Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

by Joshua D. Greene

The salvation of humankind is possible, but it’s going to take concerted effort.

- Robert Wright

Sex and death are the gas pedals and brakes of tribal growth. (Gay sex and abortion, for example, are both alternatives to reproduction.) What’s less clear is why different tribes hold different views about sex, life, and death, and why some tribes are more willing than others to impose their views on outsiders.

Contrary to popular lamentation, humans are getting better and better at getting along. Violence has declined over the course of human history, including recent history, and participation in modern market economies, far from turning us into selfish bean counters, has expanded the scope of human kindness.

Many people now believe that no human tribe ought to be privileged over any other, that all humans deserve to have certain basic goods and freedoms, and that violence should be used only as a last resort.

Beyond the marketplace, nearly all human relationships involve give-and-take, and all such relationships break down when one or both parties do too much taking and not enough giving. In fact, the tension between individual and collective interest arises not only between us but within us. As noted above, complex cells have been cooperating for about a billion years. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for some of the cells in an animal’s body to start pulling for themselves instead of for the team, a phenomenon known as cancer.

Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage.

As Steven Pinker observes, the logic of loyalty is particularly clear in the domain of romantic relationships: You’re a great catch, but there is bound to be someone out there who’s got everything you’ve got plus a little more. Knowing that your partner might someday meet such a person, you’d be reassured by the knowledge that your partner isn’t going to leave you as soon as something better comes along. This would make you much more willing to settle down with your partner and start a family—a high-stakes cooperative endeavor if ever there was one. It’s wonderful that your partner fully appreciates your many marketable qualities, but that may not be enough to keep you together. What you really want is for your partner to have a deep, unshakable desire to be with you and you alone. In short, you want your partner to love you, to want you not only for your wonderful qualities but just because you’re you. Only love provides the kind of loyalty you need in order to take the parenting plunge. Thus, love appears to be more than just an intense form of caring. It’s a highly specialized piece of psychological machinery, an emotional straitjacket that enables cooperative parenting by assuring our parenting partners that they won’t be abandoned.

That's why you want a partner who thinks you're special, very special.

According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, humans spend about 65 percent of their conversation time talking about the good and bad deeds of other humans—that is, gossiping. He argues that we devote an enormous amount of time to gossip because in humans gossip is a critical mechanism for social control—that is, for enforcing cooperation. Indeed, the prospect of having “everyone” know what you’ve done gives one a very strong incentive not to do it in the first place. What’s more, it’s not just that people can gossip. Gossip seems to happen automatically. For many people, not gossiping requires great effort.

Most of the time, we talk about other people - gossiping is a form of social control.

A version of the IAT developed for children shows that children as young as six years old have the same kind of race-based biases as adults. And, rather amazingly, an IAT developed for monkeys shows that they, too, exhibit implicit preferences for in-group members, associating good things like fruit with in-group members and bad things like spiders with out-group members.

Racism (as in in-group preferentialism) in monkeys

This suggests that race, far from being an innate trigger, is just something that we happen to use today as a marker of group membership.

Before moving on, I hasten to add that being wired for tribalism does not mean being hardwired for tribalism. Brains can be rewired through experience and active learning. What’s more, our brains include many different circuits that compete for control of behavior, some of which are more modifiable than others.

Racism can be altered with experiences

More specifically, we looked at people’s decision times. Over and over, we found the same pattern. The faster people decided, the more they cooperated, consistent with the idea that cooperation is intuitive

As predicted, forcing people to decide faster made them more cooperative and forcing people to slow down made them less cooperative (more likely to free ride).

Likewise, reflecting on the advantages of careful reasoning (or the disadvantages of intuitive thinking) made people less cooperative.

So deciding fast and intuitively can be bad according to Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow", but can be good (cooperative) in social decisions.

For example, the Hindu prohibition against eating cows may increase the food supply by making cows long-term sources of milk rather than short-term sources of meat. The Protestant work ethic, which combines high productivity with limited consumption, makes more resources available to the community. Even prohibitions against masturbation—a private act if ever there was one—may serve a social function: A cooperative institution such as a church may increase its power by maintaining a monopoly on the blessing of marriages, while blocking alternative routes to sexual gratification.

Really good examples

The most straightforward cause of strife on the new pastures is tribalism, the (often unapologetic) favoring of in-group members over out-group members.

And then there are places like Seoul, where contributions start out moderately high and then rise up to very high levels as free riders get reined in by punishment.

Repeated public goods game with an option to punish - koreans didn't start from high but ended with the highest cooperation amounts after free riders were punished into cooperating. Cute

In this version of the Public Goods Game, cooperators can punish free riders, but free riders can also punish cooperators, a phenomenon known as “antisocial punishment.” In places like Athens, people who didn’t contribute to the common pool often paid to punish those who did. Why would anyone do that? In part, it’s about revenge. Free riders resent being punished by cooperators and strike back. But it can’t be about revenge only because, in some places, low contributors will punish cooperators on the first round! It’s as if they are saying, “To hell with you do-gooders! Don’t even think about trying to make me play your little game!” As shown in figure 3.2, the prevalence of antisocial punishment is an excellent predictor of a group’s failure to cooperate.

Eg, Greece

So who did better, the selfish careerists or the seekers of justice? The surprising answer is that the selfish careerists did better. Bear in mind that the selfish careerists did not succeed by trampling over the seekers of justice. The selfish careerists were negotiating with each other. What Harinck and colleagues found was that two people told to negotiate selfishly were, on average, better at finding win-win solutions than two people told to seek justice. Why is this? Once again, in this set of negotiations, the key to mutual success is for both negotiators to make concessions on the issues that are less important to them, in order make greater gains on the issues that are more important to them. As a selfish negotiator, you’re willing to make these concessions because they result in a net gain.

While compromising (eg in a partnership), make concessions with issues that are not so important to you, so that you can make gains with more important issues.

In a later study, some of the same researchers had Arabs and Israelis watch news coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre. The two groups saw the same coverage, yet both concluded that it was biased in favor of the other side, a phenomenon the researchers dubbed the “hostile media effect.”

Finally, the researchers asked those surveyed for their views on climate change. Contrary to conventional liberal wisdom, the researchers found that scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with slight decreases in the perceived risk of climate change. But the real story emerges when you sort people into tribes. The egalitarian communitarians, as expected, reported perceiving great risk in climate change, but within that group there was no correlation between scientific literacy/numeracy and perceived risk. Likewise, the hierarchical individualists were, as expected, skeptical about the risks of climate change, and within this group, those who were more scientifically literate/numerate were somewhat more skeptical about the risks of climate change. (This is why higher scientific literacy/numeracy was, overall, associated with more skepticism about climate change. The overall effect was driven by the effect within the hierarchical-individualist group.) But overall, scientific literacy and numeracy were not very good predictors of people’s beliefs about the risks of climate change. Instead, their beliefs were well predicted by their general cultural outlooks—by their tribal memberships (see figure 3.3).

Climate skeptics are individualists living in communities with other skeptical individualists around them and this, not scientific reasoning, is the reason for their not believing.

The people polled in this study were not climate science experts. They were ordinary U.S. adults whose scientific literacy and numeracy scores formed a bell curve around the mean for U.S. adults. While there is widespread disagreement about climate change among nonexperts, there is, once again, overwhelming consensus among experts that climate change is real and that the risks are serious. The lesson, then, is not that it’s all “relative” or that there’s no way to cut through the cultural clatter and find out the truth about climate change. Nor is the lesson that ordinary people are, in general, hopeless slaves to tribal prejudice. On the contrary, when it comes to most issues, people of all tribes are perfectly happy to accept the advice of experts. (People’s views about treating psoriasis are not well predicted by their tribal allegiances.) Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched—once they’ve become tribal badges of honor—are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people. In 1998, Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to believe that climate change is already under way. Since then, the scientific case for climate change has only gotten stronger, but the views of Republicans and Democrats have diverged sharply, to the point that in 2010, Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to believe in the reality of climate change. This didn’t happen because Republican scientifi...

Oddly enough, the escalation of force in this experiment seems to be related to your inability to tickle yourself. When you perform an action, your brain automatically anticipates the sensory consequences of the action and uses that information to damp down the sensory effects of the action. As a result, self-produced sensations are less salient than sensations produced by another person. (I know what you’re thinking, and, yes, that’s correct.)

Aha.. :) best moment reading this book! Yes, I was thinking the same.

We gave our doctors and public health professionals the opportunity to comment on their decisions, and their comments were very revealing. For example, one public health professional wrote, “In these extreme situations . . . I felt that a utilitarian . . . philosophy was most appropriate. Ultimately that is the most moral thing to do. . . . It seems the least murky and the most fair.” In contrast, a medical doctor wrote, “To make a life-or-death decision on behalf of someone who is capable of making that decision for themselves (and who has not forfeited that right, for example by knowingly committing a capital crime) is a gross violation of moral and ethical principles.” The voices of Mill and Kant, speaking from beyond the grave.

Public health professionals gave more utilitarian answers, doctors more individualistic answers.

We’ll see how the dual-process theory of moral judgment described in the last chapter fits into a broader understanding of our dual-process human brains. In nearly every domain of life, our success depends on both the efficiency of our automatic settings and the flexibility of our manual mode. (For a superb, book-length treatment of this idea from its most influential proponent, see Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.)

Ah ok, it fits with Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow

There are animals that have emotions while lacking the capacity to reason (in our sense), but there are no reasoning animals that do not also have motivating emotions. Although not everyone agrees, I think it’s clear that reasoning has no ends of its own, and in this sense reason is, as Hume famously declared, a “slave of the passions.” (“Passions” here refers to emotional processes in general, not exclusively to lusty feelings.)

Reasoning is based on emotional info as well (not ony logic or something), e.g Phineas Cage with the frontal lobe injury that made him not have proper emotional behaviour also did bad or nonsensical decisions where he needed (logical) reasoning. Our emotions help us do reasonable decisions.

And once again, this advice, this gut feeling, may precede any conscious awareness of what’s good or bad and why. This explains why people with VMPFC damage make disastrous real-life decisions, despite their good performance on standard laboratory reasoning tests. They “know,” but they don’t “feel,” and feelings are very helpful.

One answer is that there is no right answer. Some tribes do it one way, others do it another way, and that’s all there is to say. This is the answer of the proverbial “moral relativist.”* The problem with the relativist’s answer is that, practically speaking, it’s not really an answer. The relativist might be right about something important. Maybe, as the relativist says, there is no ultimate moral truth. However, even if that’s correct, people must nevertheless live one way or another. The relativist may not want to choose, but someone must choose. And if the relativist refuses to choose, that, too, is a choice, reflecting a kind of judgment against judging. Even if the relativist is right about the nonexistence of moral truth, there is no escape from moral choice. If retreating into relativism is no answer, then what is? Here’s a natural thought: Maybe the herders should simply do whatever works best. If individualism works better than collectivism on the new pastures, then go with individualism. And if collectivism works better, then do the opposite. If a strict code of honor keeps the peace, then let us foster a culture of honor. And if honor culture leads to endless feuding, let us not. And so on.

There is a way to measure if something moral is good or bad - look at the results, does it bring good or bad?

One can imagine a society that is highly economically productive but in which everyone is miserable. Is that a good society? If the consequences that really matter aren’t economic consequences per se, then what does really matter? We might begin by asking ourselves what we want from economic productivity. Once again, if we’re all miserable, our wealth is apparently not doing us any good. On the flip side, if we’re all happy, you might say that it doesn’t matter whether we’re rich or poor. Thus, a natural thought is that what really matters is our happiness. Not everyone agrees with this conclusion, but it is, at the very least, a reasonable place to start. If we combine the idea that happiness is what matters with the idea that we should try to maximize good consequences, we get utilitarianism.

The founding utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were not just armchair philosophers. They were daring social reformers, intensely engaged with the social and political issues of their day. Indeed, many familiar social issues became social issues because Bentham and Mill made them so. Their views were considered radical at the time, but today we take for granted most of the social reforms for which they fought. They were among the earliest opponents of slavery and advocates of free speech, free markets, widely available education, environmental protection, prison reform, women’s rights, animal rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, the right to divorce, and the separation of church and state. Bentham and Mill were unwilling to accept moral business as usual. They refused to accept practices and policies as right simply because of tradition, or because they seemed intuitively right to most people, or because it was “the natural order of things.” Nor did the founding utilitarians appeal to God to justify their moral ideas. Instead, they asked the kinds of questions that we asked above: What really matters, and why? By what standard can we evaluate our actions and policies, without begging the questions we’re trying to answer? On what grounds, for example, can one say that slavery is wrong? Bentham and Mill couldn’t appeal to God because their proslavery opponents thought they had God on their side. Even if the founding utilitarians had wanted to appeal to God, how could they show ...

Likewise, consider one who volunteers at a homeless shelter, not because she particularly enjoys it, but because she thinks it’s important to help others who are less fortunate. This sounds more like “helping others,” “charity,” or “social responsibility” than happiness. But again, our volunteer presumably hopes to increase these poor people’s prospects for living a good life, and their living a good life presumably includes being happy and contributing to the happiness of others.

If our goal is to maximize happiness, lifting people out of misery is generally more important than placing cherries atop people’s sundaes. But when we think of “happiness,” we’re more likely to think of cherries than homeless shelters.

This is the central idea behind the utilitarian conception of happiness. Happiness is not (just) ice cream and warm summer evenings at the lake house. One’s happiness is the overall quality of one’s experience, and to value happiness is to value everything that improves the quality of experience, for oneself and for others—and especially for others whose lives leave much room for improvement.

For now, what I want to convey is twofold: First, the utilitarian conception of happiness is very broad, encompassing all positive aspects of experience as well as the removal of negative aspects. This is what we mean by “happiness.” Second, in light of this, it’s not unreasonable to think of happiness as occupying a special place among our values, as more than just another item on the list. Unlike the most ardent utilitarians, I don’t think that happiness is the one true value. Instead, what makes happiness special—and this is Bentham and Mill’s real insight, in my opinion—is that happiness is the common currency of human values.

As Barbara Frederikson has argued in her “broaden and build” theory of positive emotion, the things that we find pleasurable are often things that build resources. Tasty food provides nutritional resources. Spending time with friends builds social resources. Learning builds cognitive resources. It seems that Mill’s “higher pleasures” are pleasures derived from activities that build durable and shareable resources.

The utilitarian is not, as you might expect, necessarily on the side of the collectivists. Nor is she necessarily an individualist. Our splendid idea is for herders of all tribes to put aside their respective ideologies and instead figure out what actually works best—what actually maximizes happiness—on the new pastures. And what works best may turn out to be more individualistic or more collectivist. Figuring out what works best requires putting our prejudices aside and instead gathering and evaluating evidence about how various policies and practices fare in the real world.

The Tragedy of the Commons is averted by a suite of automatic settings—moral emotions that motivate and stabilize cooperation within limited groups. But the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality arises because of automatic settings, because different tribes have different automatic settings, causing them to see the world through different moral lenses. The Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy of selfishness, but the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is a tragedy of moral inflexibility. There is strife on the new pastures not because herders are hopelessly selfish, immoral, or amoral, but because they cannot step outside their respective moral perspectives. How should they think? The answer is now obvious: They should shift into manual mode.

Dear Dr. Laura, Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them? I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her? I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19–24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians? I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:...

A letter to all christians who condemn homosexuality because the bible says so. :)

If we’re right, morality evolved to promote cooperation, but that’s not the whole story. Once again, morality evolved (biologically) to promote cooperation within groups for the sake of competition between groups.* The only reason that natural selection would favor genes that promote cooperation is that cooperative individuals are better able to outcompete others. This highlights a more general point about the function of morality, which is that its ultimate function, like that of all biological adaptations, is to spread genetic material. Evolution is not aimed at promoting cooperation per se. It promotes cooperation only insofar as cooperation helps propagate the genes of the cooperators.

As you now well know, I believe that the values behind utilitarianism are our true common ground. Once again, we herders are united by our capacity for positive and negative experience, for happiness and suffering, and by our recognition that morality must, at the highest level,** be impartial. Put them together and our task, insofar as we’re moral, is to make the world as happy as possible, giving equal weight to everyone’s happiness.

The manual mode doesn’t come with a moral philosophy, but it can create one if it’s seeded with two universally accessible moral values: happiness and impartiality. This combination yields a complete moral system that is accessible to members of all tribes.

Consider, for example, the analogous dilemma we face as we try to eat a healthy diet. As a perfectly healthy eater, you would identify the healthiest possible set of foods and consume only those foods, in precisely optimal quantities. If you were to maintain a perfect diet, chances are you would never eat your favorite foods, not even on your birthday. You would travel with bundles of optimal food, because, odds are, optimal food will not be available wherever you’re going. Upon receiving a dinner invitation from a friend, you would either decline, eat before, eat after, or bring your own optimal food. (BYOOF!) You would never take a date to a restaurant, or you would only take someone to restaurants that serve optimal food. And so on. If you were a food-consuming computer, maintaining an optimal diet might be a realistic goal. But as a real person with limited time, money, and willpower, trying to maintain a physiologically optimal diet is not, in fact, optimal. Instead, the optimal strategy is to eat as well as you can, given your real-world constraints, including your own psychological limitations and including limitations imposed on you as a social being. This is challenging because there’s no magic formula, no bright line between the extremes of perfectionism and unbridled gluttony. To be the healthiest that you can actually be—not in principle, but in practice—you have to set reasonable goals, which will inevitably be somewhat arbitrary, and then work reasonably hard...

There clearly are things you can do that relieve a lot of suffering while requiring comparably little sacrifice on your part. How much sacrifice should you make? Again, there’s no magic formula, and it all depends on your personal circumstances and limitations. There’s a social dimension to the problem that may, in the long run, favor strong efforts over heroic ones. Your life is a model for others, especially your children (if you have children). If you improve the lives of hundreds of people every year through your charitable donations, but your life remains happy and comfortable, you’re a model that others can emulate. If, instead, you push yourself to just shy of your breaking point, you may do more good directly with your personal donation dollars, but you may undermine the larger cause by making an unappealing example of yourself. Promoting a moderate, sustainable culture of altruism may, in the long run, do more good than pushing yourself to your personal limit. Heroes who make enormous sacrifices for others are “inspiring,” but when it comes to motivating real-world behavior, research shows that the best way to get people to do something good is to tell them that their neighbors are already doing it.

The more general point is this: If what utilitarianism asks of you seems absurd, then it’s not what utilitarianism actually asks of you. Utilitarianism is, once again, an inherently practical philosophy,

Humans evolved to live lives defined by relationships with people and communities, and if our goal is to make the world as happy as possible, we must take this defining feature of human nature into account.

All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our best interests?

Instead, utilitarianism asks only that we push ourselves to be morally better, to care more than we do about people beyond our immediate circles. Utilitarianism doesn’t ask us to be morally perfect. It asks us to face up to our moral limitations and do as much as we humanly can to overcome them.

The first problem is Me versus Us. This is, once again, the basic problem of cooperation, the Tragedy of the Commons. Our moral brains solve this problem primarily with emotion. Feelings of empathy, love, friendship, gratitude, honor, shame, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, and embarrassment impel us to (sometimes) put the interests of others ahead of our own. Likewise, feelings of anger and disgust impel us to shun or punish people who overvalue Me relative to Us. Thanks to these automatic settings, we do far less lying, cheating, stealing, and killing than we otherwise could, and that enables Us to succeed.

Our moral emotions—our automatic settings—are generally good at restraining simple selfishness, at averting the Tragedy of the Commons. That’s what they were designed to do, both biologically and culturally. Thus, when the problem is Me versus Us (or Me versus You), we should trust our moral gut reactions, also known as conscience: Don’t lie or steal, even when your manual mode thinks it can justify it. Cheat on neither your taxes nor your spouse. Don’t “borrow” money from the office cash drawer. Don’t badmouth the competition. Don’t park in handicapped spots. Don’t drink and drive. And do express your contempt for people who do such things. When it’s Me versus Us, trust your automatic settings. (The moral ones, not the greedy ones!)

Most controversial real-world moral problems, such as global warming and healthcare reform, are very complicated. Nevertheless, people without expertise on these topics have strong opinions about them. In an ideal world, we’d all transform ourselves into experts and make judgments based on extensive knowledge. Given that this will never happen, our next best option is to emulate the wisdom of Socrates: We become wiser when we acknowledge our ignorance.

Sometimes the smartest thing is to admit you don't know enough