Introduction
I recently came across Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson. I was alerted to the book via an episode of CBC’s Ideas [podcast – Political tribalism is an existential threat to humanity: evolutionary anthropologist]
This has been a theme I have been pursuing for some time now. We must understand why we exclude if we are going to be effective in crafting strategies to foster inclusion.
This is especially important in times when the staff who lead Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and those who support them are time poor. It makes sense to ensure that maximum benefit is had from the time and effort directed at making workplaces more inclusive.
The Trust Paradox
Samson opens his book with “For all social species, one of the most intract-
able problems is whom to trust. I call this the Trust Paradox.” Whom to trust is a fundamental question at every level of community – from family upwards. Samson says the next level up from family is friendship, and then there’s the tribe.
Tribalism served human communities well as an answer to the Trust Paradox: “If your signal is not received as honest, you gain no entrance into the social inner sanctum. But if others recognize your signals as honest, you pass the test and are treated with a positive bias and, buttressed by your shared identity protective cognition, given tribal privileges.”
However: “Humanity had a new way to promote cooperation… but at a terrible, horrific cost. Once in-groups exist, by definition, so too do out-groups. It was both feature and bug, curse and blessing.”
Samson here introduced the idea of evolutionary mismatch. We adapt to what was rather than what is. In a sense the speed at which we adapt means we are playing catch up. That wasn’t a huge problem when things didn’t radically change. There was a chance to catch up. That’s no longer the case. Population growth and greater urbanisation are taxing our tribalism’s virtues and exposing its limitations.
As I noted in my last post, we are space-age people with still stone-age minds. We need to re-imagination how we trust and how we expand our sense of in-group.
The importance of getting our ideas right
Not being inclusive is often seen as a failure. We have legislation and policies that require inclusivity. There is an expectation by some that this means compliance is required, and non-compliance is a failure.
The problem with this perspective is that it fails to account for something fundamental in our psyches. We don’t adapt our behaviour to edicts unless strong self-interest is activated. The Neuroleadership Institute observes that behaviour change can be stimulated by moving away from danger [a strong impulse] or toward reward [the preferred]. This is more sophisticated than the reward/punishment duality.
The mere presence of inclusive legislation and policies will stimulate a minority to adapt their behaviour, but for the majority compliance isn’t triggered strongly. Our tribalism impulse, which is valid in so many ways, will continue to exert its dominance.
Changing attitudes and behaviour takes significant emotional and cognitive effort. There must be a strong need to adapt and move from an adverse situation to move toward a rewarding one.
Not everyone is highly motivated to conform to new attitudes and behaviours. If we understand this as a spectrum, we will see a minority with little motivation and a minority with high motivation and in between a range of degrees of motivation which might be responsive to canny persuasion.
We must understand what modifies levels of motivation. At one extreme inclusivity may be dampened by cultural or religious influences, or personal psychological circumstances. Others who may be inclined toward inclusivity might not feel able to give the emotional and cognitive effort needed to integrate inclusive attitudes and behaviours into their personal repertoire because of other life demands. These can be carer responsibilities, adverse personal relationships, health challenges, financial or other woes, and adverse work circumstances.
Aside from a minority who are resistant, and a minority who are highly motivated, the majority might be seen as responsive, but passive to varying degrees.
Quite simply, intentional change to attitudes and behaviours, even when very desirable, can be very hard to do.
The risk of inclusion champions becoming excluders
There is nothing that necessarily makes a member of a diversity group a paragon of inclusion. And the worst risk is of creating an inclusive in-group muttering about a non-inclusive out-group.
Samson’s vital insight about trust is important here. An inclusion champion must earn the trust of people they want to influence. This is to say that changing attitudes and behaviours is often about doing things on other people’s terms rather than your own.
Militant inclusion champions are not unknown. Their passion might be comprehensible, but their behaviour just triggers hardwired tribalism reflexes.
Tribalism is everywhere
The stone-age mind is everywhere, in everyone. The extent to which it exerts influence differs from person to person. Groups in a workplace can become in-groups with no awareness of exclusion.
Whether executives and managers like it or not they will form in-groups that relegate subordinates into an out-group. And non-management staff can equally see organisational leaders as an out-group.
Likewise frontline staff can see members of the public [customers or service users] as the out-group.
As individuals we can be members of multiple in-groups [and out-groups in other people’s eyes] and have a sense of multiple out-groups – at work and in the community.
Now this isn’t always a bad thing. In large complex communities this is inevitable. Our natural sense of tribal grouping is reckoned to be around 1500. In urban settings with populations in excess of 1 million it is clear that our communal sense is beyond its natural limit.
Being aware
Anti bias training has been shown to have outcomes contrary to intent. You can’t train a person to not be biased. You can help them become aware that bias is natural but not appropriate in every circumstance – and to know the difference.
Being aware of bias doesn’t make you inclusive. You can be aware of your bias but still go with it. For example, you might be recruiting and decide not to offer the role to a clearly superior candidate whose ‘diversity’ attributes you calculate won’t be a good fit for your team. That’s activating in-group privilege. It makes sense, and your superiors may even be sympathetic. But its counter to the ideals of inclusion.
Being aware of how your stone-age mind influences you is the first step.
Principles and ideals
The fact that our ability to adapt to novel social and communal settings is slow means that we must see legislation and policies mandating inclusion as ideals to be attained rather than mandates to be enforced.
The stone-age mind’s tribal reflex renders accountability in enforcing compliance with legislation and policy profoundly problematic. Organisational leadership will invoke the in-group privilege of being more forgiving of its members. This creates a problem since this in-group is the one charged with enforcing compliance with legislation and policy.
Often members of the leadership’s out-group are more likely to be held to account for non-compliance – with resultant angst or anger.
Principles to be adhered to and ideals to be aspired to should be guiding principles in any community. But how this guidance is expressed is another matter.
Effective leadership – at ERG or organisational levels requires self-awareness and knowledge. The challenge is to open up our stone-age mind’s reflexes to reflective awareness in the context of our space-age world. That way we can identify when they don’t fit a contemporary workplace situation, and a canny approach to adhering to principles and ideals can be developed.
But for that to happen there must be buy in on acquiring and applying the knowledge. There are many strategies that can reduce risk and build trust that can then be developed.
Conclusion
In our space-age reality exclusion is something we all do out of necessity. But, because we don’t live in a stone-age reality, we need to modify our behavioural reflexes to ensure that we can manage to be exclusive when its okay to do so, and inclusive when we have a duty to be so.
The word discrimination used to refer only to choice. Decades ago, being a discriminating person was a good thing. Now, because we have the idea of anti-discrimination, it is no longer a good thing. Its short for inappropriate choice – because we have created a principle and an ideal which say we must not make choices about people because of certain attributes and in certain settings.
It would be nice to argue for universal inclusion regardless of setting – and that might flow from effectively growing inclusion in workplaces – but that’s a bigger challenge than I can explore here.
Workplaces, because of legislation and policies, are remarkable petri dishes where we are learning to better adapt our stone-age minds to space-age world. We are building Tribalism 2.0 – how well can we do that?
Michael Patterson
6 January 2025