep rally like behaviors where people are, somebody is leading people in a chant and then some charismatic manager jogs on the stage and gets everybody to do a jumping jack sort of something. There are ritual like behaviors that happen in corporate America and in corporations around the world, but ceremonies can be quieter than that. A lot of companies or teams within companies will have things like meditation Monday or Taco Tuesday, where it may be something we do on our lunch break that only takes a half an hour, but people look forward to it and people reminisce about past occasions. And it creates a sense of meaningful continuity. And the fact that it is repeated in exactly the same way each time adds to the sense of meaning. Something that becomes ritualized, that makes complete sense.

Michael Morris (40:59)

And we did an episode on the power of ritual that I will post in the show notes for listeners if they want to go deeper on this. But let's go back to the other tribal instincts which include the peer instinct and the hero instinct. How could we harness those in order to be better leaders?

Michael Morris (41:18)

Well, I'll give an example that I think is very current for a lot of people. After years of pandemic and then post pandemic hybrid work arrangements, we now see this big push to return to the office. And we all got to really like not having to commute every day. So there's a bit of resistance to that in many quarters. Why do organizations want it? Well, what many organizations discovered from doing really careful studies of productivity with many different kinds of metrics is that measures of strictly individual productivity went up when people were working from home. So when I'm working from home, I'm more likely to get through my personal to do list in the day. I'm less likely to be interrupted, I'm less likely to get distracted by what's happening in the conference room nearby. But on measures of collective productivity, especially measures of coordination, so are decisions that the right hand of the organization are making, are they being made in a way that dovetails with what the left hand of the organization is doing? That fell apart during the work from home era because when people weren't coming into the office, they weren't getting triggered by the office environment to think in terms of the shared culture of the organization. So the office is a lot of things. It enables face to face communication, and that's an important thing. But the office is also a trigger. It has audiences of your coworkers, it has familiar sights and sounds. And it's a trigger also for certain ideals or values. Because when we walk into the office, we often see a picture of the founder, we see the corporate logo, we may see some sort of mission statement on the wall or some sort of core values indicated somewhere. So these are all symbolic, iconic triggers that make us want to contribute and make us want to live up to the distinctive ideals of this organization. And what every organization values is different depending on what their strategy is and what they really need from their employees. And so, both because it triggered peer codes and because it triggered hero codes, coming into the office enables coordination among the different groups and the different individuals in a way that doesn't happen when people are not coming into the office. But there's a caveat to all this, which is it is still the case that organizations recognize that sometimes they don't want that. They don't want the conventional ways of thinking and the conventional goals of their organizational culture to be top of mind for people. And that is when people want to. When an organization wants to rethink its strategy or to brainstorm about entirely new business models, they almost always will hold an off site meeting in some very different setting. It might be at a hotel in the woods, or it might be at a mountain resort. It's someplace that's very different from the office. So that these everyday office frames and scripts are not top of mind and we have access to other kinds of thinking. And I think we do that in our personal lives as well. We go away on a retreat somewhere or we go backpacking somewhere and we suddenly are having memories from our college days that we haven' thought about in a decade because we've taken ourselves out of the triggers of our everyday professional life.

Michael Morris (45:27)

That's really interesting. All of that was really interesting.

Dan Harris (45:32)

Much more with Michael Morris coming up, including some organizations that have successfully harnessed our tribal instincts. This episode is brought to you by Hill's Pet Nutrition. Every shelter pet deserves a second chance, and you are making it possible for thousands of them every day. Because when you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, which helps make them healthy, happy and more adoptable. I am a huge, unrelenting, unreconstructed fan of adopting shelter pets. We've got three shelter cats marauding around our home. And actually my friend and former colleague with Johnson was here the other day. He's an anchorman at ABC News, but he's got a side hustle.

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It's not really a hustle.

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Michael Morris (48:10)

Earlier you mentioned code switching and then also the power of totems and symbols. Are there practical nuggets related to either of those notions that a listener should be aware of as they think about operationalizing your ideas?

Michael Morris (48:27)

Yeah, I think a lot of this book, and for me it's been a personal journey from a hyper individualistic, hyper rational young man who started studying this side of human nature to recognize that a lot of things that I grew up thinking as irrational are actually very functional and serve important purposes. So I never thought that ceremony was a good use of time. Why does a company have an awards ceremony before their annual party? Why does the chaplain say a prayer before the Congress starts its session? Well, these ceremonies can be useful in creating the state of reverence and mindfulness of tradition that is wanted for a given event and the symbols in an environment. I grew up in a family that was a very Catholic family, so we would go to church and there would be crucifixes on the wall and paintings of saints and stat. And to me this all seemed like claptrap. If we're here to talk about theology, let's talk about theology. Let's not look at all this gaudy artwork. But then, you know, later in my life, I got very interested, as many people do, in the religions of other cultures. And I realized that they also have icons and they also have mandalas and they have statues. And these religious icons are regarded by most of world religions as sort of cognitive prosthetics, as objects that you can put in an environment that help people come to a state of spiritual awareness that they might not otherwise have access to or might not easily be able to get to otherwise. And it works to the extent that there is a problem that recurs in religions, which is called iconophilia, where people start to worship the icons rather than the deities that the icons stand for. And then you often have this pendulum swing of a group of iconoclasts, people who are purists, who run into the house of worship and break the statues and paint over the paintings and try to restore the religion to its fundamental, purer state. So there's this dialectic between iconophilia and iconoclasm that has recurred in many religions. In Christianity, but also in Islam and other religions. And it speaks to the power of icons, that icons really do create psychological states that are not easy to get to otherwise.

Michael Morris (51:11)

So should we in our organizations be coming up with icons? Should we be proposing. I mean, this is probably at least in part why companies come up with logos.

Michael Morris (51:22)

It's why they come up with logos. It's why in social movements. Social movements are a community without formal membership and formal boundaries. Like a community like, like say, Black Lives Matter or the communities that rise up, like in Myanmar, against the government there. Often graphic designers play a pivotal role in social movements by coming up with a symbol, and journalists come up with phrases that are often thought of as resonant frames, phrases that help people understand the community that they're in and feel like they have things in common with the fellow members of those communities. So these things aren't really rational and they may seem superficial, but we shouldn't disregard them. If we want to build a community, we need to have visual symbols, we need to have verbal symbols, we may need to have a company song or a chant that signifies the group and makes everybody feel at one. So these things are not just hocus pocus. They have a very tangible psychological effect on people. And they're part of how we evolved to live in these cooperative communities. It's the superpower of our species, this capacity to form large scale cooperative communities. And the tools that we have available to help make that happen involve some irrational things like symbols and ceremonies and making audiences salient.

Michael Morris (53:12)

Yeah, I don't think I have ever thought of this in evolutionary terms, but specifically as it pertains to slogans and phrases, which I think are way more on the rational end of the spectrum here. I've long embraced those, not only in my public messaging, but internally on my team, we have our own little language, some of which I've talked about before on this show, like the term squirrel, which is our little term for a potentially not very helpful digression. The word like chasing a squirrel, like a dog. And. But we also have little catchphrases that we use internally and that I use externally. One of them, this isn't something I coined, but the notion of never worrying alone, which is a very powerful idea then. And it is evidence based that if you want to reduce your stress, it's great to talk to somebody else. And so on my team, my coo, Tony, will sometimes say, hey, I need to not worry alone about this thing. And so we haven't yet gotten into the symbols or ceremonies part of it, but for sure, the Slogans.

Michael Morris (54:09)

Yeah. First of all, I love that particular slogan and I think it's a great slogan for a family that some, some families are like, we have no secrets in this family. I'm like, I think that's a little unrealistic that, you know, people have a private life, but never worrying alone, I think is a very good motto that we shouldn't fret by ourselves. I think slogans are symbols. They're on the rational end of things, as you. Because they do have semantic content, but it's. They're compacted. It's a little bit of semantic content that in the head of cultural insiders, expands into a much richer set of meanings. And I think having slogans that are unique to the in group are sort of like inside jokes. They make insiders feel like insiders. They're things that when you're welcoming a new member into the group that you explain to them and then they feel like, oh, they get it. So I do think they are an important part of every culture.

Michael Morris (55:10)

So are there organizations and maybe let's just pick one if you're up for it, that have harnessed our tribal instincts in a very positive and effective way?

Michael Morris (55:21)

Sure, I think there are very many. But I can think of one story that comes to mind that I write about, but that has been in the newspaper the last week, and that's the story of what Mary Barra, the CEO of gm, is accomplishing. GM is a fascinating company for someone like me, an organizational behavior professor, because for most of the 20th century, it was the world's largest corporation and it sold more cars than any other car company. And everything about the company was oriented towards being large. You know, they had divisions in many other countries and decisions were very centralized and very top down. There was a book written quite some time ago by John DeLorean called on a Clear Day, you can See Detroit or something of that nature. And it was about being on the top floor at GM and top down and bureaucratic, the organization was. He eventually left to build his innovative car in a smaller company that would be more nimble and that would make that possible. But Mary Barra, she was a sort of lifelong GM employee off and on. She had grown up in a GM family and she, I've read, started working at age 18 in a summer job inspecting fenders at a Pontiac plant. She knew this organization, bottom to top, soup to nuts, and she worked her way up. She worked as an engineer, she worked in human resources. She worked in a number of different roles. And then at a certain point around the time that GM was heading towards its bankruptcy, because for so long it had been doing the same thing that had worked in the past, but that was no longer working, which is making lots of cars, making lots of cars and not making a profit on those cars because you had to discount them to get people to buy them. And eventually it just stopped working and they had a bankruptcy and a bailout. And around the same time, she was elevated to become the chair of the human resources division. And that's often a division that people don't think of as a very powerful part of organizations. It's regarded as the sort of wishy washy people who try to make employees feel better, but not the place that affects the strategic direction of the company. But she saw what was coming for the company, that a lot of radical changes were going to have to come to reorganize to be a profitable company. And a lot of those changes were going to be HR decisions. They were going to rethink their pension, they were going to have downsizing, they were going to have lots of things. So she had a lot of big weighty decisions ahead of her. But she chose as her first major action in the role to rip up the dress code that had accumulated at GM, which was a document, it was about 15 pages long that had had been added to incrementally across decades. Much of it was in outdated terms and a lot of it was about how women should dress. And it seemed like it was written by men. So there was a lot about this document that everyone would just shrug and say, I don't like it either, but it comes from upstairs and we have to give it to every new employee and we have to follow it. It was something that was symptomatic for GMers of the GM inertia and the GM stasis that people were still coming to work dressed the way people did a generation before when most of the world had moved on. So she proposed that this dress code that everyone knew would be ripped up and replaced by a two word dress code. Dress appropriately. And every division of the organization would have to meet and decide what dress appropriately meant for them. And so for the legal division, it might mean wearing suits, but for the assembly line on a hot day, it might mean you can wear shorts to work. For designers, it might mean something in the middle. And so there was immediate protest of people saying, oh, it's not explicit enough. How do we know what appropriately means? And she listened, but she didn't answer the question for them. She said, talk it through. Think about what's necessary in your part of the organization and what would be optimal in your part of the organization and come to a decision and check in with us about it. But we don't expect that we'll be overriding any group's decision. And so it wasn't easy, this change, but, you know, a month or two into it, all the groups had made their decision. And then suddenly people started coming into work dressed differently and it was a breath of fresh air. And it was like a visible difference that affected every single employ, not just with regard to what they were wearing, but what they saw around them and what they saw even the leadership wearing. So it sort of sent a shockwave through the organization that things are going to be changing and the direction of the change is going to be driving decision making downward and people taking ownership of decisions and then living by those decisions that they've made. And so, so to me, this is a great example of a leader who understood the sort of symbolic meanings of an artifact in the organization. This dress code, you know, it wasn't quite like a slogan or a logo, but it was sort of a tradition and something that people had an ambivalent feeling about. And so it was a good target for one of these top down shock therapy change approaches because it affected everybody. It was symbolically resonant, but it didn't affect the basic operations. And it produced a visible change that everyone could see as evidence that times were changing. So to me, that's the mark of a leader who gets the cultural side of things and who understood how to send cultural signals to help evolve a culture. And then it's really remarkable what she's accomplished. She went on to become CEO, she's created change that no one else at a Big three automaker has been able to achieve. And she's the first female CEO of a Big three automaker. She recently came out with a plan that was her 2040 plan, and she wanted to state the vision in a very bold way and in a slogan that everyone could remember. And I think it was six words. It was zero emissions, zero fatalities, zero delays, or something like that. And it referenced the changes. And she also announced that GM should stand for General Mobility, not General Motors, because there will come a time in history when it will move beyond motors as they have been traditionally understood. So I think that she's someone who does this symbolic, cultural leadership really well in a sector of the economy where it's really important. So I really love watching her.

Michael Morris (62:49)

That's a great example to state the Obvious. And we talked about this earlier. Once you start tapping into the power of our tribal instincts, I mean, you are in a sense playing with fire because it can go so violently, genocidally wrong. And so I wonder if you have thoughts on how we can avoid. I mean, I don't think, hopefully most of us are not in a position to spark up genocide, but we can, we can, we can get people into unhelpful us versus them thinking biases, prejudices. How can we tap into these forces without having it go awry?

Michael Morris (63:25)

It's a great question and a difficult question. At the end of my book, I take on that question with regard to some of the conflicts in our time that people have tried to explain in terms of toxic tribalism as manifestations of this resurgent hate. And I try to argue in each case that it's not resurgent hate, it is a kind of tribalism. But it reflects one of the three tribal instincts going awry. Because these tribal instincts can get caught up in feedback loops where they operate unchecked and there are ripple effects and they end up affecting people more than they should. So one example of this that I start with is the partisan blindness and the partisan conflict between the red and the blue tribes. We can all see that it's gotten worse over the last 20 years than what we might have remembered from younger in our lives. It's by no means the worst it's ever been in history. That's so far from being true. If you read a little bit about Abraham Lincoln and what he had to deal with and what he accomplished, you can see that the current rift is nothing like what the American society has come through in the past. But in any case, we have reached a state that is different from a generation ago or two generations ago, where being in the blue tribe or being in the Red tribe has become a sort of primary identity for a lot of people. And then there's the longer term project of aside from ourselves as individuals. But if we want to help evolve the culture of the Red tribe and the Blue tribe so that they are less polarized, what can we do? And there are a lot of programs that have cropped up over the last five or six years that are trying to bridge the red and blue parties. And some of them have, have been found to be effective, and some of them have been found actually to be counterproductive. And I think that some of the behavioral science research can help us understand that. I don't know whether those are programs that you're familiar with, but one group called Better Angels that sponsors these dialogue groups. They essentially, they all have the structure of. They bring together a bipartisan group of, of people for an event, for a kind of discussion somewhere. And some of them are called High from the Other side or Red Meets Blue or Bridging the Divide. And the problem with these programs is that it makes it hypersalient that you're talking to people from the other party. And that raises people's defenses. People naturally learn from the opinions that the others around them express if they are thinking of those people as peers, as other people, not if they're thinking of them as people from the other side, people from the out group. So there's another class of programs that may seem less goal oriented or well directed, but it actually seems like they're more effective. And these go under names like Coffee Party usa, Make America Dinner Again, Open Lands, Discussion. And the logic here is to bring together people from both parties to talk about a subject that is not explicitly political. It's a shared passion that cuts across party lines, whether that be we're all foodies here or we all really love coffee, or we care about government lands and how they're used and what the regulations pertaining to them in our area are or could be. And so it's a case where talking about non political topics, it turns out to be more likely to start a deep conversation and a conversation that continues beyond the initial event and that ultimately may broach upon political topics, but does in a way that becomes a teachable moment for the people involved rather than an opportunity for polarization, for feeling like you're different, you're one of them, I'm one of us.

Michael Morris (68:02)

This has been a fascinating discussion. Before I let you go, Michael, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and let us know about a website if you have one where we can learn more about you.

Michael Morris (68:12)

Yes, the book is called Tribal how the Cultural Instincts that Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. And I have a website called tribalbook.org and another one that's called michaelworris.com that's broader, that covers my research as well as the book, if people are interested in the research foundation of a lot of the ideas.

Dan Harris (68:40)

Michael, thanks for coming on.

Michael Morris (68:41)

Appreciate it.

Michael Morris (68:42)

Thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

Dan Harris (68:47)

Thanks again to Michael Morris. You heard me reference the episode I did with Michael Norton about ritual. I've dropped a link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out. As always, we'll be doing a cheat sheet for subscribers over@danharris.com, where we sum up the key takeaways and give a full transcript. So if you're a subscriber, you'll be getting that or you will have already received that in your inbox. Also at danharris.com, you get the chance to chat with me in the text and also many of our guests pop into the chats as well, which is super cool and I'm doing monthly live AMA sessions and much, much more. I personally would love your support and feedback if you care to take the time to sign up. Final thing to say, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our Executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondering plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondry.com survey.

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