Rational Tribalism

Personally, I think its wrong to lump people into groups. In my opinion, people should be judged on their own merits as individuals. However, I've thought of how tribalism might exist even if everyone were philosophically opposed to it.

Imagine a club which has a history of having exclusively black members. However, the current members don't particularly care to carry on the tradition. Race is irrelevant to them. They are charged with selecting one new member from a list of five candidates, one of which is black, four of which are white. For a candidate to be selected, he needs a majority vote from the members. If no candidate attains a majority, then there is a runoff.

It just so happens that the candidates' resumes are all equally impressive, making it difficult for the members to choose who to vote for.

Given that the selection process imposes some cost (time, energy, etc.) on the club and that a runoff would impose an additional cost, I believe that the black candidate would win even though the members have no racial preference. The reason is that his race is a Schelling point, a kind of meta-expectation, that the members would naturally arrive at. Each member, wanting to avoid a costly runoff wants to vote for a candidate that others will also vote for. Given the history of the club preferring black members, black-ness is a natural schelling point. Each individual member has no personal preference for the black candidate, but he votes for the black candidate because he expects others to vote for him. It's kind of a positive feed back loop.

This all depends on the relative strength of the schelling point. By that I mean, it depends on how costly extending the selection process would be verse the cost of taking the risk of not selecting the best candidate.