Universal Versus Tribal Psychology

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Are we obligated to treat all human beings with the same respect, fairness, and sympathy, or do we owe loyalty and support mainly to members of our group, our family, and those with whom we’ve established personal relations on a friendly, reciprocal basis? A strain within global religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, and within Western secular morality since the Enlightenment, leans in the first direction and has been termed “moral universalism” by some psychologists and social scientists. The moral systems that people pick up from their families, communities, ethnic groups, and nations usually lean in the other direction, and have been called tribal, communal, clan-based, or family-based morality. The difference has become a key lens through which to view some of the gravest tests of our time, including the current war in Ukraine and the crisis of democracy in the U.S. and other countries.

Universal versus relationship-based morality

In his 2020 book, The WEIRDEST People in the World, anthropologist Joseph Henrich provides a compelling discussion of how the two mindsets differ, using several striking examples.

First, he discusses decision experiments designed to identify differences in the value placed on truth-telling in different cultures. A subject arrives at the lab room, is given a cup containing a standard six-sided die, and is asked to enter a private booth or cubicle, roll the die one time, and write down on a sheet of paper the number that comes up. The experimenter will pay her an amount of money proportionate to the number unless it is a six, in which case she’ll receive no money.

No one observes the die roll, so the experimenter can’t distinguish between a truthful and an untruthful report, and the subject has no incentive to report truthfully unless she values truthfulness as a good in its own right or sees it as being helpful to the experimenter. The experimenter can study behavior only on the level of the population, not the individual.

In cultures in which a strong obligation towards truthfulness extends even to strangers, each number is reported with roughly the same frequency. In ones where such obligations are absent or weak, there are sharply higher proportions of fives and almost no reports of sixes. (Mild guilt feelings sometimes lead to higher reports of rolling a four, since this yields more money than most options but still lets the reporter feel some success at resisting temptation.)

Results vary considerably depending on the country and population in which the experiment is performed: from nearly equal reports of each number in some Scandinavian countries, Austria, and the U.K. to reports highly skewed towards five in Morocco, Tanzania, Vietnam, and Georgia. Payoffs are set to a similar share of local incomes at each site to reduce the possibility that larger monetary rewards of lying give rise to differences.

Other examples of variation in universal versus relationship-based morality used for illustration include the frequency with which U.N. diplomatic mission members from different countries took advantage of an exemption from New York City parking fines during the years the city extended all diplomats that privilege, and the proportions of positive responses to a hypothetical question about whether it is one’s duty to lie when asked to do so by one’s friend or a relative—for example, if one had been their passenger when their driving caused another’s injury or death.

Universalistic morality is relatively rare

Henrich argues that the sense of equal moral obligation towards strangers is a peculiar outcome of centuries of gradual social change in western Europe, changes his research traces back to church rules prohibiting marriage among cousins and other kin, including relatives by marriage.

What interests me here are not the specifics of this evolutionary process, but the compelling evidence that strongly universalistic morality is a relatively rare and novel development for human society, that it formed an important part of the substructure of honesty and trust that facilitated modern economic growth, and that it also helped to promote notions of equality of rights, political democracy, and integrity in civil service. These, in turn, helped give rise to the liberal modern societies that flourished in the decades between the end of the Second World War and the first decade of the 21st century, societies associated with values that appeared to be on the ascent around the world at the time.

Economists seem only recently to be noticing the diversity of moral systems along the communal versus universal dimension, although it overlaps to some degree with literature on trust and social capital and on collectivist versus individualistic norms, which began appearing in the late 1980s and 1990s. Economist Guido Tabellini began to generalize the difference between family-based moral systems and universal moral systems, following earlier research by sociologists and political scientists on differences in trust and value systems between northern and southern Italy. He extended the analysis to the sub-national regions of other European countries and demonstrated correlations with integrity in government and business in work summarized in a presidential address to the European Economic Association in 2008. Several economists, including Benjamin Enke, Jonathan Schulz, and Devesh Rustagi, have also contributed to studies closely related to Henrich’s book’s themes, and are frequently cited in it.

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The question of the moment may not be whether we now have a perfect explanation for the emergence of moral universalism as an important contributor to late 20th-century modernity, but rather whether we’ve begun to identify the phenomenon a bit too late to keep this rare flower alive. Events of the past few years suggest that the pervasiveness of universal moral values may not have been as far-reaching as it had seemed.

From the mid to late 20th century, once the fascism of Nazi Germany and its allies had been defeated on the battlefield, universalist values seemed a shared element of the discourse of mainstream political parties in Western countries. It was embraced by global organizations (e.g., the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the Catholic papacy, many protestant churches, secular humanists, dominant mainstream news outlets, and the rhetoric of communist and socialist parties. But parochial, national, religious, and ethnic identities stayed alive and well in most parts of the world, and since the end of the Cold War, they’ve spawned conflicts in almost every region—the current struggle in Ukraine being framed by many (see Klein) as a battle for “liberal” values that largely overlap those of universalism.

The struggle between universal and tribal or identity-specific values also now threatens civil discourse and democracy in the United States. Enke (2020) confirms that the gap between Republican and Democratic politicians over the use of “communal” (us/them) vs. “universalist” language widened dramatically as candidate Donald Trump captured his party’s nomination by tacking sharply towards the language of emphasis on self-interest, rights of self-defense, and return to a white and Christian national core identity. The more social survey responses in an electoral district indicated the strength of communal relative to universalistic values, the higher was Trump’s vote share, and the larger the difference between the Obama vs. McCain and Obama vs. Romney vote margins, in 2008 and 2012, and the Trump vs. Clinton vote margin in 2016.

The behavior of Vladimir Putin when dispatching his military to pummel civilian apartment blocks into rubble in the name of perceived national interest may appear to be explicable by the simple will to control territory and resources, and thus to be the stuff of ordinary economics and politics, without need for explanation in terms of the psychology of moral systems. But Henrich’s book and the related work mentioned here make a strong case for a link between moral value systems and psychology, and it is not much of a stretch to see the bullying nationalisms that he and the world’s other rising authoritarians are promoting as evidence that the universalism that propelled the West to its peculiar position in the world of recent decades remains a fragile minority outlook in danger of being extinguished if not vigorously defended.