Digital platforms amplify our tribal instincts

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In today's hyper-connected daily life, we can scroll through notifications on our smartphones and, in a matter of moments, feel ancient impulses boiling within us. We become furious at yet another provocative comment from a stranger online, we feel comforted by the virtual embrace of a community of like-minded strangers, or we experience the bitter thrill of seeing an opposing group cheer for something we perceive as a threat to our values. In those moments, profound dynamics of our psychology emerge, forged in contexts far different from our current one.

As a provocative contemporary maxim goes, we have Stone Age minds and emotions and godlike tools. This paradox sums up the condition of humankind in the modern world: creatures with brains shaped by prehistoric tribal life and centuries of visceral passions, now wielding technologies and powers once attributed only to deities. We are, to quote biologist E.O. Wilson, a kind of "evolutionary chimera" carrying within us a complicated mix of Paleolithic emotions, pre-modern legacies, and almost godlike technological capabilities. The result is a profound disconnect—an evolutionary mismatch—between what our minds and emotions have adapted to and the cultural and digital ecosystem in which we operate today.

Much of human evolutionary history unfolded in an environment radically different from today's. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived in small, close-knit nomadic groups, typically consisting of a few dozen individuals—perhaps up to a hundred at most. In these primordial tribes, belonging was everything: being part of the clan meant protection and access to resources, while being excluded could be tantamount to a death sentence. Natural selection honed our social instincts in this context: we developed a powerful need for belonging and identity loyalty, as well as sophisticated mechanisms for monitoring our status within the group and sniffing out potential threats from outsiders. The emotional circuits that regulate fear, anger, affection, and shame were calibrated for human-scale, face-to-face interactions, in which each individual knew the other members of the community personally and shared their myths, symbols, and goals. The human brain, structurally, hasn't changed much since Paleolithic times: neuroanatomy and instinctive predispositions remain those suited to ensuring the survival of small bands of hunter-gatherers. It's no surprise, then, that our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind, designed for a simple, stable world that no longer exists.

That ancestral mind now finds itself immersed in a complex, fragmented, and technologically overloaded planetary environment—an environment in many ways incompatible with its expectations. We have gone from real villages to global digital tribes. Thanks to the godlike tools at our disposal—the internet, social media, instant communications—each of us is connected to thousands of other people, daily exposed to news, opinions, and conflicts from every corner of the globe. Our communities are no longer geographical and cohesive, but elusive and overlapping: we can simultaneously belong to dozens of online groups, forums, and social networks, each with its own values ​​and languages, often unfamiliar with one another. This proliferation of simultaneous identities and affiliations is unprecedented in evolutionary history and creates a significant psychological burden.

Many of us experience a kind of cognitive dissonance in having to constantly shift from one identity context to another—for example, from being, in rapid succession, a serious professional on work social media, to a passionate fan in a sports community, to a fiery political commentator on Twitter. Our internal balance suffers: juggling multiple "versions of ourselves" can cause us to lose the sense of a coherent identity. Our ancestors certainly didn't have to face anything similar. They lived immersed in a stable social world, with clear roles and a limited number of relationships, whereas we navigate a constant flow of information and fleeting interactions, bombarded by social stimuli that our senses and emotions struggle to fully decipher.

This disconnect between ancient psychological predispositions and contemporary reality lies at the heart of many phenomena unique to our time. The tribal instinct that once ensured cooperation within the group and cautious distrust of outsiders is now resurfacing in the form of online ideological affiliations and polarized conflicts on a global scale. The urge to draw boundaries between "us" and "them"—described in political terms by jurist Carl Schmitt as the friend/enemy distinction—is ingrained in our evolutionary heritage and manifests itself everywhere, from soccer parochialism to "culture wars" on social media. In the visceral desire with which we defend our favorite digital group or our ideological position, we recognize the same logic of ancient tribal alliances: identity loyalty in exchange for protection and a sense of belonging.

On the other hand, the hostility toward the outgroup that once served to protect us from potential enemies is now inflamed against abstract categories of people we've never met in person—voters of the other party, supporters of a certain cause, members of a different online subculture. Each of these can become, in our eyes, a target onto which to project atavistic fears and resentments. And so digital tribes coalesce and oppose each other, bickering fiercely over often symbolic issues. Social networks are crowded with factions that feel under mutual attack, ready to strengthen their strong internal camaraderie and paint their adversaries as utterly evil or insane. It's a profoundly human mechanism: ultimately, humans express moral outrage online for the same reason they did in Stone Age tribes—to defend the community from harmful behavior and reinforce shared norms. The error lies not in the instinct itself – which was actually advantageous under the right conditions – but in the new context in which it is activated, a context for which it was not designed.

Indeed, many of our emotional reactions today are "deprogrammed" with respect to contemporary reality. Evolutionary psychologists use the term "misalignment" to describe this very disconnect: for example, we tend to overestimate immediate and tangible dangers, overreacting to mild stimuli, while simultaneously underestimating more abstract, diffuse, or distant threats. Our brains are wired to activate the "fight or flight" response when faced with an immediately visible aggressor—such as a predator or a tribal enemy—but are far less prepared to deal with complex threats like gradual climate change or global financial crises.

Thus, paradoxically, we can become enormously angry and fearful over a provocative tweet or an alarming news story read online (a symbolic stimulus that nonetheless triggers concrete fears), while remaining apathetic in the face of real problems perceived as abstract or distant. Similarly, what was once group cooperation can transform into sectarian conformism: we seek approval and validation within our online "pack," and this can lead us to embrace increasingly extreme beliefs or behaviors in order not to be excluded. In our ancestral inner circle, expressing moral indignation toward those who violated the rules served as a virtuous sign of loyalty (it demonstrated our concern for the common good) and helped to correct deviants; today, the same impulse sometimes translates into viral outrages and moral lynching campaigns against complete strangers, perhaps guilty of expressing an unpopular opinion. The emotional passion with which we react to certain disagreements is more reminiscent of the ardour of crusaders or the baleful wrath of a religious feud than of the reasoned debate our modern democratic institutions would expect. It's as if parts of us have remained at a pre-modern level of emotional response : beneath the veneer of Enlightenment civilization, we remain ready to wage war over a heretical idea or a desecrated symbol, just as in an age of inquisitions and witch burnings—only today the "burning" takes the form of a live media pillory broadcast worldwide.

Further exacerbating this situation is the power of modern technological tools, which interact perversely with our innate cognitive biases. Digital platforms don't simply play off our tribal instincts: they actively amplify them. Social networks, designed to capture and hold our attention for as long as possible, have discovered (almost in an algorithmic-evolutionary manner) that nothing captures human attention like content capable of triggering our strongest tribal emotions—indignation, fear, a sense of vindication, or righteousness. A moderate, nuanced post, requiring slow reflection, is unlikely to go viral; conversely, a message charged with anger, fear, or identity-based moralism is much more likely to spread because it presses precisely the emotional buttons to which we are most sensitive. Platform algorithms have learned this through experience (crunching billions of data points on user behavior) and tend to primarily re-present us with content that provokes intense instinctive reactions, be it a political scandal, an alarmist headline, or the latest divisive provocation. The result is a vicious cycle: we are naturally drawn to seek out news and opinions that confirm our group's view; algorithms, sensing our preference, show us increasingly similar ones; over time, our beliefs become radicalized by repeated exposure to a single side ; digital reality polarizes into separate bubbles of hostile tribes, each fueled by its own streams of partisan information, and the identity conflict further escalates, spreading to traditional media and politics. All of this often happens without our knowledge: we remain trapped in what computer scientist Eli Pariser called filter bubbles, personalized filters in which we see primarily what confirms our prejudices, while the other's view comes to us distorted or caricatured.

Recent studies, for example, show that voters on opposing sides vastly overestimate the hatred and dehumanization the opposing faction would feel toward them —a sign of how distorted our perception of others is when viewed through the lens of polarized media. In this sense, algorithms tap precisely into our cognitive vulnerabilities, exploiting ingrained biases: for example, confirmation bias (we tend to seek out and believe information that confirms what we already believe), negativity bias (negative and emotional stimuli capture our attention more), or the identity effect (we give more credence to those we perceive as members of our own group). The misalignment between the goals of social media (maximizing engagement for commercial purposes) and the functions of human psychology has led to greater polarization and misinformation in today's public discourse. When our social learning mechanisms evolved, information loaded with moral and emotional valence was crucial because it served to enforce group norms and ensure collective survival. Today, however, algorithms, driven by entirely different goals, overexpose precisely the type of " PRIME " information (Prestigious, In-group, Moral, Emotional) to which we are most receptive, regardless of its accuracy or representativeness of reality. Thus, extreme and divisive content gains an abnormal resonance, and users—if not intentionally exposed to differing opinions—end up developing a distorted view of others' positions and feeling increasingly justified in their anger. In practice, the technological machine amplifies and weaponizes our instinctive emotions, creating a social environment in which moderation and rationality struggle to emerge.

Another crucial element of the digital world is the absence of some of the natural checks and balances that existed in face-to-face interaction. In traditional tribes, there were clear boundaries and responsibilities: you knew every member of the community personally, you saw the consequences of conflict firsthand, and you knew you would have to continue living with those people even after a disagreement. There was therefore an incentive to maintain a certain mutual respect, not to overstep certain boundaries, because a breakdown in relationships would ultimately result in the loss of the entire group. Online, all of this largely disappears: we often interact with strangers whose faces we don't recognize, whom we will likely never see again, and to whom we feel no responsibility.

While in a real village it would have been unthinkable to swear at a neighbor without suffering the consequences, on Twitter or in an anonymous comment, many give in to their worst impulses without filters. The digital medium, protecting us behind a screen, disinhibits our reactions: we can lash out with far greater vehemence than we would by looking someone in the eye. Furthermore, physical and social distance makes it easy for us to dehumanize others—to reduce them to an icon, a username, forgetting that there is a real person behind them. This further lowers the threshold of empathy and fuels cycles of provocation and verbal retaliation. In short, we find ourselves with incredibly powerful communication weapons—the ability to instantly spread our thoughts and moods to vast audiences—but without a corresponding increase in our emotional wisdom or capacity for self-control. These "godlike" tools have ended up in the hands of beings with the reactions of territorial primates, severely testing the civil and institutional conventions that sustain peaceful coexistence.

Just think of the impact a few charismatic figures with millions of followers can have in spreading conspiracy theories or fomenting hatred : their inflammatory messages activate in their followers the mechanisms of tribal alignment and suspicion toward the enemy, often completely bypassing the traditional intermediary bodies (parties, authoritative media, academies) that in the past filtered and moderated the content of public debate. In this sense , our socio-political "institutions," still largely modeled on twentieth-century or even nineteenth-century logic, struggle to keep pace : representative democracy and rational Enlightenment discourse presuppose citizens capable of critically informing themselves and negotiating compromises, but the combination of archaic emotions and new technological channels undermines these premises, pushing towards a politics of the gut and visceral affiliations. The political philosopher of the last century thought of public opinion as an arena for argumentative debate; Today, it's more like an emotional battlefield where the winner is the one who cries out loudest about treason or heresy. And so our "Paleolithic" passions—honor, faction pride, moral fervor—resurface powerfully, only instead of brandishing stones, swords, or burning torches, we're wielding smartphones and scathing tweets.

Given this picture, one might be tempted to be pessimistic : after all, a Paleolithic mind with modern tools can do great harm, and this is partly what we see in current social pathologies. But acknowledging the problem is already a step toward possible remedies. The very fact of understanding that this tribalization of online life is not simply an individual moral flaw, but rather an evolutionary misalignment, can help us address it with a more constructive approach. It's not a question of condemning humanity for its irrationality, but of recognizing that we are all vulnerable to these mechanisms—even educated, aware people are influenced by them to some extent. Ultimately, being human means carrying within ourselves this dual legacy: on the one hand, the immediate instincts of a social organism forged in scarcity and imminent danger, on the other, the spark of reason and creativity that has allowed us to build complex civilizations.

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