The Washington Monthly /
By Chris Mooney
Why Right-Wingers Think the Way They Do: The Fascinating Psychological Origins of Political Ideology
Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution?
April 28, 2014 |
If
you want one experiment that perfectly captures what science is
learning about the deep-seated differences between liberals and
conservatives, you need go no further than BeanFest. It’s a simple
learning video game in which the player is presented with a variety of
cartoon beans in different shapes and sizes, with different numbers of
dots on them. When each new type of bean is presented, the player must
choose whether or not to accept it—without knowing, in advance, what
will happen. You see, some beans give you points, while others take them
away. But you can’t know until you try them.
In
a recent experiment by psychologists Russell Fazio and Natalie Shook, a
group of self-identified liberals and conservatives played BeanFest.
And their strategies of play tended to be quite different. Liberals
tried out all sorts of beans. They racked up big point gains as a
result, but also big point losses—and they learned a lot about different
kinds of beans and what they did. Conservatives, though, tended to play
more defensively. They tested out fewer beans. They were risk averse,
losing less but also gathering less information.
One
reason this is a telling experiment is that it’s very hard to argue
that playing BeanFest has anything directly to do with politics. It’s
difficult to imagine, for example, that results like these are
confounded or contaminated by subtle cues or extraneous factors that
push liberals and conservatives to play the game differently. In the
experiment, they simply sit down in front of a game—an incredibly simple
game—and play. So the ensuing differences in strategy very likely
reflect differences in who’s playing.
The
BeanFest experiment is just one of dozens summarized in two new
additions to the growing science-of-politics book genre: Predisposed:
Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, by
political scientists John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R.
Alford, and Our Political Nature, by evolutionary anthropologist Avi
Tuschman. The two books agree almost perfectly on what science is now
finding about the psychological, biological, and even genetic
differences between those who opt for the political left and those who
tilt toward the right. However, what they’re willing to make of these
differences, and how far they are willing to run with it, varies
greatly.
Hibbing,
Smith, and Alford, a team of researchers at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University who have published some of the most
penetrating research on left-right differences in recent years, provide
a lively and amusing tour of the landscape. But they mostly just walk
up to and peer at the overriding question of why these apparently
systematic left-right differences exist in the first place. Their
explanation for the “origin of subspecies,” as they put it, is tentative
at best. Tuschman, by contrast, has written a vast and often difficult
book that attempts nothing less than a broad evolutionary explanation of
the origins of left-right differences across countries and time—and
does so by synthesizing such a huge body of anthropological and
biological evidence that it’ll almost bury you. Whether the account
deserves to be called merely thought-provoking or actually correct,
though, will be up for other scholars to evaluate—scholars like Hibbing,
Smith, and Alford.
Let’s
begin with the large body of shared ground. Surveying the evidence with
a fair mind, it is hard to deny that science is revealing a very
inconvenient truth about left and right: long before they become members
of different parties, liberals and conservatives appear to start out as
different people. “Bedrock political orientations just naturally mesh
with a broader set of orientations, tastes, and preferences because they
are all part of the same biologically rooted inner self,” write Hibbing
et al. The research demonstrating this is so diverse, comes from so
many fields, and shows so many points of overlap and consistency that
you either have to accept that there’s really something going on here or
else start spinning a conspiracy theory to explain it all away.
The
most rock-solid finding, simply because it has been shown so many times
in so many different studies, is that liberals and conservatives have
different personalities. Again and again, when they take the widely
accepted Big Five personality traits test, liberals tend to score higher
on one of the five major dimensions—openness: the desire to explore, to
try new things, to meet new people—and conservatives score higher on
conscientiousness: the desire for order, structure, and stability.
Research samples in many countries, not just the U.S., show as much. And
this finding is highly consequential, because as both Hibbing et al.
and Tuschman note, people tend to mate and have offspring with those who
are similar to them on the openness measure—and therefore, with those
who share their deeply rooted political outlook. It’s a process called
“assortative mating,” and it will almost certainly exacerbate our
current political divide.
But
that’s just the beginning of the research on left-right differences. An
interlocking and supporting body of evidence can be found in moral
psychology, genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and Hibbing’s and Smith’s
preferred realm, physiology and cognition. At their Political Physiology
Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the researchers put liberals
and conservatives in a variety of devices that measure responses like
skin conductance (the moistening of the sweat glands) and eye gaze
patterns when we’re exposed to different types of images. In doing so,
Hibbing and his colleagues have been able to detect involuntary
physiological response differences between the two groups of political
protagonists when they encounter a variety of stimuli. Once again, it’s
hard to see how results like these could mean anything other than what
they mean: those on the left and right tend to be different people.
Indeed,
here is where perhaps some of the most stunning science-of-politics
results arise. Several research groups have shown that compared with
liberals, conservatives have a greater focus on negative stimuli or a
“negativity bias”: they pay more attention to the alarming, the
threatening, and the disgusting in life. In one experiment that captured
this, Hibbing and his colleagues showed liberals and conservatives a
series of collages, each comprised of a mixture of positive images (cute
bunnies, smiling children) and negative ones (wounds, a person eating
worms). Test subjects were fitted with eye-tracker devices that measured
where they looked, and for how long. The results were stark:
conservatives fixed their eyes on the negative images much more rapidly,
and dwelled on them much longer, than did the liberals.
Liberals
and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process
different worlds.” No wonder, then, that they often cannot agree. These
experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that
is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to
argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue
them out of their skin.
Perhaps
the main reason that scientists don’t think these psychological and
attentional differences simply reflect learned behaviors—or the
influence of cultural assumptions—is the genetic research. As Hibbing et
al. explain, the evidence suggests that around 40 percent of the
variation in political beliefs is ultimately rooted in DNA. The studies
that form the basis for this conclusion use a simple but powerful
paradigm: they examine the differences between pairs of monozygotic
(“identical”) twins and pairs of dizygotic (“fraternal”) twins when it
comes to political views. Again and again, the identical twins, who
share 100 percent of their DNA, also share much more of their politics.
In
other words, politics runs in families and is passed on to offspring.
Hibbing and his coauthors suspect that what is ultimately being
inherited is a set of core dispositions about how societies should
resolve recurring problems: how to distribute resources (should we be
individualistic or collectivist?); how to deal with outsiders and
out-groups (are they threatening or enticing?); how to structure power
relationships (should we be hierarchical or egalitarian?); and so on.
These are, of course, problems that all human societies have had to
grapple with; they are ancient. And inheriting a core disposition on how
to resolve them would naturally predispose one to a variety of specific
issue stances in a given political context.
All
of which brings us to the really big question. It is difficult to
believe that systematic psychological and biological differences between
those who opt for the left and the right in different
countries—differences that are likely reflected in the genetic
code—arose purely by chance. And yet, providing an evolutionary
explanation for what we see is fraught with peril: to put it bluntly, we
weren’t there. We didn’t see it happen.
Moreover,
in evolution, some things happen for an explicitly Darwinian
“reason”—traits become more prevalent or fixed in populations because
they advanced organisms’ chances of survival and reproduction in a
particular environment—while others happen more accidentally. Some
complex social traits may emerge, for instance, because they are a
fortuitous by-product of other, more fundamental traits laid down by
Darwinian evolution.
A
good example of such a trait may be religion. It’s pretty clear that
evolution laid down a series of attributes that predispose us toward
religiosity, such as “agency detection,” which refers to the human
tendency to detect minds and intentions everywhere around us in the
environment, even when they aren’t necessarily there. The evolutionary
reason for such a trait seems obvious: after all, better to be safe than
sorry when you’re out in the woods and hear a noise. But start thinking
that there are intentions behind the wind blowing, or the hunt failing,
and you are well on your way to constructing gods. And indeed, religion
seems to be a cross-cultural human universal. But does that mean that
evolution selected for religion itself, or just for simpler precursors
like agency detection?
You
see the difficulty. In this context, Hibbing and his colleagues
consider a variety of potential explanations for the stubborn fact that
there is large, politically relevant psychological and biological
diversity among members of the human species, and ultimately settle on a
tentative combination of two ideas. First, they assert, conservatism is
probably more basic and fundamental, because it is more suited to a
world in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Being defensive,
risk aversive, hierarchical, and tribal makes sense when the threats
around you are very real and immediate. As many of these threats have
relaxed in modern times, however, this may have unleashed more
variability among the human species, simply because now we can afford
it. Under this scenario, liberals are the Johnny-come-latelys to the
politico-evolutionary pageant; the Enlightenment itself is less than 300
years old, less than an eyeblink in evolutionary time. “Liberalism may
thus be viewed as an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli
becoming less prevalent and deadly,” write Hibbing et al.
However,
Hibbing and his colleagues also consider a more controversial “group
selection” scenario, in which evolution built some measure of
variability in our political typologies because sometimes, diversity is
strength (for the group, anyway, if not for the individual). The trouble
is, it is still fairly novel for evolutionary explanations to focus on
the reproductive fitness of a group of individuals, rather than on the
fitness of a single individual or even that individual’s DNA.
Nonetheless, it’s easy to see why a group of early humans comprised of
both conservative and liberal psychologies might have fared better than a
more homogenous group. Such a society would have forces in it that want
to hunker down and defend, but also forces that push it to explore and
change. This would surely make for better adaptation to more diverse
environments. It just might enhance the group’s chance of survival.
Yet
it would be going much too far to suggest that Hibbing et al. have a
strong or highly developed theory for why biopolitical diversity exists
among humans. Avi Tuschman does, though. “Political orientations are
natural dispositions that have been molded by evolutionary forces,” he
asserts. If he’s right, a dramatic new window opens on who we are and
why we behave as we do.
One
of the most stunning revelations of recent genetic anthropology is the
finding that Homo sapiens, our ancestors, occasionally bred with Homo
neanderthalensis in Europe or the Middle East some 40,000 to 50,000
years ago. These encounters may have been quite rare: just one offspring
produced every thirty years, according to one estimate. But it was
enough to shape who humans are today. Recent genetic analyses suggest
that some modern humans have a small but measurable percentage of
Neanderthal DNA in our genomes—particularly those of us living in Europe
and Asia.
The
more you think about it, the more mind-boggling it is that this
cross-species mating actually occurred. Imagine how strange it must have
been, as a member ofHomo sapiens, to encounter another being so closely
related to us (much more closely than chimpanzees), and yet still so
different. J. R. R. Tolkien buffs can probably visualize it the best,
because it would indeed have been something like humans encountering
dwarves. Neanderthals were shorter and stronger, with outjutting brows.
There is some evidence suggesting that they had high-pitched voices and
red hair.
Knowing
how prevalent racism and xenophobia are today among members of the same
human species, we can assume that many of our ancestors would have
behaved even worse toward Neanderthals. And yet some Homo sapiens bred
with them, produced offspring with them, and (presumably) cared for
those offspring. Which ones were the lovers, not the haters?
The
answer, hints Tuschman in Our Political Nature, is that it may have
been the liberals. For one core of the apparently universal left-right
difference, he argues, is that the two groups pursue different
reproductive strategies, different ways of ensuring offspring and
fitness in the next generation.
And
thus we enter the realm of full-blown, and inevitably highly
controversial, evolutionary explanations. Tuschman doesn’t hold back.
Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary
accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern reflection of an
evolutionary impulse that leads some of us to seek to control sexual
reproduction and keep it within a relatively homogenous group. This
naturally makes today’s conservatives more tribal and in-group oriented;
if tribalism does anything, it makes it clear who you are and aren’t
supposed to mate with.
Tuschman’s
liberals, in contrast, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary
impulse to take risks, and thereby pull in more genetic diversity
through outbreeding. This naturally makes today’s liberals more
exploratory and cosmopolitan, just as the personality tests always
suggest. Ultimately, Tuschman bluntly writes, it all comes down to
“different attitudes toward the transmission of DNA.” And if you want to
set these two groups at absolute war with one another, all you need is
something like the 1960s.
According
to Tuschman, these competing reproductive strategies arise from the
fact that there are advantages to keeping mating close within the group,
but also advantages to mixing in more genetic diversity. Moreover,
there is a continuum from extreme inbreeding to extreme outbreeding,
featuring many different reproductive strategies along the way. Thus, we
see in other species, such as birds like the great tit, a range in
mating behavior, from a high level of breeding with more closely related
birds to a high level of outbreeding.
Outbreeding
brings in diversity, which is vital. For instance, diversity in the
genes that create the proteins that ultimately come to comprise our
immune systems has obvious benefits. But outbreeding also has risks—like
encountering deadly new pathogens when you encounter new human
groups—even as a moderate degree of inbreeding appears to have its own
advantages: perpetuating genetically based survival strategies that are
proven to work, increasing altruism that arises in kin relationships,
and also, it appears, having more total offspring.
Extreme
inbreeding, to be sure, is deleterious. But Tuschman presents evidence
suggesting that there is an optimum—at around third-cousin or
fourth-cousin mating—for producing the largest number of healthy
offspring. He also shows related evidence in Danish women suggesting
that a moderate degree of geographic dispersal to find a mate (measured
by the distance between a woman’s birthplace and her husband’s) is
related to having a high number of children, but too much dispersal and
too little are both related to less overall fertility.
Returning
to the present, Tuschman emphasizes that conservatives, and especially
religious conservatives, always want to seem to control and restrict
reproduction (and other sexual activities) more than liberals do. It’s
understandably hard for an evolutionary biologist not to see behaviors
that systematically affect patterns of reproduction in a Darwinian
light.
And
it’s not just reproductive patterns: Tuschman also suggests that other
aspects of the liberal-conservative divide reflect other evolutionary
challenges and differential strategies of responding to them. He traces
different left-right views on hierarchy and equality to the structure of
families (a move that cognitive linguist George Lakoff has in effect
already made) and the effect of birth order on the personalities and
political outlooks of siblings. And Tuschman traces more positive and
negative (or, risk-aversive) views of human nature on the left and the
right to different types of evolutionarily based altruism: altruism
toward kin on the conservative side, and reciprocal altruism (which can
be toward anyone) on the liberal side.
But
is all of this really … true? Tuschman’s book is difficult to evaluate
on this score. It says so much more about evolution than Hibbing, Smith,
and Alford do, and yet manages to do so without leaving the same
impression about the importance of caveats and nuances. Is Tuschman
advancing a group selection theory, or not? It sometimes sounds like it,
but it isn’t clear. And most importantly, is the variation among humans
of politically relevant traits just part of the natural order of
things, or does it itself reflect something about evolution? Again, it
isn’t clear. This is not to suggest that Tuschman lacks a view on such
questions; it’s just that he synthesizes so much scientific evidence
that this kind of hand-holding seems less of a priority.
In
the end, Tuschman’s book attempts a feat that those of us monitoring
the emerging science of politics have long been waiting for—explaining
the now well-documented psychological, biological, and genetic
differences between liberals and conservatives with reference to human
evolution and the differential strategies of mate choice and resource
allocation that have been forced on us by the pressures of surviving and
reproducing on a quite dangerous planet. It may or may not stand the
test of time, but it certainly forces the issue.
In
the end, what’s so stunning about all of this is the tremendous gap
between what scholars are learning about politics and politics itself.
We run around shutting down governments and occupying city
centers—behaviors that can only be driven by a combination of intense
belief and equally intense emotion—with almost zero perspective on why
we can be so passionate one way, even as our opponents are passionate in
the other.
To
see politics as Hibbing, Smith, Alford, and Tuschman see it, by
contrast, is inevitably to want to stop fighting so much and strive for
some form of acceptance of political difference. That’s why, even though
not all of the answers are in place yet, we need their line of thinking
to catch on. Ideological diversity is clearly real, deeply rooted, and
probably a core facet of human nature. Given this, we simply have no
choice but to come up with a much better way to live with it.
