nestedness & politics

Does some of the tension between humans on matters of group policy result from the fact that our social systems involve 6 layers of organization, but the individuals within them have only adapted (e.g. paleolithically) to do a good job with 4 or 5 layers at a time? If so, one consequence might be that unbalanced narratives are too easy to embrace.

Thus we've seen at various times tension between groups that prefer to focus their attention either inward or outward (but not both) from their boundaries of skin, family, or culture. For example looking only inward toward the interests of one's own culture, or looking outward too much toward questions of harmony between cultures, are both ways that this inward/outward balance sometimes fails.

On the adaptation of codes (molecular or idea) by trial and error i.e. concerning our approaches toward statistical inference, one might have also seen groups in which the above shortcoming manifests as a bias toward old data (as in tradition), toward new data (as in new opportunities), or in some cases even toward no data (as in "a mind made up").

What groups do you think of as falling into one of more of these unbalanced categories?