What Happens To Tribalism When Resources Are Abundant

"Do materially abundant communities show less tribalism?" sounds straightforward until you try to operationalize it. What counts as materially abundant? What counts as tribalism? How do you control for all the confounds — history, culture, inequality, governance quality — that travel alongside material wealth?

The honest answer is that the research is a mosaic of findings from different methodologies, none of which answer the question cleanly on its own. What we can do is triangulate.

The macro-historical case — Pinker's thesis — has genuine empirical substance. Violence has declined over centuries along timescales that track (imperfectly) with increases in economic development, trade, and institutional governance. Joshua Goldstein's Winning the War on War (2011) documents the decline of interstate war since 1945 specifically. John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday (1989) argued that major wars had become essentially obsolete among developed nations. These are real phenomena.

The critique of Pinker, however, is also real. Nassim Taleb and others have pointed out that "violence has declined" can mask distributions where you've eliminated many small conflicts but retained the capacity for catastrophic ones. Critics like John Gray (The Silence of Animals, 2013) argue that Pinker's thesis is triumphalist, underweights non-Western violence, and cherry-picks historical moments. Epidemiological criticisms note that the decline in war deaths is partly a function of better medical care for wounded soldiers, not fewer actual conflicts.

For our purposes, the relevant critique is narrower: even granting Pinker's macro-trend, it doesn't tell us that abundance within communities reduces intergroup hostility within those communities. The data on between-nation peace doesn't necessarily translate to within-society harmony. The United States is materially abundant and has chronic, intense tribalism. Nordic countries are materially abundant and show less. The material variable is insufficient.

Muzafer Sherif's 1954 Robbers Cave experiment remains one of the most cited studies in social psychology and one of the most clarifying for our purposes.

The experimental design: twenty-two 11-year-old boys, screened to be psychologically healthy and from stable middle-class families, were brought to Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma for a summer camp study. They were divided into two groups — the Eagles and the Rattlers — kept separate during an initial bonding phase, then brought into competitive contact.

Within hours of intergroup contact, hostility emerged: name-calling, flag-burning, cabin raids, food fights. This was not a function of resource scarcity — the boys were comfortable, fed, and safe. What triggered it was competition for status (athletic competitions, prizes) and mere group distinctiveness. The simple fact of being two identifiable groups in proximity was sufficient to generate us-versus-them dynamics.

Sherif then tested various interventions to reduce the hostility. Mere contact — bringing the groups together in neutral, pleasant settings (meals, movies) — did nothing. The hostility actually intensified because it provided more opportunities for confrontation.

What worked: superordinate goals. When Sherif's team staged crises requiring both groups to cooperate (the water supply "broke"; the truck that was supposed to get their food "got stuck"), intergroup hostility declined measurably. When the boys had to work together toward goals that neither group could achieve alone, the we-versus-them logic was reorganized into us-versus-the-problem.

This experiment, though methodologically dated and not replicable in identical form (IRB ethics now prohibit deliberately inducing intergroup conflict in children), has been confirmed in its central finding across decades of subsequent research. Two meta-analyses of contact theory research (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; 515 studies, 713 independent samples, 250,000+ participants) confirm that contact reduces prejudice most effectively when it includes cooperative interdependence.

The Robbers Cave finding is not that abundance doesn't help. It's that abundance alone doesn't disrupt the identity and status logic that sustains tribalism independently of resource competition.

Here is the crucial complication that most discussions of abundance and tribalism miss: it's not absolute abundance that matters most for intergroup relations. It's the distribution of abundance — inequality.

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level (2009), analyzed data across 23 rich countries and across U.S. states. Their finding: virtually every social outcome — mental illness rates, violence, educational performance, social mobility, trust, community cohesion — is worse in more unequal societies, even holding absolute wealth constant. The U.S. and UK, both wealthy, have worse outcomes than less wealthy but more equal countries like Japan and Scandinavia.

The mechanism they propose: inequality generates status anxiety across the entire social spectrum (not just at the bottom), which activates the kind of competitive, zero-sum social orientation that produces tribalism. In a more equal society, your social position is less precarious, so others' success is less threatening. In a highly unequal society, social position is everything — and therefore the threat posed by out-groups (who might compete for that position) becomes existential.

Applied to our question: "abundant" communities can still have profound scarcity dynamics if that abundance is unequally distributed. A wealthy suburb that contains significant internal class stratification will generate tribalism along class lines even as its aggregate affluence is high. The relevant psychological experience is relative position, not absolute wealth.

This reframes the thesis somewhat: what reduces tribalism isn't abundance per se but widely shared abundance combined with low-stakes status competition. That combination is rare. It's essentially what Scandinavian social democracies have approximated, with some success. The low homicide rates, high social trust, and cross-class civic participation in countries like Denmark and Norway aren't just a product of wealth — they're a product of wealth combined with compressed inequality and robust social insurance that reduces status anxiety.

The Robbers Cave finding points to something deeper: humans need groups for reasons that have nothing to do with resource competition. We need them for identity, meaning, belonging, and ontological security — the basic sense of knowing who you are and where you stand.

Henri Tajfel's social identity theory framework explains this formally. Group membership provides three psychological functions: cognitive (categories simplify a complex world), evaluative (group membership provides self-esteem through positive distinctiveness), and social (groups are the primary unit of meaning and belonging for humans). None of these functions are directly tied to material scarcity. They're features of how human cognition and sociality are structured.

This means that even in conditions of genuine material abundance, humans will form and maintain group distinctions because the grouping itself serves fundamental needs. The question is not whether groups will exist — they will — but what the groups are for and what their relationship to each other will be.

Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory adds another layer. Different communities weight different moral values: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, liberty. Tribalism in the modern political sense is often less about resource competition than about different moral communities defending different conceptions of the good. This is meaning-level conflict, not scarcity-level conflict, and it is often intensified by abundance — more wealth, more leisure, more education, and more media creates the conditions for more elaborate ideological tribalism.

Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis (1993, Foreign Affairs) is partly right for wrong reasons: as material competition decreases in importance (or is perceived to decrease), cultural and civilizational identity conflicts do seem to intensify. The culture war is in some sense the luxury of a post-industrial society that has solved the most basic material problems and now fights over meaning.

Given all of this, what does the research say actually reduces tribalism in abundant communities?

1. Structured intergroup contact under conditions of equality, cooperation, and institutional support (Allport's Contact Hypothesis, 1954; confirmed by Pettigrew & Tropp's 2006 meta-analysis)

The conditions matter enormously. Contact without these conditions doesn't help and can harm. With them, effect sizes for prejudice reduction are moderate but consistent across cultures, conflict types, and contact forms (direct, extended, imagined).

2. Common ingroup identity recategorization (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000)

When people can be helped to see themselves as members of a superordinate category — "us" rather than "us vs. them" — prejudice toward former out-group members declines. The mechanism: they get reclassified as in-group and receive the automatic favoritism that in-group membership generates. The challenge is making the superordinate identity vivid and meaningful rather than abstract.

3. Intergroup cooperation toward superordinate goals (extending the Robbers Cave finding)

Cooperative structures — not just "working in the same space" but genuinely interdependent collaboration toward shared outcomes — have the most robust effects. This is the intervention that actually reduced hostility in Robbers Cave, and it's been confirmed in workplace, school, and community settings. Jigsaw classroom research (Aronson, 1978) showed meaningful prejudice reduction in desegregated schools through cooperative learning structures.

4. Narrative and identity interventions

Work by Dan Bar-Tal on "societal beliefs" in conflict zones shows that the stories communities tell about themselves and their relationship to out-groups are independently powerful — and independently malleable. Deep canvassing research (Broockman & Kalla, 2016, Science) shows that personal narrative sharing produces durable attitude change on highly charged identity-relevant issues (immigration, transgender rights) where factual argument fails. The mechanism appears to be activating the capacity for perspective-taking and reducing identity threat.

5. Economic security (not just abundance)

Piketty's work and others suggest that it's the security aspect of abundance — knowing you won't fall off the edge — rather than the surplus itself that reduces status anxiety and zero-sum thinking. Universal basic income pilots have shown reductions in stress and increases in trust, community engagement, and interpersonal generosity. The abundance has to feel stable and accessible, not just statistically present.

The most accurate framing: abundance is necessary but not sufficient for the reduction of tribalism. It removes one significant driver — the survival and resource competition logic — while leaving others intact and sometimes amplifying them.

Necessary: without addressing material deprivation, the other interventions will be limited. People operating under genuine scarcity have reduced cognitive bandwidth for the perspective-taking, tolerance of ambiguity, and long-term thinking that intergroup cooperation requires. Mullainathan and Shafir's work makes this concrete. Address the material basis first, or simultaneously.

Not sufficient: identity, meaning-making, status competition, and the fundamental human need for bounded belonging will generate group distinctions and in-group preference regardless of material conditions. Reducing tribalism to a mere resource problem misses these drivers entirely and leads to interventions that address the wrong level.

The complete recipe, as best the research can specify it: shared material sufficiency, compressed inequality (so status stakes are lower), structured cooperative contact under conditions of equality, common purpose that transcends group identities, and active narrative work on the stories communities tell about who belongs.

No single element is sufficient. Together, they shift the odds dramatically.

For community organizers, civic leaders, and anyone trying to reduce intergroup hostility in their specific context, the practical implications are these:

Don't assume shared space creates shared identity. Proximity without structure tends to surface existing tensions rather than dissolve them. Design for structured, interdependent cooperation — not mere coexistence.

Identify superordinate goals that neither group can achieve alone. What does your community face that requires genuine collaboration across the tribal lines that exist? Economic development, shared infrastructure, public health, climate resilience — these are candidate superordinate goals. Make the interdependence explicit and structural, not just rhetorical.

Address inequality within your community even if aggregate wealth is high. Relative deprivation and status anxiety are more predictive of intergroup hostility than absolute poverty. Internal inequality is often the hidden mechanism producing tribalism in apparently affluent communities.

Invest in the narrative. The story your community tells about itself — who it's for, what it's about, what unites it — is not epiphenomenal. It's part of the infrastructure. Deliberately cultivate shared stories that cut across the tribal lines you're trying to soften.

Create conditions for equal-status contact, not just any contact. Events that bring groups together without addressing status differentials often reinforce existing hierarchies. Design deliberately for parity in voice, contribution, and recognition.

This article's central finding — that abundance is necessary but not sufficient — has a direct implication for the book's central premise: that if every person said yes to Law 1 (We Are Human), it would end hunger and achieve peace.

The insight is this: ending hunger (removing material scarcity) is a necessary condition for world peace, but it's not sufficient. Solving the hunger problem solves one of the drivers of conflict. It doesn't solve the identity, meaning, status, and narrative drivers that produce the rest of it.

What Law 1 is actually asking for — if taken seriously — is not just material redistribution. It's an identity revolution: genuinely experiencing other humans as part of your in-group, not at the abstract species level, but at the level of moral concern, political solidarity, and practical community. That requires the material substrate (enough for everyone) plus the relational infrastructure (shared purpose, equal contact, common story).

The hunger-ending part is arguably the easier ask. The harder part is the meaning-making — building the superordinate identity of humanity that makes "we're all in this together" feel real rather than sentimental. That work is cultural, narrative, and perpetually unfinished.

But the research says it's possible. Not inevitable. Possible. And the conditions under which it becomes more possible are legible and actionable. That's enough to work with.