David Berreby It Takes A Tribe Summary

In David Berreby’s “It Takes a Tribe”, he proclaims that humans subconsciously want to join and become firmly loyal to groups in order to fulfill their need for a sense of belonging. Humans are willing to sacrifice a lot for these groups and conform to their standards. Berreby supports his ideas about how humans live under tribes through the data of various studies done on college students by experts. The outcomes of the research suggest college students are aware that they could have ended up at other schools, but end up living under the norms of the campus such as following traditions and despising school rivals. Moreover, Berreby also claims that the subconscious mind of humans are able to differentiate the value of groups and rank them into a hierarchy. The importance of groups are

based on how much they had to suffer to get in as well as their prestige; humans have stronger feelings towards groups that have better reputations and were harder to get into.

From the evidence of the studies, Berreby advocates that college groups depict how humans want to live under tribes and their rules and keep their affiliations with these groups for life.
According to Berreby, joining tribes, whether based on interests or at random, is a part of human nature. Since he states that people will sacrifice a lot for their groups (9), their extreme devotion reflects human beings in their primitive stages. In ancient times, it was essential that humans were a part of and contributed greatly to tribes in order to survive; hunting, gathering, and cooking could not be done alone. As humans started to evolve, tribal affiliations were not mandatory to survive, but the idea of tribes could possibly have been inherited from the ways that their ancestors lived. Thus, one can infer that the modern day need for a sense of belonging was derived from the tribal affiliation of early humans because they have always been a part of tribes throughout history. This theory supports Berreby’s

claim that humans have the subconscious need to join groups, whether the groups are for survival or not. Furthermore, Berreby illustrates that humans are loyal to their groups for the duration of their whole lives; this is evident when Professor Banaji claims that she could not sit on the Harvard side of a basketball game after being a professor at Harvard’s rival, Yale (12). From this example, it is evident that humans do not severe their bonds with groups they identify themselves with throughout their lives. The lifelong loyalty indicates that humans consider the groups they are in as part of their identities. As reported by Maslow, who is a famous psychologist, fulfilling the need for a sense of belonging is part of a human’s journey to reach self-actualization. Therefore, humans are not able to find out who they truly are and grow in character without identifying themselves among others. From the various evidence in Berreby’s essay as well as other background knowledge, one can conclude that the subconscious need to join tribes was derived from humans in the primitive stages and is necessary to seek personal growth throughout one’s lifetime.