Evolutionary Political Psychology

Petersen, Michael Bang

doi:10.1002/9781119125563.evpsych247

Cited by 33 publications

(45 citation statements)

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“…If social life is a game, then politics is the process of establishing and negotiating the rules of that game, defining who is entitled to get what, when, and how (Petersen, 2015). Politics conceived in this way extends far back into our species' evolutionary history (see De Waal, 1982), and there has been a recent surge of studies arguing that human biology shapes the way modern humans represent and think about modern politics (for reviews, see Hatemi & McDermott, 2011;Hibbing et al, 2013;Petersen 2015).…”

Section: The Psychology Of Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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!Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants' categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target's race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race-such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support-categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind's systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race.!

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Section: The Psychology Of Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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“…In contrast to the General Orientations Model (Haidt 2012;Hibbing, Smith, & Alford 2013, 2014Jost, Federico, & (Petersen 2015;Weeden & Kurzban 2014). In this paper, we reviewed evidence that the bulk of the US population shows little tendency to align opinions on a single left-right axis across religious and racial/economic domains.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, we've suggested that views on government economic redistribution relate more to socioeconomic status and the extent to which one's private support network reduces one's need for public safety nets (Weeden & Kurzban 2014). When opinions across such issue domains align in ideologically consistent waysthat is, when individuals are either liberal on various types of issues or conservative on various types of issues-we argue, echoing Petersen's (2015) view, that it's typically either, first, because the underlying domain-specific interests happen to align or, second, because the political coalitions happen to become organized such that various liberal constituencies are allied in competition against various conservative constituencies.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Our view is that people are generally able to identify the rough contours of their adaptive interests with respect to these diverse policy domains-often related to their demographic features-and tend to take positions consistent with these interests; to advance these interest-based goals, people might endorse or affiliate with ideological and party coalitions that seek to implement often unrelated policies (Weeden & Kurzban 2014). Petersen's (2015) view of the evolutionary political psychology of issue opinions is parallel to our own: "Political judgments are … informed by at least two general types of evolved mechanisms: first, adaptations designed to judge the fitness consequences for the self of the content of rules (in part, due to the effects on valuable others) and second, adaptations designed to coordinate judgments with other coalitional members, independently of rule content. "…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Here, we look at explanations for these differences through an evolutionary lens, an approach that has been steadily gaining traction among political psychologists (Lopez & McDermott 2012;Petersen 2015), contrasting our approach with other candidate explanations.…”

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Do People Naturally Cluster into Liberals and Conservatives?

Weeden

Kurzban

2015

Evolutionary Psychological Science

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Many researchers have attempted to link evolutionary notions to political psychology by proposing a natural tendency for people to cluster into liberals and conservatives across various social and economic opinion domains. We review evidence showing that, in contrast, for the large majority of Americans, racial and economic opinions are only trivially correlated with opinions regarding matters of lifestyle and religious fundamentalism. The key exception is a group that does, in fact, show reasonably robust ideological alignment across diverse domains: whites with high levels of human capital (measured by education and test performance). Further, since the early 1980s, while the US public as a whole has increasingly tended to choose liberal/conservative labels and political parties in line with their issue opinions, substantial increases in cross-issue correlations have occurred only among whites with high levels of human capital. Nonetheless, mass public opinion is not unstructured-it maintains an underlying coherence grounded in domainspecific demographic connections relating to different opinion areas.

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The Evolved Functions of Procedural Fairness: An Adaptation for Politics

Bøggild

Petersen

2016

Evolutionary Psychology

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Abstract:Politics is the process of determining resource allocations within and between groups. Group life has constituted a critical and enduring part of human evolutionary history and we should expect the human mind to contain psychological adaptations for dealing with political problems. Previous research has in particular focused on adaptations designed to produce moral evaluations of political outcomes: is the allocation of resources fair? People, however, are not only concerned about outcomes. They also readily produce moral evaluations of the political processes that shape these outcomes. People have a sense of procedural fairness. In this chapter, we identify the adaptive functions of the human psychology of procedural fairness. We argue that intuitions about procedural fairness evolved to deal with adaptive problems related to the delegation of leadership and, specifically, to identify and counter-act exploitative leaders. In the chapter, we first introduce the concept of procedural fairness, review extant social psychological theories and make the case for why an evolutionary approach is needed. Next, we dissect the evolved functions of procedural fairness and review extant research in favor of the evolutionary account. Finally, we discuss how environmental mismatches between ancestral and modern politics make procedural fairness considerations even more potent in modern politics, creating a powerful source of moral outrage.Keywords: procedural fairness, procedural justice, evolutionary psychology, politics, dominance, leadership, strategic moralization 3 Politics is the process of determining resource access (Petersen 2015). In a classical definition, the political scientist, David Easton (1953), thus defined politics as the process of determining the "authoritative allocation of values for a society." In more plain terms, another classical definition described politics as about "who gets what" (Lasswell 1950). These definitions highlight that politics is ultimately about outcomes: who gets a resource and who does not. Some researchers of politics have taken this to imply that outcomes are all people care about in politics. As Ulbig (2002, p. 793) notes, the traditional notion has been that "when people get what they want they do not care how they get it". Popkin (1991, p. 99), for example, holds that people "care about ends not means; they judge government by results and are . . . indifferent about the methods by which the results were obtained". is their strategy for achieving those interests? Research has documented that such a focus is, at least in part, demand driven: people crave information about the process leading to outcomes and the strategic aspects involved (Smith et al. 2007;Trussler & Soroka 2014).This appetite for information about what goes on behind the scenes of political outcomes extends even to the personal lives of politicians: who are they, whom are they personally affiliated with, and do they practice what they preach politically? This latter observation illustrates an importan...

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Evolutionary Political Psychology

Cited by 33 publications

References 70 publications

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

Do People Naturally Cluster into Liberals and Conservatives?

The Evolved Functions of Procedural Fairness: An Adaptation for Politics

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