Humans are tribal.

Whether it’s an evolved behavioral trait — a hypothesis Edward O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), supports quite strongly — a learned, cultural one, or a combination of the two (most nature/nurture arguments are, after all, false dichotomies) will undoubtedly be the focus on much future research.

The nature/nurture question doesn’t matter to you at all. Where you live as a business leader, what matters is that both you and the humans you work with are tribal, not why they are tribal. The same holds true for you as a parent, part of a community, member of a political party if you are, and voter, which I hope you are: You’re tribal, everyone you know is tribal, everyone you read and read about is tribal too, with almost no exceptions.

It’s the old joke: There are two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.

Except the second kind is as rare as unicorns.

A person is tribal if his/her self-assigned membership in an identifiable group biases their acceptance of ideas, evidence, and the quality of the people they encounter. It’s why, in so many companies, the bean-counters in Accounting distrust any spending proposed by the propeller-heads in IT, who have no patience for the HR bureaucrats. It’s also why they all agree that the company’s pointy-haired bosses exemplify the Peter Principle.

My tribe is better than your tribe. Everything about us is better. And not just better: Everything about my tribe is admirable; everything about yours is despicable.

Tribalists aren’t “they.” The question isn’t whether you’re tribal. It’s what you do to minimize the damage you do to your ability to understand and solve problems by being tribal.

Self-awareness is a good start, of course. It will help you fight the tendency. It’s most useful when you need it the least, though … when you have time to think and reflect. When you’re in a heated argument, and your side is trying to win a political point over the other side, that’s when cooler heads are desperately needed. Exactly when you’re most likely to be a hothead instead.

Fighting a tendency this deep-seated (and very possibly innate) is more admirable than effective. An alternative that’s more likely to keep you on an even keel is to embrace the tendency but to send it in a harmless direction — possibly even a productive one.

Choose your own tribe, and choose it carefully. There’s no reason you have to belong to an already identified combatant tribe, either, and many reasons to avoid doing so.

In political discussions, for example, I find that identifying with the non-existent “Competence Party” invented in this space several years ago helps me avoid falling for the worst of the partisan nonsense fomented by the propagandists who have taken over most of our political dialog.

Join me. Once you’re a member of the Competence Party you’ll have no reason to become enraged at one party because of something horrible ascribed to it by the other. You’ll recognize that you’re just seeing symptoms of incompetence — something our tribe does our best to avoid by limiting our own information-gathering to sources whose first allegiance is to accuracy. And, you’ll immediately recognize attempts to make you angry, recognizing that whoever is trying to enrage you is playing you, no matter which side they’re on.

It works in business situations, too (which is fortunate, because otherwise this would be a pointless KJR). Imagine, for example, that you find yourself in the middle of a dispute between, say, IT and HR management, due to a conflict between IT’s need to recruit a position and HR/Recruiting’s policies and procedures.

Instead of choosing sides or trying to decide which side is right and which side is wrong, join an IT outsourcing firm who just took over responsibility for whatever the work is that IT needs the hoped-for new hire to handle. Ask yourself what that outsourcer would do to fill the position and compare it to the arguments being made by the parties you’re listening to.

Anger makes people stupid. Exploiting tribal tendencies is a great way to make people angry, so joining a non-combatant tribe … even if it’s one you’ve just invented … will help you keep the exploiters from messing with your head.

There’s another, more practical advantage to joining a non-combatant tribe: When an issue is undecided and the votes are close, both of the combatant tribes will need all the help they can get.

You might have to join one, but if you do, you get to choose.

Even better, you can negotiate favorable terms for doing so.