#77 How Group Identity or Tribalism Has Taken Over our Political System with Yale Law's Amy Chua

What this episode is about

The discussion focuses on how group identity, or tribalism, significantly influences political dynamics in the U.S., with Yale Law professor Amy Chua explaining that humans are inherently social beings driven by a need for belonging. She argues that this tribal loyalty often eclipses ideological beliefs, impacting both foreign policy and the political landscape, exemplified by the rise of figures like Donald Trump, and offers insights into addressing these challenges.

Key takeaways

• Tribalism isn't just a quirk—it's hardwired. Rejecting groups means swimming upstream against human nature.
• Ingroup bias is a potent drug: we feel joy in our team's success and schadenfreude in the other team's failures.
• Vietnam's conflict shows ideological views can blind us; it was less about communism, more about ethnic dynamics.
• Tribalism can enrich life—sports, family, community—but becomes perilous when it infests politics and clouds our reason.
• Understanding group identity is crucial for foreign policy; overlooking it could mean mistaking economic conflicts for ideological ones.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Tomman (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Amy Chua (Guest) · 17 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Amy Chua, New York Times, Time Magazine, Columbia
2. 10:00 – 15:00: Pew Foundation

Notable quotes from "#77 How Group Identity or Tribalism Has Taken Over our Political System with Yale Law's Amy Chua"

• And Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode I'm delighted to be here today with Amy Chua she's a professor at Yale a leading original…

  about Amy Chua · at 0:20

• Time in US history whites are about to lose their majority status at the national level the Pew Foundation says it will happen around 2044 I think the US Census says 2050 but…

  about Pew Foundation · at 11:13

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Amy Chua — Person · Main guest · 1 mention · first at 0:27
  Primary interview subject explaining her framework of tribalism/group identity and how it shapes U.S. politics and foreign-policy failures.

Companies & orgs

• Harvard — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at 0:18
  Mentioned as one of the institutions where the host is a board member.
  Learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to…
• Columbia — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at 0:20
  Mentioned as one of the institutions where the host is a board member.
  Careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode I'm delighted to be…
• Pew Foundation — Company · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 11:18
  Mentioned as a source of demographic data in the discussion.

Media & podcasts

• Time Magazine — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 0:34
  Mentioned as one of the publications that named the guest as influential.
  To be here today with Amy Chua she's a professor at Yale a leading original thinker she's been named one of Time Magazine's most influential people one of the Atlantic's Brave…
• New York Times — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 0:45
  Mentioned as one of the publications where the guest's books were bestsellers.
  Of the Atlantic's Brave thinkers and also one of foreign policy's Global thinkers she's the author of Five Books including International and New York Times bestsellers and…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode I'm delighted to be here today with Amy Chua she's a professor at Yale a leading original thinker she's been named one of Time Magazine's most influential people one of the Atlantic's Brave thinkers and also one of foreign policy's Global thinkers she's the author of Five Books including International and New York Times bestsellers and unusually her ideas have received overwhelming positive reviews and support from across the political Spectrum she will talk

0:56 about how group identity and a failure to realize its importance has played a role in both the failure of US foreign policy and in the rise of Donald Trump she will also provide a Way Forward welcome Amy it's so nice to be with you again thanks so much Lynn it's great to be with you so Amy your unconventional ideas center around how loyalty to groups or what you call tribes often outweighs ideological considerations can you explain what you mean when you write quote humans are tribal animals unquote yeah basically we are exactly like our fellow primates we need to belong to groups we're hardwired that way and if you try to think how many Hermits you know there are so few in the entire world humans need to belong to groups and once we connect with a group we tend to want to cling to it and defend it and see it as better in every way one of the fun things about writing this book was I had a chance to review

2:02 the latest psychological and sociological and neurological studies out there and it's fascinating so just to give you one recent example in a fascinating study children between the ages of four and eight which is really young were randomly assigned to either the red team or the blue team which you wouldn't think would be a very important distinction but these kids were then given a t-shirt of course in color so they were either wearing a red t-shirt or a blue t-shirt these young subjects were then shown computer edited images of a whole bunch of other kids half of whom were wearing red t-shirts the other half wearing blue t-shirts and then they were asked questions about these children in the computer the results Lyn were fascinating even though these kids knew absolutely nothing about the children in the computer edited images they they consistently said that they liked the kids wearing their color

3:04 better wanted to allocate more resources to them and most disturbingly consistently displayed systematic unconscious bias that is when they were told stories about all these kids they systematically tended to remember all the positive things about the kids wearing their color and all the negative things about the kids wearing the other color humans aren't just a little tribal we are very tribal and once we identify with a group our identities basically become sort of bound up with it and the effect is like a drug there are these amazing studies that show that we experience pleasure when members of our ingroup do well even if we personally aren't actually gaining anything and more troublingly we experience pleasure when members of the opposite group fail or suffer a misfortune there are studies that show that the pleasure centers of our brain actually light up when we stick it to the other side yeah it's

4:09 very very Stark that that's amazing that it's almost hardwired into us so is tribalism always bad no I know it made it sound kind of negative but no there are all these Godly accounts of why we evolved to be tribal animals and I think you could intuitively guess the reasons it's a lot safer to travel in bands but Tri tribalism can be absolutely harmless or fun I think Sports is a great example the most tribal phenomenon I can think of but relaxing and entertaining family can be very tribal I will be the first to say that I am a very tribal person I'm kind of proud of that the problem though is when tribalism takes over a political system that's when things get dangerous because then suddenly facts and studies and data and policy and erical research none of that matters you basically just see everything through your group's lens you just want your team to win and you follow your team leader and you try to take down the

5:11 other side no matter what before we turn to American politics can I ask you about Vietnam did the US mistake Vietnam for an ideological conflict over communism where it was really a tribal fight well they basically missed a huge dimension of it know it was also at one level yes of course it was partly about communism versus capitalism but because we were so blind to the most important ethnic and group dynamics on the ground we missed the fact that there was also a huge ethnic Dimension that in a way may have been even more important and that is that all of the capitalists or the vast majority of them in Vietnam were actually not ethnic Vietnamese but ethnic Chinese so Vietnam has what I call I coined this term a market dominant minority that is a tiny minority only about 2% of Vietnam's entire population and yet this tiny minority controlled about 60% of Vietnam's private economy so here we

6:14 come in the United States we think that we're saving the world we're championing capitalism and we don't see that basically in the eyes of the very poor largely farming indigenous Vietnamese we're basically championing policies only tend to benefit all the bankers and the retailers that in their eyes are all this hated Outsider group this ethnic minority and that was a major mistake which we've repeated subsequently in places like Afghanistan and Iraq was it also the case in in Venezuela with the rise of Hugo Chavez were we again mistaken in attributing his rise to the attractiveness of Socialist Communist ideas Yes again yeah it's not be totally wrong but we just through this blindness and optimism we missed this ethnic side of the Venezuelan conflict which is much more subtle than in Southeast Asia it's not black or white in the countries of Latin America they call it a pigmentocracy with generally speaking

7:16 the all the wealthy and powerful people being lighter skinned you know blueeyed with European features especially in a country like Venezuela the vast majority of the people being darker skinned with indigenous and and afcan features Hugo Chavez yeah he came in with a lot of kind of socialist stuff but he also said look at me you know I am the first leader or person trying to be your leader who looks like all of you he called himself a I think it was a Paro he said he even said I'm the Indian from barinas and he basically flipped it something that was considered so degrading that nobody would want to admit that you look like an Indian he turned it around and he made it a source of Pride so many Americans are like how can people possibly support him look what he's done and they're absolutely right he ran that country into the ground the policies didn't work but what they missed was people identified with

8:08 him they said you know what he's elevating us he's giving us a voice and also He's finally sticking it to all these white oligarchs out there and that feeling of group identification finally it's our turn for revenge is very powerful and how again did the US misread the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq again very different Dynamic is there it's not just one religion or not a pigmentocracy but they had incredibly entrenched and important tribal structures the most complicated in the world actually we just kind of said you know what it's fundamentalist Islam versus the good guys and we missed that the way we developed our policies look like sort of the largest and most powerful ethnic group there are the pins and the way way we devised our policies a lot of the postums there thought that we were kind of helping other groups like The tajiks and the USCS a lot of people don't even know this but the

9:11 Taliban is a largely poson organization so there's an ethnic Dimension to the Taliban that we just kind of missed and because we missed it we kept doing things that like in Vietnam were basically shooting ourselves in the foot so let's turn to America how do you see tribalism in the United States is it tribalism that's taken over our politics absolutely you know I said that that's when things get dangerous and this is a moment where tribalism has taken over our political system you can see used to be Republicans and Democrats could be friends you could talk at dinner parties there are these crazy studies now that show it's almost like an ethnic divide or a racial divide some vast number of Democrats say they would be incredibly upset if their child married a Republican and vice versa you know which is much more I mean it's really something relatively new so what I really try to do in the book is answer

10:09 why you know why now why are we seeing all this bitter division at this moment and one of the major factors is the massive demographic transformation that we've been going through so to put it really bluntly for 200 years this country was dominated econ economically politically culturally by a white majority you know when a one group is so overwhelmingly dominant obviously a lot of terrible things can happen they can abuse that power that's how we got slavery and the wiping out of our Native American populations but when a group is so dominant it can also afford to be more generous which is exactly what the white Protestants did in the 60s and 70s when basically they voluntarily opened up the IV League to African-Americans Jews asian-americans kind of because they just thought it would be a right thing to do today that is absolutely not the case and that is because For the First Time in US history whites are about to

11:16 lose their majority status at the national level the Pew Foundation says it will happen around 2044 I think the US Census says 2050 but it's going to happen we don't know exactly what will look like and it's already started to happen in many major States you know Texas California DC non-hispanic whites are already a minority so why is this important it's important because it's now the case that not just minorities feel threatened but whites feel threatened there's a fascinating study that shows that I think 65% of white Americans believe that they are subject to more discrimination than minorities and this is not just a republican phenomenon I believe you know because of affirmative action competition for University spots and also the right to define the nation's identity I think 30% of Democrats believe that there is significant discrimination against whites so not just African-Americans feel

12:19 discriminated against whites feel under threat not just religious minorities like Jews and Muslims feel threatened Christians feel threatened you hear about the war on the Bible Asians Latinos Straits gays women men everybody feels threatened and the studies show that it's when people feel threatened that's when they Retreat into tribalism when they become much more insular and defensive and much more US versus them that is why we are now seeing sort of both the left and the right fracturing into ever smaller and smaller groups that are fighting against each other and and also very disturbing kind of explicit identity Politics on both sides of the political Spectrum what do you think is the most serious tribal or political divisions today well because of our original sin of slavery race will always be one of the major problems and that's just not going to go away anytime soon but equally or at least very important is

13:26 something new and that is the roughly speaking the division between Cosmopolitan Elites you know many of them living on the coast and what you might call well president Trump's base uh Heartland or rural or Southern America Blue Collar White America that divide is really Stark now in a way that it wasn't before so I do ethnic studies and one of the ways that people Define an ethnic difference is how much intermarriage and Interac action is there the difference between Coastal or Cosmopolitan whites you know probably the viewers of this podcast it's certainly the people I teach the difference between those whites and whites in Appalachia or you know again in president Trump's space is so bitter now that there is almost no intermarriage or no interaction between those two groups and it's almost what social scientists would call an ethnic divide it is much more likely that a white person who attends Colombia would

14:31 marry someone from Nigeria or a South Asian background of comparable educational status than somebody from rural Kentucky when did this Coastal versus Heartland or Elite versus non- Elite divide emerge very gradually over the last you know I don't know 30 years or so you know education is something I also have written about in my tiger mom mode our system is really broke you know education used to be a source of Weber Mobility it wasn't perfect obviously we excluded huge populations like all African-Americans but generally speaking you know you could grow up in a small town in the midwest go to State College if you're smart get lucky work hard make it to New York or San Francisco today how hard it is to study for the SATs the price of these private schools the the Head Start that the coastal Elites have how expensive it is to buy real estate in California and New York you just don't have that upward Mobility now so

15:35 you know going back to your question about Vietnam and Iraq what I say is that for the first time in US history we are starting to demonstrate dynamics that formerly were much more common in developing countries you know we were like we're not like Vietnam my goodness or or Syria goodness or Indonesia but what's happened is that because of this decline in upward mobility and this emergence this divide between these two sets of whites we are seeing I think our own idiosyncratic version of a market dominant minority that it is this hated minority that is viewed by much of the country as this arrogant Outsider group that doesn't care about Real Americans and by that I'm referring to The Cosmopolitan Elites and you know of course Cosmopolitan Elites are not a racial or ethnic group I mean there include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton but there are these similarities it is in fact fact true that Cosmopolitan

16:31 Elites share a lot of the similar tastes we dress similarly we send our kids to the same kinds of schools we even have our own vocabulary we police that vocabulary much of this country's wealth is held on the coast whether in Wall Street or Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Washington so you can see in a way how president Trump mobilized his base it was through something that was actually very familiar to me I was believe it or not one of the few people that called the 2016 election correctly and I think that's because I had seen this pattern in the developing world before what happened in November 2016 was exactly what I would have predicted in a developing country where you had this resented Outsider minority viewed as controlling the levers of power from afar and that's the swamp that President Trump would talk about these technocrats these experts that care more about the poor in Africa than they do about the

17:32 poor in our own country and what I would have predicted what we actually got was the rise of demagogic populist voices that say you know what it's time for us to take back our country make America great again and he actually said you know we have to take it back from the Chinese and the Mexicans we need to reclaim our country and that pattern of we need to take back our country is something that I would study in Zimbabwe you know we need to take back Zimbabwe for black zimbabweans Indonesia for real Indonesians not the Chinese Malaysia for Malaysians and and Kazakhstan for kazaks and so on and so on so Amy what is the way forward believe it or not I'm an optimist and I think the way forward lies in remembering what makes America special it is so easy to become disillusioned and I will be the first to say that we have this incredible Constitution that we have repeatedly fail to live up to but here's something

18:32 really special that we forget our national identity is ethnically and religiously neutral we didn't originate in the idea of blood and even countries like France and Germany that are now Western democracies they did originate as ethnic Nations as obviously China did so we have our identity centers and is built on the values in our constitution now now we have again repeatedly failed and shamelessly failed to live up to those ideals but what I always tell my students is let's not throw the baby out with the bath water I'll hear my students say America is a country based on you know uh rooted in uh built on white supremacy our values are genocide and I will say be careful let's not forget what makes this country special there's a huge difference between saying we have this very very valuable Constitution with important ideals that we cherish which we have shamefully failed to live up to there's a huge difference between

19:35 that and saying you know what all of the ideals that are in our constitution they're just all lies and fraud just an excuse for white supremacy because if this country really is built on nothing more than white supremacy then it's hard to know why it's worth fighting for I think that the first thing to realize is that we have a lot of work to be done because in order for the Constitutional values to resonate for everybody including the descendants of slaves as well as the descendants of slave owners you know old and young rural and urban we have to work to make those values a reality I mean we can't keep saying we have these great principles if people are like it they don't even apply to the people I know to my neighborhood absolutely not so there's a lot of work to be done and I think that the right needs to see that that it's that patriotism isn't just waving a flag but on the left I think progressives also

20:30 need to say I favor the fact that we are now teaching our children a non whitewashed version of our history it's good that they realize that our Founders were flawed that we did terrible things but I worry that we are overcorrecting I think we have to find a way to teach our children about America's history in an honest painful way while also preserving them the idea of America as a special Nation and do you have practical suggestions on how to do that I have one that I love you know and I I think this is a policy proposal whose time actually might have come because everywhere I go people seem to be talking about it and that is the idea of a national service program so hear me out the idea is I don't think you'd be that different because if you have children you know after high school a lot of our young people on the coast take a gap Year anyway and often they go to Europe or Australia or Guatemala and

21:32 they do wonderful things ly but often they're still in that same bubble you know they're kind of with other friends from the coast so what if After High School Young Americans from New York or California or Chicago were either required or incentivized to go to another part of the country that they would ordinarily never go to Ohio or rural South and work side by side on some project with Young Americans from a totally different socioeconomic background I think that would be a phenomenal way to begin to bridge the gap between the Cosmopolitan Elites and and you know the rest of the country and to kind of start to alleviate this deep Mutual suspicion and disdain between again the coasts and president Trump's base really interesting idea Amy what are the three key takeaways or insights that you'd like to leave the audience with today okay I'll try to be piffy takeaway one tribalism has taken over America's

22:40 political system takeway two as much as we don't like to admit it Cosmopolitan Elites are part of the problem finally and more optimistically takeway number three America is unique we are a special Nation but we've forgotten why and we need to remember Amy thank you for a really interesting discussion today this has been terrific thank you so much Lyn for having me you're a terrific interviewer if you enjoyed today's episode you can listen or subscribe for free on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen if you would like to receive information on upcoming episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaways tocom or follow us on Twitter Instagram Facebook and Linkedin note that three takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out for all social media and podcast links go to three takeaways tocom

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#77 How Group Identity or Tribalism Has Taken Over our Political System with Yale Law's Amy Chua"?

Lynn Tomman (Host), Amy Chua (Guest).

What is "#77 How Group Identity or Tribalism Has Taken Over our Political System with Yale Law's Amy Chua" about?

The discussion focuses on how group identity, or tribalism, significantly influences political dynamics in the U.S., with Yale Law professor Amy Chua explaining that humans are inherently social beings driven by a need for belonging. She argues that this tribal loyalty often eclipses ideological beliefs, impacting both foreign policy and the political landscape, exemplified by the rise of…

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

6 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Amy Chua, Time Magazine, New York Times, Harvard, Columbia, Pew Foundation. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#77 How Group Identity or Tribalism Has Taken Over our Political System with Yale Law's Amy Chua"?

The episode runs 24 min; the transcript is about 3,766 words in 23 timestamped sections.

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