27 Jun Understanding Political Tribalism to “Make America Relate Again”

Face it. You are tribal.

It’s true. “Humans aren’t just a little tribal. We’re very tribal,” writes Yale professor Amy Chua in her recent book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. “We crave bonds and attachments, which is why we love clubs, teams, fraternities, family. . . .

“But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude.”

Blame evolution.

A tribe meant safety for our ancestors. People in the tribe could usually be trusted. People outside the tribe? Usually not.

We all have in-group empathy, even if we don’t want it, even if we don’t want to admit it. Brain scans show that three-month-old babies have a strong preference for faces that look like their own family members. It starts that early.

Intelligence and education don’t protect us from bias.

Our tribes, whatever they happen to be, even influence how we process information. According to a study by Dan Kahan at Yale, people with stronger numeracy skills are more likely to err in the direction of their political predispositions. “The smarter you are with numbers, the more likely you are to manipulate evidence to conform to your group’s core beliefs,” Chua comments.

It goes beyond numeracy. “The better informed people are, and the better educated, the more polarized they tend to be on politically controversial factual issues, and the more stubbornly they manipulate new facts to support their tribe’s worldview.”

No one is exempt.

Ouch. Did we mention that no one is exempt from these tribal tendencies?

Chua paints a fairly bleak picture of America’s political tribalism, but she’s not without hope. We can overcome these tendencies. She writes, “There are signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes,” to “Make America Relate Again. . . .

“This may all seem . . . like a Band-Aid for bullet wounds—but a prodigious body of evidence shows that when individuals from different groups actually get to know one another as human beings, tremendous progress can be made.”

What history can teach us.

Remember Northern Ireland? In 1998, after decades of horrific division and violence (and centuries of religious tension), both parts of Ireland approved the Good Friday Agreement, a significant commitment to peace and stability. Helping make that possible was an international fund established in 1986 supporting thousands of projects across all of Ireland to promote dialogue and joint economic development. Groups working for Israeli-Palestinian peace are looking to the Irish model to likewise build trust between the groups by “humanizing each other through people-to-people dialogue.”

Let’s work on it together

If we can help with your people-to-people dialogue in anyway, please reach out. We would love to be part of the (broader) solution.

We all have to be.

——————————

For a deeper dive into political tribes and hives, check out these articles:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/23/amy-chua-political-tribalism-book-overcome

Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice; go here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mGxJkFVQpI for an introduction to the classic work.

https://www.fca.org.uk/insight/tribes-vibes-and-hives-improving-diversity-through-science

http://www.allmep.org/northern-ireland-as-a-model-for-shared-society-in-israel/