Man Is by Nature a Political Animal
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Man Is by Nature a Political Animal

Evolution, Biology, and Politics

Peter K. Hatemi, Rose McDermott, Peter K. Hatemi, Rose McDermott

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Man Is by Nature a Political Animal

Evolution, Biology, and Politics

Peter K. Hatemi, Rose McDermott, Peter K. Hatemi, Rose McDermott

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About This Book

In Man Is by Nature a Political Animal, Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott bring together a diverse group of contributors to examine the ways in which evolutionary theory and biological research are increasingly informing analyses of political behavior. Focusing on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks of a variety of biological approaches to political attitudes and preferences, the authors consider a wide range of topics, including the comparative basis of political behavior, the utility of formal modeling informed by evolutionary theory, the genetic bases of attitudes and behaviors, psychophysiological methods and research, and the wealth of insight generated by recent research on the human brain. Through this approach, the book reveals the biological bases of many previously unexplained variances within the extant models of political behavior. The diversity of methods discussed and variety of issues examined here will make this book of great interest to students and scholars seeking a comprehensive overview of this emerging approach to the study of politics and behavior.

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1

EVOLUTION AS A THEORY FOR POLITICAL BEHAVIOR

Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott
Political science covers a broad range of meaningful human behavior from attitudes to warfare. Traditionally, political behavior has long been dominated by two distinct approaches, one that might be called situational, and the other that is more individual in its orientation. However both are considered “environmental” or at least environmentally influenced. The former might include, for example, models of voting behavior based on parental socialization, while later models include rational-choice theories of decisionmaking, which posit that changing a (usually financial) incentive structure should prove sufficient to shift the direction of individual choice. In their most reduced form, behavioral models argue that all behavior results from social conditioning (Campbell et al. 1960), while rational-choice models assume preferences are exogenous, fixed, and given, and remain agnostic, if not unconcerned, about their source (Bueno de Mesquita 1983). In essence, both models represent environmental theories—if the socialization or incentive structures change, then the behavior is supposed to change as a result.1

The Limits of Socialization and Rational Choice

Behavioralist and rational-choice theories form the core of political behavior, yet as an explanatory framework for human behavior these theories are widely considered implausible as uniform explanations of human behavior outside of political science (Green and Shapiro 1994; Robson and Kaplan 2003). Numerous challenges from economics, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields have found that not all people are socialized to act the same way; rational-choice models also hold limited explanatory capacity by remaining almost exclusively focused on choices motivated by unrealistically narrow conceptions of self-interest (Dawes and Thaler 1988; Tversky and Thaler 1990; Fehr and GĂ€chter 2000; Gintis 2000; Henrich et al. 2001; Fehr and Fishbacher 2004).
While rational-choice models allow idiosyncratic preferences to drive choice among options, such work fails to interrogate the fundamental basis or cause for such preferences, or why they may differ among individuals. Rather, analyses begin from such preferences and seek to understand the nature of subsequent choice behavior. Yet just as some people may be driven by the incentives such as money or status or power, others appear more focused on sex, food, and travel. These differences may result not only from different levels of biological drives states, but also because not everyone is socialized in the same manner, and not everyone learns to associate rewards from the environment in the same way. We suggest both such domains of difference remain well worthy of further investigation.
The political implications of the origins of such differences appear obvious. For example, conflict and cooperation are often conceptualized as opposition forces rather than two sides of the same whole. Yet the same person can be deeply cooperative, even loving, to an in-group member, while retaining murderous intent toward out-group members. The political motives that undergird such behavior deserve examination, elucidation, and explication.
Evolutionary models provide insight precisely in the theoretical lacunae in which rational choices remain silent and where socialization models fail to account for differences in behavior when socialized the same: on the origin of preferences. The process of natural selection is based upon adaptive traits beginning at a much earlier period in human development, where pure economic power-seeking and self-interest were not the only potential adaptive traits, if such abilities were adaptive at all. Certainly many important human social and political traits, including detecting kin, selecting mates, foraging for food, avoiding predators, and detecting cheaters, evolved in a context prior to modern market conditions.
Few better examples can be found than the central role cooperation and trust play in human evolution. Collaboration is an adaptive trait, particularly for related individuals. Numerous studies show that it takes enormous incentives to motivate one to “sell out” in-group and family members, particularly those with whom a person shares a significant amount of genes (Trivers 1971; Axelrod and Hamilton 1981; Kruger 2003). Trust can prove adaptive in many situations and, though strongest for family members, also allows for cooperation with those to whom we are not related. Gintis et al. (2003) finds humans maintain a predisposition to cooperate with others and punish those who violate the norm of cooperation, even at a personal cost or when there is no expectation that they will recover the cost of punishing.
Yet people must be careful in their judgment concerning who to trust, and keep careful track of those who violate trust in order to maximize opportunities for successful cooperation over time with those who share similar values and goals. With the exception of vampire bats, the ability to track others behaviors and know who and when to trust, and when to punish, is unique to humans and certain primates (Wilkinson 1984). The human capacity to “identify a large number of individuals and to keep score of its relations with them, detecting the dishonest or greedy and taking vengeance, even at some cost to itself” is an evolved one (Gintis et al. 2003).
Certainly, the evolution of our species directly results from our success as a collective, but our universal or individual genetic adaptive traits may likely have little bearing on modern-day individual success within our society. We cannot confuse our species’ success with individual success, nor can we confuse our species’ source of evolved attitudes with individual ones.
Rational choice appears primarily interested in choices as “revealed preferences” or end results. However preferences are modified and developed during the process of making a decision suggests that decisionmaking may involve a creative rather than a revelatory dynamic. Indeed, from a functional perspective, in many cases it would be maladaptive to have fixed preferences. In addition, rational-choice models cannot account for certain behaviors, such as acts of pure altruism or suicide, and ultimately such an argument can lead to a tautological method in its “thin” form, since any action, even an irrational one, can be explained by hidden “preferences” (Landemore 2004). However, preferences often remain absent, relative, volatile, and based upon non observable internal processes. Most important, rational choice ties all outcomes to preferences, but offers no explication for the preceding logical step, “where do preferences come from?”
One potential place to look for explanations of the origins of preferences resides in animal ethology. Brosnan and de Waal (2004) provide a very simple example of the fallibility of absolute gains and rationality in an experiment where they taught monkeys to receive tokens as a reward and then barter them for food. The monkeys learned to be content to swap tokens for cucumber, but if the researchers gave one of the monkeys a grape, a better-tasting food, the other monkeys would act irrationally and refuse to hand over their tokens for cucumber; in some instances, they would exchange their tokens for cucumber but refuse to eat it. The monkeys clearly paid attention to what other monkeys were doing and acted differently when other monkeys received a better reward; thus relative gains proved more important to monkeys than absolute gains. In another demonstration of seemingly irrational decisionmaking, Chen et al. (2006) showed that capuchin monkeys displayed different levels of reference dependence and loss aversion when confronted with risky gambles. Both studies not only illustrate a primate basis for seemingly irrational economic and social behavior, but also point to individual differences in the behavior of nonhuman animals.
In one of the most intriguing experiments, Glimcher and Rustichini (2004) isolated a single neuron to determine its relevance in decisionmaking. They trained a monkey to recognize that by looking a certain direction when prompted to make a decision, the monkey would receive a well-liked juice reward 40 percent of the time, but by looking the opposite direction the monkey would receive the juice 60 percent of the time. Examining the brain activity during this decision process revealed that during the learning period signifi-cant brain activity was present, but after the learning period the monkey exhibited no activity in any part of the brain outside of the single neuron in the eye when faced with the decision task. In other words, after the training period, the monkey’s optical neuron appeared to encode a defined expected utility and, in turn, the monkey reacted in anticipation of a preferred outcome without ever accessing the brain!
While most evidence finds that primates, including humans, often do not always act in a utility maximizing way, especially because emotional constraints prohibit or supersede decisionmaking capability, Platt and Glimcher’s (1999) experiment provides evidence that in certain situations a single neuron can act rationally (unbeknownst to the individual), even if the brain and the larger conscious person does not (also see Glimcher and Rustichini 2004). That is, even when the rules of the game changed (new information), the monkey had already been cued to stay on course in its pre-preprogrammed decision. What possible purpose could this serve? From an energy-saving biological perspective, once a task is learned, ignoring new information could be adaptive because it saves energy. Based on these findings, it could be hypothesized that this conservation of cognitive energy may constitute part of the reason why many people have a difficult time changing their opinions once formed. Staying the course may simply be an energy-saving tactic, so new information need not be processed unless severe pressures requires re-learning. So while rationality exists, and behavior can be trained or socialized, it is not the rational-choice or socialization conceptions of behavior that scholars in political science promote, nor is it the kind of choice humans may always be aware of; rather, rationality may emerge prior and subsequent to environmental stimuli. Thus, rationality exists at a biological, not merely cognitive, level.
Outside of political science, rational choice is even questioned on the grounds that rational action is self-serving. Gintis (2000) emphasizes that “[i]n neither the everyday nor the narrower economic sense of the term does rationality imply self-interest.” Indeed, interest can be defined in myriad ways and what appears logical at the level of the individual may not actually prove beneficial for reproductive success, for example. Those who fight to ensure the security of their families and communities may die, but still improve their relative prospects for passing their genes along into the next generation. The source of our preferences and the processes of accessing preferences are biologically influenced and dependent in part on biological mechanisms. In a remarkable way, biology does not challenge rational action; instead, biology can be used to help fill in the lacuna within the “black box” of individual preferences.

Nature and Nurture

The nature–nurture debate does not remain an open question. It has become widely accepted in science that human behavior is not predetermined, nor is it uninfluenced by our biology; outcomes of interest, including preferences and actions, result from a combination and interaction of both environment and biology. In our view and the view of a growing number of scholars, there is no intellectual line in the sand or juxtaposition of biological and environmental approaches as polar opposites. Rather, the environment constitutes a central component of biology; situational cues and triggers elicit, define, and shape the emergence and representation of our underlying genetic structure and physiological makeup. Indeed, reactions to the environment ultimately drive human behavior and variation in these propensities pass through offspring and population shifts. But individuals react differently to the same stimuli, and the source of such variation remains a continually intriguing puzzle which can best be addressed by constructive collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. As E. O. Wilson (2002) stated, “The boundary between the natural sciences on one side and humanities and humanistic social sciences on the other is not an epistemological fault line, but a broad domain of poorly understood material phenomena that invites cooperative exploration from both sides.” This book constitutes an empirical attempt to overcome just such a divide by manifesting such an integrated enterprise.
A majority of political science essentially embraces the standard social science model, which posits that humans come into the world as a tabula rasa, possessing only a general-purpose learning instinct, and focuses only on the present environment without reference to the variability of the biological organism under observation (Lopreato and Crippen 1999; Alford and Hibbing 2004). Simply put, our current theories and examinations largely assume that all people are biologically the same when it comes to politics, which is a radical notion considering how remarkably diverse humans are in virtually every other domain.
For example, consider typical models of vote choice. Researchers gather several important social indicators, such as sex, race, age, income, religion, education, ideology, and so forth, observe individual-level voters using a large sample, employ one of the many accepted statistical techniques, examine the significance and coefficients, and make generalizations. These models provide insight into why people at large vote for the candidates they choose. Yet taking a look at the majority of the literature, the R-squares are often fairly low. Thus, while significant predictors are identified, in many cases the models are not predicting very much (Matsusaka and Palda 1999).2 Specifically, traditional models do not provide explanations as to why, when faced with different stimuli, individuals make the same choices or, when faced with similar stimuli, individuals often choose radically different paths of action, outside the tautological recourse to “preference” being invoked. If a signifi-cant portion of individual variation in behavior is explained by nonenvironmental influences, then our current models are limited in their ability to accurately predict political behavior. The only way this would be false is if we believe all humans are the same. Such a position is often taken, though even a passing examination of any given individual bears false witness to such a claim. While all people may share certain similarities, each person remains indelibly unique as well.
Using traditional theories and models, the most critical cause of behavior is left unanswered: that is, where do those preferences come from? It is a question political behavior scholars have not been able to fully answer by invoking only environmental factors. For instance, even though males and females are biologically different, the majority of the social science literature accounts for sex differences as socialized gender differences (Gilligan 1982; Chodorow 1978, 1995). In political science the biological difference is rarely considered (for an exception see Hatemi, Medland, and Eaves 2009; Thayer 2000). Indeed, political-behavior research considers “gender” the same as “sex”! While it may be possible to socially influence one’s sexual identity or gender roles, it is certainly impossible to socialize ovaries and childbearing onto a male, or sperm production onto a female. Using biology and the human organism as a potential starting point for universal human similarities as well as individual differences, a biological model can offer an answer for why sex provides variation in addition to “gendered” socialization, and why we find further variation in a given subgroup when all other environmental considerations remain constant.
Taking this argument further, environmental models also do not clearly distinguish between different sources of environmental variation. For instance, numerous studies attempt to determine if voting is primarily based upon familial influence as suggested by Campbell et al. (1960), or more uniquely driven by individual rational action (Downs 1957). Variables are labeled as “familial” (e.g., religion) or “personal” (e.g., occupation), but this is an almost arbitrary categorization. Without considering a third biological layer and controlling for familial her...

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