So many people have given up hope of winning the culture war through persuasion alone. They think the other side is too far gone . Instead, they think the only way to win is to destroy the other side before the other side destroys them.

This view is understandable. As humans , we're inherently tribal. The problem isn't that we sort ourselves into groups. It's that once we're in these groups, we're a little bit pro-"us" and a lot anti-"them."

One study shows this particularly well. In 1970, social psychologist Henri Tajfel split boys into two groups using a completely arbitrary metric. He then asked members of those groups to help him allocate some money: They could either give a large and equal sum to both groups, or they could award a smaller sum to their own group but a much smaller sum to the other group. Tajfel found that the boys were overwhelmingly more likely to pick the smaller sums.

Here's how David McRaney summarized the study in his book How Minds Change: "Once people become an us, we begin to loathe a them, so much so that we are willing to sacrifice the greater good if it means we can shift the balance in our group’s favor."

When we're in the crosshairs of people on the other side who try to hurt us even at the expense of overall well-being, it can be easy to lose faith in the power of persuasion. It can be easy to think that the only way out is to destroy them.

But there is another way, and it also leverages our tribal identity. The problem isn't that we form groups. It's that as soon as we form an in-group, we are tempted to form an out-group to define the boundaries of our in-group. Once we define an out-group, we are more likely to go to war with it. But if we can help people on the other side feel like they're a member of our in-group, then we can defuse their anger and change their minds.

One way to do this is to treat people who hate us with kindness and inclusion. In How Minds Change, McRaney describes how extremists and former cult members change their minds. A key, he stresses, is being treated with kindness by people not in their in-group. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of Westboro Baptist Church, left the church in part because people outside of it were willing to adopt her into their own group. She needed a sense of identity, and she didn't feel safe leaving her in-group, Westboro Baptist Church, until another in-group was willing to see her humanity and welcome her. As McRaney put it, Phelps-Roper and members of other cults "couldn’t leave their worldviews behind until they felt like there was a community on the outside that would welcome them into theirs."

Another way is to remind people that we all belong to a bigger tribe: the common in-group of humanity. As the civil rights leader Pauli Murray  put it , "When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them."

Jamie Winship is a Christian who uses this strategy to walk into camps of armed Muslim extremists and convince them to give up their extremism and pursue a life of peace. He has won over hundreds of extremists by showing them that he sees them as part of one large in-group of God's children. When they try to draw a circle to exclude, or even kill, him, he draws a larger circle to include them. 

When one terrorist kidnapped Winship and said he was going to kill him, Winship  responded with , "I am not afraid, and I want to be your friend." That simple statement, expressing common humanity, floored the terrorist. He didn't kill Winship. Instead, he invited Winship to have dinner with him. That night, Winship reports, the entire terrorist cell that his attacker led "decided to withdraw from all hostilities in the region."

Our psychology is partly tribal, but tribalism doesn't have to define us. When we can see our opponents not merely as members of the out-group but as  people  first and foremost — or, even better, people who all belong to one giant tribe of shared humanity — we can defuse a lot of their hostility. Once we lower their walls, persuading them doesn't look quite so hard.

Julian Adorney is a writer for the Foundation for Economic Education, a member of the Braver Angels media team, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the founder of Heal the West , a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization.