Tribalism is human nature, as social success - a key survival criteria - requires alignment.
The reason it becomes a problem is that there the only options for each "tribe" is one of two extremes, and that these are perceived so fundamentally different it is hard for people to find common grounds. When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
Being more understanding of tribes with other ideas rather than making them villains would also help both sides in communication and political mobility.
Veritasium released a wonderful new video yesterday, "On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse" which ..... I'm not going to spoil it for you but you will understand why I responded with the link.
Watching, they discuss a study about gun control and I though omg I was thinking about that recently and the study they presented answers the question I've been pondering about gun control. If you watch the video, you will understand my disappointment.
I had been living in New Orleans including when it had the 8th highest murder rate ... not in the United States but the world in 2022 (it was #1 in US hence not 8th). The city couldn't hire police officers and close 120 position had been unfilled. There is a very strange phenomena happening in the past 2 years, the crime rate in New Orleans is plummeting without police. [1] So, in the Veritasium video, they talk about a gun violence study and I think, that is exactly the question I'm asking. Does gun violence go down if law enforcement is removed from the equation because that is exactly for unknown reasons happening New Orleans today. Nobody is taking away guns in New Orleans and everyone I know has at least 2. I was a little disappointed with the study but tapped my self on the shoulder asking the correct question when presented with it.
Smarter people did better than Dumber people. The people with a score of 8,9 on numeracy did the best [1] but not as good as they should've. This is basically best shown on page 12 [2] on the actual paper, people with high numeracy have a better chance of correct answer than low numeracy.
I suspect the effect is even across low & high numeracy but because high numeracy people were more likely to get the correct answer to begin with. Akin to say you playing a toddler in Counter-Strike. You're more likely to win a round than them. So if for a round I disconnect one of your controllers then the disconnection is more likely to cause you a loss than the toddler because the toddler was going to lose anyways, the effect of disconnection for them is dwarfed by their innate ability.
The title says that smarter people do worse, which is correct in the sense that their relative performance is 20% worse than less numerically inclined people. They cover this in the latter half of the video. However, in order to believe this was the title’s intent, you would have to assume the title should have read, “Smarter people score worse on political numerical questions than on apolitical numerical questions.” Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
> Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
The dude isn't some rushed working single mother. He had amble time to choose what he wanted to convey and instead chose that title.
When your study creates 2 populations (those with good numeracy and those without) and you make a claim that one of those populations "do worse" than it's always implicitly with respect to the other population.
> When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
That is a good theory, but coalitions can also easily create stalemates on many topics and effectively rendering a government incapable of any significant action. There are recent examples in EU countries.
The effect of coalitions is in political execution rather than in ideological separation. The concern here was entirely about the social impact on residents, not the political efficiency.
Coalitions can partly negate the benefit of the “spectrum”, but each member still answers to a different body of voters and going along with too many conflicting proposals would put them at risk of losing the confidence of their voters. Not differentiating from the other coalition members puts the party at risk of voters jumping ship to the others, and each party ultimately wishes to grow their own voter base.
Nah, tribalism of this sort is absolutely not human nature. People naturally form tribes and define ingroup/outgroup boundaries around their actual relationships and communities.
It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances to get people to attach their identities to "tribes" that are actually aggregations of completely unrelated strangers grouped together on the bases of abstract symbols.
People are naturally loyal to their families and local communities, not to continent-spanning political organizations.
I’m confused: You start by saying that tribalism isn’t human nature, but then you describe that tribal behaviors are natural.
People are indeed loyal to their local communities - which includes having ideologies that would not greatly offend your peers - but everyone has different communities. Yours might include family A and B. Theirs might include C and D, and E and F, respectively. Continue a few rounds and you’ll see that each social circle is unique and inter-connected.
No one within this “super-tribe” can have a different ideology without offending their local community by aligning with the opposite extreme - even if your opinion only differed slightly, your choice is one of two extremes.
In order to fix this, you need people to have more choices so that they can select something slightly different from your community without offending it.
I feel like I'm using pretty clear qualifiers to distinguish actual tribes from what Kurt Vonnegut would call granfaloons.
The point is that equating these ideologically polarized aggregations of strangers with tribalism is a huge stretch, and not really valid. They're two very different phenomena.
Yes, social circles are unique and inter-connected, and most people are simultaneously members of multiple "tribes", but this has nothing whatsoever to do with vast aggregations of strangers linked only by abstract symbolism.
I fail to see the justification for not considering this a (super)tribe. I wouldn't think of Cat's Cradle as the authority on social dynamics, but "granfaloons" refer to people that have no connection, whereas everyone in the supertribe is connected in a meaningful way.
What we are dealing with is a local community (for which I believe "tribe" is a perfectly valid use), which is directly and closely linked to nearby communities in such a way that, when combined with a binary and divisive choice, makes the whole network form a virtual supertribe.
With only two choices, so you are either 100% aligned or 0% aligned which makes it very difficult to have connected communities with differing opinions. Each individual is either aligned with their local community, or at risk of being ejected from it. With no connected communities of differing opinions, this in turn means you get ejected from all other possible local communities - the entire virtual supertribe. This makes it far less likely that someone will deviate than if it only affected their own direct connections.
If you had, say, 10 choices, you would be able to have a community that was only 70-90% aligned with its connected communities while still being tolerated, so no virtual supertribe would form.
> I fail to see the justification for not considering this a (super)tribe.
Call it whatever you want: tribalism may be an omnipresent manifestation of human nature, but "supertribalism" is something qualitatively different and not remotely as normal.
> It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances
Heh.. well.. California *was* majority white not even a decade and a half ago. And, the judge that put the final nail in on that issue for California wasn't exactly a white person.
The reason it becomes a problem is that there the only options for each "tribe" is one of two extremes, and that these are perceived so fundamentally different it is hard for people to find common grounds. When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
Being more understanding of tribes with other ideas rather than making them villains would also help both sides in communication and political mobility.