Reclaiming Tribalism (with Michael Morris)

Michael Morris: Thanks so much. It’s really an honor to be here. I’ve listened to your show from time to time over the last year, and it’s really one that engages with ideas beyond the sound bites, and so it’s really an honor to be here.

Michael Morris: It’s a great question to start off with. I think that we’ve heard the word ‘tribal–‘tribalism’–a lot in the last decade. I started to write the book almost a decade ago, and the word was not as frequently used then. And, I worried at times that the meme would pass before I ever finished the book; but it turns out there’s enough tribalism to go around that it’s still alive and well.

But I feel like the notion of tribalism–the notion that we have some evolved group instincts that affect our thinking–has been seized upon by the pundit class and by politicians from time to time to express a kind of despair, and express a kind of–yeah, I would say cynical despair. And, Tom Friedman wrote a very prominent article some years ago now where he said, ‘We’ve acquired a virus of tribalism from our Middle East adventuring that makes us look at political opponents as enemies who must be attacked, and elections as things that must be denied.’

Andrew Sullivan wrote about a sort of atavistic return of a primal urge for absolute allegiance and hate for outsiders. The LA Times (Los Angeles Times) called it ‘toxic tribalism,’ and I think that’s been echoed by many other–that there’s a toxic tribalism that we’ve had a resurgence of it, contaminating our thinking and destroying our democracy.

And to me, this has always seemed a little strange. Like, either this is new or it’s age-old. Right? You can’t really argue that it’s both.

And, I think that group conflicts are not new. There have been group conflicts of every decade, and every decade thinks that civilization is going to seed.

What’s new is this kind of despair and this notion that we’re genetically predisposed to hate each other and close our minds to each other.

And, if you know much about evolution, that’s not how we evolve. That’s not what our group instincts are. There is a species that evolved to hate outsiders: it’s called Neanderthals. And they went extinct, because homo sapiens were more inclined towards broad-scale cooperation, and that turned out to be the winning strategy.

So, I’ve tried to reclaim: What are these solidaristic instincts that distinguish our kind from other species and enabled the distinctively human forms of social life? How do they work? And, I’ve tried to debunk also the notion that cultures are somehow unchanging and unchangeable. You and I have lived long enough to see that American culture is a different thing every decade. And, cultures of other countries are the same. And so, culture is incredibly malleable and there are levers for adjusting it in the short term and in the longer term that great leaders have always used and that we can still use.

So, I agree that our cultural instincts are very strong and that they affect us–sometimes outside of our awareness. But we can work as communities to redirect them, and channel them, and turn them on, and turn them off. We always have.

Michael Morris: Well, you’ve already alluded to a couple of them–that we sometimes have this notion, you know, to be effective in another culture, you have to be Lawrence of Arabia. You have to be someone who knows the culture as well as the natives do. And that’s not the case. There have always been examples of people who were effective outside of the culture that they grew up in.

And this story is a really interesting one. It centers on this fellow, Guus Hiddink, who is largely retired now, but every World Cup or Olympics, some country of the world, you know, says they’re going to bring him out of retirement. Most recently China. He has a track record–not just in this one case, but in many cases–of going to parts of the world that are not soccer strongholds and finding a way–always a slightly different way–to bring out something special and strong and winning in the team.

And, in this case, South Korea was hosting the World Cup; and it was a bid that they made when their economy was riding high in the mid-1990s. By the end of the 1990s, they were reeling from the financial crisis that was somewhat humiliating, that brought international bailouts and accusations of crony capitalism. And, their caché in the world had fallen, and they were hoping that the World Cup would be a way to redeem their image in the world.

But their soccer team, the Reds–which usually is a regional power–had been faltering; and they had lost to, I think Kuwait, in the Asia Cup. You know, Kuwait is not a big country. So, they were faltering really badly in about the year 2000. And, they were about 18 months before the World Cup and so not usually when a host nation wants to make a change. But, they decided to call in this wunderkind from the Netherlands who had turned around teams in a couple of different countries.

And, he came there and there was a lot of anxiety in the Korean sports press: that he didn’t speak Korean, he didn’t seem familiar with all of the star players from years past in Korea. And, he was not getting with the program of how the World Cup team was usually selected in Korea. It was usually selected through a very social process of, like, ‘Okay, we want some people from Seoul National University, and we want some people from this prestigious club team, and we want some people who are from–,’ you know. And instead he was just holding open tryouts where any fresh-out-of-high-school, any speedy kid who could jump could try out.

And, some of the legends didn’t make the cut. And that rankled people.

And then, he signed up for Exhibition Games against the world’s best teams; and so they were losing, you know, five-zero, six-one and that was something that created further complaints.

But, all the while he was sort of shifting the culture of the team away from a kind of hierarchical deference that had characterized their play in the past where there were a couple of senior players that in a crucial moment, the ball was always kicked to them. And, that became a little bit predictable to opposing teams.

And so, he kind of sniffed out: well, what were some of the national cultural patterns that were bleeding into the play on the field?

And then he made changes to the training camp. For example, it used to be the case that the veterans would all eat dinner at one table and the rookies would all eat dinner at another table, and there were even rituals like the rookies would polish the shoes of the veterans on a Friday–things like that. And he kind of put a damper on some of these rituals that he thought were reinforcing hierarchy. And, he introduced new rituals that he thought would introduce a more egalitarian way of interacting.

And it ultimately changed the way they were playing on the field and enabled them to adopt more contemporary strategies. Including the strategy that grew out of the Netherlands called Total Football where you kind of–you swap positions. Might be a winger, and then you become a forward, and the forward takes your thing, so the defenders are thrown off.

So, he got the Koreans to play in a way that nobody was expecting them to play; and they surprised a lot of the world’s best teams and made it to the semi-finals, which nobody had expected. And it was a great moment for Korea; and one of the moments that led Korea to the South Korea that we know today. The one that wins Oscars and that exports K-pop bands (Korea pop bands) and soap operas. They’ve become one of the world’s cultural exporters. A very cosmopolitan nation.

Michael Morris: Well, it is a great question. I take on that question at the very end of the book, not with regard to that first story. So, I’ll first say a few more things. And, I love Ted Lasso as an example, to kind of push up against this example.

A couple of things that are interesting about what Guus Hiddink did that are relevant to I think why he eventually succeeded–because in the short term, they didn’t play very well. One thing he did: he accepted this offer with three unprecedented provisos. Number One was complete roster control, which no coach in Korea had had previously, because the Korean Football Association, who are these politicians and executives, they would usually interfere. The second thing was he wanted a budget to bring in the world’s best teams for exhibition games; and that meant losing spectacularly, but it meant that they weren’t having a false sense of security.

And then the third thing was–and this was the most radical demand–he demanded that the Korean club season be canceled or rescheduled for the year. So, ordinarily the ordinary World Cup coach may only have their squad together for a month or so because the players are playing on club teams and they’re not released from their club teams. And so, most–almost all–of his players were playing in the Korean club league. And, that club league suspended its season–its professional soccer season–until after the World Cup so that he had much longer with his team than any other coach before the World Cup.

And, he arranged for training camps that were uninterrupted and somewhat sealed off from the rest of the world. In those days, cell phones weren’t as big a thing. So, he basically brought people to other countries, he brought people to rural places, and it was like a hermetically sealed bubble. That was a place that he was able to create in a more bottom-up way, the new culture that was needed.

And, now when you think about these examples, you’re exactly right. There was a big study by McKinsey some years ago of CEOs (chief executive officers). And, they looked at: Do companies promote an insider or do they bring in an outsider, and what variables affect that? When a company is failing and there’s a sense that radical change is needed, they’re more likely to bring in an outsider. That was the McKinsey’s finding.

And then, there was another major study of CEO succession and success that had a really interesting finding that aligns exactly with what you’re describing, which is that: outsider CEOs are more likely to fail and they’re more likely to fail precisely because they don’t understand the cultural nuances. And it’s very easy for them to make some change–it might even be changing the logo or changing some taco Tuesday ritual or something–they change something that is a core value, a sacred value of the insiders, and then there is an almost irrational resistance to them that forms.

And so, I tell a story at the end of the book. So, Reddit, the online bulletin board that’s known for its somewhat unfiltered content, got into trouble with a couple of scandals including Gamergate, and they realized that they needed to rein it in somehow. And, they thought, okay, well let’s bring in Ellen Pao, who is a woman with a legal background, which might be helpful and an outsider and a woman–an outsider to the culture in a number of ways–and elevated her to be CEO. And, she decided that she would institute a speech code where she said, ‘We don’t want harassment of any individuals. Just like in the standard First Amendment rule, you can criticize a group, but we don’t want harassment of any individuals.’

And, there were a number of threads on Reddit that basically consisted of harassment of individuals in different categories. Like, one was called Fat People Hate, and it was making fun of overweight people.

And so, you might not think that’s controversial: that maybe we should get rid of that thread. It’s not really serving any social purpose.

But to Redditers, it was controversial because it seemed like censorship. It seemed like top-down censorship. And, the whole value system of Reddit was that it was a bottom-up system. If you post something on Reddit and I like it, I up-vote it, and if I don’t like it, I down-vote it. And then, your post can move its way through up-votes to the front page of the Internet, the front page of Reddit, or it can get down-voted into oblivion. And, it’s all bottom-up; and no Reddit executives are participating in this. It’s all the user base. And that’s the core value. And she violated that core value.

And, immediately there were attacks of all nature. They called her Chairman Pao. There was sexist stuff, there was racist stuff. She did what a good CEO should do, which is to apologize that she hadn’t communicated more clearly. She had used the word ‘safe’-something, and everybody jumped on that because it sounded like the leftist rhetoric of safe spaces as opposed to free speech. And she issued this apology; but the apology was down-voted into oblivion so almost nobody saw her apology. She didn’t really understand the ecosystem that she was a part of.

And so, ultimately there was like a change.com petition that she had to go, and within 24 hours, it had 400,000 signatures. So, she had to go. And, I’m not sure she did anything wrong except that for the local sensibilities, she didn’t do it in the right way.

And then, that same year, there’s a contrasting case that I think is quite interesting, which is: The same year was the year that Mary Barra at GM (General Motors) was elevated to the C-Suite. She was at first the head of HR (Human Relations); and then a few years later, she became CEO, which she still is.

And, when she became elevated the C-Suite, it was right around the time that the company was going bankrupt and all sorts of painful adjustments were going to have to happen.

But, the very first thing that she did was she announced that the legacy dress code at GM–which was something that had grown over time to being, like, a 20-page list of ad hoc rules, most of which were expressed in outdated jargon like pencil skirts and things that we might not even know what they are. And, most of it was about women, although it clearly was written by men. And, everyone hated it, and everyone was a little bit cynical about it. Everyone would shrug and say, ‘Okay. Well, we don’t like it either, but it comes from upstairs and you have to follow this.’

So, she replaced that with a new dress code, which was two words: Dress appropriately.

And, it caused a panic in middle management. They’re, like, ‘Well, how can we stop the assembly line workers from coming in with something obscene on their shirts?’ And, ‘How do we know–people may wear cutoffs.’ But then, she said, ‘Well, it’s up to each division–each unit–to decide what ‘dress appropriately’ means. It may mean something different for the legal division than for the auto body paint division, etc.’

But, she knew the organization really well because she came from a GM family. She had gone to GM University as an undergraduate. She started working at a Pontiac Fender plant when she was 18. So, she really knew the company top to bottom.

And, she knew that this change, even though it was a top-down change was symbolically resonant but non-threatening. It was something that people thought of as a very GM thing, the dress code. But, everyone recognized that it was symptomatic of the inertia and the bureaucracy that was stifling the company and preventing it from being nimble, preventing it from making the changes that needed to be made.

So, it was the right kind of top-down change. It affected everybody. It threatened nobody. It affected everyday life because then people were coming into work dressing differently–including Mary Barra. She dressed very differently than the former CEOs, and it was a breath of fresh air. And, she has ultimately led changes there that no one else has managed in a big three automaker. She recently came out with her–I think it’s the 2040 Vision. And it was: zero emissions, zero accidents, zero–it’s six words, not two.

Michael Morris: Yeah. But, it’s a vision of–and she said, ‘General Motors may stand for general mobility because we’re going to move beyond the motors of the past.’ So, she’s really been able to lead change, and I think she understood that change has to be culturally congruent. You have to change things that people are ready to have changed.

Michael Morris: Well, I think the biggest sin a leader can make is hypocrisy. Guus Hiddink was promoting a more egalitarian team culture. And, he himself is a very informal, you know, Dutchman. He grew up on a farm. He’s from the sort of rural part of the Netherlands that people in Amsterdam make fun of. So, he’s a really down-to-earth guy, and he was promoting a culture that was a down-to-earth culture. And, I think when you’re promoting something and then your own behaviors as a leader don’t rhyme with what you’re saying everyone should do, that’s a problem.

I was just teaching my students–I taught a very intense class that ended last week. And we talked about corporate cultures, and we talked about WeWork as an example that was recent enough that some of them work there, some of them had WeWork as a client, some of them were customers of WeWork. And, I think people all understood that WeWork was an exciting thing to be a part of for a couple of years.

But then, it became apparent that–well, there were some unrealistic financial decision-making going on, or at least bad risks being taken. But then, once austerity was required and the IPO (initial public offering) that people had been counting on, it disappeared, the CEO and a small coterie around the CEO were continuing to live large. Flying across the world to go surfing on the company jet while other people were being fired. And, that didn’t resonate with the rhetoric of community that had been a fairly effective–a corporate culture works really well when it’s also the brand. The brand is what customers see, and the culture is what employees see. And, for both people who are customers coming to WeWork and for employees of WeWork, the promise was: this is more than just a transaction. You’re joining a community that will be a meaningful tribe to you. And, that worked for a couple of years until the hypocrisy became maddening to people.

Michael Morris: Sure. Yeah. I kind of tell the origin story of this because these three instincts evolved in waves, and they built on each other, and they enabled increasingly sophisticated forms of social organization and social living, leading ultimately to the breakaway of our species from other species and the development of cultures of all kinds–national cultures, organizational cultures, professional cultures.

But, all three of them are still with us, and they’re still very recognizable in our daily experience.

So, the peer instinct is your sideways glances at classmates and co-workers and neighbors. It’s your sense of, ‘I should, especially in a moment of ambiguity, match what other people are doing. Oh, people are wearing this this year, I guess I should wear this.’ Or ‘People are buying electric cars, I guess I should buy electric cars.’ And, as you’re probably familiar, a lot of economists have done great studies in recent years of peer effects: that you take a student who is at a mediocre school and they transfer to a higher performing school, they tend to move towards the mean of the new school that they’re a part of. We gravitate towards what those around us are doing.

And, for all of these instincts, they don’t operate all the time. They operate when they are triggered or activated, brought to our active consciousness. And, what triggers peer effects is seeing the other members of our community–seeing our tribe mates, seeing signs of the tribe, artifacts of the tribe. The peer instinct evolved for coordination because they are greater for, like, say, foraging. Foraging works better, whether you’re hunting or gathering, when it’s a coordinated, collaborative group activity as opposed to each person for themselves.

And so, we’re wired that when we see fellow members of our community or we see just the signs of them, those habits come to the surface.

And, one of the more obvious forms of this is what gets called ‘code switching,’ and which we’re hearing about a lot now because of Kamala Harris; and we heard about it a lot when Barack Obama was President. In most parts of the world, this is just taken for granted. When Trudeau in Canada is in front of a French audience, he speaks French, and when he’s in front of an English audience, he speaks English. And, this happens without even a thought. And, for Kamala Harris, she speaks a little bit differently when she’s talking to fellow members of her sorority in Atlanta or talking to a legal group in the Bay Area. It’s a different lexicon that just comes to the surface.

And so, that’s code switching. It is peer codes that are activated by just seeing the audience, which is members of one group that I’m a part of or members of another group that I’m a part of. And, it sort of carries the shared habits of a culture, the sort of taken-for-granted customs. And it allows us to mesh: it allows us to have a seamless collective experience that doesn’t involve a lot of collisions or stepping on each other’s toes or misunderstanding each other. And, that’s the peer instinct. Leaders can dial it up or dial it down by being mindful about the cues in the environment that are signs of this tribe or signs of that tribe.

So, in the case of Guus Hiddink, one of the things that he did is when he wanted his players to learn this new tactical system of Total Football, he decided: Okay, the first stretch for several months of their training camp was at an international soccer facility in the United Arab Emirates, so very far removed from Korea and surrounded by other professional soccer players. Not surrounded by the Korean sports press, for example. And, it sort of brought a different identity to the surface. It brought the identity and the norms of being a professional soccer player, not being a good Korean who is respectful of people who are more senior or people who have been on the team longer–which is a big deal in Korea. It’s embedded in the very language that you have to defer to people who are more senior.

So, that was an example of–I think Hiddink just sort of intuitively–he’s always been understood as a coach who operates more through actions than words. That he just makes adjustments. He tweaks this, he tweaks that, he tweaks that, and then eventually it sinks.

So, he kind of took them out of a Korean setting where they weren’t seeing Korean reporters every day and they weren’t seeing their Korean friends and neighbors after practice, and he put them around international soccer players; and that made them more able to learn this new tactical system that before there had been some defenses and some inhibitions about taking on. So, that’s the peer instinct.

Michael Morris: Yeah. It’s a great question. It points to one of the big distinctions in the book, which is: There are things you can do as a leader to either activate or not activate a cultural identity and a set of cultural habits. And, that’s short term. That’s from one hour to the next, one day to the next.

And then, there are things you can do to evolve a culture, to change the shared ideas in a collectivity, in community. And, that is a process that happens over the months and the years and the decades.

And, the ways in which you change peer codes are different from the ways that you kind of turn them on or turn them off.

So, taking a team out of Korea and putting them in a different–that’s sort of dialing down the intensity of Korean peer codes on their day-to-day experience, but it’s not changing them. To change them is a longer process.

And then, your example of company offsites I think is a great one; and Hallmark is a great example. I’ll have to note that Hallmark is a company that has engaged in cultural invention. I talk about the invention of traditions, which is skipping ahead to the third instinct. But, Hallmark basically reinvented Valentine’s Day, changing all the expectations around it in order to sell mass-produced greeting cards. So, they know a little bit about culture.

But the retreats are kind of–it is silly to think we’re going to–companies use offsites because the office is a cue to the organization’s culture, to the corporate culture. And so, an offsite is somewhat dialing down the ubiquitous influence reminder of: ‘This is how we do things around here.’ And it does allow people to be a little bit more open to other ways of thinking. And, often you’ll have your offsite in a different environment, like: Let’s go to a park, or let’s go to someplace that is very different. Now, circus hats are probably not the best idea. Ropes courses are, I think, a little bit overused.

But, nowadays, we have return to office going on after work from home. And, the reason for that is that when people worked from home, individual productivity metrics went up–you know, people were getting through their personal to-do lists–but collective productivity metrics went down. So, people were not solving problems in a way that involved coordination between, you know, the concerns of the engineering division and the concerns of the marketing division. People were doing what worked locally. And that is an expensive error for organizations.

So, they are realizing they have to bring people back to the office despite all the inconvenience of commuting, because being in the same building helps you be on the same page when you’re engaged in decision-making and when I’m doing something that will affect what you have to do.

So, the office is a cue, and that is mostly a good thing. But, when you want to envision a radical change, you want to take people away from the office so that their thinking is not as channeled by convention. By the convention of that particular organization.

Michael Morris: Yeah. If the peer instinct is our drive to be normal, the hero instinct is our drive to be normative. To be, not just a typical member of the group, but an exemplary member of the group. And to gain the esteem from fellow members of the group and the tribute that comes with being seen as a contributor, a person who is giving to the group.

So, for evolutionists, altruism has always been a bit of a puzzle. Darwin himself struggled to understand the noble savage. How does the noble savage, who is willing to die for his group, ever pass on his genes so that it continues? And, Darwin came up with a theory called group selection that evolutionary theory rejected for a long time, but now it’s come back into vogue.

And, the cultural-evolution people, they all believe in group selection. So, they believe–there’s this set of theories called dual inheritance theory that I think is one of the most influential developments in social science in the last 20 years. And, it basically argues that there is a coevolution between genetic evolution and cultural evolution–that, when cultural evolution moves to a certain point, that creates new selection pressures on genetic evolution, and then genetic evolution changes and that enables new levels of cultural evolution. And so, there’s a spiral between the two forms of evolution that has led to our particular species becoming what it is.

But, the cultural evolution is almost all group selection. That: Our culture evolves something and that helps us as a group do better than other groups, as opposed to helping an individual do better than other individuals.

So, the hero instinct–when we became–when some mutation caused us to be interested in status and yearning to distinguish ourselves and make a contribution and give to the group; and we also at the same time had to develop some way of learning what the group valued. And, we do that largely by looking at who has status.

We have this–we have eyes that are different from most other primates where we can track what another person is gazing at. So, we have an idea of other people’s intentions in a way that other primates don’t.

And, through that, we can see who has status in the group. Because, literally who gets attention? Who is looked at by most other people? So, we know who are the heroes of our community.

And, as academics, we know who the heroes of our discipline are. When we go to a conference, it’s very obvious who is the big shot. At a university we know who the people who are the real citizens, the ones who’ll step up and they’ll serve as Provost when the university is in crisis, and, you know, put their own work on hold to give to the group. And, they gain this kind of clout–that means, you know, that it’s very hard to say no to them if they ask you to do something.

And so, this constellation, this suite of adaptations, I call the hero instinct.

In the academic literature, it’s often called prestige learning–this notion that we look at who has prestige and we emulate what they do. And, it’s considered to be a very adaptive thing because it allowed for innovations to spread.

And, you know, historians will look at different pastoral groups who, you know, raised sheep; and then somebody started raising goats and that person became wealthy. And then, in the next generation, more people were raising goats; and that allows for cultural adaptation.

So, this is a second wave of things. It evolved about half a million years ago, and that’s around the time when you start to see signs of self-sacrificial valor. Where, you know, a wooly mammoth is brought down by a lead spears-person who probably paid the ultimate price, but the group was able to get this large game.

That’s around the time when you start seeing shelters being built, which helps elderly people and weaker people. It’s when you start seeing people with some physical handicaps that live to the age of adulthood, which didn’t exist for earlier humans–so, this giving to others, this sort of pro-sociality manifested in a variety of ways.

And of course, we still experience it today. It explains our interest in CEOs and MVPs (most valuable persons) and politicians and why there are human interest articles in the Wall Street Journal about whether politicians wear boxers or briefs. We want to know what they eat for breakfast.

At the beginning of my career, I did psychoanalysis for a little bit, and I went to a few of these conferences; and I was struck by what a large fraction of the psychoanalysts-in-training had beards, very similar to Freud. And, you would think that it’s a fairly self-aware profession, and they wouldn’t be as prone to this imitation of heroes, but they were. And, in Silicon Valley, there are a lot of tech CEOs who have worn black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs. When in doubt, emulate. We don’t know what it is about Steve Jobs that accounts for his strategic brilliance why not–

Michael Morris: I’ve heard people try to defend it. They’re like, ‘Because he wore the black shirt every day, he didn’t have decision fatigue, and he came into work–‘. People will try to rationalize it. But, yeah. So, we saw in Theranos, the cost of that, which is that I’m imitating, emulating Steve Jobs in the superficial ways, but maybe not in the deeper ways.

Michael Morris: No. That’s the hero instinct, which is a different set of social feelings and a different set of social impulses, different forms of automatic social thinking that–we can deride these things because status-seeking seems like a vain and silly and superficial activity. But, my argument in the book and what I came to believe after studying this stuff for a while, is that these are adaptive instincts that have enabled us to live in large groups and enable us to get over free-rider problems that stop other primates from having large-scale social organization. And, they are things that enable the adaptive forms of social life.

Now, they can be part of the nefarious kinds of tribalism also, but they’re not out of our control, and they’re not some alien thing that’s taken possession of us in the last decade. They’re the essence of humanness.

Michael Morris: Well, I’m a research psychologist and I was–I started my career at Stanford. Amos Tversky was one of my mentors. Danny Kahneman was someone I considered going to work with in graduate school and was a lifelong friend. And, I think Danny’s book, System 1 and System 2 (Thinking, Fast and Slow), I would call them intuition and reason.

And, I would say that intuition drives more than 90% of our thinking and behavior. But, the part that we over-educated types think a lot more about is reason, which is a recently-evolved system that we don’t share with previous humans. And, it is what we have introspective access to and it is what we have more deliberate control over. But, it is a niche system that mostly operates after the fact. Danny called them ‘thinking fast and slow’ because intuition can handle a broader set of informational inputs and can come to an answer much more quickly–you know, before reason has even gotten started.

And so, when I teach my students, I give them lots of demonstrations of that. For example, I will give them a anchoring-bias problem where I say, ‘Do you think the average German car last year cost more than $90,000?’ And then, I’ll ask some other people on the other side of the room, ‘Do you think the average German car costs more than $30,000?’ And then, after answering yes or no to that question, they then make an estimate of what did the average German car cost last year? And, what’s quite interesting is that the people who are asked $90,000, they all say, ‘No. That’s too high.’ But then, when they estimate, they estimate $45-, $50,000. And the $30,000 people say, ‘I think that’s a little low.’ But then, they estimate $35-, $40,000. And so, they’re still anchored by the arbitrary number that has been presented to them.

And then I ask them, ‘Did you try to make a rational estimate?’ These are MBAs (Masters of Business Administration): they’re numbers people. And, they say yes. And, I say, ‘Well, how did you try to make the estimate?’ And, they say, ‘Well, I thought of German cars. I used my knowledge of German cars.’ And so, I turn to the side of the room where they saw $90,000, and I say, ‘Which brand of German cars came to mind?’ And, they say, ‘Mercedes, Audi.’ And then, I turn to the other side and I say, ‘Which brand of German car came to mind?’ ‘Volkswagen.’

So, our rational efforts are already contaminated by intuition. Intuition has already reached a conclusion–unconsciously–before we can even get started.

And, there have been lots of studies with different kinds of professionals like real estate appraisers, who will tell you they’re not at all affected by the list price of the house. Because they have a scientific, bottom-up procedure for coming to it. But, they are incredibly affected. It’s just that when they see a high price for the house, they choose different neighboring houses as the comparable properties, and they count the den as a third bedroom. And, when they see the low price–so we need intellectual humility to really be effective in the world.

I think the economic model is incredibly elegant and it works fairly well to explain behavior in the aggregate because a lot of the intuitive biases offset each other. So, if you’re looking at aggregate behavior, they offset each other and what you get has some approximation–loose approximation–to rationality. But, we don’t have time for the everyday decisions or the crisis decisions to engage in this prospective calculative enterprise. There’s a reason why you have to take an economics class to understand it. It’s not what you’re already doing.

Michael Morris: And then some of the models, like the models of crime, always tickle me because it’s like the shoplifter is calculating the odds of getting caught. I don’t think so. I think there are different things that are bigger levers on the shoplifter’s behavior than evidence about the odds of being caught.

Michael Morris: Agreed. I mean, other social sciences, we admire the rigor of economics and that you guys are not easy on each other and that you want to see the math. And, sociology, you know, is the other side of psychology, and they often just invent phrases. I’ve heard sociology once described as a language with a million words and no sentences–because every new phenomenon, there’s a new construct for, but there’s not necessarily principles that are easy to disconfirm, sometimes.

And, I think that economics has that virtue: that, you may be wrong about some things, but at least we know you’re wrong because you express it clearly enough that we can tell what you believe. So, I understand the game that you’re playing in economics. And, Behavioral Economics is a substantial development of trying to build rigorous formal models that are a little bit more psychologically realistic. And, I think that’s a positive development and good for both fields–the approach to empirical.

Michael Morris: Thank you. Yeah. The final wave of evolution that led to the package of human social instincts is what I call the ancestor instinct. And it’s what supports traditionalism and the inheritance of a body of knowledge from the prior generations.

And, this is something that didn’t exist until the last hundred thousand years or so. But, it really was crucial because once we became wired to be really curious about what the elders are saying and very intrigued by the traces of what past generations were doing, we acquired this collective memory where the wisdom of the past was not lost. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every generation.

And, cultures of human groups started accumulating and sort of tuning themselves to the ecology. And, this was around the time that humans started migrating to all around the world–glacial Europe, the rainforests of Indonesia–and the cultures adapted because there was this borrowing from past generations, selectively. Not borrowing a hundred percent, but borrowing the things–the things that were valuable were not lost.

And, even things that were not useful immediately stayed for a while. So, during the Mini Ice Age, you had times where you would have an ice age for a couple generations and then it would become warm again. And, cultures that knew how to–for example, boat building or fishing–some of these things might be irrelevant for a couple generations; but they were retained because there was a sense the ancestors did this, so we should keep doing it.

And so, our sense of tradition is not so practical. We hold on to things that don’t have immediate practical value. And, that turned out to be a good thing because it means that we can learn crafts that are a little bit beyond our understanding, and we can learn symbolic things like art and religion that maybe don’t have an immediate practical value, but they are bonding. They help the group recognize each other and they help other people find entry into the group.

And so, this was the final piece of the package, the ancestor instinct; and we still have it today. We’re very interested in the founders of our company. We’re very interested in the earliest ancestor. Adam Smith is your ancestor as an economist. I know you wrote a great book about Adam Smith; and some would say that is a form of ancestor worship. And, most cultures of the world still engage in some form of ancestor worship. We engage in oblique forms of ancestor worship: We have an inordinate amount of sentiment for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and the founders of our universities. And, we are very invested in continuity: that there are some aspects of our life that still resemble those of past generations. And, we are prone to exaggerating that. And, people invent traditions–like, Hallmark invented that Valentine’s Day involved giving cards to a hundred of your closest friends, whereas in the past–

Michael Morris: Yeah. So, it is a real paradox that we tend to think of culture as unchanging in part because of our need for continuity and our need to believe that we live in a similar way to our ancestors. But, what the Founders meant by “the pursuit of happiness” is very different from what we think of as the pursuit of happiness. The word ‘happiness’ meant something different to them. And this is–what’s confounding about originalists on the Supreme Court–that they think we have to interpret things the way that the Founders meant. Well then, if so, then really you should study what people really meant at that time, because it’s not what you’re claiming it is.

So, yeah: we both have a need to believe that culture doesn’t change because we want to feel similarity to our ancestors, and that gives us a sense of connection to this tribal tradition. And, it gives us a feeling of indirect immortality, because if something has been constant across many generations, it will probably continue for many generations. And so, when we die, part of us is living on. And so, that’s all part of the ancestor instinct.

Michael Morris: Well, I think it leads to delicious irony where I remember reading about these sort of utopian communities that were founded based on the ideas of B.F. Skinner–that we are blank slates and that everything is immediate reinforcement. And, some of them still live on, but now they worship B.F. Skinner–

Michael Morris: They have, like, statues of B.F. Skinner: you know, so they have a sentiment about their ancestor.

And, a few weeks ago I was on Guy Kawasaki’s podcast and he was involved in the Think Different campaign for Apple, which, you know, rescued Apple from the edge of oblivion. And the idea was: We’re not like these IBM-PC (International Business Machine-Personal Computer) people, these square, Bill Gates-like people. We are Steve Jobs-like, human, liberal-arts types. But, they basically erected a set of cultural heroes: you know: Einstein, you know: Jane Goodall. You know, like, people who were of the right, sort of friendly, Macintosh-friendly-type people; and Steve Jobs obviously at the top of the list.

And so, when you have a counterculture, it’s not like it lacks all of the conformity of a culture. It’s just a different culture. And, there aren’t that many, you know, heroic rebels who are alone in their work. The ones that we know about are the ones that join a community and sometimes adopt ancestors even if they have no direct connection to them.

So, like, radical poets will, you know, say, ‘Oh, but it’s in the spirit of Baudelaire.’ So, they kind of create, retrospectively, a tradition that may not even be what causally led them to a path of creativity–because it adds gravitas, it adds luster, it adds intrigue. We have a mix of emotions about the past, but we feel that it’s more meaningful.

There have been these funny studies where they ask people, ‘Taste this chocolate. It’s a brand that’s three years old.’ Or, ‘Taste this chocolate. It’s a brand that’s 123 years old.’ And then, people describe a different taste experience when it’s 123 years old. ‘There’s a richness, and after-notes of something.’ You know, so, and so, we experience something differently when we think that we are walking in the footsteps of prior generations. (More to come, 1:15:16)