Tribalism is Human Nature
Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than groups comprised of nonloyal members. Therefore, selective pressures have sculpted human minds to be tribal, and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. The common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives gives little reason to expect protribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other. This evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis has been supported by recent research. In a recent meta-analysis, liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and several protribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar other people) were found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune.
Humans are tribal creatures. They were not designed to reason dispassionately about the world; rather, they were designed to reason in ways that promote the interests of their coalition (and hence, themselves). It would therefore be surprising if a particular group of individuals did not display such tendencies, and recent work suggests, at least in the U.S. political sphere, that both liberals and conservatives are substantially biased—and to similar degrees. Historically, and perhaps even in modern society, these tribal biases are quite useful for group cohesion but perhaps also for other moral purposes (e.g., liberal bias in favor of disadvantaged groups might help increase equality). Also, it is worth noting that a bias toward viewing one’s own tribe in a favorable light is not necessarily irrational. If one’s goal is to be admired among one’s own tribe, fervidly supporting their agenda and promoting their goals, even if that means having or promoting erroneous beliefs, is often a reasonable strategy (Kahan et al., 2017). The incentives for holding an accurate opinion about global climate change, for example, may not be worth the social rejection and loss of status that could accompany challenging the views of one’s political ingroup. However, these biases decrease the likelihood of consensus across political divides. Thus, developing effective strategies for disincentivizing political tribalism and promoting the much less natural but more salutary tendencies toward civil political discourse and reasonable compromise are crucial priorities for future research. A useful theoretical starting point is that tribalism and concomitant biases are part of human nature, and that no group, not even one’s own, is immune.
https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/2019/07/tribalism-is-human-nature.html
https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/1/863/files/2019/10/Clark-et-al-2019.pdf
Here's Why Tribalism Trumps Truth. We like to think that we are reasonable, but our politics show otherwise.
We evolved to survive, not to see reality. Thus, our view of reality, of what is true, is filtered through a "survival" lens.
As social creatures, what has helped us survive and thrive over the course of hundreds of thousands of years is being part of a cohesive tribe. Being part of a functional tribe meant life, but a dysfunctional tribe, or being cast out from a tribe, meant death. Thus, our view of reality is filtered through a kind of in-group or tribal bias because being part of that tribe, historically, was necessary for our survival. Quite naturally then, we favor our own tribe. There is a large body of literature indicating that we tend to show in-group favoritism, including biases about truth, even when group assignment is random and meaningless.
The Rider and the Elephant
We'd like to think that our political positions are based on objective truths but, sadly, that's far from the truth. As social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt describes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, our morality, politics, and values are based more on sentiments than reason. He likens the relationship between our reasoning and sentiments to a rider on an elephant with the rider being our reasoning and the elephant being our sentiments. In general, it is the elephant, our sentiments, in charge. The rider, our reasoning, is along for the ride.
The rider doesn't have much control over the elephant. It's more often the case that the elephant decides to lumber in a particular direction and the rider, after the fact (post hoc), concocts some reasons to justify why the elephant has turned. "Ah, yeah, well I decided to steer the elephant over toward... that tree over there because... ah, yeah, well, the tree might have bananas, and, um, I think this big fella is hungry. Yeah, that's the ticket!"
Our confirmation bias kicks in such that we cherry-pick information to support what we already have decided is true and discount contradictory information. This is usually just below our conscious awareness. When it comes to supporting our values, morals, and political positions, our view of the "truth" is often a tribal allegiance in disguise. As Haidt observes, morality "binds and blinds." That is, our moral sentiments bind us to our group or tribe and blind us to information that contradicts our sentiments.
Sticking to Our Guns
Our tribal nature explains why people are curiously resistant to attempts to change their moral and political views, even when confronted by damning information. Attempts to change others' views can often result in a backfire effect. Thus, when someone who holds a particular view is confronted with contradictory data, it will often strengthen their original view. How annoying is that?
If we step back a bit, we can see that we aren't merely pressing these "other" tribal members to change their beliefs. We are actually asking them to switch tribes. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't switch tribes. For our ancient ancestors, leaving the tribe meant death. Thus, the motivation to distort reality in a way that favors our tribe is incredibly strong, often as if our very lives were on the line.
The Takeaway?
From one viewpoint, it seems irrational that people's political positions would be so impervious to contradictory information. That's because our morals, values, and political positions are not based on reason in the first place. We don't experience the world in an objective fashion. Fitness (our survival) beats reality. Our survival, from an evolutionary standpoint, has been based on our ability to stay connected with our tribe. Tribalism trumps truth because our survival, historically, has depended upon it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-happy-life/202009/heres-why-tribalism-trumps-truth
In-Group Favoritism Is Difficult to Change, Even When the Social Groups Are Meaningless.
One has to go to great lengths to counteract the deeply ingrained tendency to infuse new social groups with rich meaning
People are really quick to sort themselves into categories, or social groups, and to form a preference for their in-group. In-group favoritism starts early, and has been found in children across a wide range of categories, including gender, race or ethnicity, language, nationality, and religion. Intuitively, we may think that in-group favoritism develops because the in-group is meaningful. However, almost 50 years of research on less meaningful groups suggests this is surprisingly not the case.
In 1970, the first "minimal group" study was published. Henri Tajfel and colleagues were surprised to find that people gave more resources to their in-group members even when the groups were based on highly superficial dimensions such as the tendency to overestimate or underestimate dot arrays or an interest in abstract art.
Since then, psychologists have shown over and over again that even under the most minimal conditions, people more positively evaluate their in-group members, allocate more resources to them, and hold stronger implicit favoritism towards them. Minimal in-group bias has been found in young children-- even as young as age three-- highlighting the deeply ingrained nature of this bias among humans.
Still, an important question remains: how does minimal group favoritism compare to biases that arise in real groups? You might think that since minimal group biases lack real-world significance, they would be weaker than real group biases. However, the evidence to date on this question has been mixed. While some studies have found that meaningful groups show greater in-group bias, one recent study on 4- to 6-year-olds found that the effects on generosity were similar in their pattern and magnitude despite fundamental differences between two groups (one group involved shared interests and the other group has minimal group membership). The researchers concluded that their findings "highlight the broad impact of affiliation on young children's sharing behavior."
How to Overcome Tribalism, the Shouty Minority and Facebook Toxicity
...I would say that we are in a fundamentally new era — since 2012 — which makes it difficult to use history as a guide. As I see it as there is a before time, which is before 2009, and there is an after time, which is after 2012. What changed in between those years is that Facebook added the like button and Twitter added the retweet button. Thereby social media became far more engaging. Millions of people flooded on. All journalists flooded on to Twitter. I talk in my book about how societies create a Moral Matrix. Between 2009 and 2012 social media essentially knocked over the Tower of Babel. In the biblical story of Babel, God thinks humans are getting too powerful. So he says “Let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another.” That is what happened to us between 2009 and 2012. Before 2009 there was some semblance of sanity, there was some vague connection between the Moral Matrix and some underlying physical reality. By 2012-2013, that connection had been severed. So now any set of beliefs can be fostered in a community completely separate from any objective reality. This is especially happening to the extremes. The far-right has always had conspiracy theories — that it is very clear in the United States at least — but never before have we had one that drew in the majority of Republicans. Crazy conspiracy theories that draw in most of the two major parties. On the far left we have a woke ideology which has an unbroken track record of failure and destruction when entering institutions. Yet institutions keep adopting it. So, while I pointed to cycles of history before, this one really could be different because the means of knowledge production are now broken. It is not clear how we fix them...
...The major dynamic here is called the polarization cycle. Not all conflicts are polarization cycles, but you get such cycles when you have two groups at either extremes, groups that each believe they are in an existential struggle for survival. Especially when you also have a media environment that feeds the worst statements and actions of the other side instead of the average statements and actions. So each side is then driven towards more and more passion by all the anecdotes and stories that supposedly confirm the radicalism of the other side. Both sides also believe the end justifies the means so neither side will care about due process and law. Victory must be had at all cost. Then, yes, you get a polarization cycle that can easily lead to violence. In America we are absolutely experiencing a polarization cycle...
...The polling shows that the majority of almost every group — Black, white, liberal, conservative — dislikes political correctness. I do not know what the polling says about the right-wing extremity; I think that depends on what the Republicans think so I do not know what people think about the far right. But a fundamental law of our times is that the average does not matter. So even if 80 percent of people are fed up, it does not matter since after 2012 the dynamics are different. In the old times 80 percent was bigger than the 20 percent — or at least as big as 20 percent. Now 80 percent is not nearly as big as the 20 percent. So, yes, most people are fed up but it does not mean things will change...
The Myth of Tribalism.
Beware of the false notion that group solidarity leads inevitably to conflict.
Humans do seem to possess the innate capacity to identify with members of their own groups. People in every culture share the same propensity to form coalitions. This tendency is what the anthropologist Donald Brown calls a “human universal.” But it does not lead inexorably toward intergroup conflict. “Groupishness”—a term some researchers use to describe humans’ tendency to identify with social groups—can be the source of a much wider repertoire of actions, including cooperation, altruism, embracing diversity, and helping people radically different from ourselves.
In our new book, the two of us argue that, to explain collective behavior, researchers and commentators must distinguish between two key concepts: how strongly members identify with their group and its norms. Some members of the same group, for example, often feel a stronger sense of connection to the collective than others. Holiday Catholics are less committed than worshippers who attend every Mass. Zealous sports fans attend every home game and despise fickle supporters who pay attention only when their team makes the playoffs.
Members who strongly identify with a group generally conform more to its norms. But those norms vary dramatically. For every hate group, another group, such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, exists that is committed to helping others. And the more deeply members identify with the latter, the more likely they are to help people different from themselves—even at significant personal cost. Recognizing that collective norms can be either positive or negative is a key to understanding why and when tribalism occurs. It also suggests how different groups can find common ground.
When people use the term tribalism, they are usually aiming to capture a toxic dynamic in collective life, such as the one that characterizes much of contemporary American politics. But what happens between groups is often both a symptom and a reinforcer of unhealthy patterns within individual groups as well. Such patterns include the suppression of dissenting voices and a cult mentality in which members seek only to affirm one another’s worldview.
These characteristics describe how people can behave in groups, but they do not always apply. Indeed, in most cases, they do not. If you think about the many groups in your life, such as your workplace or your daughter’s soccer team, how many of them are at war with a sinister outgroup and try to suppress intergroup contact or internal dissent? Neither of us belongs to many, if any, groups that fit this description.
When humans identify with a group, we are motivated to pursue the group’s interests and goals. But while that feeling provides the fuel for collective action, group norms set the direction, determining what forms those actions take. In some experiments, psychology researchers have sought to manipulate whether people believe that their own group tries to treat outsiders fairly. Participants who are led to believe that their group normalizes fairness engage in less in-group favoritism than do people who think that their group has a discriminatory norm.
Rather than adopting discriminatory norms, real-life groups can and often do embrace norms of tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion. In a recent experiment, social psychologists questioned Italian high schoolers to discern which of their classmates, in the students’ view, best represented the group norm. Students who believed that their most prototypical classmate would take action to support immigrants expressed greater willingness to organize an event for World Refugee Day or attend a pro-immigrant demonstration.
Strikingly, the influence of the quintessential group member was greatest among students who identified strongly with their group. These were the people who agreed with statements such as “I often think about the fact I am a member of this class” and “I have a lot in common with other classmates.” The two of us are immigrants, and these findings give us hope. As the researchers put it, “Ingroup prototypes can have a key role in mobilizing advantaged group members in pursuit of a more equal society.”
The power of group norms has long been recognized in other domains. For example, young people’s drug and alcohol use or risky sexual behavior is heavily influenced by what they believe their peers do. This insight has led to promising interventions: Learning that others in your group drink less alcohol than you do can persuade you to cut back on your own excessive consumption. ((((Many students overestimate))) how much their peers drink. In one study, university freshmen who received accurate information about drinking behavior by students of their own gender reported imbibing about 25 percent fewer drinks a week five months later.
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