Key points
- Pundits may invoke tribalism to mean an evolved psychology. As an anthropologist, that framing is half right.
- Our ancestors likely met other groups often, keeping both hostile and cooperative relationships with them.
- The same coalitional psychology builds movements like MADD and MeToo, so tribalism is not all bad.
- In anthropology, “tribe” names a specific form of social organization and not our most ancient one.
You’ve probably heard the term “tribalism” more than a few times in recent years. Most likely in the context of political debates or disagreements between parties or factions. Kristen Soltis Anderson tells us, “America has eight political tribes,” for example
But what you think you know about tribalism is incomplete at best and misinformed at worst
Recently, on TheBulwark Daily podcast, Piers Morgan argued that algorithmic social media echo chambers increasingly demonize those we disagree with, creating a “quite toxic tribalism…we regressed 2,000 years when tribes used to…exist on their own, all shared the same views, all dressed the same, spoke the same, [and] as they slowly went out and encountered other tribes the only solution they found was to kill each other.”
As an evolutionary social scientist, part of me appreciates the pundit class adopting the adaptationist psychological framework tribalism implies. As an anthropologist, however, I can also explain why it’s wrong
What is tribalism?
Soltis Anderson defines political tribes as “groups organized not just around demographics, party affiliation, or even issue positions but also around their postures toward institutions and societal norms.” Merriam-Webster defines tribalism as “strong in-group loyalty often combined with a negative view of outsiders.” That propensity is usually attributed to our evolved psychology: individuals who formed strong in-group bonds and out-group biases were more likely to survive and reproduce. Through psychological variation, genetic inheritance, and differential reproduction, natural selection left our brains prone to this “tribal” behavior. There is a neuroscience of tribalism.
The concept of tribalism, therefore, rests on the assumption that our socio-political psychology has been shaped by natural selection. We bear the features of our ancestors who survived and reproduced. Rather than simply identifying a psychological “bias,” tribalism maps a behavior to a function that promoted <a href="https://healthylife7.com/13-actresses-who-are-total-fitness-powerhouses/” title=”13 Actresses Who Are Total Fitness Powerhouses”>fitness. Evolved psychology is often a contentious topic in mainstream or colloquial discourse. So it’s heartening to see this concept applied and evoked ubiquitously
Here’s what’s wrong with this story
1. Between-group interactions were likely diverse
Morgan and the typical approach to tribalism do get something right. Our psychology is highly coalitional. It is very easy for us to form strong in-group bonds and out-group biases. I don’t want to diminish that. David Pietraszewski’s work on coalitional cognition makes a strong case that the mind contains a small set of cognitive primitives for representing sides in a conflict and will map almost any social category onto them
However, our minds are not just designed to kill outsiders, and there is likely a very long history of positive intergroup interactions. It’s not that at some point these “ancient tribes” finally encountered an outsider. Throughout hominin evolution, our ancestors were likely to encounter people from other groups and to maintain both positive and negative relationships with them, including other ethnic groups
One unique feature of humans is our capacity for positive intergroup interactions. Chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, effectively never have peaceful between-group encounters. We do. As Luke Glowacki puts it, “humans are alone in having durable, positive-sum, interdependent relationships across unrelated social groups.” That capacity is difficult to pull off. Glowacki describes “an ironic logic to peace,” where “the factors that enable peace also facilitate the increased scale and destructiveness of conflict.”
Intergroup conflict and warfare have certainly been recurrent, and I’m by no means denying that intergroup interactions are often dangerous. But it is an oversimplification to suggest they always ended in killing
The groups themselves were also not as small or isolated as the story suggests. Douglas Bird and colleagues make the argument that foragers do not live in small-scale societies. Their work with Martu in Australia’s Western Desert finds that group composition is variable, shaped by ecology and built on links between non-relatives rather than kin. Smaller-scale and tribal societies sustain long-ranging intergroup networks that carry economic exchange and social alliances
2. Tribalism is not all bad
As the definitions above imply, tribalism in its colloquial use is a negative byproduct of our evolved psychology, or a mismatch between our ancestral, ethnically isolated histories (a premise I just challenged) and our heterogeneous, post-industrialized societies
But perhaps tribalism is sometimes a good behavioral strategy. Maybe not. But maybe so
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Our coalitional psychology lets us form strong bonds beyond demographics and markers of identity, biological or cultural, and across lines of sex, gender, and ethnicity. Many recent social movements are born of this, including MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving
MADD didn’t end drunk driving, and Black Lives Matter didn’t end racism. But whatever positive social change came about because of these coalitions is in part due to our coalitional psychology, which lets strangers build tight bonds around a shared goal and identity
So our tribal psychology allows us to form coalitions across broader groups for protection and prosocial ends. It produces prosocial outcomes as well as antisocial ones
3. “Tribal” has a specific meaning in anthropology
This is a minor semantic point. But within anthropology, “tribe” is most typically associated with an early evolutionary framework for social and cultural diversity. Elman Service, in Primitive Social Organization, classified societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Bands and tribes are relatively small and generally egalitarian. Chiefdoms have hereditary leaders and rank people by ascribed statuses. States are larger and more centralized, governed through formal institutions, laws, and social classes.
Putting aside the strengths and weaknesses of that framework, it suggests that tribal societies are a particular form of social organization, and not the most evolutionarily ancient one. Our “tribal psychology” would in fact trace back to our hominin ancestors and early human groups predating the first tribal-level societies. Tribalism, the kind Piers Morgan was discussing, is probably as much a consequence of our social structures as it is our psychology
Which is why what we call tribalism, in broader discourse and within psychology, would be better called factionalism, or simply what our coalitional psychology produces
Bird, Douglas W., Rebecca Bliege-Bird, Brian F. Codding, and David W. Zeanah. “Variability in the Organization and Size of Hunter-Gatherer Groups: Foragers Do Not Live in Small-Scale Societies.” Journal of Human Evolution 131 (2019): 96–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2019.03.005
Pietraszewski, David. “Toward a Computational Theory of Social Groups: A Finite Set of Cognitive Primitives for Representing Any and All Social Groups in the Context of Conflict.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X21000583
Pisor, Anne C., and James Holland Jones. “Do People Manage Climate Risk through Long-Distance Relationships?” American Journal of Human Biology 33, no. 4 (2021): e23525. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23525
Pisor, Anne C., and Martin Surbeck. “The Evolution of Intergroup Tolerance in Nonhuman Primates and Humans.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 28, no. 4 (2019): 210–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21793
Glowacki, Luke. “The Evolution of Peace.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, December 16, 2022, 1–100. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22002862
Glowacki, Luke, Michael L. Wilson, and Richard W. Wrangham. “The Evolutionary Anthropology of War.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 178 (2020): 963–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.014
Hames, Raymond. “Pacifying Hunter-Gatherers.” Human Nature 30, no. 2 (2019): 155–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-019-09340-w
Grueter, Cyril C. “The Evolutionary-Ecological Basis of Xenophilia.” Human Nature, ahead of print, May 4, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-026-09521-4
