The Psy­chol­ogy Of Tribes

In my pre­vi­ous post on Build­ing Your Tribe I rec­om­mended an­swer­ing 9 cru­cial ques­tions in or­der to start build­ing a flour­ish­ing tribe. Your an­swers are the blue­print for build­ing your tribe.

To­day we’re tak­ing the next step, and delve into the ‘Psy­chol­ogy of Tribes.’

This is, first of all, the psy­chol­ogy of the in­di­vid­ual tribe mem­bers. I’ll cover the group as­pects of tribes in a later post. To­day and to­mor­row I fo­cus on how the in­di­vid­ual be­comes at­tached to a tribe in the first place.

• What makes your read­ers, pod­cast lis­ten­ers, and video view­ers feel con­nected to you, your con­tent, and your community?
• What makes them feel com­pelled to stick with you , and not move on to one of the other ‘ex­perts’ cov­er­ing the same topic?
• What are the emo­tional trig­gers at work in en­thu­si­as­tic tribes, com­pared to com­mu­ni­ties where peo­ple come and go and rarely participate?

A tribe doesn’t flour­ish by it­self, sim­ply based on a nice idea. If you, as a leader, don’t put the emo­tional trig­gers in place, your tribe will get nowhere.

Think of a blog post with a bor­ing title. 

It’s not get­ting the at­ten­tion the au­thor would love to get. Why? Sim­ply be­cause the au­thor was too lazy, or too proud, to write a ti­tle that trig­gers an emo­tional response.

The same is true for build­ing your tribe. If your ‘re­cruit­ing ef­forts’ are lame and ig­nore psy­chol­ogy, not much is go­ing to happen.

The most pop­u­lar ex­pert on tribes, and prob­a­bly the au­thor who es­tab­lished ‘tribe’ as metaphor for on­line com­mu­ni­ties, is Seth Godin.

In his book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us” Seth Godin says:

“Tribes are about faith-about be­lief in an idea and in a community.”

Be­fore our fu­ture tribe mem­ber is in­ter­ested in the com­mu­nity, she must first be in­ter­ested in the idea. Godin gets more precise:

A tribe “tells a story about who we are and the fu­ture we’re try­ing to build.”

And fi­nally:

The Core Of Your Tribe Is A Shared Dream. Your Tribe Mem­bers Gather Around Their Shared Dream Like Our An­ces­tors Gath­ered Around A Campfire.

At this point, it might still be an in­di­vid­ual dream.

An in­di­vid­ual per­son will join a tribe cater­ing to the dream she al­ready has. Or a tribe leader might ac­tu­ally ig­nite a fresh dream and seek to in­spire oth­ers to join the ‘new’ idea.

The Dream Has Three Components

1. The de­sire to go from here to some­where else .
2. Hope that it can be ac­com­plished, fu­eled by
3. A “way to get there,” which is es­sen­tially what the tribe leader is “sell­ing.”

Num­ber 3 is what makes you an au­thor­ity in the de­sired field, ide­ally the au­thor­ity. Know­ing and show­ing the “way to get there” is what makes you the leader of the tribe.

It seems tribes are ini­tially fu­eled by dis­sat­is­fac­tion. By a dis­crep­ancy be­tween what some­one is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing, and what she wants to ex­pe­ri­ence instead.

If this is so, then we can learn a lot about the psy­chol­ogy of tribes by look­ing at psy­cho­log­i­cal trig­gers used by mar­keters and per­sua­sion ex­perts.

It’s no se­cret that dis­sat­is­fac­tion and sell­ing the dream fu­els most of today’s sales and mar­ket­ing. Think of the biz op­por­tu­nity mar­ket, make money on­line, self-help, anti-ag­ing, se­duc­tion, di­et­ing, and many more.

On a philo­soph­i­cal note, dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the “un­de­sir­able cur­rent state” is the also root and symp­tom of humanity’s un­hap­pi­ness. Eck­hart Tolle calls it “our in­her­ited dys­func­tion,” and it re­sults in peo­ple feel­ing a con­stant “back­ground unhappiness.”

The so­lu­tion would be to be­come free from be­ing dis­sat­is­fied and from long­ing for a “bet­ter” future.

That’s es­sen­tially the same mes­sage we were sup­posed to learn from Dorothy Gale.

She was dis­sat­is­fied, too, and went on a quest over the rain­bow – only to come back and tell us:

“There’s no place like home.” A ro­man­tic way of saying:

• The cur­rent state is the de­sir­able state.
• Be happy with what you have.
• Don’t look to find your hap­pi­ness some­where else.

I didn’t be­lieve her for a second.

Did you?

We did­n’t watch Wiz­ard of Oz to see the farm!

You’d swap your “cur­rent state” for Emer­ald City and a mag­i­cal wand any time, right?

Even at the end of the movie, “home” is still black and white, and Munchkin land is Technicolor.

That’s why the dream is the core of a thriv­ing tribe – be­cause the un­der­ly­ing struc­ture is the core of our every­day ex­pe­ri­ence and psy­chol­ogy. The never-end­ing and un­ques­tion­able need for im­prove­ment is deeply in­grained in our west­ern cul­ture, and Asia is rapidly adopt­ing the same model.

Given that tribes work best when cen­tered on big dreams , you are deal­ing with fairly heavy stuff!

The weird­est thing is that the same psy­cho­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples are at work in a world-span­n­ing  re­li­gion, a po­lit­i­cal party, a foot­ball club, or a blog­ger community.

In my next post I’ll con­tinue this one and cover 6 psy­cho­log­i­cal in­gre­di­ents that work ex­cep­tion­ally well for peo­ple trapped in the force field of dis­sat­is­fac­tion and hope.

This is some high-con­­cept stuff, prob­a­bly not for every­one, and not the usual ‘What’s the best time to send a Tweet’ type of post.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.