Imagine yourself in deep space, circling Earth at around 28,000 kilometres per hour. Peering through the window of the International Space Station, you gasp as the sun rises beyond the curved horizon of the planet, like a diamond ring refracting light in all directions. Viewing the world from afar is awe-inspiring, as I discovered when I experienced this as part of a virtual-reality simulation. But it also makes you realise how isolated and vulnerable we are.
Humans are the only species capable of seeing our home from this unique vantage point in space or imagining how it came to be this way. We have always asked big questions about the origins of our world and our place in it. However, that place has changed dramatically over time. Over the past 10,000 years, people have gone from living in small groups of familiars to nations of strangers numbering millions. Tribalism, one of our most powerful evolved psychological biases, has contributed to this expansion. Now, however, it has led humanity to a cliff edge.
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Along with our global dominance, we have created a disturbing range of global threats, from climate breakdown and pandemics to famine, war and nuclear annihilation. It may sound contrarian, but I believe that more tribalism would help us meet these challenges. This propensity, although responsible for some of the cruelest acts in human history, has also motivated tremendous feats of cooperation. The need for that is now greater than ever. We require a global tribe of billions – a teratribe. And research by myself and others can help us achieve it.
The origins of tribalism
For most of prehistory, our ancestors lived in small foraging bands composed of individuals who generally recognised each other, knew something about one another’s characters and personal histories, and could say who was related to whom. Around 10,000 years ago, the first farmers began to settle down to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. As they did so, human settlements . By around 7000 years ago, some people were living in kilotribes: elaborate political systems subsidised by agricultural surpluses in which thousands of individuals established ways of cooperating even with relative strangers.
Eventually, the most powerful civilisations grew larger still by invading or absorbing their neighbours, so that by around 4500 years ago, there were some megatribes: societies numbering a million or more. Today, our tribal instincts are the basis of nation-states – but they tend not to extend to the feeling that we belong to a single tribe of humanity.
As an anthropologist, I have spent my working life studying human social groups and trying to understand the evolutionary forces that have shaped our world. This has taken me to archaeological sites, child psychology labs, tribal initiations and war zones in regions as diverse as Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Oceania. It has also led me to co-establish a vast database of human societies stretching back thousands of years, which we have named after the Egyptian goddess of writing and record keeping. The insights my colleagues and I have gained through psychological experiments, fieldwork, surveys and mathematical modelling combine to provide a history of humanity unlike any other, as I recount in my new book .
This new science of the social allows us to test competing hypotheses about the evolution of human civilisations more systematically than ever before. For instance, thanks to Seshat, we have shown that moralising religions – those with gods that take a strong interest in right and wrong – emerged with the first multi-ethnic empires, setting limits on the powers of elites and extending the rule of law to all. Statistical analysis of the database has also confirmed that agriculture was one of the most powerful drivers of the rise of larger and more complex societies. But, much to my dismay, it has revealed a of sociopolitical evolution: warfare. Tribalism, the psychological bias that enabled our ancestors to stand united in small warrior groups and hunting parties, has been and forms of modern warfare capable of engulfing the entire planet.
Studies in the lab and field can help us understand how tribalism emerges. They reveal that when people feel they share very personally affecting experiences – – with others, their individual and group identities can become bonded together. Psychologists call this visceral sense of oneness with the group . It is one of the most powerful forms of group bonding known to science, and the bedrock of tribalism.
A collective identity
Identity fusion, based on shared experiences, is nowadays being scaled up ever more effectively through forms of immersive media reporting about catastrophic events such as wars, along with their human consequences. Salacious news sells and advertisers exploit this, creating a vicious circle. In its most destructive manifestations, this process has driven increasingly potent forms of transnational radicalisation and terrorist violence. It helps explain not only why soldiers lay down their lives for each other on the battlefield, but also why terrorists strap bombs to themselves. However, if humanity could achieve such intense social cohesion on a grand scale, this could also be harnessed to address global problems in more peaceful ways, from conserving Earth’s resources and managing conflict more effectively to reforming our economies and reducing inequality.
Consider the story of Cecil – a wild lion in Zimbabwe who, in 2015, was shot by a US trophy hunter using a bow and arrow. Reports of the killing went viral almost immediately, causing an outpouring of grief and anger around the world. It so happened that lion conservationists at the University of Oxford, where I am based, were tracking Cecil. Thousands of people jammed their phone lines wanting to know what they could do to support the group’s efforts to protect big cats from being hunted illegally. So, my colleagues and I took the opportunity to explore the psychology of these would-be charitable donors. Our large survey uncovered with Cecil the lion, rooted in feelings of shared suffering.
This was the first time anyone had shown that people can bond in this way with an entirely different species. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about our Cecil study isn’t that fusion can cross the species barrier, but that it can be based on perceptions of shared experiences occurring thousands of miles away and affecting individuals one will never actually encounter in the flesh. If the death of a lion can do that, it suggests that human experiences shared by people around the globe can too.
United for a purpose
You may counter that humanity can’t unite unless faced with a common enemy, such as an extraterrestrial army. When I raise the prospect of identity fusion across humanity at large with my students, the conversation usually turns to Martian invaders or another sci-fi fantasy. However, the science doesn’t back this up. Although some forms of tribalism entail a competitive attitude towards other groups, competition isn’t required to achieve identity fusion. This suggests it is possible to be fused with all other humans – potentially even all forms of life – without feelings of rivalry, fear or hatred towards out-groups.
Evidence for this comes from research I have been carrying out with at the University of Oxford’s , where I am director. Our first study was of mothers. Giving birth can be a truly life-changing experience, and previous research had shown that can lead to identity fusion. To explore how far this might extend, we ran an online study with 481 US mothers. We found that these women were with and more willing to allocate money to women all around the world if they shared motherhood experiences with them.
Sharing life-changing experiences is one way of fusing people to each other. The other main way is to make them feel like family. When we believe that we share some underlying biological essence with other members of a group, it can bind our personal and group identities together. Throughout the world and stretching back into prehistory, people have recognised the importance of kinship – relationships based on shared essences (often construed as having the same blood or bones or other physical characteristics) inherited from parents and passed down through the generations. Common ancestry is the basis for some of the world’s most cohesive communities, including families, clans and ethnic groups. It is also often hijacked by nationalists when they portray their country as a motherland or the great leader as a father figure. If entire nations can feel like family, then why not humanity at large? This was the question Reinhardt and I decided to focus on in our follow-up study.
To do so, we ran a survey that measured changes in identity fusion among US citizens before and after watching a TED talk by best-selling author . In it, he explains how all people alive today are descended from the same ancestors and therefore we are all members of one giant family. He concludes by in New York – a vast party intended to bring us all together to celebrate. As predicted, we found that watching the video at large. But we also learned that this didn’t diminish their feelings of fusion with their compatriots or their extended family – in fact, quite the opposite. Watching the talk increased fusion at all three levels. Even more remarkably, it caused Democrats to become more fused with Republicans and vice versa, bringing these polarised political coalitions into closer alignment and making supporters of the two parties more generous towards each other in a money allocation game.
These studies point to the power of identity fusion to heal divisions between rival groups. Whether the same approach could work in more extreme conditions – when rival groups are killing each other, for example – is another matter. This is what Reinhardt and I wanted to find out next.
Soon after the start of the war between Hamas and Israel in October 2023, veteran British peace campaigner made a speech in the UK’s House of Lords, and he agreed that I could rewrite it so as to emphasise feelings of shared suffering on both sides of the conflict. We then filmed him making the revised speech and showed this to Muslim and Jewish people in the US who aligned with the people of Gaza and Israel respectively. As we had hoped, watching the video significantly increased fusion with the opposing side. Our results, which aren’t yet published, also showed that people became more trusting of the other group and more open to friendship with them.
Leaders of the teratribe
All this suggests that the idea of a teratribe isn’t pie in the sky. But if we are to mature into a global tribe, capable of solving global problems, we will also need leaders capable of crossing existing tribal divisions. Such barrier-crossing leaders already exist. Nelson Mandela was a famous example, but there are many lesser-known leaders who work tirelessly to bridge the divisions between their own group and others who oppose or oppress them. In a recent study, my colleagues and I ran a survey with 60 leaders from African American, British Muslim and Irish Traveller communities. Just over half of them were barrier crossers and the rest weren’t – we called them barrier bound. Our goal was to figure out how they differed. You might suspect that what distinguishes barrier crossers is a personal quality such as empathy. That isn’t what we found.
Once again, the importance of identity fusion. The most important attribute of barrier-crossing leaders, we found, was a willingness to recognise that personally defining experiences of suffering are shared with people in other groups. Barrier-bound leaders cared about shared suffering too, but they tended to view it more in terms of the grievances of their own tribe, focusing on histories of injustice, which serves to deepen divisions between groups. We also found, unsurprisingly, that barrier crossers had a greater level of identity fusion with the “enemy”. In addition, when talking about members of both their own group and other groups, they used the language of family to emphasise intense bonds. This is the kind of leadership we will need if we are to overcome the socially corrosive impacts of polarisation and intergroup conflict that bedevil so many societies today.
No doubt, humanity will always be subdivided into innumerable groups with distinct cultures, languages, dialects and social norms. No doubt, individuals will always affiliate with multiple tribes at different levels. But perhaps we are at last entering a stage in our evolutionary history when we can all pull together if we need to. In the past 10,000 years, our species has made a series of transitions, each increasing the size of groups to which we affiliate. Now, we could be on the cusp of another transition that will see us become fused into a single entity: a global teratribe. To take this leap, we will need to harness our evolved psychology for identity fusion in ways that are grounded in science and address our shared moral concerns and collective interests. It won’t be easy, but our ability to stave off an apocalyptic future may depend on it.
Harvey Whitehouse is an anthropologist at the University of Oxford. His new book, Inheritance: The evolutionary origins of the modern world, is out now
