This is the Argument Ninja podcast, episode 025.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Kevin deLaplante.

Last episode I talked about how my business has been doing, and I said that I would continue to talk about that in the next episode or two, but let me just say for the record, when I say things like that you should take it with a grain of salt. Because my track record for forecasting what I’ll be doing on future episodes is not very good.

And that’s because my situation, especially right now, is evolving, and what I need the podcast to do for me, how it connects to other things I’m doing, can change pretty quickly. And right now, I’m producing a video series on critical thinking and tribalism, and it makes sense for me to use the podcast to expand on that topic, so that’s what this episode will be about.

I’ll have more to say about how my business will be changing in 2018, but if you really want a deep dive into these issues, I’ll just refer you to the blog post I wrote, which you can find at kevindelaplante.com/2017-year-in-review.

So, on this episode I’m going to give you the audio of the two videos I’ve done on tribalism, and wrap that with some additional commentary that’s not in that audio. We’ll talk about the nature of tribalism and tribal psychology, the dangers of tribalism and polarization, cognitive biases that are connected to our tribal psychology, metacognition and critical thinking, and the idea of collective intelligence.

An Unexpected Gift

So, that’s what’s on deck, but before we start into that, I would like to share a nice story that does relate to my business.

Toward the end of January I received an email from a woman named Debbie. I won’t share her last name here because she really doesn’t want this to be about her or her family, who live in Southern Indiana, but here’s the email:

Kevin,

Each year for Christmas, my family (husband, 2 kids and their spouses) take turns choosing a place to make a group donation to in lieu of getting each other presents. It’s my husband and my turn this year and I’d like to donate to you. (I already am a small Patreon donor.)

Anyway, although my family would donate however I choose, I was wondering if we could make our donation specific somehow, perhaps some item you would need for your work.

Our donation would be $500 at least.

Do you have anything that I could tell them our donation would go to specifically?

Thanks for all your work, Debbie.

I looked at this message on my screen, and it really just destroyed me. I couldn’t believe it.

I mean, I love this idea of a group donation in lieu of Christmas presents. My wife loved the idea too, we both decided we would pay this forward next year.

But to be the recipient of such a donation, out of the blue, is really a remarkable thing. I tear up every time I think about this. Gratitude is one emotion, you certainly feel grateful and thankful. But for me, there’s also humility — humility before an act of generosity that is so unexpected, but also humility at being the beneficiary of an act that you don’t deserve.

And I mean that literally. No one deserves a gift that is an unsolicited act of generosity. Later that day I was shoveling snow at the end of the driveway that we share with a neighbor, and the plow had gone by and left a big pile at the end. Normally we shovel our own respective sides of the driveway, that’s our arrangement. But that night I shoveled out my neighbor’s pile so he wouldn’t have to when he got home. And I did that because I felt like I needed to pass on this undeserved thing in some way.

After I came in my son asked me why I did this, and I said, just in passing, “one act of unearned grace deserves another”. And then we ended up having a discussion about the concept of “grace”, and what things we did and didn’t deserve.

Now, no one would mistake me for a religious person, but as a student of religion, I do think that certain traditions have valuable things to say about the human condition. And one of the concepts I’ve always resonated with in Christianity is the concept of grace. But I give it a secular spin.

In Christianity, grace is connected to the imperfection of humanity, which is a condition of our existence. Human beings, on our own, aren’t virtuous enough, or wise enough, to transcend our sinful nature. Limited beings can’t understand what is unlimited; imperfect beings can’t understand perfection.

Not only that, our sinful nature can’t be overcome by any act of will or effort of our own. That’s what it means to say that we’re all subject to original sin. We’re fallen creatures. On our own, we can never find our way back to God. And we can never deserve salvation, we’re never entitled to it, no matter how good we try to be.

The only path to salvation is through God’s grace, which is an act of undeserved generosity. He reveals himself to us, and he grants us a path to salvation, a path to transcending our finite, sinful nature, even though we don’t deserve it. And even when we accept that grace, we still don’t deserve it. We’re humbled by it, we’re grateful for it, but we’re not entitled to it.

Now, what’s the secular version of this? The secular version of original sin is that it’s impossible for us to ever fully live up to all the values that we recognize, that reflect our highest ideals. if you’re any kind of pluralist about value — if you think there is more than one kind of intrinsic value in the world, or if you care about more than one kind of value — then optimizing for one value inevitably sacrifices others that we care about.

So we’re always making choices that involve trading off one kind of value for another, and we can never be fully satisfied with those choices, because we will always fall short somewhere. As a morally self-aware species, there’s something tragic about this condition, of feeling driven to do the right thing, and knowing that in form or another you will fail to live up to the values that you’re striving toward.

Now, this may sound pessimistic, but I find that if we accept our fallen nature, or tragic nature, this perspective can be a resource for us.

For one, it can be a source of humility. Humility can open our eyes, help us see more clearly. It can give us insight into ourselves and other people.

And it can be a source of compassion and forgiveness. In the face of weakness and failure, we can have contempt for ourselves, or we can have compassion. Contempt is toxic, and paralyzing; the only way forward is compassion and forgiveness. For ourselves. That’s how we keep getting back on our feet after being knocked down, over and over. That’s how we keep striving for excellence, striving for perfection, even when we know we’ll never attain it.

And this acceptance of our fallen nature, and the need for compassion and forgiveness, can also be a ground for our shared humanity. You may be a stranger to me in many ways, but you and I share this much: you struggle to live a life that has meaning, you struggle to live the values that matter to you; and you will fail, just as I fail, just as we all fail. We have this in common.

And when I’m in touch with my own fallen nature, and the compassion that I need to extend to myself … I can extend that compassion to you, because I see myself in you — in this respect, you and I are members of the same tribe.

Now, where does the concept of grace come in? I don’t want to say that we’re never entitled to certain kinds of treatment. We need a concept of entitlement, it’s connected to important values of justice and rights and fairness.

But we have to admit that much of the good that we receive in our lives is not entitled. It’s not just random acts of kindness. None of us are entitled to the benefits we receive, nor deserving of the harms we suffer, through the accidental circumstances of our birth, our parentage, our race, our gender, our culture, our genetic makeup.

Nor is it clear how to attach praise or blame to our personality traits, or our virtues and vices. I’m very slow to anger, some people are much quicker to anger. To the extent that being slow to anger is a virtue, I’m happy for it, but I can’t really say that I deserve to be praised for it, it’s just the way I’m wired.

So if we don’t deserve most of the goods that we receive in our lives, or the talents we enjoy, what’s the right attitude to take when we contemplate this dimension of our lives?

The Stoics and the Buddhists have a line on this that I like, but I also find I’m attracted to this picture that I’ve been sketching, which, if you wanted to attach some labels to it, is kind of a secularized Christian existentialism. When I contemplate the good things in my life, I grant that everything could have turned out differently, and that fundamentally I’m not deserving of any of this. What I am is grateful for the moments of undeserved grace that I’ve been given.

So, Debbie, if you’re listening, let me extend another thank you to you and your family for your act of generosity. It made me reflect on some of these themes, so I thought I’d share them here.

And just so you know, within a couple of days I received 800 dollars in my PayPal account. I used it to buy an iPad Pro, which I’ve wanted to get for years, but couldn’t justify the expense when you’re struggling just to pay your basic bills every month. My old tablet had died some time ago, but I used to use it all the time for work. The new tablet is fabulous. And when I’m using it, I’m reminded of the gift of grace, and it’s a good feeling.

Why Tribal Literacy?

Okay, enough of that digression. The title of this episode is “Why Tribal Literacy?”, so let’s talk about this.

If you’re a Patreon subscriber or on my email list then you know I started a new public video series on tribalism and critical thinking, that is intended to present in an accessible what I consider to be essential components of “tribal literacy”. As of this recording I’ve posted two videos, one called ”The Dangers of Tribalism”, and other called “Our Tribal Intelligence”. You can find those at kevindelaplante.com, or just search for Kevin deLaplante in YouTube to find my channel there. I’ll embed those videos in the show notes for this podcast episode too.

So, why tribal literacy?

Well, we seem to be having a “tribal moment” in our popular consciousness. I can’t get through a day without seeing an article or a podcast or a book pop up on my radar that mentions tribalism in one form or another.

Here are some news article titles:

• “The Retreat to Tribalism”
• “Can our Democracy Survive Tribalism?”
• “Two Threats to World Peace: The New Cold War and Tribalism”
• “The Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism”

That doesn’t sound good at all.

That last article is by Amy Chua, who has a new book out right now called Political Tribalism: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.  She argues that America’s foreign policy has long been undermined by our underestimation of tribalism abroad, and that our domestic stability is now being hollowed out by our inability to see it clearly at home.

This line of thinking connects with a lot of scholarship on democracy and polarization. There’s a new book out now called How Democracies Die, by Steven Levisky and Daniel Ziblatt, that is primarily about the way that several 20^th century democracies in Europe and Latin America have degenerated and slipped into authoritarianism, and as part of their work they document the increasing polarization of American political parties over the past fifty years, and especially the past ten years, and the various ways this could threaten American democracy.

In my circles I follow a lot of people working on cognitive and social psychology that are studying our tribal psychology, for lack of a better term — the effects of human groupishness on our moral and epistemological thinking — and this work is starting to get noticed too, for obvious reasons. People want a deeper understanding of why this is happening, and what, if anything, there is to be done about it.

My own preoccupations with the relationship between critical thinking, argumentation and persuasion have lead me in and out of this literature on tribal psychology for years. Because the very same literature on cognitive biases and the evolutionary origins of our distinctively human ways of thinking, also show up in the literature on tribalism. I think of it as part of the essential background knowledge for critical thinking — understanding how our brains work, how we make judgments, how perception works, how emotions work, how successful communication works, how reasoning works, and so on.

But now we have this new political context that is making this background relevant in a new way. So I thought, let’s do a video series on tribalism and critical thinking. It does double-duty; the tribal perspective sheds new light on the challenges of critical thinking, and the critical thinking perspective — or rather the focus on the psychology and epistemology of rationality and belief — adds some depth to the conversation about tribalism.

And I wanted to do something that was visually more engaging, that combined words and images in a way that reflects how I tend to think of these topics. So I decided to use a sketchbook format. If you haven’t seen them, the video shows me flipping through a sketchbook with drawings and narrating over top.

I wanted to start out with a video that acknowledged the obvious point, the point that everyone is making, that tribalism is dangerous, that it can bring out the worst in human nature, and it can be politically and socially destabilizing.

But one of my recurring themes is that tribalism per se isn’t the real problem. The real problem is excessive polarization.

So, I’m going to play the audio for that first video on the dangers of tribalism. There are a few places that the narration refers to a drawing, but for the most part the audio can stand on its own.

Let’s listen to it, and I’ll add some commentary afterward.

The Dangers of Tribalism

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[Audio for “The Dangers of Tribalism”]

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There are some graphics in this video that I think really do help to sell the message, so I do recommend you check out the video if you haven’t already.

One thing I do when I make a video like this, that is intended to be very accessible, is that I don’t spend a lot of time talking about references or make the sorts of qualifications that you might writing for an academic audience. But those references are important, and when I’m doing my research I collect them, they become part of my personal background knowledge.

In this case I share some of these references on the accompanying blog post.

Tribalism Cuts Across Disciplinary Boundaries

An important point about research on tribalism and tribal psychology is that the phenomenon cuts across disciplinary boundaries, and different disciplines focus on some aspects but not others. So to get a fuller picture you need to survey these different disciplines.

For example, social psychologists can study in-group / out-group biases without knowing anything about the neurobiology of us-them thinking. And you can study both without knowing anything about the evolution of human sociality or debates over group selection in evolutionary theory.

And you can learn all of this and not be familiar with work on the psychology and physiology of belongingness, and all the correlations between physical and mental health benefits and healthy group identities, or social isolation and the epidemic of loneliness.

You can keep extending this list. You can know all about what I just mentioned, and not be familiar with the research that political scientists have done on tribalism and polarization, how polarization is measured, and what theories are being discussed to explain the steady rise in polarization that we’ve seen, in the American context at least, over the past forty years.

One of the advantages of being a philosopher of science studying this work, and not a psychologist or an evolutionary biologist or a political scientist, is that I don’t have a disciplinary home base in any of these fields, so I don’t feel any pressure to “stay close to home”, as it were.

It makes it easier to step back and try to visualize the elephant, as it were.

Anyway, let’s move on to the second video, which is on tribal epistemology, and which I titled “Our Tribal Intelligence”.

Our Tribal Intelligence

“Tribal epistemology” is itself another one of these “cluster concepts”, that you can decompose into a large number of distinct phenomena that are studied by different disciplines.

In this video I wanted to set the stage for discussions that are coming farther down the line. I wanted to talk about the evolution of human groupishness, and at least one topic that connects strongly to human evolutionary biology, which is the evolution of culture and the role that culture plays in our success as a species.

Anyone familiar with Joe Henrich’s work on the coevolution of the human genome and human culture will see his influence in this video.

This video also calls back to an earlier video I did on the “knowledge illusion”, or what is known as the “illusion of explanatory depth”, which is discussed in Steven Sloman and Phil Fernbach’s book The Knowledge Illusion.

So, here’s the audio portion of “Our Tribal Intelligence”. I’ll add some comments afterward.

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[Audio for “Our Tribal Intelligence”]

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I have a couple of comments to make about this video.

Cognitive Biases and Metacognition

The first is that it illustrates a recurring theme in research on cognitive biases, which is that these biases are grounded in cognitive shortcuts or heuristics that are generally adaptive in a wide range of contexts. They’re a feature of our design, not a bug.

But they can have negative effects, and we want to minimize these effects when we can.

When it comes to overconfidence biases like the illusion of explanatory depth, there is no easy debiasing strategy that can reduce the first-order effect.

In most cases, our fast, automatic judgments of how much we understand about a particular topic are going to be too high — we’ll overestimate how well we know what we think we know, and underestimate how much we don’t know.

But what we can do is cultivate a second-order attitude toward our first-order judgments; namely, that we should be skeptical of our first-order judgments.

This is an example of what is sometimes called “metacognition”, thinking about thinking. Part of critical thinking is acquiring the rights kinds of metacognitive habits of thought that will promote our critical thinking goals rather than inhibit them.

And one important class of such habits of thought is our attitudes toward our own cognitive limitations.

If someone asks me whether I think tighter gun control laws will be effective at reducing the number of mass shootings, I’m going to have an initial judgment about that, especially if I’m familiar with the general opinion of the leaders in my social tribe on this topic.

But unless you’re an actual social scientist who has studied the empirical data on this, or have made a serious commitment to acquiring a diverse background on the relevant social science, that initial judgment will be way overconfident.

What the research on this illusion predicts is that if you’re asked to actually explain the mechanism, give the causal story, of how a change in the law will ultimately impact rates of mass shootings, you will struggle to assemble a coherent story about that. And your confidence about your understanding will drop as a result. That’s the effect that we see over and over in experimental studies.

So my second-order habit of thought should be to acknowledge this fact — my understanding of this topic is shallower and less complete than I think it is — and act accordingly.

What does it mean to act accordingly? Depends on the situation. At the very least, it means acting from a position of epistemic humility.

If I generally lean pro-gun control, it could mean simply saying, “I don’t really know. I’m inclined to think it’ll have some impact but how much I don’t know”.

If I generally lean the other way, I might say “I don’t really know. I’m inclined to think it won’t have much effect, but I could be wrong about that.”

Now, this kind of measured response isn’t going to curry you any favors if your social tribe is a partisan tribe that has a more confident view on this, because there are strong incentives to signal your membership in the tribe by adopt a view that matches that confidence.

But it is the more intellectually honest and honorable response, once you’re aware of the biases in your thinking.

Collective Intelligence

Okay, that’s the first point I wanted to raise.

The second point is on a different topic. It’s about collective intelligence.

This is another area where you find disciplinary expertise in unexpected areas.

I read a lot of social psychology, I’ve read a lot about IQ and the debates over how to interpret IQ scores. But from that crew you rarely encounter anyone talking about collective intelligence.

The people who are doing the most interesting research on collective intelligence are academics working in business departments, at the intersection between psychology, business management and organizational performance.

These are the people studying the features of successful teams, and the cognitive and personality traits of individuals who comprise successful teams, with respect to problem solving, innovation, planning, consensus finding, and so on.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that if you stack a team full of high-IQ academic overachievers, they won’t do as well as a team with a better distribution of social, emotional and communication skills.

The skill set that promotes high functioning groups is not the same as the skill set for high functioning individuals.

And when you think of how important teamwork and collaboration are in modern work environments, it would be nice if this fact was more widely appreciated in public education circles.

In business it’s all over the place, but I don’t think our schools are teaching students about the psychology of effective teamwork, or designing curricula to foster these kinds of skills.

That seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Wrapping Up

Anyway, I could go on, but I think that’s enough for now.  I’m going to wrap up here.

Hey, thanks for listening. You can see the show notes for this episode at kevindelaplante.com or at argumentninja.com. Just look for episode 25 of the podcast.

I’m going to post this and then I’m going to get to work on the next video in the tribalism series, which will focus on the way that our tribal nature influences our judgments about who counts as an expert and what sources of information are trustworthy, which is a very timely topic. So stay tuned for that.

If you find this podcast and these videos valuable, there are many ways you can support it. You can subscribe to the Argument Ninja podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can watch and share the videos on social media. Or you can support my work directly, by becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon, over at patreon.com/kevindelaplante.

My goal is to be fully funded from monthly supporters so I can devote myself fully to creating new critical thinking resources, including the Argument Ninja Academy. But I’m not there yet, so until that happens I’m forced to do other kinds of work to make ends meet, which makes it harder to produce new content on a regular schedule.

So if you’d like to see more content on a more frequent schedule, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. And just a reminder, for as little 3 dollars a month, you also get access to all the video tutorial content over at criticalthinkeracademy.com. I have video courses there on basic concepts in logic and argumentation, logical fallacies, cognitive biases, argumentative essay writing, and much more. You get access to all of that content when you sign up as a recurring monthly supporter.

Thanks again for listening.