Fear
Tribalism Overwhelms Reason Because It Keeps Us Safe
We blindly ignore evidence so we can remain loyal to the tribe that protects us.
Posted July 21, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- Few observers have recognized that our instinct to be tribal is rooted to our instinct for self-preservation.
- Tribes give us more power than we have as individuals.
- That power gives us a sense of control and safety.
- The primal need for safety readily trumps reason.
Richard Nixon was right when he said, “People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.” And there is plenty to fear these days; the increasing threat of global war, our increasingly uncertain economic future, and the increasingly uncertain future of democracy itself in the U.S. and elsewhere. But there is an even deeper fear we have not yet fully recognized that lies at the heart of many of the threats we face. It is the fear we have of being kicked out of our tribe.
It's hardly fresh to observe that tribal instincts are tearing America and many other places apart. Many have made that case. But none of what I’ve seen has gotten to the heart of why tribal loyalty matters so much that it can leave otherwise intelligent, highly educated people “cognitively impenetrable," literally blinded to any evidence that conflicts with what our tribe believes.
Why is our need to demonstrate tribal loyalty so powerful? Why does it so readily turn disagreement into violent us-them conflict? Why does it turn family members and friends who hold different values into detested enemies? Why does our need for tribal protection lead to wars and genocide? If we are to start healing the destructive divisions this instinct produces, we need to go deeper than just observing the phenomenon. We need to understand where its power comes from and appreciate how absolute that power can be.
Humans are social animals. We have always affiliated in groups, driven by the most fundamental imperative for any animal: our safety and survival. The imperative to seek protection from our tribe exists deep in our biologically-driven behavioral roots, way below and before consciousness. You know that feeling in your chest or the pit of your stomach when you hear about some upsetting thing the other tribe is doing that goes against your tribe’s position or beliefs, or when you argue with someone over politics, religion, Palestine-Israel, climate change, or even just Yankees-Red Sox (Yankees suck!)? That is your conscious awareness that a threat has already subconsciously triggered your fight, flight, or freeze biology. Before you’ve taken even a moment to think things through, your body is already undergoing physical and chemical changes designed to keep you safe!
A friend’s story reveals this instinct with chilling clarity.
As a younger man, Mark was a fierce eco-warrior, a highly respected member of a tight group that sabotaged bulldozers and ripped up fields testing genetically modified plants. But in writing a book about ways to save the world, his research convinced him there was little threat from such plants, and great benefit. It took him two years to work up the courage to publicly admit his change of mind. He said that he felt terrified. “The whole time it felt like I was standing on the trap door of a gallows with the rope around my neck and the lever in my hand.”
Consider the visceral nature of that language: the animal-level instinctive fear – of death itself – triggered merely by adopting a belief he knew was anathema to his tribe. He’d be shunned, kicked out, alone. That fear literally triggered the same subconscious fight-or-flight biology in his brain as if someone was pointing a gun at his head.
Or, consider another story that illustrates how these ideas help explain America at the moment. It comes from Francis Collins' book The Road to Wisdom. He writes of a pastor at a conservative church who “encountered some serious feedback while seeking to help his congregation through difficult times” after several decades of social liberalization. “His parishioners were increasingly unhappy about the state of the country. They expressed deep concerns about the rise of secularism, hostility toward Christians, and the collapse of traditional family values... They were fearful that their way of life was threatened, and they were angry.” After preaching about Jesus’ admonitions to turn the other cheek and treat others as we would be treated, one parishioner said, “Pastor, those words might have been fine for Jesus’ time. But we are at war now. We are in a death struggle for survival against the forces of evil and radical secularism.”
Again, listen to how visceral that language is: deep fear, a profound sense of nothing less than existential danger…people who felt ”threatened” and at “war” in a “death struggle for survival.”
Why has our tribalism become so fierce in recent times, not just in the U.S. but in many places around the world? Globalization of the world's economy has created winners and losers and a sharp rise in economic insecurity/income inequality. Many people feel that they have less control over their lives and futures, and the psychology of risk perception has found that the less control we feel we have over anything, the more powerless and threatened we feel. The more threatened we feel, the more we instinctively turn to our tribe for a reassuring sense of empowerment and safety. We circle our tribal wagons ever more closely. Minds close. Compromise vanishes. People we disagree with become "the enemy." All of this is inflamed by the new information environment that magnifies our tribalism by letting us tune in to the “facts” that reinforce our beliefs and tune out anything else. The growing tribe of populism and its organizing anthem of “Us against Them” is a symptom of this phenomenon.
To reduce the real and present danger that our increasingly fierce divisions pose, we must recognize and respect that our deep need for safety through tribal loyalty controls how we think and behave. It easily overpowers reason. We must respect that this is an inherent trait of the human animal, not simply a matter of how educated people are. We must respect that solutions to a problem so deeply rooted in our behavior, so tied to the biological imperative of survival, will require more than pithy political messaging or rational “if they only understood the facts” argument.
Only by accepting the inescapable influence of how vital our need for tribal belonging is for our sense of safety can we begin to move toward an e pluribus unum that allows room for tribes of different, even conflicting values. That understanding is a key first step toward rising above our own separate tribal instincts and finding the courage to risk tolerance and compromise, in pursuit of a less divided society which will help protect us all.
