The Tribal Mind
Human Biodiversity (HBD) refers to fundamental human biological differences. Developmental Psychology describes a progression through four stages of cognitive development. The following article offers insight into South Africa's tribal violence:
The Tribal Mind: Understanding South Africa’s Xenophobic Violence Through Developmental Psychology, by Lipton Matthews, 13 August 2026.
South Africa has adopted the forms of modernity without the psychological development to sustain them.
The images are harrowing. South African mobs wielding machetes and clubs, forcing foreign nationals* from their homes, looting their shops, and, in some cases, ending their lives. In recent months, vigilante violence has driven thousands of immigrants from countries including Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe out of South Africa, with Nigeria and Ghana repatriating around two thousand of their citizens on government-sponsored flights. The victims have been subjected to a level of brutality that shocks the conscience. ..
Drawing on the insights of Jean Piaget and the cross-cultural research he inspired, one can understand why South Africa remains stuck at what the Swiss psychologist called the preoperational and concrete operational stages of cognitive development, incapable of the formal operational thinking that characterizes modern societies...
Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology describes a progression through four stages of cognitive development. The first two stages, which characterize children up to about the age of seven or eight, involve magical, animistic thinking in which the boundaries between natural and moral laws blur. Children at these stages believe that objects, rocks, and rivers can see and judge human actions, that fate and morals govern every occurrence, and that the cosmos itself intervenes to punish wrongdoing. The third stage, concrete operational thought, involves some logical reasoning but remains bound to immediate, tangible experience. The fourth and final stage, formal operations, emerges only in adolescents and adults of modern societies between the ages of ten and twenty...
Crucially, cross-cultural research conducted across Afghanistan, Lebanon, West Africa, China, and among American indigenous peoples has demonstrated that adults in traditional or backward regions remain bound to the second and third stages. They do not reach the stage of formal operations...
When South African mobs attack foreign nationals, they are not engaged in sophisticated political reasoning or economic calculation. They are manifesting the same primitive psychological structures that produce animistic belief systems, objective responsibility, and kangaroo justice...
However, South Africa lacks the cognitive development of the typical Western society. The country is not yet at the formal operational stage, and its legal institutions reflect this fact...
South Africa’s persistent tribalism, its inability to build a unified national identity, its chronic violence, and its resistance to democratic institutions all reflect the same cognitive deficit. They are, in Piaget’s terms, operating at the level of concrete operations, unable to grasp abstract principles of justice, unable to distinguish between their immediate emotions and the rights of others...
South Africa has adopted the forms of modernity without the psychological development to sustain them...
* What the author does not mention is that much of this violence is directed against another race - that is, against Whites, even though White families have lived in those countries for 400 years.
The question then surfaces: how much of this behavior is predicated upon Human Biodiversity - that is, biological differences between human species, which includes IQ.
It also might be interesting to reread the above paragraphs, thinking not about South Africans, but about Muslims in Islamic societies. There is a strong parallel.