Robert Kegan developed a theory of adult development. He identifies five stages. Stage 3 can be described as communal, stage 4 as systematic and stage 5 as metasystematic. These are modes of thinking and describe how you relate to others, how you make sense of the world, etc. He says that most adult people belong to stage 3, some to stage 4 and very few to stage 5. He also holds that higher stages include the capacity to think in lower stages and are really better, in the sense that they increase your capacity to make sense of the world.

I believe that the three groups mentioned in the article map pretty nicely onto this framework and that, while you may not be able to choose your (maximum) stage, you can over time progress into higher stages.

I don't think that you can't choose them, to me which tribe you consider yourself in reflects your ideals in software, and that may change over years.

Your tribe represents your personality. While I believe that belonging to tribe 3 could make my life way easier, unconsciously, I'm always leaning to tribe 1. I could resume my life with this sentence.

The second tribe sounds more like engineering than science though