Michael Morris on Why We Divide and How to Reconnect | EP 628

In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Michael Morris, a leading cultural psychologist and professor at Columbia University, to explore the psychology of tribalism and belonging. Drawing from his new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, Michael explains how three evolutionary instincts—the Peer, Hero, and Ancestor Instincts—drive our group behavior, shape identity, and influence leadership. The conversation unpacks how these instincts manifest in politics, corporate culture, and social movements—and how understanding them can help us bridge divides, build trust, and lead intentional change. Whether you’re managing a team, navigating conflict, or trying to understand your own biases, this episode offers a powerful lens for personal and collective transformation. Visit THIS link for the full shownotes! Go Deeper: The Ignited LifeIf this episode stirred something in you, The Ignited Life is where the transformation continues. Each week, I share behind-the-scenes insights, science-backed tools, and personal reflections to help you turn intention into action.🔗 Subscribe at TheIgnitedLife.net and get the companion resources delivered straight to your inbox. Catch more of Michael Morris: https://business.columbia.edu/faculty/people/michael-morrisIf you liked the show, please leave us a review—it only takes a moment and helps us reach more people! Don’t forget to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally. How to Connect with John:Connect with John on Twitter at @John_RMilesFollow him on Instagram at @John_R_MilesSubscribe to our main YouTube Channel and to our YouTube Clips ChannelFor more insights and resources, visit www.passionstruck.com. Connect with John Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Book John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Keynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it. DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Every generation thinks things are falling apart. It's incumbent on us to not despair and not engage in mystical fatalism about our problems, instead to try to understand them as best we can and understand what levers we have and how we can go about remediating the problems. And at the same time, problems are dramatic and they dominate our attention. The good things that happen as a result of our tribal motivations happen at a more tacit implicit level and we don't stop to think about them very much.

• 0:38John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck.

• 1:20John R. Miles?

  Welcome to episode 628 of Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles, and this is the show where we ignite change from the inside out, so you can live life with more intention, meaning, and connection. All month, we've been exploring the connected life, what it means to build real relationships, lead with emotional intelligence, and thrive in a culture that often pulls us apart. Last Tuesday, in episode 625, we covered the neuroscience of craving and connection with Dr. Anna Lomki. And then on Thursday, we explored the art of unforgettable communication with Bill McGowan. And on Friday, in my solo episode, I shared the React Method, a five-step toolkit to

• 2:04John R. Miles?

  stay grounded and connected even in moments of emotional fire. Today, we're going Going even deeper because one of the most powerful but often overlooked forces that shapes how we connect is our tribal instinct. Whether it's our families, workplaces, political parties, or even fandoms, we are wired to find belonging. But in a world that feels increasingly divided, is tribalism a problem? Or could it be part of the solution? My guest today is Dr. Michael Morse, the Shafkin Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School and one of the world's foremost experts on cultural psychology.

• 2:44John R. Miles?

  He's advised presidential campaigns, Fortune 100 companies, and global leaders on how culture shapes cognition and how our social instincts shape the future. In his new book, Tribal, Michael makes a compelling case. The instincts that divide us can also unite us. In today's episode, we explore why tribalism isn't just about division. It's about meaning, memory, and movement. We go into the three core instincts driving human behavior: the peer, the hero, and ancestor instincts. We discuss how these forces shape everything from corporate culture to political identity, and how we can lead more intentionally by understanding the groups that shape us and

• 3:29John R. Miles?

  the ones that we shape in return. This conversation will shift the way you think about culture, leadership, and the human need to belong. Before we dive in, if you're looking to go deeper than just listening, join me each week on The Ignited Life. It's where I share behind the scenes reflections, practical tools, and weekly challenges to live what you're learning here. You can find it at theignitedlife.net. And if you want to see this conversation or explore past episodes, check out our YouTube channel at John R. Miles and our clips channel at Passion Struck Clips. They're all designed to fuel your journey to intentional living. Now, let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Morse.

• 4:11John R. Miles?

  Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:25John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled and honored today to bring Dr. Michael Morse to you on Passion Struck. Welcome, Michael.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure to be here, John. Thanks for having me.

• 4:37John R. Miles?

  Today, we're going to be doing a deep dive on the topic of your book, Tribal. Its subtitle is How the Culture Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. It came out in October, and I must say, you have a laundry list of endorsements I think most authors would just die for. So congratulations on its release and the endorsements that you got for the book.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. It's a sort of cringey experience to write to people in your field and ask them to endorse a book that they probably don't have time to read, but at least a few of them were willing to do so. I was happy to see that.

• 5:16John R. Miles?

  You know, it is something that is discomforting, I have to say. The first person outside of my publisher, who I sent the book to because I needed a lead endorsement with Seth Godin. And I was so nervous, I can't even tell you because of the rejection I thought I was going to get. And not only did I not get a rejection, he loved it and said, could I be your lead endorsement? Because this book needs to get out there. I think the problem most people do is they get so concerned of the no that they never ask. So I'm so glad that you asked. I am so glad that I asked.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I dragged my feet a lot when I was first told to do it because composing those letters, it feels you become very self-conscious. But I think a lot of people, they do want to be an advocate for books other than their own, and they do want to lend their particular insights about a book. So I think a lot of people who've written a couple of books, they think of themselves as thought leaders or intellectual brokers who can help curate the new ideas coming out and help audiences find books and books find audiences. So I'm grateful for people who put their energy into it. The person who became my lead recommendation is a guy named Adam Grant, who I have unlimited respect for

• 6:34Speaker 01

  because he seems to be able to simultaneously be a top behavioral science researcher and to be a New York Times columnist and to be an award-winning teacher and to write blurbs for so many books each month. I don't know how he does it.

• 6:51John R. Miles?

  He has become the golden child in many ways. I just finished his book Hidden Potential and really enjoyed in that book, his whole concept of scaffolding, which is something I'm going to use in some future episodes and work that I'm doing myself. And I'm going to put it out there. I have asked Adam three times to come on the podcast and so far I've been met with no's, but I am hoping he will come on in the future.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I'm sure he will. I think he is helpful probably to a fault. He helps so many kinds of people in so many ways that he is just, yeah, I think very scheduled as a result.

• 7:24John R. Miles?

  Yes, I get it. And I always just feel when the timing is right, the timing will be right for him to come on. Well, let's get into your book. So I want to talk about tribalism around this concept. Is it really the enemy? Many people hear this word tribalism and they immediately think of things like division, polarization and conflict. But in tribal, you argue that these instincts, they're not flaws, but they're really essential to human progress and cooperation. How do we start to shift our perspective on tribalism as a force for good, rather than a problem that needs to be eliminated?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I chose to call the book tribal as opposed to cultural or community or something like that, in part for this reason, that the word tribal has become an allegation. It's become, there's a sort of trope of toxic tribalism is taking over our world and it's going to be the end of our democracy and the demise of international cooperation and the, it's going to destroy large organizations. And it's a sort of dystopian fantasy that somehow a deeply evolved impulse to hate outsiders has somehow atavistically reawakened for some

• 8:50Speaker 01

  reason as we move into the 21st century. And it's impairing our ability to cooperate at a large scale. It's impairing our ability to have civil society. I think this is a little bit overblown. We do have some very deep conflicts in the world, both. Political partisan conflicts, ethnic racial conflicts, religious ideological conflicts. But we have had conflicts like that in every generation. What's new is this way of talking about it that is a bit despairing and fatalistic. This idea that we're cursed by our tribal nature and that this will ultimately prevent us

• 9:34Speaker 01

  from having nice things. And it makes for, it's come out of the pundit class, the political pundit class of Tom Friedman, Andrew Sullivan, these people. And they're wonderful writers and they're deep thinkers and they specialize in being provocative. And this thesis about toxic tribalism has led to some spellbinding articles, but it's not very science-based in the way that they talk about it. They're not people who read behavioral science in particular. And it's highly rooted in a bunch of metaphors. They talk about tribalism as a virus that has infected our mind, or tribalism as a genie that's gotten out of the bottle and we can't put it back inside again. And these metaphors are fun to read, but they're not a good basis for policy.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  They're not a good basis for really understanding the problem and thinking about what measures might be useful for remediating the problem. One of the things I'm trying to accomplish in the book is pushing back against this discourse about toxic tribalism that is bringing the end of the world upon us. Every generation thinks their civilization is crumbling under their watch. Socrates wrote about how the youth, the youth of Athens have no discipline, et cetera. Every generation thinks things are falling apart. It's incumbent on us to not despair and not engage in mystical fatalism about our problems. Instead, to try to understand them as best we can and understand what levers we have

• 11:05Speaker 01

  and how we can go about remediating the problems. And at the same time, problems are dramatic and they dominate our attention. The good things that happen as a result of our tribal motivations happen at a more tacit, implicit level and we don't stop to think about them very much. But Steve Pinker is another person that I really admire in the behavioral science, public intellectual area. And according to his books, the general state of humanity gets better and better every generation, or at least every century. And that's not the narrative that most intellectuals like to work with. They like to think that the

• 11:48Speaker 01

  old times were great and now everything is going to hell. When Pinker looks at the actual statistics of crimes, people killed in wars, dictatorships, et cetera, it looks like the arc of human civilization is towards better society. That may be a little boring. And of course, everyone on the left accuses him of being an apologist for big this and big that. And I think Steve Pinker is mostly just an honest broker who tries to find objective data and speak to questions from objective data rather than from some ideology or social theory. Yeah, I think that we don't, we don't pay as attention, we don't pay

• 12:30Speaker 01

  as much attention to the good things that come out of the human talent for collaboration at large scale. And we really notice when these talents for collaboration at large scale contribute to pernicious conflicts. We really see that and we focus on it a lot. It doesn't mean that tribalism net is a bad thing. And even if it were a bad thing on average, we're stuck with it. Tribalism is as human as breathing. Tribalism is the defining characteristics of our species. Our tribal instincts are these brain adaptations

• 13:10Speaker 01

  for sharing culture in groups that evolved in the Stone Age. And that's what makes us different from the other great apes. Almost all of our DNA is identical to chimpanzees. It's just a few adaptations that are different that made a huge difference because they enabled us to live in a very different way. Instead of groups of 30 chimpanzees, we live in groups of 300 million humans and we gain all of the economies of scale and the gains to trade and the synergies that come from living in those large groups.

• 13:49John R. Miles?

  So I wanted to take this to a different concept. I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book Revenge of the Tipping Point. And when I think of tipping points, as he was describing this, because he was looking at large societal tipping points such as Ozempic. Well, he was looking at really why we started getting into painkillers and the Purdue family and stuff like that. But it could be Ozempic. And it caught my eye in your book. You write that contrary to essentialist views of cultural character as set in stone, people's cultural conditioning and convictions change over time.

• 14:32John R. Miles?

  We internalize new cultural identities and codes with every new community we join. And I want to go back to a tipping point. So how do these cultural changes sometimes influence something like a tipping point?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  The classical idea of a tipping point that Malcolm Gladwell draws upon is evidence about how people that we have these sort of conformist instincts and we are very sensitive to our peers. And we, at a certain point, when we see that there's a critical mass of people around us doing something, we become inclined to do that thing. And it's not as though, you know, the simple model of it is that there's one tipping point. A lot of people believe that conformity only happens when the majority is doing X and then the minority starts to join the majority.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  But we've known for a very long time that there's like an interaction between.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Individual temperament and taste for risk and adopting new things and where the tipping point is. So there are always in every, whether it's politics or using a new product or something, there are the innovators, the very first people to do things. And those are people who they're allergic to conformity. They really want to do something that's unique, that's new, that hasn't been done before. And then there are early adopters, people who are not the initiator, but who have a high tolerance for risk and a high willingness to be idiosyncratic. And they adopt something when it's still a very rare thing. And then there are, I can't remember all of the labels for these different, for these different levels, but there are the people

• 16:25Speaker 01

  willing to adopt something when 30% of people are doing it. Then there are the people who will only adopt it when more than half are doing it. And then there are, I think, what are called the laggards, who are the last people to adopt something, the people who are still using manual typewriters. And those are, those people need almost everybody to be doing something the new way before they give up the old way of doing things. So those are, the tipping point refers to when I'm affected by what my peers are doing and I change my practice. And there's different tipping points that happen for different kinds of people. But tipping points play a big role in social change and it works through the psychology of what I call the peer

• 17:10Speaker 01

  instinct, which is that wired to mesh, we're wired to notice what most of the people around us are doing. And we're wired to have some motivation for matching or joining what the people around us are doing. And we tend to deride that as lemming or conformist behavior, but it's the foundation of our species' greater capacity for culture. We are, we say monkey see, monkey do, but we are much more deeply imitative than any of the other primates. We are very sensitive to what our peers are doing and we imitate not just their motor movements, but we're very Good at reading their minds and imitating their intentions as well.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And that's why cultural practices can become quickly shared within a human group. Because we, we see what other people are doing and we can read it. And we are motivated to take it on, to join them so that we can coordinate with them. And tribal instincts that I discuss in the book are things that most of us, highly educated types, were brought up to derive. Conformity is the peer instinct. Status seeking is largely what I call the hero instinct. And then sentimentality and nostalgia is what I call the ancestor instinct. And so these are kind of irrational sides of human social psychology that are easy to derive.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And in my book, what I'm trying to show is that these tendencies may be irrational, but they are the foundations of our capacity for community and our capacity for culture and our capacity for collaboration. And those are the things, not our candle power, those social things are the things that really made us human and made us the dominant species of the planet.

• 19:03John R. Miles?

  Thank you for sharing that, Michael. And I'm just reiterate these because it's one of the core things I want the audience to get. You, you just covered the three instincts from your book that drive us. Peer instinct relates to how we conform to social norms and seek to mesh within our environment. The hero instinct, as I understand it, is how we aspire to emulate respected figures in our culture. And the ancestor instinct is how we feel a deep pull towards tradition and preserving history. Is that a good way to look at each one of them?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yes, and they correspond to three waves of brain adaptation that happened during the Stone Age that brought our species to the point where we could live with a very different kind of social organization, living in these large groups that are united by cultural legacies. And that turned out to be extremely adaptive and it led to the, the way of living that we accept as normal now in the modern world. I think what I also try to point out in the book is that these same three psychological

• 20:15Speaker 01

  systems, these same three instincts are what drive our attraction to cultures today. These are the ways that we learn cultures today, and these are the ways that we are motivated by cultures today. So, understanding these instincts that evolved help us see the levers that are available to us today, both in terms of self-leadership and in terms of trying to lead the groups or shape the communities that we're a part of.

• 20:47John R. Miles?

  Thank you for sharing that, Michael. I have two ideas going forward, how I want to shape this discussion. I want to take this whole point of tipping point and everything that you've just been talking about with culture change, these different instincts, and I want to apply them in some useful ways that I think will help the audience. So I'm going to start this out by talking about my own experience. So, earlier on in my career, I was an executive at both Dell and Lowe's. And they had black and white different cultures. Lowe's, at the time I was there, it still had the family feel, even though we were

• 21:30John R. Miles?

  50 billion in revenue, people walked around with pride, a lot of them wearing Jimmy Johnson shirts that showed the Lowe's car, or just shirts that had Lowe's somewhere on them. And I remember almost in every single meeting that we had with the CEO, especially the VP and up meetings, he was always talking about culture, the importance of culture, what it meant to the company, why it needed to be instilled as a constant reminder. I got to Dell, and I don't remember, in the years that I was there, unless it was doing a sales call, ever remember seeing any employee ever walking down the hall with a Dell shirt.

• 22:13John R. Miles?

  In fact, at the time I was there, a lot of people were embarrassed to be at Dell. And I never heard of culture as something that was talked about on a regular basis. And where at Lowe's, I saw a very engaged workplace. At Dell, I found a very disengaged workplace.

• 22:34John R. Miles?

  And as I'm thinking about this, where I wanted to go with it is in your book, you write about culture change. And you write that the power and also the danger of cultural change is not just that it's malleable. It can be liable and sometimes downright volatile. So where I want to take this is Gallup in 2023 put out a statistic that 77% of all employees are disengaged at work. And I have to believe that a lot of that disengagement comes to the culture that they're a part of. And that part culture of making them feel like their contributions matter.

• 23:18John R. Miles?

  So if you take this tribal instinct and you talk about the culture that's going on, I think it's a good lens for us to look at. These different instincts that you talk about, first one being peer instinct. So you're in this environment where you feel completely disengaged. And there's a lot of conformance of peer norms that impact decision making. So there can be ideological echo chambers, there can be social cohesion. How, looking at this evolution of how do you break through disengagement? Does this whole tribal approach fare out?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  I think you're right about people feeling disengaged at work. And I think the experiences of work from home and now return to the office. And some of the technological changes that are causing layoffs are, it's been an uncomfortable experience for a lot of employees in the last decade or so, more so than in previous decades. Now, why did, I don't know enough about Dell to know like why there was this kind of malaise that you're describing at Dell at that time. I remember Dell when it was an early, Dell started in Iowa, is that correct? Am I remembering that?

• 24:40John R. Miles?

  No, Austin, Texas, so Round Rock is where it's headquartered.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Okay, that's where it started or that's where it is now?

• 24:48John R. Miles?

  That's where it started. Michael left the University of Texas and formed the company.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Okay, I have memories of the early days of Dell when it felt like a quirky company that was building computers but in a different region of the country. And then I think Dell became just like your generic commodity computer where it wasn't like considered to be pushing the envelope of innovation. So I can understand that maybe a company that is competing on cost rather than competing on quality is harder to build a culture around, although they do it at Walmart and they Lowe's is probably a place where they're competing both on cost and on quality. I had a discussion last night, I was with a group from, I was with a group of alumni

• 25:36Speaker 01

  from the business school that I teach at. For many years, we're based in this building, an old building from like the 1950s that had been, that was designed for about a quarter of the number of people that were currently using it. So we were really crowded in this building and there was, the culture of the school at that time was this, it was a culture of complaining and making fun of the place. Everybody would be joking like, "Oh, I had this terrible experience where I went into a classroom and the projector didn't work." And someone would be like, "Oh, that's nothing. I went into my classroom and there was like a dead mouse in the HVAC system and the room smelled terrible."

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And then someone else would have their horror story of something even worse. And that was how people bonded about complaining about how bad the building was and everything. And then in recent years, we have moved to this beautiful building that looks like the Google headquarters and it's right next to the Hudson River and it's on its own campus, removed from the main campus. And we all just feel like lucky to be there and there's so much space and wonderful coffee machines and wonderful conference rooms. And so the culture of the school has changed, just the way students act and the way that we bond with each other. We talk about how environmentally efficient the building is and how much we care about that as opposed to talking about how loud.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Everything is so I think that the physical setting, the environment that people are in can be a big factor in triggering certain cultural patterns. I don't know if that's something that, I don't know if the culture was reinforced by the, by the physical space in the Lowe's headquarters or in the Dell headquarters, but that I think is an underappreciated factor of just how much the triggers. Having a workplace where you have signs of your peers around you, where you see your peers, a lot of open office plans or headquarters like at Bloomberg in New York where all the walls are glass.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  You see your fellow employees and that's very important in triggering the norms of the place. And then there are symbols that everybody encounters. So at Bloomberg, there are fish tanks everywhere because the symbol is, it's a symbol of transparency, which is the core, core value in their culture. And, and then there are ceremonies, whatever the ceremony is, I don't know what, if Lowe's has certain, the founder's birthday or Taco Tuesdays or celebrating when an employee reaches their 30 year anniversary at the firm or whatever. But these rituals, these ceremonies that take place often at the workplace

• 28:27Speaker 01

  are really important in maintaining the traditions that give a culture continuity. And I think one of the reasons in the current moment, while, why we're seeing this push of return to office after some years of work from home is that firms have realized how important this common physical setting is to creating a strong and accessible culture that is the basis of coordination. There was a major study going on at Microsoft about productivity that happened to be going on right before the pandemic hit. And so they just kept the study running.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  And it was a natural experiment in how did productivity change when people were working? From home. And the interesting finding was that on most of the measures of individual productivity, did you or I get through our to do list and take care of the tasks that were clearly within our dominion? Individual productivity's measures went up because we weren't wasting time commuting and we weren't wasting time having to go ten stories down to the cafeteria for lunch as opposed to just going to our kitchen. But the measures of collective productivity, the measures of whether I solved a problem in a way that worked both for my division

• 29:48Speaker 01

  and for your division, or measures of are we are we coordinating, are we sharing knowledge that was developed in this division with another division? Those measures really declined because when you're at home, you're just not thinking about your coworkers as much and you're not seeing them. The norms of the organizational culture are not as triggered in your head, nor are the ideals and nor are the traditions. So a lot of the reason for returning to the office at least a couple of days a week is that the office, the work site is a trigger of the organizational culture,

• 30:29Speaker 01

  which is a vehicle for coordination so that work gets done where the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. So I think that was somewhat related to your question. I might have gone off on.

• 30:45John R. Miles?

  I think part of it is coordination, but I think a bigger element of it, hopefully is human connection. And I'm going to just answer a couple of the things that you asked about while you were speaking. So when I was at Lowe's, the culture initially was very cohesive. We started out in a headquarters building up in Wilkesboro that they had taken the town's local mall and turned it into the company headquarters. So it was funny because they'd say, my office isn't just J C Penney or mine was in the juice, where the juice place used to be, or mine was where Sears used to be. But what was nice about it.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Everyone remembered the mall.

• 31:29John R. Miles?

  People remembered the mall because so many of them were from that area. And what was nice is you would see the senior executives, including the CEO, walking about the people because the cafeteria was just like in a mall, in the middle of the mall. So they would interact with people.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  That's really, that's a great use for mall because we have a big problem around the country of these abandoned malls. And the idea that they could become corporate headquarters that have a built in common space. It's brilliant.

• 32:01John R. Miles?

  Oh, it was brilliant and it made us all feel like these aloof leaders were accessible. I'm not saying they were aloof because they were all down to earth, but you don't think typically in a company that you can access Marc Benioff or Michael Dell, but this made that environment like that. And then the environment shifted when the company moved to Mooresville and the CEO had a threat on his life. And they decided to isolate all the senior executive team up on the top floor of a building. Key card only access, they had their own chef, their own kitchen, and they stopped walking the halls. And to me, it was the start of the disintegration of the culture that had been with the company for a long time.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  They're replicating the old fashioned GM headquarters where the every, all the decisions come from a mysterious top floor that nobody else is allowed to go to. And the drift of organizational change has been all towards flat organizations with less. It's just really funny that they went backwards after, after being a sort of flat, open, fluid organization at the start.

• 33:13John R. Miles?

  And it's very true. And I'll give you the difference with Dell. Dell was a very flat organization. We didn't have that many VPs throughout the company. But what I found at the time I was there is we were at this really huge inflection point. We were going from primarily being known as a hardware provider to getting into software and solutions, which is where Michael has guided the company. But at the time when I was there, this ancestor instinct was really shaping cultural identity because so many of the long-term employees were holding so tightly on to traditions. That even when they weren't serving the company anymore, they couldn't let go of them.

• 33:55John R. Miles?

  So it was becoming very difficult for new people to influence new ideas. And at the same time, you had a lot of the old guard who were leading the groups. So people would aspire to emulate those they admired. And so I found as we were trying to do initiatives, that if you wanted to get an initiative to be successful, you really had to get leaders to buy into it. Because it, these things, people mistake IT implementations and they think it's all about the technology. And my experience from doing a ton of them is it's all about cultural change.

• 34:39John R. Miles?

  And really, how do you get leaders, managers, and then employees to change their values and behaviors around the new way of working? And this is where I was going with this whole disengagement is ultimately, it's been a period of decision after decision that has caused employees to get disengaged. And you can't just flip a light switch to automatically get 80% of employees to be re-engaged. I really think it comes down to creating a new culture and a new currency on how you need them to see the values and their purpose in fulfilling those values.

• 35:23John R. Miles?

  That's just my instinct of what needs to happen, but that's where I was trying to ask you what your thought was.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I think that one of the things that a lot of firms suffer from is too many top-down change initiatives that aren't really followed through. And then people become cynical. They say, oh, another announcement from on high about how our strategy is going to change or how our human resources policies are going to change. And they just wait it out and drag their heels and pay lip service to the new system, but stick with some of the old ways that they know well and that they trust and that make them feel safe. And so I think that one useful contrast is between bottom up change initiatives like grassroots movements and then top down initiatives like shock therapy.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  And both of them can work under certain circumstances. When something is controversial, and I would use an example, it might be like same sex marriage in the United States. When people tried to impose it top down, like as Gavin Newsom tried to do in California early on, it inspired blowback because people are saying marriage is a sacred thing and for thousands of years it's been defined this way and you can't unilaterally, even though you're in San Francisco and in San Francisco, there's a lot of support for same sex marriage. It's a matter of state law and you can't just impose a change like that. And that kind of slowed the eventual progress of same sex marriage in California.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  But what happened nationwide is that there were bottom up initiatives in the 90s about coming out of the closet and being open with your relationships. And then in the 90s, you know, if you look at Gallup polls and you ask, do you know somebody who's in a same sex relationship? The number doubled within five years. And it's not like the number of people in same sex relationships doubled. It was that people were more aware of it. People saw that this existed among their peers. And then, then same sex relationships started appearing in television shows and in movies as not as the side character, but as the main character, the admirable kind of relationships

• 37:42Speaker 01

  in shows like Will and Grace, shows like that. And that was a change from a change in peer codes to a change in what I call hero codes, the sort of collective ideals of a society. And then eventually you had a change in the institutions where you had state after state and then major churches, major corporations respecting same sex relationships. And then finally in 2015, the Supreme Court. And so that's a story of a Bottom up movement where you start with ordinary people changing their everyday life and perceptions of peers changing. And then this idea of your heroes changing, the ideals changing, and then finally the institutions changing.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  But it took 25 years to happen. So bottom up change, it's really slow. And then there is this kind of top down change. My, my colleague Jeffrey Sachs, the economist, he did it with countries. So he went to Poland when Poland was liberalizing its economy. And the idea was you need a bold stroke. You need to change a bunch of institutions all at the same time, disrupt people. And this institutional change will then lead to a, like a break in the equilibrium. And a new set of ideals will take hold and eventually a new set of habits will take hold. And that worked in Poland, but it didn't work in Russia.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Because in Russia, the government making the changes didn't have the same legitimacy that the Polish government of Lekwalessa, who had led this resistance movement. People were willing to do anything, to suffer any amount of discomfort to help that government succeed. And that was not the case in Russia. There was more cynicism about the whole process of changing, liberalizing the economy and becoming more of a capitalist country. And I think there are examples in corporate America of both reactions to top down changes. Top down changes that met with incredible blowback and usually firing the CEO. And then top down changes that have been very successful.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of times it turns on this issue of legitimacy. If there's a company where there's a widespread sense that, okay, changes are needed. The status quo is not working. And there's a leader who's perceived as understanding the place and knowing what they're doing. And then that leader does something bold. It often does have that effect of sending a shockwave through the organization and leading people to change some of their values and change some of their habits. An example I would point to is Mary Barra at GM. She's a lifelong G M-er and she engaged in some very bold symbolic changes to policies early on in her reign in the C suite.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  And then she's been able to lead GM to change and adjust much more dramatically than any of the big three automakers have done before. But there are many stories of outsider CEOs who come into a place and try to make bold changes and it often creates a lot of pain. And then if people feel like they're overreaching, they're overstepping what is their proper dominion as a leader, then you have intense resistance to the leadership. And one example I talk about in the book is Ellen Pao, who took over as the CEO at Reddit and then tried to change what a lot of outsiders thought were reasonable changes, removing

• 41:18Speaker 01

  some of the Reddit threads that were making fun of overweight people, for example. But at Reddit, there's a very strong community value on free speech and that the idea is even offensive speech has to be allowed because you need the marketplace of ideas and people there take that very seriously. And she was perceived as overstepping what executives should be doing at Reddit. And there was just a kind of social movement that rose up against her and she very quickly had to resign. All of this, I guess, is interesting because we're seeing right now a new administration in the federal government where, like most administrations, there's an effort to engage

• 42:01Speaker 01

  in these bold strokes in the first week of the administration to try to send a message about the change that's needed and send a shockwave and reinvigorate the country. And it's an open question, like, will it be effective or will it inspire a counter movement? I can't read the future right now, but it's, we're at a moment where, I guess, we'll know in a few months how it's going to play out.

• 42:25John R. Miles?

  Well, thank you for that, Michael. I just wanted to comment on a couple of things that you said. Going back to Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, he also mentions Will and Grace, and how that show really inspired the tipping point for gay marriage. And he also talked about the movie Holocaust, as we're in these days talking about, I think it's, we're going through the anniversary of that right now, and how that movie at that moment really is what brought about so many of the Holocaust museums and movement that we've seen that up until that point was really shied away from, people in that community who were persecuted

• 43:09John R. Miles?

  in those very centers of horror that they found themselves in. I want to take this down a different direction. You mentioned your time at the beginning of your career at Stanford. One of the people at Stanford who I've really enjoyed his writing has been Jeff Cohen. And Jeff does a lot of work on belonging. And I haven't had a chance to interview Jeff yet. I've reached out to him, but we've had deep conversations on the show with guests like Dr. Julianne Holt-Lundstedt, who is an expert on loneliness, and Dr. Dacher Keltner at Berkeley, both of them about how human connection is fundamental to our well-being

• 43:49John R. Miles?

  and our sense of overall mattering or belonging, as Jeff calls it. And your book Tribal explores how our cultural instincts, our need to belong, to emulate heroes and to honor traditions, shape our behavior. In the world today, where loneliness, mental health, disconnection, all these things are on the rise, how do you harness these tribal instincts to foster a deeper sense of belonging or mattering in our lives and communities?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  It's an important question and one that I had more chapters about that ultimately my editors said the book was getting too long, so it didn't end up being featured very much in the book. But the research on happiness, when people started to try to objectively measure happiness and well-being, the things that they focused on early on correspond to what we would call hedonistic happiness. Like, how much joy and excitement and pleasure do you have in your life? And there was this reductionist tendency to say, okay, this is what happiness or well-being is. And then they would have findings that were a bit counterintuitive, like it would be found

• 45:01Speaker 01

  that people without children are more happy than people with children. But that doesn't seem to capture the fullness of what it's like to either not have kids or have kids. And then people realize there's not just one dimension of happiness, there's a hedonistic happiness, which might be the amount of joy and pleasure. But then there's what the Greeks called eudemonic happiness, which is the sense of meaning that comes from fulfilling your role within a larger community or tradition or profession. And a lot of that involves what we might call meaningful drudgery. Changing diapers of your children.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  For me, grading papers at the university. For you, probably lots of meetings to create buy-in about a new IT system when you were a CIO. These things are, it's wearying. But if we believe in our role and we believe in the institution that we are representing, the drudgery can be meaningful drudgery, and it's a deep and lasting kind of meaning and well-being. And some people would say, okay, there's a third dimension of happiness which has to do with having a rich and varied experience, even if some of that experience is unpleasant.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Like, having a life where you take risks and you have setbacks and then you have recoveries. So happiness and well-being, human connection, comes in these different flavors. And I think my book... Speaks a lot to why we are motivated to feel rewarded by meshing with other people, why we are motivated to emulate those who are respected in our community, and why we are motivated to perpetuate traditions, even traditions that may not be serving a useful function. It's a funny thing about the ancestor instinct that it's almost agnostic about, is this age-old practice useful?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  But I argue in the book that it evolved that way for a reason, which is that it keeps alive ideas and practices that may not be needed every generation. In a lot of Asia, tsunamis are a big problem, but in some places tsunamis may only occur every 50 years or every 80 years. And so many generations will not experience a disastrous tsunami. But a lot of the indigenous people there, they have traditions of song and dance and wood carving and boat building that are all very intimately tied to their knowledge of tsunamis.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  And because these things have become traditions that people keep alive, even if they don't seem useful, the knowledge perpetuates so that it's there when it's needed. When the giant tsunami happened in 2006 and hundreds of thousands of people died, some of these indigenous groups who live right on the water, who live on boats, they saw the wave patterns indicative of a tsunami early on, and they went to land and they went up the hills and took cover, and they didn't lose any people. Whereas these supposedly more knowledgeable communities, the more modern communities, did not see the tsunami coming. So the ancestor instinct is a funny thing.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  It leads people to hold on to ancestral knowledge that may not be useful. But I think there's a reason that we evolved that way, because it's a good thing to err on the side of keeping certain wisdom alive, because it may seem useless to me, but my knowledge might be limited by my personal experience.

• 49:00John R. Miles?

  Okay. Well, Michael, I wanted to ask some questions to make this actionable for listeners. So we've probably all seen someone who's deeply entrenched in a tribal mindset, whether it's a political mindset, a cultural mindset, or otherwise. What are the first steps to opening up and engaging with new perspectives? For instance, if you yourself are one who is entrenched in one of these mindsets, how do you open up to start seeing this perspective of others?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  It's a really important question, especially with regard to partisan politics, where we have acquired a syndrome that is often called partisan blindness, where we have stopped talking, the red party has stopped talking to the blue party, and we increasingly have unrealistic perceptions of each other. We think that liberals think that a very high percentage of conservatives are openly racist, whereas it's a very small percentage, not much higher than the percentage on the liberal side. And conservatives hold mistaken views of liberals or of Democrats.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  And so what do we do to try to correct our own misperceptions and help other people correct theirs? One of the rules of thumb is be aware of how much your situation reinforces and triggers the mindsets that keep you thinking in one political worldview and break out of your bubble. In writing the book, I became very aware that where I primarily live, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it's a blue bubble. Everybody, almost everybody around me is a Democrat. They dress like Democrats, they talk like Democrats. When I bicycle into work, I pass the Lululemon, the Whole Foods.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  All these things are touchstones of the blue tribe of America. It's not Hobby Lobby, it's not Cracker Barrel. Even the businesses are not the businesses that are associated with the red tribe worldview. And so I think it's important if we want to

• 51:20Speaker 01

  At least if you go on vacation or buy a second home or spend some time elsewhere to try to get diversity in the political partisan surroundings in your life. In the same way that we care so much about diversity in which cuisines we eat, et cetera, et cetera. But we don't apply that to which news channels we listen to on television or which newspapers we read. So we need to break out of our red and blue bubbles so that we're not constantly in one worldview that causes us to be missing a lot of the news and missing a lot of the opinions that are actually reasonable. And then when it comes to trying at a broader level,

• 52:04Speaker 01

  aside from just me as a person, which kind of programs are helpful? There's been a wave of programs that try to create dialogue between the red and the blue parties in the last four years. And they haven't been enormously successful. Some of them have been studied carefully by behavioral scientists who look at how much do attitudes about the other side or perceptions of the other side change? And they don't change as much as the founders of these programs would hope. And I think one reason is that a lot of these programs are framed as they're called things like hello from the other side, or town meets town, or the red-blue divide.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  It's framed and set up as you're going to have a conversation with one of them. And it raises people's guards where people are, okay, I'm ready to go have this conversation, holding my nose, and I'm not going to be influenced by anything I hear because it's one of them. And then there's another wave of programs that the research actually finds, at least some of the studies find, are more successful. And it's counterintuitive because these other programs are more oblique. And these programs are called things like Make America Dinner Again, or Coffee Party America, or Open Lands Together. And they basically bring together people from both parties. They recruit people from different neighborhoods,

• 53:32Speaker 01

  bring together people from both parties, but people who are also interested in some topic that crosses party lines, like coffee, or bringing foodies together to talk about food and to cook together, or bringing hikers together to talk about what the policies should be about the trails on public lands in an area, which is a big issue in many parts of the country. And so the idea here is that you're bringing them to talk about a topic that's not politicized, and that's a topic that crosscuts the partisan divide. But that ultimately, these topics, ultimately, if you talk about food long enough, or if you talk about open lands long enough, you are going to veer into some political topics.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  You'll veer into them after you've had some initial trust and bonding with the person, because you're talking with them about a shared passion. And the conversations are more likely to continue after the event, because I meet you at the event, and we talk about coffee, and you say, I've once had Ethiopian coffee. I think it's the best coffee. And I say, oh, yeah, there's a new place down on the street that opened. I think they do that. Oh, well, let's meet next Wednesday. And so it's a more oblique strategy for bringing together Democrats and Republicans to talk to each other. But I think ultimately, a more effective one. And we can gain an understanding of why this might work as opposed to the more direct way

• 54:59Speaker 01

  when we understand the psychology of these tribal instincts.

• 55:06John R. Miles?

  And I had one other way that I wanted you to apply this. I recently had on the show one of your peers from Columbia, Sandra Matz. And we were talking about algorithms and AI. But one of the things that really piqued my interest was we talked about her upbringing in a German village, and how so much of society has gone from these small villages or tribes to now we're living in a global village, so to speak. So, speaking of this global village.

• 55:42John R. Miles?

  It is now consumed by media and social platforms. How do these modern, global village type of social platforms fuel tribal division? And what can be done to encourage more productive bridge building conversations online?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  With each year, it starts to seem that social media platforms, social network platforms are creating more harm in our lives than good. I think there was a study recently asking high school students, if you could push a button to make Instagram never have been invented, would you do it? Almost all of them would push that button. They wish that it didn't exist, but given that it does exist, they have to be on it. So it's a bind. I think that with regard to the partisan divide, it's pretty clear that the reason why the red and blue tribes are much more divided and unable to speak to each other

• 56:42Speaker 01

  than they were several generations ago, when the political parties really overlapped to a great degree, is that first, there was residential sorting in the United States on the basis of politics. As people became freer to live wherever they wanted, liberals went to the coasts and the college towns, and conservatives went to the heartland and the exurbs. And then suddenly, people, when you went to play in your neighborhood softball game, or when you went to the school board meeting, or when you went to the town meeting, or the homeowners association, you weren't surrounded by a mix of political beliefs. You just had the reinforcement of your own biases, whether they were liberal or conservative.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  And then in the last generation, our consumption of news and information has, at first, it was network news where everybody was watching Walter Cronkite and everyone was on the same page, and then it became cable news, 24/7 cable news that was partisan, and then websites, then blogs, then social media. And we're getting more political news than We ever did before and it makes us feel like we're really informed. But we're getting a small subset of the spectrum of opinion. Whereas we used to all get the whole spectrum of opinion. And so I think that's been really pernicious. And there's nothing inherent in the technology that forces us

• 58:12Speaker 01

  to only consume the social media that reinforces our ideology. But it's a bad interaction of our tribal psychology where we're motivated by agreement. It feels good to hear things that agree with our beliefs and to express beliefs and have them, have people agree with them and reinforce it. So we've created this sort of agreement machine that has a negative impact on how well informed we are about the range of political news and the range of political opinion. And then when we see the other side, we're just baffled about why they believe the things that they believe. Because everything we know suggests a different set of conclusions.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  And so then we draw negative attributions. Either that they're crazy, there's some cognitive deficiency. And we heard a lot of that in this last election. Everyone was accusing the other ones of being cognitively impaired in one way or the other. Or we think that they're insincere, that they know what the truth is, but they're not saying it because it serves their interest to say something else. And so both of those are negative attributions. And I think it's those negative attributions that have created the sort of enmity between the political parties that has grown a lot worse in the last couple of decades. So social media has definitely been a very important part of this. I don't know which administration will be politically courageous enough to do it.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  But I do think that regulating social media platforms a little bit more might be a good idea because. I think early on, they established themselves legally as a, we're just the newsstand. We're not the publication. So misinformation can be printed on Facebook and Facebook is not liable for it. And that seems like an inept analogy to me. The social media platforms are much more active in controlling what news you and I get than the physical newsstand ever was.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  And I think that they should bear some responsibility for how they're shaping the information flow to people, because it really is quite pernicious.

• 1:00:32John R. Miles?

  Well, Michael, thank you for sharing that. And I wanted to end on something I haven't done in a while. And this is just a quick, rapid round of short questions for you. And I'm not looking for long answers, just

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  I'll try my best.

• 1:00:46John R. Miles?

  Really short answers.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:49John R. Miles?

  If you could correct one misunderstanding people have about tribalism, what would it be?

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  It would be that we should just despair because we have a tribal nature that we can't control, that is inevitably going to lead to the destruction of civilization. And this is an idea that has become increasingly expressed, and I think it couldn't be less helpful and it couldn't be less correct.

• 1:01:18John R. Miles?

  If someone listening today wants to be more open, more collaborative and less reactive in their tribal instinct, what's one thing they can start doing right now?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Going to different places than they usually go, places where there are people that disagree with them or people who are on the other side of some cultural divide. So choosing to put yourself, to immerse yourself in communities other than your own.

• 1:01:49John R. Miles?

  And then this is one of my favorite questions. We are talking a lot now about on a mission to Mars. If you were selected as one of the first people to go to Mars and the powers that be bestowed upon you that you were one of the guiding leaders of this new world, knowing what you know about how we live on Earth, what's an edict or a law or something that you would want to put into place to make this next world a better place?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  I would be tempted to come back from Mars and tell everyone on Earth that the Martians are soon going to invade Earth because it might bring together the people on Earth. And that's what I care about more than like a small group of tech bros who make it to Mars on a one-way voyage. I don't really think that should be our priority right now. It's cool. It's certainly very cool, but it, I don't think is, yeah, I don't think it's the best use of our resources and our expertise right now. This idea that, oh, we're this single planet species and we should be ashamed of that. We need to be a multi-planetary species. That's, there's a lot of things we should be ashamed of. Not, that's not on the top of my list.

• 1:03:09John R. Miles?

  Okay. And then lastly, Michael, where can listeners connect with you, find more of your work and pick up a copy of your book, Tribal?

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Well, I have a website for the book called tribalbook.org. I also have a personal website, michaelwmorris.com, where you can find out about the behavioral science research I do and the teaching I do and that sort of thing, as well as the book. So those are two places that people can start.

• 1:03:37John R. Miles?

  Michael, it was such an honor to have you and congratulations again on the launch of your book. Such a fun discussion. Thank you so much.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. It's really a pleasure to be here and it's an honor to talk to you. And you have a really rare combination of life experiences that make, lends itself to a really deep conversation. So I felt very pushed to think about things from new angle. I always enjoy that.

• 1:04:01John R. Miles?

  Thank you. One of the things I try to pride myself on is I don't want people to come to Passion Struck and hear the same conversation someone's doing everywhere else. So I try to make it different and push the envelope as much as I can.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  In a very gentle and respectful way. So I really enjoyed the conversation.

• 1:04:18John R. Miles?

  That's a wrap. What a powerful conversation with Michael Morse. His book Tribal challenges everything we assume about division and connection. He reminds us that we are all shaped by instincts, not just to survive, but to belong. And if we can understand those instincts, the drive to align, to contribute, to preserve, we can also use them to lead, to connect, and to create change that lasts. I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Tribal. You can find the link in today's show notes at passionstruck.com. And if you're part of a team, company, or community that's navigating cultural shifts, generational gaps, or connection challenges, I'd love to speak with your group. I deliver keynotes and workshops on intentional leadership, the psychology of mattering,

• 1:05:01John R. Miles?

  and how to lead change that sticks. You can learn more at johnrmiles.com/speaking. And if this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating or review. It's one of the best ways to support the show and help others discover these conversations that truly matter. Next up, I'm sitting down with Dr. Eli Finkel and Dr. Paul Eastwhip, two of the most respected voices in the science of relationships. They're also the voices behind Love Factually, a podcast that dares to ask what science can learn from Ryan Gosling. Together, they unpack what pop culture gets right and hilariously wrong about modern love, drawn from decades of research on dating desire, and what makes love last. Whether you're single,

• 1:05:43John R. Miles?

  swiping for 20 years into a marriage, this episode offers some myth-busting insights.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  It's one thing to really find somebody initially appealing and find yourself falling for them, and you're learning all these things about them. But what ultimately happens is regardless of what happens to the initial passion, you create Eventually, patterns of interacting, ways of making it through your daily life, a little culture that's all your own, that sometimes we call these microcultures. Movies are often very good at depicting that because sometimes those are really the specifics that give each relationship a life of its own.

• 1:06:23John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, if you found value here, share it. And more importantly, live it. Because ideas don't change lives. Action does. Live life. Passion Struck.