YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Morris

lines on the record: 87
first: 2024-11-27
most recent: 2024-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“By soaking it in water works, but it works. So if I just trust and take it on faith and learn by rote, then I can continue that expertise and pass it on to the next generations. And for the group, it created a kind of tribal memory. Before that, in the archaeological record, what you'd see is that a group in a particular area would develop, you know, the throwing spear and have it for 10 generations and then lose it for 30 generations. And then someone would invent it again. So they were reinventing the wheel a lot. And after the ancestor instinct was also in place, then you had these three instincts. You had the ancestor instinct, which allowed you to hang on to the lessons of the past. You had the hero instinct, which made people want to go beyond what's already in place. So it turned into building on the expertise of the past.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parents were not supposed to ask questions. We're supposed to repeat the Seder dinner exactly the way the Seder dinner was done by prior generations. And that is what I call the ancestor instinct is this impulse to learn by rote about things that the past generations did and then replicate almost compulsively those things in exactly the way that we've learned them. can lead to superstitious learning and hanging on to ways of the past that are no longer adaptive but it was very adaptive for our evolutionary forebearers because it contributed to memory both as an individual I could I could learn some technique like a spear making technique that might go beyond my understanding you know I don't understand why this way of straightening”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we feel about past generations, you know, when we hear about the founder, when I used to teach at Bloomberg, I would tell them, you know, when Mike Bloomberg started a company on the first terminal they leased, he put it in the trunk of his car and he drove down to Wall Street and people just hang on every word when you're talking about those formative legends, you know, what the founder did at the beginning of the organization. People are very curious to hear about prior generations of their family. They're curious about the original family recipe and they take a deep satisfaction in following those recipes on a holiday. We fetishize antiques, you know, these artifacts from the past. And so all of this is the psychology of nostalgia for the past or sentimentality for the past. And it comes with it a capacity for rote learning. So when we're learning religious things from our grand”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the ancestor instinct to a lot of people when I describe it, it sounds like the most primitive of all of these instincts, but it's actually the crowning touch that enabled us to live in tribes and accrue all the advantages of it. And the ancestor instinct, just like the other two, we can still recognize it in ourselves today. The peer instinct corresponds to the sideways glances at our neighbors and our coworkers and the impulse to do what they're doing. The hero instinct corresponds to our upward curiosity about MVPs and CEOs and celebrities and the weird impulse we have to emulate their quirks, you know, to kind of eat what LeBron James eats for breakfast or to use the same hand gestures that Barack Obama uses. The ancestor instinct corresponds to the curiosity.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah Working as a united front, and there's all these economic analyses of foraging, you know, both by biologists and foraging collectively is more efficient. For working as a group, there's less likelihood of any of us starving.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambition to be a contributor, they got socially rewarded. But it also was very adaptive for the group because it incentivized individuals to build tools that required toiling alone for a long period of time. It's also around the time when archaeologists start to see the skeletons of people with congenital deformities that survive to the age of adulthood. And that suggests that someone was taking care of a person in their group who probably couldn't reciprocate. And so I'm doing something pro-social. I'm not going to get paid back by the person that I'm helping, but I'm going to get paid back by the group because I'm doing something noble or something good or something exemplary. I'm a hero.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It into a needle sharp point, and then you have to somehow haft the spear tip onto the thing. So there's a pretty elaborate process of making a spear, but that is one of the hallmark innovations of the next big wave of human social evolution, which happened about a half a million years ago. And that involves what I call the hero instinct, which is if the peer instinct was an instinct to be normal, to do what most people are doing, the hero instinct was this new impulse to be normative, to be exemplary, to go beyond what other people are doing, to be a key contributor and gain the status and the tribute that the community accords to those who are the key contributors. And it was an interesting thing to evolve because it was rewarding for the individuals who had the”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the herd, eventually it just keels over from exhaustion and dehydration. And we have an antelope. And so it's become evident from Fossilized footprints that even a million and a half years ago Homo erectus was capable of that sort of thing and it's also become evident from other kinds of microscopic particles of burnt stone that they were cooking And so they were coordinating both with regard to hunting and with regard to gathering and that suggests that they were sophisticated with regard to social intelligence in ways that goes way beyond the picture of them that archaeology presented in prior generations. The first evidence for stone-tipped spears is about half a million years ago, I think because the technology for building spears is that you have to first straighten if it's a thrown spear you have to straighten the shaft of it and then you have to sharpen the point of it.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With just a hand axe, stand a chance of getting an antelope. Well, today there are some African peoples who engage in what's called persistence hunting, which is, say, you and I are hunters in a group that doesn't really have many weapons. So we watch an antelope herd, and then we see maybe one antelope on the margin of the herd, and then you go chase it and you kind of separate it from the herd, and then you're tired and it's tired. But then I start chasing it, coordinating with you on the same antelope. It does no good to chase different antelopes around all afternoon. But if we can chase the same antelope, you know, evolution designed antelopes to be sprinters, not marathoners, right? A lions only charge once. And so if you and I and someone else can take turns chasing this antelope in a coordinated way and keeping it separated.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Handax, which is a sort of teardrop shaped piece of flint that they use to chop, they use to grind, they use to this. And so they were always kind of portrayed as this single tool simpleton, you know, that was around for a million years and only invented this one tool, portrayed as more intellectually more ape than human. But what has become evident from footprints that have been discovered in Kenya in the footprints that ossified in the mud is that groups of erectus, you know, a million and a half years ago, engaged in coordinated hunting of antelopes. And it's long been known that there were antelope bones in erectus sites, but it was thought that, oh, they must have been scavengers, you know, because how could antelopes can run 50 miles an hour, not even Usane Bolt could come near them. So how could Homo erect?”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat jokingly in the book, suggests that the field of archaeology owes a very sincere apology to Homo erectus. Because for the longest time, archaeology was pretty much the science of stones and bones. It's what has survived, but it's not necessarily the only tools that these archaic humans had. It's kind of selective survivor bias, right? So we tend to think of them as the flintstones, but of course they had lots of wooden tools and other tools that just aren't around for us to see. But archaeologists have become much, much more clever. They use these CSI worthy techniques to learn a lot more from often microscopic traces of things of soil in these sites that they identify as living sites. And one thing that has become clear is that Homo erectus only invented one tool.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have this just strong impulse to mesh. And almost everything important that humans have accomplished. Newton said, you know, if I've seen farther than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants, right? So it's our ability to work with and build on the ideas of others that are really responsible for everything that we've accomplished. And it's this peer instinct, this conformative instinct, this conformist instinct that is largely responsible for that.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That other chimps are doing the red button, they stick to what works for them. So we are more imitative. We are quicker to join the consensus than other primates. And we tend to deride that side of us. I call it the peer instinct. It's this impulse to mesh with what the others around us are doing. And we tend to deride it as a herd instinct or as conformity. And of course, it does limit our independent thinking sometimes and sometimes tragically, but we forget that that is the cornerstone of human culture and human collaboration because it allows us to meld minds and mesh actions. And when we are with people who are part of the same in-group, are part of the same culture, we can finish each other's sentences, we can help each other without even a request in a way that no other species can because we're”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we are far more imitative than they are. And there's this psychologist named Michael Thomas Sello who's done this wonderful work because he's one of the world's experts at child cognition, but he's also one of the world's experts at primate cognition. So he can kind of do these comparative experiments between children and orangutans and chimpanzees. And what he's found is that if you teach a child how to solve a puzzle to get a treat through one method, say pushing the yellow button and you get some M&Ms. But then you show that child for other children who all work with the same puzzle and hit the red button and get M&Ms. Then you let the first child go again. They'll push the red button. They'll conform to what they see the peers are doing. When you put a chimp through that same procedure, they stick to what works for them.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if one of them develops a new way to use a stick to get termites or to use a stick to get fruit from a tree, others may see it and they may do something that's crudely similar to it, but they don't catch what the method is and what the intention is. Whereas humans, you know, if somebody invents something new, the people around them immediately can replicate it and start doing it and innovations spread very, you know, we all know about fads, right? You know, innovations spread really rapidly. And it's funny because we say monkeys see monkey do. We have this notion from going to the zoo that there are such copycats, such imitative.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, you know, evolution works in funny ways. Evolution is kind of a tinkerer. And one of the things that evolution came up with, or a mutation came up with that then became harnessed by our social intelligence is the whites of our eyes. Other primates don't have white sclera, and so they can't track each other's gaze as easily and that means they can't read each other's minds as easily there's this old idea, the eyes of the window to the soul, and the research on this has found a new scientific understanding of what that means. And so our ability to mind read enables us to imitate each other's behavior at a much richer level than other primates can do. It's more like mimicry when one chimps are very inventive but not very collaborative.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To trust each other in a way that no other animal can. And that was the Rubicon that we crossed as a species that after that we left the rest of the primate pack in our dust because once we were forming these rich cultures that were shared by large groups, it was like a collective brain. It was this pool of knowledge that started accumulating across the generations and that individuals could tap into to become more capable than the individuals from prior generations because the cultures became richer and richer.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the broad evolutionary anthropology perspective is the distinctively human form of social organization. Our nearest neighbors, chimpanzees, they can form troops of up to about 50, 60 individuals. If it gets any larger, it breaks apart into clashing factions and bloodshed. We obviously can form much larger groups and collaborate in much more sophisticated and adaptive ways. And the way that we can do that is that we can form groups that transcend KIF and Kin. We can form groups where we are connected to total strangers who share the same cultural heritage as us. So culture is a glue that holds together large human groups and enables us”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things like that, that other primates would be completely incapable of. But it's not like we're ants or bees who are wired by their DNA to behave socially in a particular way. If you go around the world, anthills are always conical and beehives are always hexagonal because that's genetically programmed. We're not genetically programmed to build our shelters in any particular style, but we do learn culturally, you know, to build a yurt if we're in Kyrgyzstan or to build a tepee if we're in plains Native American.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fair statement. Yeah, it's a position that kind of falls in between the traditional nature versus nurture framework that people of our age got in school. What the new consensus is, and there's a field of evolutionary anthropology that has had a lot of the key insights, is that human nature is nurture, that we are the species that became wired by evolutionalize the patterns of communities that nurture us. And what that means is that we can operate as a coordinated group that functions seamlessly and that meshes together based on cultural patterns, because we all internalize them unconsciously and we are motivated to follow them, and hence we can have large organizations and cities.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inform these larger networks called tribes that proved to be a lot more adaptive, proved to be a more winning strategy over time. So there's this kind of fallacy that just because these conflicts involve hostility, that somehow they start from a drive for hostility. And that's just a false diagnosis that doesn't help us understand ways to ameliorate these conflicts. It makes for riveting articles about how we're doomed and the end times are here, but it doesn't make for good policies. And so as a secondary purpose of the book, I've tried to argue that, hey, we really need, if we want to talk about tribal psychology and tribalism, let's have a science-informed view of what tribal instincts are and understand how they do figure in conflicts, but not in a way that curses us to eternal internacine conflict. It's a manageable...”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back from the nice things that we would like to have, like international cooperation or ethnic. Harmony, political functioning. So I think that this way of talking about tribalism is part right, but part wrong. It is the case that our tribal psychology plays a role in these escalating conflicts, but where the pundits get it wrong is that we don't have a tribal instinct to hate other groups. That wouldn't have been a particularly adaptive instinct, right? Like a warring instinct. There was an archaic human species called Neanderthals that kind of did have that sort of orientation towards neighboring tribes. They practiced cannibalism and warfare and they went extinct in part because our kind had a different foreign policy. We made it and traded with other groups.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Campaigns to evolve the culture in a way that you think will support the needed strategy in the future. So I started to write a book sharing that playbook, but then over the course of the last five years, and I've been writing the book for about five years, there have been a series of conflicts in the world that have evoked people to start using the word tribal and tribalism much more than they ever did before. And I'm talking about the red, blue rift, the record racial protests in the streets, and the religious strife, you know, both at home and around the world where you start to hear this new discourse about tribalism as a curse, you know, an evolutionary curse that we are somehow genetically predisposed to hate or to fear and loathing of some other group, and that this will always hinder us and hold us.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Well, as a business school professor, I do a lot of teaching to executives. I also do a lot of consulting. As you mentioned, I consult to political campaigns every election season. It doesn't always work out the way I wish. But I also consult a company. So 10 years ago, I ran a course for a couple of years at Bloomberg about decision-making, biases, culture, and leadership to the top executives here. Through that process, I've developed a playbook or a toolkit for thinking about how to lead through culture, how to use what I know about the malleability of culture and the manageability of culture so that as a leader, you're not thinking of culture as an obstacle to what you want to get done, but as a force that you can harness, that you can dial up or dial down, and that you can mount slow.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is striking. And it really goes against this notion of cultures as permanent fixtures or people, you know, there are ways of talking about culture like this is in our cultural DNA. And it's this equation of culture with genetics in a way that I think is a bit of a fallacy because it leads us to think of culture as a set of traits, whereas culture is a set of lenses that we look through, but the lenses are shifting and the lenses change over time.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the country and the official language of the cockpit from Korean to English. Now all pilots already spoke English because it's the language of air traffic control around the world. But when people were speaking to the same colleagues in English, they weren't cued to be deferential because just like in Japan where you have to call your boss Sato San or something, you know, you have to use certain suffixes. In Korean, there are these complex honorific declensions that you have to use that are constant reminders of the status relative status level. And of course, in English, we don't have those things. So it's a remarkable story about the, you know, the cultural patterns are not essentialistic or inherent. You know, sometimes if you can just change the environment slightly so that they're not triggered, the same people are totally unencumbered by them.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For those parts of the world. But then at the same time, this study of cockpit black boxes that are recovered after accidents and have recordings of the cockpit dialogue, that came out around the same time and pointed to a very similar conclusion. And Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers wrote about the confluence of these two things and I think brought it to a lot of people's attention at that time. But what I found even more interesting than the paradox that a country like South Korea, which is high in technology, high in wealth, et cetera, was having problems, was that they managed to get rid of the problems. They made some very simple changes in Korean Airlines, and they haven't crashed since. They went from the world's worst safety record to an unblemished safety record. And the change they made was not firing a bunch of people. It was not changing all their procedures. It was changing the official language.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was enormous variance across the world's flagship airlines in safety rates and the countries that were having the most problems were not the ones that you might think. They were Taiwan and South Korea. Those were the countries with the worst safety record. And those are not poor countries in particular or countries with particularly bad weather, but they are countries that are among the highest in the world when you look at hierarchical values, what researchers called power distance. And in those societies, if someone is of senior rank, you're not supposed to equally, you're not supposed to interact with them equally. And it was sufficiently worrying that Boeing actually considered designing a different plane.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a lot of this is unconscious automatic behavior, right? I mean, I'm a co-pilot, socialize my whole life to speak in a differential way to those of senior rank. And so I'm speaking that way. I'm not calculating that if I spoke more assertively, that might change the pilot's comprehension of the urgency of the situation. Yeah, so I think that a lot of accidents are caused by automatic behavior and a lot of cultural behaviors. The situation with Korean pilots, it was something that was discovered first by Boeing. Boeing researchers who made the 747 class jet, which requires equal collaboration among co-pilots and pilots, which wasn't the case with smaller jets, they noticed that there were”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just behaviors Right. Well, let me start by saying this touches on the core theme of the book, which is that culture changes. There's this myth out there that culture is unchanging and unchangeable, that the cultures of the world are permanent fixtures and that the Americans of two centuries ago were the same as us. And that's an illusion that we kind of enjoy, but it's an illusion. You know, what the founding fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness is not what you and I think of as the pursuit of happiness. And what we know today in the pop culture as code switching, it sort of came into the popular discourse when Obama was president, and we've seen it again this year as Kamala Harris campaigned, is this notion that people who've grown up in more than one ethnic subculture that have corresponding dialects”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first day of teaching at Columbia University was actually 9 11. Oh jeez. So that was an interesting introduction. But I've enjoyed living and working in New York quite a lot. I never thought I would still be living here because I had been in a pattern of moving every five years. But an easy solution to life. I take a lot of sabbatical years”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School, you don't have much exposure to it. It seemed like the universe was telling me that what I was doing was of great interest to people in business school. So my career turned a corner at that point. And then I started at Stanford Business School at age 26, you know, before I had even finished my dissertation. And it was a learning experience. My first couple years, but you learn, you learn from teaching. And then I did well there and got promoted early there and then decided to come back to New York where I grew up in the New York area. That brought me to Columbia. I came back to Colombia in 2001.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Schools of the world were becoming very, very interested in cultural differences and in particular interested in research on cultural differences that was somewhat objective, you know, that used precise measurements rather than anthropological fieldwork, which has a more subjective feeling, although it's valuable in many ways to the economists running the top business schools. It felt a little vague and impressionistic. And so I was running experiments and precise surveys comparing professionals and students in these different parts of the world and observing regular differences in some of the cognitive biases. And that led three of the top business schools in the world to all make me job offers. And so I had not foreseen that this research would carry me into the world of business schools. You know, Brown is not a place that has a business.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started doing work that you can think of as sort of east-west comparisons. You know, often it was comparing college students in China to college students in the US or bank employees in Hong Kong to bank employees in New York. When I was doing that, it was considered to be sort of fringe research in psychology because psychologists at the time liked to think of themselves as natural scientists, you know, part of the natural sciences. And they thought that most of the biases they observed were rooted in brain structure in one way or another. And they were part of universal human nature. And so what I was doing was a little bit considered to be critical of that. But at the same time, the business schools of the world, at least the top business,”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resurfaced in the mid 90s as people were trying to understand the rise of the four tigers and China and Japan and how was it that you could have multiple modernities. You know, not everyone was becoming Western. And that's sort of the time and place in which my career started.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then comparative literature is obviously all about tradition and the collective representations that shape the discourse in a community over the centuries. And so I think it was kind of natural for me to be interested in how the received culture shapes the thought processes that a group of people have. I had grown up around people from different parts of the world and didn't seem to me like everybody thought the same way that everybody didn't seem to have the same common sense. So I started working with people who were rebuilding a field called cultural psychology, which had existed briefly in Moscow in the 20s, but then kind of got shot down by Stalin. And, you know, it...”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the original career plan was I wanted to stay in school for a little while. I went to do a PhD. I had actually gone to four different universities in my four years as an undergraduate. And so my feet had been moving. And I thought I could benefit from going to graduate school. And I chose something sort of in the middle of the two topics that I studied as an undergraduate, you know, cognitive science is a computer science and sort of Noam Chomsky-style linguistics. It's sort of a more mathy formal approach to the mind.”
2024-11-27 · Masters in Business · The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source