Tribal - by Michael Morris

Older generation of scholars presumed that cultural landscapes were permanent fixtures. Psychology compared individual traits. These approaches reduced cultures to stable patterns - age-old institutions or fixed character traits. However cultural patterns - of societies and of individuals - are in flux. Generations develop new lifestyles through selective retention of their parents’ ways and heightened borrowing from other traditions. Individuals migrate more than ever but not always assimilating - instead, maintaining multiple cultural worldviews that they switched between situationally.

It was not simply collective institutions or individual psychologies that determined culture, but the interplay between them. Cultural institutions shape the individual’s mind, and the individual’s mind shapes cultural institutions. Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined. This fusion of anthropology and psychology has produced a new science called “cultural psychology.”

Scholars study cultural groups - from clans to corporations to nations - investigating cognitive structures, social structures, biases, and behaviors. Cultural patterns are mutable and malleable. With the right tools, we can harness them. Like soccer coach Hiddink’s method of unlocking talent through selectively evoking and adjusting cultural patterns.

People tend to construe cultural patterns as unchangeable: “gun culture in Texas,” or “drug culture in Hollywood” or art “runs in the blood” of Italians. But people’s cultural conditioning and convictions change over time. We internalize new cultural identities and codes with every new community we join. Someone who joined the army or an ashram acquire a fresh identity and outlook.

People switch between their multiple cultural mindsets situationally. Cultural selves take turns.

If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree, you would learn by watching, and soon the whole group would share the skill. In this way, groups living in different ecologies developed different pools of knowledge: different cultures. Surviving through sharing knowledge in these groups is tribal living.

We are tribal. Latin term tribus: the cultural and regional groups that made up ancient Rome. Only during the era of colonialist expansion did “tribe” take on pejorative connotations of primitivism. As anthropology developed, the tribe concept came to be used very broadly.

A culture evolves as some elements are learned and others are overlooked as the rising generation re-creates the society. Customs associated with success and status are more likely to be learned and passed on.

Three characters inside every person: Conformist seeks belonging and understanding. Contributor dreams of esteem and tribute. Traditionalist cherishes continuity. Once all three tribal instincts were in place, in the last hundred thousand years, our forebears began to thrive and to live in recognizably human ways.

Big brains evolved for mastery of the social environment, not mastery of the physical environment.

Social judgments are handled by different parts of the brain than judgments about the physical world.

Everyone in the group knows it. It’s what “we” do. It contributes to similarity within the in-group and distinctiveness from out-groups, heightening feelings of connection and loyalty. Because I know that they know it, I can anticipate their moves, and understand their intentions.

We are less alone than other primates because we carry around our peers in our heads. Continually reminded of what others in our group tend to do or think. We are kept company - and sometimes feel suffocated - by the steady stream of suggestions from our unconscious about what’s normal to think, normal to do, or normal to say in a situation.

The psychological processes of the peer instinct - attention to peers, mind reading, learning from observation, conformist motivations - are the underappreciated foundation of human culture. We internalize a cluster of peer codes for each cultural community we belong to. Those codes guide us toward socially safe actions. It’s why your mannerisms at church are different than at the gym. It’s why crypto investments go suddenly from boom to bust.

Lee Kuan Yew was impressed that British citizens abided the law because they believed that everyone else did too (the faith in “rule of law”). Lee believed that his fellow Singaporeans remembered the British rule-based approach. With the right cues, these memories could be reawakened. White cotton uniforms became the dress of all government officials. Lee also reinstated English as the language of government business. The changed sights and sounds cued the free port norms, backed by anti-corruption laws and role models of rectitude. Over time the change became contagious. There was less reason for merchants to offer bribes when they saw that their peers were no longer doing it. Within a decade, Singapore had become the “cleanest” business environment in the world.

People’s perceptions that “almost everybody does it” precipitate their own corrupt behaviors.

Peer instinct: the cue is presence of tribemates, or ambient signs of the tribe. Minor details in a setting that are diagnostic of a culture can trigger us, but it’s hard to recognize because it happens unconsciously. Signs of a tribe are powerfully evocative, but only for insiders to the culture.

I usually traced a person’s success or failure to character traits and credited or blamed the person accordingly. My Chinese friends tended to refer to more contextual pressures on the actor - whether from family, friends, or coworkers - and shared credit or blame with these groups surrounding the central figure.

In the early 1990s, psychology experiment evidence from outside of Western settings scarcely existed. Culture wasn’t considered to be relevant to basic processes like cognitive biases.

We interpret the same activity through different cultural lenses. Attributions of causality and the narratives that followed. This perception-warping power of cultures comes primarily from peer codes. The biggest difference was their perception of their peers’ beliefs. Differing views of peers accounted for their differing biases in explanations for behavior.

Code-switching among bilinguals: People told slightly different narratives and answered questions differently when interviewed in English as opposed to when interviewed in Japanese. Bicultural individuals switch automatically rather than deliberately. They would explain behavior in the Western way when that culture was cued and would explain behavior in the Eastern way when that culture was cued. Switching cultural frames reflexively without any awareness of the cues triggering them.

People can be fully at home in two or more cultures. Those who feel their two identities to be compatible tend to mesh with the cues of a setting (like chameleons). Those who feel identity conflict tend to resist the peer cues (like contrarians).

Preverbal infants are oblivious to race, but they prefer strangers who speak their mother’s language (and accent).

In Western societies, racial characteristics align with major cultural fault lines, but this is not true in much of the world. Skin color and facial features don’t reliably distinguish Russians from Ukrainians, Palestinians from Jews, or Hutus from Tutsis. Language and attire are the primary cues for tribes other than ethnic groups. For bankers, surfers, or hipsters, it’s how a person talks and dresses that marks them as one of the tribe and triggers in-group codes when interacting with them.

Lee Kuan Yew declared English the language of government in Singapore. He felt a language of the ethnic groups - Chinese, Malay, and Indian - would lend itself to favoritism, so better to use an external lingua franca.

Dress triggers peer codes: Army fatigues triggers military habits like discipline and obedience. Nurses who wear uniforms adhere to protocols more than non-uniformed nurses. EMTs uniforms cue shared frameworks and protocols that enable coordinated work. Undercover agents adopt the attire of the networks they infiltrate, and sometimes start to identify with the criminals they have been sent to spy upon.

Imagine that you are driving to a countryside inn. Your car’s navigation system suggests a path to your destination - a well-traveled route that most drivers take. But you prefer scenic back roads, or might try a shortcut. Now imagine you’re leading a convoy of wedding guests to the inn: You prefer a route that is certain and clearly understandable, so no one gets lost. Peer instinct prompts you toward paths that are normal or typical for your group. When we want to be original, we ignore its advice. But when we crave certainty and understandability, we tend to follow the peer-code path. Pressure heightens conformity.

Immigrants: if settled in a group from their heritage country, adhered more to the heritage-country customs.

Peer instinct: what most people do. Hero instinct: what the most respected people do. Contributing to a community requires noticing what behaviors its members approve and admire.

Altruism pays off because friends reciprocate in your hour of need. If members of a community evaluate each other’s behaviors, share these judgments with others, and treat people according to their reputations, then prosociality helps reproductive prospects and would be selected for.

We volunteer for service positions in our community to gain approval and respect. We work hard to make a name for ourselves in our fields as it “opens doors” for us professionally. We engage with others or avoid them based on their reputations.

To discern what the community admires and desires, it’s hard to learn by observing or asking each person. A handy shortcut is focusing on the behavior of those members with most status. Individuals with high status exemplify qualities that the community appreciates. They are beacons that show us paths to public approval.

Emulating heroes is why there’s clickbait about what CEOs eat for breakfast, wears boxers or briefs.

Instead of just motivation to act normally, we look for exemplary ways to contribute to the good of the group. Motivating our aspirations to gain skills, uphold ideals, and distinguish ourselves.

People hold noble ideals but don’t always live up to them. Ideals become buried in our minds under the clutter of everyday tasks and selfish concerns. Part of a minister’s role is to rouse people’s higher selves and lift their ideals to the fore of their minds.

Rituals reduce anxiety by asserting control over dangers. Funeral rites that assert control over death by ushering the deceased’s soul to the afterlife.

Tradition serves our need for continuity. Threats to tribal mortality: Changes can threaten the continuity of their tradition. Majority groups, who think of a country as “their land,” feel threatened by rising populations of minority cultures and immigrants. They respond defensively with rash efforts to lock in and defend their traditions.

“Undecided”s tend to gravitate toward the majority stance on an issue - they go with what the average believes.

Victorian photographs: grim expressions were a practical necessity. Portrait sitters used to say the word “prunes” to achieve the standard pressed-lip look. Photography was regarded as an ordeal best left to professionals. Kodak realized it needed to change the cultural assumptions around photography. It introduced a cheap, user-friendly camera as a loss-leader product. Kodak donated cameras to schools, Scout troops, and YMCAs to hook the youth. Taught tricks for evoking smiles: asking adults to say “cheese”. Americans began to see others smiling for the camera. Smiling became an acceptable practice, which gave more people license to try it, and this put more smiling photographs into circulation. Through this cycle of changed perceptions and changed behavior, smiling became the standard thing to do and then even the obvious thing to do. Nowadays we do it as a reflex, on autopilot.

A minority faction consistent in its views (e.g., several participants calling a shade of blue “green”) influences their peers. Their behavior prompts a third of participants to see the stimulus that way at least once. People “try out” alternative beliefs and practices suggested by peers, even if they are not sure that they will embrace them permanently.

In the book Private Truths, Public Lies: Considered peer perceptions in the fall of the Soviet Union - an event that caught most of its citizens by surprise. Why didn’t they see it coming? For decades, the Kremlin had repressed dissent. Citizens tended to praise the system in public even if they harbored doubts in private. Discontent known only through vague rumors, not covered in the news.

Street protests are called “demonstrations” because they reveal the prevalence of a belief otherwise unseen.

Society’s understanding of itself often lags behind progressive change in its members’ private attitudes, as attitudes are not directly observable. Many citizens are loath to express their liberalized attitudes in public, for fear of offending more traditional neighbors. But this reticence perpetuates the community’s inaccurate self-understanding and its exclusionary behavior.

For definitive social change, it’s not enough to change many individuals’ private attitudes about an issue. There also must be change in their perception of the societal consensus. Getting the public to recognize a consensus that they have long overlooked requires overcoming skepticism with multiple types of evidence.

Counterproductive support group: Month-long retreat for women with disordered eating at a spa-like setting in Europe. Did people’s eating habits change? Yes, she said, some of the bulimics became anorexic. ☺

To encourage a behavior, don’t emphasize how many people currently aren’t doing it. Political campaigns used to try to shame voters about low turnout: “Only one in three Americans voted in the last election.” But this message informs you that your peers are not bothering to vote - so why should you?

Hippocrates oath was not part of medical training for most centuries since. It was adopted in modern times once physicians sought to separate themselves from bloodletters and barbers and needed a distinguished ancestor. Medical societies appropriated the white lab coat of scientists around this time too.

Connections to the ancient past infuse an activity with meaning and legitimacy. Any history that we tell is very selective in its focus and thus never definitive. Official histories are strategic in what they include and what they elide. By emphasizing parts of the past that are analogous to their favored plan, leaders rationalize it as obligated by a binding precedent. Christianity spread through Europe by scheduling its holy days around prior pagan rituals (e.g., Christmas came at the time of Yule, and Easter incorporated the eggs of spring fertility rites). The US kept the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack. “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” followed the tune of “God Save the Queen”. “Star-Spangled Banner” followed a familiar drinking song.

Complaints of “cultural appropriation”: People guard their traditions vigilantly because, as we’ve seen, traditions are quite malleable and hence vulnerable. Cultural groups with less power over global media and discourse are particularly vulnerable to distortion of their tradition.

UNESCO was founded to recognize and preserve the world’s cultural heritage sites. But the problem is that UNESCO’s stamp puts a site on every tourist’s “bucket list.” Foot traffic is “ruining the ruins”. It saved decaying buildings but displaced their inhabitants, centuries-old homes becoming postcard shops. Residents don’t want to live in a theme park. Wealthy regimes succeed in lobbying for certification more often than poor nations, leading to a highly Eurocentric representation of the world’s cultural heritage.

Pace of life is encoded at many different cultural levels: in shared habits like a brisk walking speed, in collective ideals like administrative efficiency, in traditions like relying on public clocks. In other words, it involves peer codes, hero codes, and ancestor codes.

Bottom-up progression of change - from ordinary people’s daily habits to collective ideals shared in the media and finally to public traditions and institutions - is called a “grassroots” movement.

Abrupt institutional changes (independence and stiff anti-corruption laws) set the stage for the signaling of ideals. Lee Kuan Yew’s modeling of austerity and incorruptibility and then the triggering of “free port” habits (through English and white uniforms). These are top-down progressions from institutions to ideals to habits. This strategy is often called “shock therapy” because institutional change disrupts a group’s equilibrium, allowing for the coalescence of new ideals and habits.

If most nurses are women, we jump to the value judgment that most nurses should be women.