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Our Evolutionary Legacy

Never in recent times have our tribal tendencies as a species been more on display than during the COVID-19 pandemic. “What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on 10,000 years of social evolution,” writes Sebastian Junger inTribe. “Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival.”17 Research conducted by evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello and his colleagues reveals how humans moved early on from rudimentary individual collaboration to more sophisticated group-level cooperation to successfully compete against other groups.18 This means something that often gets overlooked: these two human potentialities—cooperation and competition—emerged hand in hand, the one reinforcing the other.

Much has been written about how we have evolved as a species to both cooperate and compete, to both empathize and fear.19 Clearly the potential for both lies within us. But at leastat this stage in our evolution, cooperation and empathy are much more likely to flourish within groups while competition, even hate, is much more likely to break out across groups.20

Why is this? Why has this early evolutionary legacy survived all the way up to today? I believe the most useful answer lies in how you and I define the space between us through our everyday interactions within and across groups. As research on polarization shows, the closer we grow within groups—interacting regularly, believing the same things, tethering our identities to the group—and the more distant groups become from one another—rarely interacting, believing different things, building different identities—the more likely it is that cooperation and empathy will flourish within groups and competition and animosity will break out across groups.21

In many democracies today, including ours, these opposing tendencies are escalating ever faster, creating greater solidarity within groups and greater polarization across groups. In research on social networks in the U.S., sociologists Byungkyu Lee and Peter Bearman detected a sharp rise in political isolation across groups and political like-mindedness within groups in 2016, a trend that has not abated since then. “We’re segregating physically away from one another into our tribes and virtually in terms of the media that we consume,” says conflict expert Peter T. Coleman. “That’s a major concern because we’ve learned from research for decades that . . . when you have regular everyday contact with people who are different from you, it mitigates the escalation of intergroup conflict.”22 Byungkyu and Bearman’s research shows a similar result: people with larger, more diverse networks have more accurate political knowledge, are more likely to vote, and have greater exposure to ideological diversity.23

Our current trend toward greater cross-group distance is renewably powered by collusion cliques, or in today’s parlance, “echo chambers,” those closed, insular groups that recycle views and rarely dispute them. The rise of digital media since 2000 has turbocharged animosity among these cliques, not by reinforcing their views but by exposing them to conflicting views online without the moderating effects of face-to-face interaction. Turns out, the more cliques are exposed to competing views online, absent face-to-face contact, the more they will cling to their views.24 That, as we see today, is a recipe not only for distorting the truth, but for neverlearning that we are distorting the truth. That is a big problem, warned political theorist Hannah Arendt: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . no longer exists.”25

Closing the distance across groups, then, requires us to open up the space within groups, so individual identities c