The science behind our built-in “tribe drive”

David R. Samson says humans are hardwired for tribalism. Long ago, humans formed tribes to be able to extend human cooperation beyond small bands and camps. We developed tribal signals to differentiate between “usses” and “thems.” Over time, humans became genetically hardwired to belong to a tribe, and tribes protected us, gave us a sense of belonging and identity, and allowed us to know how to interact with others.

But now, Samson argues in his award-winning book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good, humans are in a state of evolutionary mismatch: in a polarized world, the tribe drive that once ensured our survival now tears us apart and threatens our future.

Kobo: Our Tribal Future is your first book. It’s a departure from your scholarly work, which focuses on sleep. Why were you compelled to write a book about tribes now?

David R. Samson: Around 2015 I had it all. I had financial success. I had romantic success. I had really engaging work. But I was about as depressed as I've ever been.

I was at home one Friday evening watching Netflix and I came across this documentary called Happy that’s all about positive psychology. The fact that humans are social animals was front and centre. And I realized what was missing in my life wasn't the extrinsic factors that drive wellness, it was the intrinsic factors. Having gone along the academic route, I had denied myself a lot of things, including leaving my kith and kin in Southern Indiana's greater Appalachia.

Those things, combined with my growing understanding of the idea of evolutionary mismatch, were the tinder that lit the fire of the book.

For most of the human story, we were living face-to-face in camps and bands. A camp is about 25 to 30 individuals with the shared project of reproduction and survival.

During the process of writing the book, I got married and then my wife got pregnant. I was imagining the lessons I would want to give my son if I weren't here. This book to me is like, boy, I wish I'd had this book growing up as a ballast and a north star to help me stay on course.

In the book you say that humans developed a tribe drive as the uniquely human answer to survival. How so?

DRS: For most of the human story, we were living face-to-face in camps and bands. A camp is about 25 to 30 individuals with the shared project of reproduction and survival. A band is like a neighborhood of these camps. And it was probably at this scale for a vast majority of the human experience. And then, about 300,000 years ago, modern homo sapiens anatomically evolved, and tribes evolve and come onto the scene.

A tribe is an inter-subjective belief network that bootstraps trust amongst strangers. Before this, it was pretty rare that we met strangers. But after, we had to figure out a cheat sheet to be able to know who to trust if we've never met a person before and the offshoots of tribalism kind of got lynch-pinned into our species instinctually. This is what we see in the archaeological record. There's clear evidence of “usses” trading with “thems” across very long distances with unique artifacts.

And that's simply what tribalism is. It's, Hey, we've got a suite of symbols that we emit that are basically like secret codes to those who recognize them, and those who don't recognize them know that they're not their codes. So we know who to preferentially cooperate with based on how we admit these codes in our environment.

We had to figure out a cheat sheet to be able to know who to trust if we've never met a person before.

Because of this, we got really successful. It really starts taking off post-Agrarian Revolution. 10,000 years ago, when we had to figure out how to scale cooperation in these increasingly sedentary and population-dense areas. This is when you start seeing the tribe drive go into overdrive.

Kobo: And now, you say, humans are in a state of “evolutionary mismatch.” What does that mean and why is it important?

DRS: Evolutionary mismatch is the idea that all organisms are evolved for how things were, not how things are. If you aggregate all our genes into an average, they're always playing catch up because the environment's constantly shifting.

Humans evolved for living in camps, bands, and tribes, and that occurred over the span of 1.8 million years. Now we find ourselves in a very precarious situation where our social and technological evolution is increasing at an exponential rate, the change is so fast, we run the risk of getting into mismatch. And mismatch is usually prerequisite to extinction.

Loneliness is predictive of increased broad-based morbidity, it predicts antisocial behavior, and makes it harder for your adult brain to grow and change.

Our diet is in mismatch. We have an environment that has tons of sugars, fats, and oils readily available. We can walk down the street and go to McDonald's and get just for almost no cost. That is a huge mismatch. The evidence is things like chronic disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.

We're also in a state of social mismatch. The U.S. Surgeon General just gave at the end of 2023 an advisory against social isolation. Loneliness is predictive of increased broad-based morbidity, it predicts antisocial behaviour and makes it harder for your adult brain to grow and change, it increases baseline stress, it changes your genes for the worse, so you get a much more anti-inflammatory genetic profile, it predicts drug use and suicide, and negatively influences things like your sleep.

Kobo: So if coming together in tribes is an evolutionary advantage, why is “tribalism” seen as a social problem?

DRS: These days tribalism gets kind of a bad rap because its initial adaptation was one that actually increased cooperation. But it did so at a very great cost. If you don't properly associate as part of the team that somebody is directing their altruism towards, then you can be subject to some of the worst of human behaviors, like genocide and us-versus-them behaviors. One of the biggest challenges we face in the 21st century is political tribalism, which is a weaponized version of the tribe drive.

Kobo: The other idea you explore in the book that I found fascinating is that our tribal identities can alter our perceptions of reality. Can you speak about that?

DRS: This was based on Donald Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality. As an evolutionary biologist, I dedicated my entire life to studying evolution and evolutionary theory. And it was a momentary crisis of identity when I realized I hadn't been studying adaptive perception of reality, not objective reality.

One of the biggest challenges we face in the 21st century is political tribalism, which is a weaponized version of the tribe drive.

The analogy that Donald uses is of a desktop screen. When you're looking at your desktop, the programmers have made the user interface simple and intuitive enough such that you can actually navigate it without having to interact with the ones and zeros within the machine that are doing the computation, the actual reality that is underneath the little imaginary symbols on the screen.

And it turns out evolution has done that for each species. Evolution has created an optimized user interface. And ironically, the more complicated the species, the more distorted the user interface is from actual objective critical reality. Why this is so important is that being untruthful actually can have very positive adaptive fitness consequences. If I'm part of a group and we all believe in something that is objectively false, but that false signal, the more outlandish it is, the greater a signal of allegiance to the group it is.

Kobo: So when a politician makes an easily disproved assertion, it’s not really about the fact of their statement but a signal to other in-group members—“we are the ones who say this”?

DRS: Yes. When you see these signals being used, if you closely inspect them, it's almost always a tribal signal, like a dog whistle. Every masterful politician does this.

Kobo: How do you introduce the idea that aligning to fitness on this particular issue or belief is not going to be in an individual’s best interest?

DRS: It’s tough. When someone who doesn’t believe in global warming says they don't think there's evidence for global warming, what they're actually saying is, “in my local community, it's a social norm and an identifier of the group that this is something we say when we're asked about this.”

When you're part of an identity group, you get status and belonging. But you also start preferentially biasing your group.

When they are doubling down on that signal, why it's so tough is, who's going to be at their parent teacher association meetings? Who's going to take care of their kids? It's the people in their local community. It’s really beneficial to signal alliance with the people in their community.

Kobo: Understanding that we're biologically hardwired towards tribalism is a relief because it provides an explanation for our behaviours. Can we overcome our instincts?

DRS: Instincts can only work if they're unconscious. If you’re fully aware that an instinct exists, it gives you much greater capacity to control it.

We also need to communicate that this drive exists. The science is now rapidly evolving to the point where we're getting some understanding of what's going on under the hood, which is great in terms of trying to figure out how to get beyond this.

But it's a super challenging question because on the one hand, identity is a powerful driver of our sense of wellness. When you're part of an identity group, you get status and belonging. But you also start preferentially biasing your group. One way around this is thinking about how to use the worst parts of tribe-ishness against itself.

If you’re fully aware that an instinct exists, it gives you much greater capacity to control it.

The science is showing that active, open-minded thinking — colloquially called meta-belief, or the belief that beliefs can change — is really powerful in reducing a lot of the biases that are inherent when you identify strongly with a group. The idea would be to make an identity group that adheres to meta-belief as a sacred value and something that is part of their identity.

Kobo: As a society, we don't value and appreciate people who change their minds.

DRS: That's a really good point. In social media and media, it’s two talking heads that are absolutely certain in their positions that get the most eyeballs, but that's unfortunately the worst place to get information.

In their book Superforecasting, Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock wrote that people who are best at predicting the future are characterized by epistemic humility. They're the ones who always speak in confidence intervals, never certainty. If I hear somebody speak in certainty, I don't trust what they're saying.

Kobo: Are there other ways people can overcome tribal instincts?

DRS: Avoid echo chambers at all costs. Our algorithms are designed to throw us into echo chambers because it turns out people get addicted to feeling like they're part of a team. But when it comes to social media, what we need to let people know is that it's a false signal. These algorithms are gamifying this ancient adaptation to a really negative outcome.

If I hear somebody speak in certainty, I don't trust what they're saying.

When the content that you're engaging with makes you agitated, stressed out, angry, disgusted, that disgust is your insular cortex confusing an actual pathogen with a perception of social norm violation. After writing this book and becoming familiar with the sciences, as soon as I feel it, I’m aware that I'm actually tricking myself right now.

I try to take a deep breath and step back and say, Okay, was this challenging the perception of my identity? And nine times out of 10, when we discuss response, identity is somewhere in there. If you become aware of it, you gain so much more purchase over it.

Think about, What can I control? In my own personal life, even though I can sense and feel the tension in society and that it's getting worse, ironically, it's inverse for me as I focus more and more on my local face-to-face networks. My wellness has been increasing significantly even during what many perceive as a very tumultuous moment. ◼

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

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