Easily Grossed Out? You Might Be A Conservative!

Easily Grossed Out? You Might Be A Conservative! (6/5/09)

Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? Do crawly insects make you cringe or dead bodies make you blanch?

If so, chances are you're more conservative -- politically, and especially in your attitudes toward gays and lesbians -- than your less-squeamish counterparts, according to two Cornell studies.

The results, said study leader David Pizarro, Cornell assistant professor of psychology, raise questions about the role of disgust -- an emotion that likely evolved in humans to keep them safe from potentially hazardous or disease-carrying environments -- in contemporary judgments of morality and purity.

This press release doesn't explain how the link between conservatism and feelings of disgust is based, at least in part, on theories of an academic in Virginia named Jonathan Haidt.

I've written about this guy before: Moral neuropolitics and ideology. His pet theory is that morality in general arises out of several human characteristics that can be explained by evolutionary psychology (EP). While it is true that EP can be taken too far in "explaining" human nature, I think it also has a lot of validity and if used carefully it can give real scientific explanations for some things.

The problem I have with Haidt's theories is not because of EP. Rather it's because he singles out three evolved traits that he believes influence conservative theories of morality yet are generally disregarded in liberal theories. One of these traits is a serious concern about "purity" – which sort of means an aversion to "disgusting" things, without an attempt to provide reasonable justification for the feeling in specific situations (such as homosexuality).

Haidt thinks this suggests liberal theories of morality are inadequate. I think that he's wrong. It does not seem to me that just because a trait evolved in humans (when social and physical conditions were vastly different from those of the present) it follows that such traits should be important influences on morality under current conditions.

Further, not only are these inherited traits unreliable guides for moral theories, but they are insufficient to provide good foundations for moral principles that are important in modern conditions – such as concern for the welfare of the environment, aversion to warfare, and the need for limitations on exploitative behavior of elites. However, all this is a discussion for another time.

Returning to the research described at the top, it's reassuring that the investigators shared my concerns about the role of "purity" in moral judgment:

Liberals and conservatives disagree about whether disgust has a valid place in making moral judgments, Pizarro noted. Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something -- gay sex between consenting adults, for example -- is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm. ...

The research speaks to a need for caution when forming moral judgments, Pizarro added. "Disgust really is about protecting yourself from disease; it didn't really evolve for the purpose of human morality," he said. "It clearly has become central to morality, but because of its origins in contamination and avoidance, we should be wary about its influences."

Further reading:

Conservatives Are More Easily Disgusted (6/4/09) – LiveScience.com

A leaflet from my friendly neighbourhood fascists

Here's more about a topic I've covered a number of times before, such as this, among others. Specifically, it's about the connection between the emotions of fear and anxiety, on the one hand, and religion and political conservatism, on the other.

A leaflet from my friendly neighbourhood fascists

The leaflet itself was pretty much what you'd expect. An obsession with warfare (it even includes a list of battles dating back to Trafalgar!) coupled with stoking up in-group loyalty and out-group fears.

It got me thinking, though, about why people turn to these kinds of parties when they feel anxious.

One of the leading researchers in this field is John Jost, at New York University. Back in 2003, he analysed all the published studies to show that fear of uncertainty and feelings of being threatened are higher in conservatives and extremists. But what he couldn't tell from the data was whether these factors lead to right wing extremism in particular, or just extremism in general.

The blog author (Tom Rees) goes on to detail two important questions about the association between religion and right-wing authoritarianism.

There are at least two possible explanations for why these two sets of ideologies often go together.

One is that religion might represent tradition and ethnic identity. If so, then the association is purely circumstantial. If a society were historically atheist, then that would be held up instead as the rallying cry (think of a historically communist state facing some kind of threat).

The other is that fear - of uncertainty and threats - generates both conservative views and also increases religiosity. As far as I know, there's been surprisingly little research into this possibility. It is know that 'existential anxiety' (the fear of death) can increase religiosity. But there's no study I know of that looks into whether more generalised fear and uncertainty make people more religious - even though it's widely supposed to be the case.

He has raised this question before, such as here. I agree that more research on this topic is desirable.

However, evidence continues to appear of the association between authoritarian conservatism (as opposed to the libertarian kind, perhaps) and uncertainty avoidance. The blog post refers to this recent research:

Are Needs to Manage Uncertainty and Threat Associated With Political Conservatism or Ideological Extremity?

Three studies are conducted to assess the uncertainty— threat model of political conservatism, which posits that psychological needs to manage uncertainty and threat are associated with political orientation. Results from structural equation models provide consistent support for the hypothesis that uncertainty avoidance (e.g., need for order, intolerance of ambiguity, and lack of openness to experience) and threat management (e.g., death anxiety, system threat, and perceptions of a dangerous world) each contributes independently to conservatism (vs. liberalism). No support is obtained for alternative models, which predict that uncertainty and threat management are associated with ideological extremism or extreme forms of conservatism only. Study 3 also reveals that resistance to change fully mediates the association between uncertainty avoidance and conservatism, whereas opposition to equality partially mediates the association between threat and conservatism.

I have additional material along these lines I'd like to discuss. Maybe I'll get to it before long.

Propagandists and marketers agree: emotions may be more reliable when making choices

Here's yet another "study" that purports to show "gut reactions" are "better" than logical analysis in decision making. (Recent discussions of this are here, here, here.)

It's about how sales and marketing people and propagandists have learned to take advantage of your emotions for their own benefit.

Of course, that's not how it's presented....

Note the bait-and-switch technique going on in the research report: "reliability" is what the study seems to promise, but the fine print says that what you actually get is consistency.

Admittedly, "reliability" and "consistency" are nearly synonymous in terms of outcomes that marketing people want. But they may not be synonymous at all in terms of what decision-makers (i. e. you) want.

Trust Your Heart: Emotions May Be More Reliable When Making Choices (2/23/09)

"We investigated the following question: To what extent does relying on one's feelings versus deliberative thinking affect the consistency of one's preferences?" write the authors. To get at the question, the authors designed experiments where participants studied and chose among 8-10 products, sometimes relying upon their emotional reactions and sometimes calling upon cognitive skills. Their conclusion: "Emotional processing leads to greater preference consistency than cognitive processing."

Beware of marketing people who presume to advise you about, well, almost anything. But especially about either research conclusions or products they want to sell you.

Note the basic – and rather flagrantly expressed – dishonesty.

On one hand, the objective summary that the researchers offer of their study is: "Emotional processing leads to greater preference consistency than cognitive processing." In other words, the benefit attributed to reliance on emotion for decision making is consistency.

This isn't all that surprising: when people just go with their "gut feelings", the result is more likely to be the same each time the same decision is presented than if the actual specifics of the situation, which may vary from case to case, are analyzed.

This is also the outcome that marketers naturally prefer: predictable, consistent responses to marketing pitches.

But on the other hand, and this is the dishonest part, the authors also write "Indeed, our results suggest that the heart can very well serve as a more reliable compass to greater long-term happiness than pure reason."

This is a specious claim: where in their study did the researchers actually measure the happiness that experimental subjects experience as a result of their choices, as opposed to the consistency of the choices?

In other words, the unspoken idea they're pushing is actually this: you will enjoy more happiness if you allow your decisions to be determined according to how marketing has manipulated your emotions. (E. g.: Just go ask your doc for that Viagra prescription and have more fun in bed! And don't worry about whether your real problem in bed is something Viagra doesn't fix.)

If you think there may be some logic to that, just ask yourself whether letting yourself be manipulated by the greed of others is a good path to your happiness.

The sad truth of human behavior, despite illusions that humans are "rational" creatures, is that emotions are quite often much stronger motivators than reason. And they are generally a lot easier to control and manipulate than rational thinking about facts and logic.

As a result of that, people who stand to profit or otherwise benefit from the actions or beliefs they are able to persuade others to embrace have made a concerted effort, first of all, to persuade people that decisions are best made on an emotional basis.

What's their alternative, if facts and logic do not support whatever such people are advocating? They can always simply lie or engage in misdirection, and that's often done too, of course. But lies can occasionally be exposed, and in extreme cases can even be subject to prosecution (for fraud).

Think I'm making all this up? I suggest reading about one of the masters of propaganda techniques in the 20th century: Edward Bernays. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and literally wrote the book: Propaganda.

Here's how that book begins:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized…

I'll try to summarize some of the history and thinking of Bernays when time permits, but here are some things to read for now, if you're interested:

Stunt Man – book review of a biography on Bernays

Karl Rove & the Spectre of Freud’s Nephew – an essay on Bernays by Stephen Bender

Tags: marketing, propaganda

Moral neuropolitics and ideology

An interesting paper was recently brought to my attention. It's all worth reading, but I want to focus on one specific passage, because I think it spotlights a very important question, and provides a springboard for discussion of a number of significant issues in political psychology.

This is the paper:

We Empathize, Therefore We Are: Toward a Moral Neuropolitics

It's by Gary Olson, who is currently Chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA.

Olson begins by pointing out the important human characteristic of being able to empathize with the experienced injustice and suffering of others. Citing the empathy felt by people who viewed art depicting victims of the transatlantic slave trade, Olson connects this with recent neuroscience having to do with mirror neurons:

The abolitionist's most potent weapon was the dissemination of drawings of the slave ship Brooks. Rediker asserts that these images were "to be among the most effective propaganda any social movement has ever created" (p. 308).

Based on recent findings from neuroscience we can plausibly deduce that the mirror neurons of the viewer were engaged by these images of others suffering. The appeal was to the public's awakened sense of compassion and revulsion toward graphic depictions of the wholesale violence, barbarity, and torture routinely practiced on these Atlantic voyages. Rediker notes that the images would instantaneously "make the viewer identify and sympathize with the 'injured Africans' on the lower deck of the ship . . ." while also producing a sense of moral outrage (p. 315, Olson, 2008).

In our own day, the nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world's most eminent scientists, "What are you optimistic about? Why?" In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cited the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are "wired for empathy." This is the aforementioned discovery of the mirror neuron system or MNS. The work shows that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one's own pain and the pain of others.

Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief that with the popularization of scientific insights, these findings in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and " . . . this explicit level of understanding of our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us" (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14).

Given that background, the crucial passage in Olson's paper seems to me to be this:

That said, one of the most vexing problems that remains to be explained is why so little progress has been made in extending this empathic orientation to distant lives, to those outside certain in-group moral circles. That is, given a world rife with overt and structural violence, one is forced to explain why our deep-seated moral intuition doesn't produce a more ameliorating effect, a more peaceful world. Iacoboni suggests this disjuncture is explained by massive belief systems, including political and religious ones, operating on the reflective and deliberate level. As de Waal reminds us, evolutionarily, empathy is the original starting point out of which sprang culture and language. But over time, the culture filters and influences how empathy evolves and is expressed (de Waal, 2007, p. 50). These belief systems tend to override the automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological traits that should bring people together.

Right off the bat, of course, we have a problem. As I've just been writing about (here, here), there may be serious scientific difficulties with the whole concept of a "mirror neuron system" in humans.

Olson says "we can plausibly deduce that the mirror neurons of the viewer were engaged by these images of others suffering." He does mention fairly recent (2007-8) studies that seemed to indicate the existence of mirror neurons in humans, but the skeptical opinions of neuroscientists like Gregory Hickok, whose very recent paper I wrote about, suggest that this whole issue is still up in the air.

But perhaps the issue of mirror neurons isn't all that important. While it can be questioned whether humans have mirror neurons, and whether such mirror neurons (if they do exist) actually account for empathy in humans, surely it would be hard to dispute the existence of empathy in humans.

Or would it? One does have to question how often empathy, even if it exists, plays a dominant role in humans affairs. Sometimes it does, as the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and the final ending of slavery in the U. S. attest. On the other hand, different forms of slavery still persist in the world, as well as all manner of other ills, such as crime, genocide, war, territorial occupations, and economic exploitation.

Nevertheless, let's leave that whole question aside. Human empathy does exist in many circumstances (even if we don't have an adequate neurobiological explanation of it), yet even so, there seem to be social and cultural forces that all too often are able to override empathy. Olson evidently agrees with Iacoboni in identifying the responsible factor as "massive belief systems, including political and religious ones, operating on the reflective and deliberate level."

Let's refer to those political and religious belief systems as "ideology".

The key question, then, is how to explain the substantial power that ideology has over human social behavior – not just behavior that is culturally conditioned, but even behavior that has evolutionary, biological roots, such as the empathy that derives (perhaps) from mirror neurons. That is, we have to explain how "belief systems tend to override the automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological traits that should bring people together."

It seems to me that this is a rather important open question that political science ought to be addressing.

Because we are dealing with phenomena that can override neurobiological traits, I think we have to look at explanations that also refer to neurobiology. It just makes the most sense to consider the problem as a whole at that level.

How is it that ideology has such a compelling influence over people? What is it that ideology has to offer? How does it fit with underlying psychological factors?

We need some frame of reference to consider these issues. For the sake of concreteness, I'm going to proceed here using a circle of ideas championed by Jonathan Haidt as a convenient reference frame.

What Haidt has proposed is a "moral foundations theory" that claims to identify five "fundamental moral values" that are held by a large number of people, to greater or lesser extents, in a wide variety of cultures around the world (and in history). I think his list is incomplete as a comprehensive foundation for "morality" in general, and there are valid questions about whether some aspects of the "values" he describes even merit consideration as part of a fundamental set. Nevertheless, each of the "values" does have its devoted adherents, and so ipso facto plays a role in social behavior in those cultures where the "value" is recognized.

Here, according to Wikipedia, are the five "fundamental moral values":

1. Care for others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm.)
   
2. Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
   
3. Loyalty to your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
   
4. Respect for tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as Authority.)
   
5. Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.

Further references (listed at the end of this article): [1], [2], [3], [4].

I'm not ready to make an overall evaluation of Haidt's ideas, but let's look at them and see where they might lead.

On the basis of cross-cultural research Haidt came up with these five distinguishable biological bases of morality. If nothing else, they should be factors that would give significant force and impact to ideologies that are leveraged from them.

The first two factors are (quoting from [1]) "(i) harm, care, and altruism (people are vulnerable and often need protection) or (ii) fairness, reciprocity, and justice (people have rights to certain resources or kinds of treatment)."

Haidt sees these as having evolutionary origins in kin selection and the mechanism of reciprocal altruism.

I think they could have other evolutionary origins as well. In addition, I find it a little difficult to distinguish these two factors. Both encode an obvious "golden rule" sort of morality. However that may be, it seems that mirror neurons, or something equivalent, might play a role in the neurobiology of these factors, which both relate to "empathy".

So another important question we can ask is: what are the evolutionary origins of mirror neurons (or equivalents)? Since other primates, and indeed other animals (e. g. dogs), seem to have something functionally like mirror neurons, and also notions of fairness and justice that resemble human notions, we probably need to look back further in time than the origins of hominids.

It seems to me that something like mirror neurons should be useful equipment for a member of any species that engages in intra-species combat, which is probably a large percentage of species. That certainly doesn't mean many species necessarily have mirror neurons. But, at least, the evolution of mirror neurons certainly could be a useful adaptation for many species. So something like mirror neurons could well be a primary evolutionary development, not a mere side effect of something else. And if empathy, altruism, etc. have roots in such a mechanism, they too are at least useful side effects of evolution, even if they were not directly adaptive in themselves. (Though there are plenty of reasons to think they are adaptive in themselves, especially if you believe in group selection.)

But perhaps the more interesting aspect of Haidt's ideas comprises the three other factors he regards as basic to many human moral codes.

Quoting again from [1], "In addition to the harm and fairness foundations, there are also widespread intuitions about ingroup-outgroup dynamics and the importance of loyalty; there are intuitions about authority and the importance of respect and obedience; and there are intuitions about bodily and spiritual purity and the importance of living in a sanctified rather than a carnal way."

Let's look at these separately. First up is group loyalty, preference for the ingroup, and fear/aversion towards the outgroup. This is pretty clearly, at least in part, a kin selection sort of thing.

There is also another clever evolutionary argument for this factor. It's spelled out by Choi and Bowles in [5]. They call the idea "parochial altruism". The authors present computer simulation evidence for their idea. It has the interesing property of being able to explain the otherwise paradoxical fact that humans are a fairly warlike species, in spite of countervailing empathetic tendencies. I wrote about it here at some length. See also [6].

There are, of course, other evolutionary arguments for group loyalty, such as basic considerations of group selection – successful groups should tend to be cohesive and behave something like kin groups, even in the absence of near kinship. And this would be especially true in time of resource scarcity (which probably was not infrequent).

Among the neurobiological bases of group loyalty would be any neural capabilities that enable the detection of cheating and disloyalty. These need not be discrete neural systems or brain modules. They might be just general capabilities that enable individuals to remember the past behavior of others and reason about it in such a way as to recognize signs of loyalty or disloyalty to the group. Capability for cheater detection might be a general learning ability, like the ability to learn language. Individuals need not be born being good cheater detectors. They just need to be able to learn how to be good at it.

I'm not aware of neurobiological research into cheater detection mechanisms, or other mechanisms that could support group loyalty. Studies of loyalty and cheater detection and conditions for extending trust to others should also connect up easily with the importance of "patriotism" and "solidarity" in various ideologies. This would seem to be a great area for future research.

The bottom line here is that there are very good reasons to expect ingroup/outgroup dynamics to have neurobiological underpinnings, and that these factors would strongly influence ideology. ("Deutschland uber alles." "Defend the fatherland." Etc.)

Turning to the next factor Haidt mentions: authority and the importance of respect and obedience. The psychological power of authority is quite well established. Including the Milgram experiment, which provides a glaring example of how social psychology can override any innate sense of empathy for others. Zimbardo's prison experiment is also relevant.

Respect for and obedience to authority pretty clearly have evolutionary roots in any social species that has a hierarchically organized social life – which is many species, even insects. (Some very recent research shows that even ants will attack other ants that don't follow the rules.)

Interestingly, though, degree of respect for authority varies a lot in humans. (But then, so to does a propensity to cheat.) Political scientists have known for a long time of Theodor Adorno's concept of an "authoritarian personality".

Again, respect for and obedience to authority are key features of many powerful ideologies – features that easily override empathy-based respect for peers.

This is another area that calls for much more neurobiological research. What characteristics of our neurobiology equip us to recognize and defer to authority? Is is just fear based on the consequences of disobedience to actors with substantial social/physical power? Are obedient personalities just a result of a kind of "Stockholm syndrome"?

Haidt's last factor is "intuitions about bodily and spiritual purity." This is, to my mind, the murkiest of the factors. Clearly, humans have evolved good instincts for avoiding contaminated or corrupt food, or other gathering places of pathogenic things. Exactly how that bootstraps into elaborate ideologies featuring supernatural beings is a whole bigger question.

I think there are quite a few additional factors that go into the social psychology of religion and its ideologies, including group loyalty and obedience to authority. And research into such factors seems to be pretty active these days, though not primarily into neurobiological factors. This is a large area of research all by itself. So I don't have clear ideas about how important "purity" is as a factor, by itself, that influences ideology.

Pascal Boyer has an interesting recent essay in Nature ([7]). He writes, "So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than 'religion' in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities."

As an aside, this suggests that what we may find is that political behavior in general, and specific ideologies, are also emergent properties of our standard cognitive capacities. And that's a disquieting thought. Our cognitive capacities were shaped in a time when humans were far fewer in number, and had much less ability to cause large-scale problems for themselves and the rest of the world. Our inherited cognitive traits may result in less sanguine outcomes today than they did in the past. In particular, religion as a common sort of ideology, and Haidt's other moral predispositions, may be less beneficial for humans now than they may have been in the past.

One token of this may be seen in moral principles that do not seem to have deep roots in evolution and neurobiology. For example: aversion to war, faithful attention to truthfulness and honesty in dealing with others, sensitivity to and aversion towards manipulative behavior on the part of social elites, and respect and concern for the natural environment. Such principles don't even appear in Haidt's scheme.

Alternative reference frame: fear and emotions in general

All that said, Haidt's ideas are not the only way to approach the question of neurobiological bases of ideology. Another distinct approach involving neurobiology would center on the importance of the emotion of fear. There is, of course, a voluminous amount of research on the underpinnings of fear and its opposite (trust), as mediated by anatomical features like the amygdala and the limbic system in general.

I've just summarized a number of previous comments on this topic here. Since we're concerned with ideology in this note, it seems especially worth observing the similarities between beliefs about government and about religion, in particular the significant role that fear plays in both (see here).

Fear obviously plays a role in practical politics. How it interacts with organized ideologies is less clear. Certainly, fear of death or great harm is enough to motivate ideologies that feature institutions of authority that "protect" the populace. In any case, fear in some form or other is a strong motivator, another factor that can easily override an individual's healthier empathetic instincts.

Alternative reference frame: personality theory

Yet another direction of possible research involves trying to relate specific personality traits to ideological preferences. Perhaps the best supported of such findings could provide clues as to underlying mechanisms that link psychological tendencies to ideological features.

However, I'm skeptical. Personality traits, in fact, have been defined empirically by looking at the way people tend to use labels to describe other people. The most widely accepted type scheme, the "Big Five", is based on studies of language usage, in which factor analysis is employed to group certain behaviors using labels given to people who exhibit those behaviors. So it's entirely driven by data of a particular type, rather than theory.

That raises two problems. Firstly, there is little logical relationship between either the traits or the behavioral characteristics associated with them and specific ideologies. This is in contrast with Haidt's morality types that do connect reasonably well with ideologies. While empirical correlations between personality traits and ideologies have been found, they usually aren't very strong.

The second problem is that there's little apparent connection between personality traits and neurobiology. Perhaps that will change as more laboratory work is done that investigates the underpinnings of emotions and behavior, but I don't have the sense that clarity is close at hand.

The net result is that personality traits aren't an obvious way to make connections with either ideology or neurobiology.

Conclusion

All in all, it certainly looks like there's a huge need for research to explore how neurobiology interacts with social behavior, politics, and ideology. Understanding the potential role of something like mirror neurons is certainly important. But I think there's a whole lot more we need to understand, especially concerning the darker sides of human nature.

References and further reading:

[1] The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology – 5/18/07 Science review article by Jonathan Haidt

[2] The Roots of Morality – 5/9/08 Science News Focus article by Greg Miller

[3] Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes? – 9/18/07 New York Times article by Nicholas Wade

[4] The Moral Instinct – 1/13/08 New York Times Magazine article by Steven Pinker

[5] The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War – 10/26/07 research paper in Science by Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles

[6] The Sharp End of Altruism – 10/26/07 Perspectives article in Science by Holly Arrow

[7] Being human: Religion: Bound to believe? – 10/23/08 essay in Nature by Pascal Boyer

Tags: political science, political psychology, ideology

Emotions and politics

We've been having a little discussion about how "gut feelings" influence decisions: here, here, here.

"Gut feelings" are obviously related to emotions, but not entirely. As mentioned here, they can also be based on "implicit memory".

Alongside of this, we've also been discussing a particular type of decision making – where the domain is politics. In that case, the emotions involved are often related to fears of death and mortality. Posts in that vein: here, here, here, here.

I have another, broader post on political psychology coming up, but as a lead-in, I just thought I'd wrap up where we've been so far with decision-making, emotions, and fear specifically.

In order to do that, let's look at one more article published last October, just before the U. S. elections. It's an interview in Scientific American with Sheldon Solomon, a psychology professor at Skidmore College. Solomon's thing is an idea called "terror management theory" (TMT), which is derived from cultural anthropology.

Here's the article, with Solomon's elevator talk on TMT:

Fear, Death and Politics: What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election (10/23/08)

Terror management theory (TMT) is derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s efforts to explain the motivational underpinnings of human behavior. According to TMT, one defining characteristic of human beings is self-awareness: we’re alive and we know it. Although self-awareness gives rise to unbridled awe and joy, it can also lead to the potentially overwhelming dread engendered by the realization that death is inevitable, that it can occur for reasons that can never be anticipated or controlled, and that humans are corporeal creatures—breathing pieces of defecating meat no more significant or enduring than porcupines or peaches.

TMT posits that humans ingeniously, but quite unconsciously, solved this existential dilemma by developing cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about reality shared by individuals in a group that serve to “manage” the potentially paralyzing terror resulting from the awareness of death. All cultures provide a sense of meaning by offering an account of the origin of the universe, a blueprint for acceptable conduct on Earth, and a promise of immortality (symbolically, by creation of large monuments, great works of art or science, amassing great fortunes, having children; and literally, through the various kinds of afterlives that are a central feature of organized religions) to those who live up to culturally prescribed standards.

Thus, although cultures vary considerably, they share in common the same defensive psychological function: to provide meaning and value and in so doing bestow psychological equanimity in the face of death.

So how's that related to politics? Well, as noted in other posts on this topic, thinking about death seems to raise people's awareness of and commitment to ideals and values of the tribe they affiliate with, and reject values and worldviews of other tribes:

A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that MS [mortality salience] increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.

Some of the evidence Solomon is referring to was uncovered by Solomon himself, along with colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. For one account, see this 2004 press release, which we referenced here. (There's also a Scientific American article about it, but that requires a few shekels to view.)

Solomon thinks that these considerations definitely influenced the 2004 U. S. presidential election:

Based on these experiments, and other research demonstrating a positive relation between government-issued terror warnings and poll data on Americans’ opinions of President Bush from 2001 to 2004, I believe the outcome of the 2004 presidential election was influenced by repeated reminders of death by President Bush’s campaign, which was carefully crafted to emphasize the war on terrorism and domestic security. ... The effort was aided by the release of a video by Osama bin Laden the weekend before the election. This finding is not to suggest that all support for President Bush was necessarily a defensive reaction to concerns about death, or that the strategic use of fear to advance political agendas, which has a long history in American politics, is confined to the Republican party.

Other accounts of the research of Solomon and colleagues: here, here.

The 2008 U. S. presidential election was a much different story. MS was a lot lower, being replaced by a quite rational dread of growing economic chaos. So, again, there was a strong emotional fear factor, though not directly related to mortality, and it quite likely influenced the election results. Sometimes fear is rational.

Perhaps political scientists could do more work to understand the variety of fear-based appeals that campaigns use, and the conditions under which they are especially effective.

Tags: political science, political psychology

Trust Your Gut: Too Much Thinking Leads To Bad Choices?

Well, this is obviously what sales/marketing droids want people to believe. After all, thinking and rational deliberation is usually somewhat reality based. It tends to take into account at least some facts about the real world. Whereas "going with the gut" can just as easily as not ignore important facts that are known or obvious. Especially when propagandistic or marketing pitches are directed at the person being sold to.

Trust Your Gut: Too Much Thinking Leads To Bad Choices (1/26/09)

Don't think too much before purchasing that new car or television. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, people who deliberate about decisions make less accurate judgments than people who trust their instincts. ...

In five separate studies, the researchers found that better judgments can often be made without deliberation. In the first study, participants rated Chinese ideograms for attractiveness. In a following study, participants were asked to judge paintings that were widely considered high- or low-quality. Subsequent groups of participants rated jellybeans and apartments. In all the studies, some participants were encouraged to deliberate and others to go with their gut.

The more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation became. For example, when participants rated apartments on just three primary characteristics (location, price, and size) deliberation proved useful. But when the decision became more complex (with nine characteristics) the participants who deliberated made worse decisions.

One has to wonder exactly how these "researchers" define "better" or "worse" decisions. Better or worse for whom? The salesperson? Especially in view of the following, it almost seems as though outright deception and manipulation is being advocated:

"For example, if a car boasts one particularly good feature (for example, safety) but has a number of other negative features (for example, expensive, bad gas mileage, poor handling), a car salesman might encourage a potential car buyer to deliberate over the pros and cons of the car, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of safety. In this way, the disturbed weighting of attributes created by deliberation might be used to highlight the one sellable feature and draw attention away from the unattractive features," write the authors.

For example, decisions about home mortgages are obviously complex, yet require careful deliberation. What's advocated in this "research" is what made it possible for so many objectively bad decisions about home mortgages to be sold to buyers in recent years, with eventual disastrous results.

One wonders whether political scientists have investigated to what extent such "consumer research" studies are taught to and studied by political operative, and to what extent they adversely affect political choice about candidates and issues.

Materialism And Death Anxiety Lead To Brand Loyalty

Materialism And Death Anxiety Lead To Brand Loyalty (1/26/09)

Materialistic people tend to form strong connections to particular product brands when their level of anxiety about death is high, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. ...

While conventional wisdom holds that materialistic individuals are weakly connected to brands and use them as superficial status badges, the new research proves that brands hold more meaning for materialistic consumers than previously thought. When those individuals are also worried about death, their brand attachment grows.

"We propose that materialistic individuals form strong connections to their brands when death anxiety is high but not when death anxiety is low," write the authors. "Materialistic individuals are strongly connected to their brands and employ them as an important source of meaning in their lives."

Sounds like a good description of committed followers of certain ideologies, such as Republicans (the U. S. political party).

Earlier discussion on this theme: here.

Politics as beauty contest

Perhaps interest in politics has dropped off a lot now that the U. S. elections are over (for this year). But there's still some interesting political science that came up before the big event.

Even though political scientists, year in and year out, are as busy publishing as any other kind, quite a number of research announcements were noted recently outside of traditional professional venues. That has tapered off now, but there were a number of items that seem to call for some comment here. So I'll do some of that despite what is bound to be a declining interest in the subject.

A perennial favorite of election-oriented political research centers around questions of how the appearance of a candidate affects electoral success. That's no different this year. Here's a fairly typical example:

A Pretty Face Can Make A Difference In Whom You Vote For (10/30/08)

According to new Northwestern University research, it is not at all surprising that everyone also is talking about the great looks of vice presidential hopeful Palin.

Whether or not you believe the McCain campaign's $150,000 expenditure for Palin's wardrobe and the much-talked-about salary of her makeup artist are over the top, the decision to play up the looks of the former beauty queen is a winning strategy.

Even in 2008, a perception of competence -- a strong predictor of whether people will vote for political candidates -- is not enough to give women the winning edge in political contests, according to the new Northwestern psychology study.

For both men and women, female political candidates needed to be seen as attractive as well as competent to get their votes. ...

While gender bias related to a female candidate's attractiveness was consistent across both male and female voters, good looks was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for female candidates. And, true to prevailing stereotypes, competence was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for male candidates.

The idea that good looks positively affects electoral success has been researched many times – as well as being often suspected by a lot of people who aren't professional – in all kinds of elections from student councils on up. I discussed one study on this in a post here almost 2 years ago.

The new research I want to examine here was not entirely, or even primarily, about the importance of attractiveness in winning elections. Instead, experimental participants were first asked to rate candidates independently, based on their photos, on four different attributes: "competence", "dominance", and "approachability", as well as "attractiveness".

The politicians in question were actually candidates in 2006 U. S. Congressional elections. The politicians' photos were then presented in pairs actually competing with each other. Experiment participants were asked to chose which of each pair they would vote for if the office were actually the U. S. presidency.

The resulting data were analyzed in various ways. First, in comparison of participants' voting choice to how they had rated the candidates on each of the four attributes. Second, in comparison of candidates' gender and facial appearance to actual Congressional election outcomes. And third, in comparison between how the candidates won or lost in the simulated presidential election and in the actual Congressional election.

Since I want to focus just on the attractiveness issue, I won't attempt to summarize all the results here. You can find the summary in the research paper itself (citation below). I'll mention only two specific observations: (1) "Female candidates were more likely to win votes if they were more attractive." (2) "Male voters were significantly more likely to vote for candidates that appeared attractive." (I presume these statements represent correlations between opinions of attractiveness and voting behavior of each experimental participant.)

Now, it may be true as the research asserts, that attractiveness matters more for female candidates, while a perceptions of "competence" is relatively more important for male candidates. However, the attractiveness of male candidates (especially in contests exclusively between two males) is a still a net positive.

There's another possibility that should be considered even when voters seem to make their voting choices based on judgment of "competence" of male (or female, for that matter) candidates. Namely, that "attractiveness" (perhaps in a form not consciously associated with the term) might bias this judgment. One has to wonder exactly what visual characteristics might signify "competence" to voters, and whether certain factors – such as a "strong jawbone" (for a male) – don't contribute simultaneously to judgments of both attractiveness and competence.

Humans are fairly sophisticated in making judgments about traits like "competence", since evaluations of other people's character and ability are important in deciding whom to trust. The ability to do this reliably has a lot of evolutionary importance. This doesn't mean people are infallible about such judgments – clearly they aren't. But people probably can do better than chance in making such judgments, at least when not faced with situations where the person being judged is skilled at faking appearances. Perhaps it's more a case of detecting lack of competence, as might be signaled by poorly managed facial expressions (e. g. simply looking perplexed or "stupid").

But judgments about good looks and attractiveness are even more natural. We make them all the time, hardly giving any thought to the matter. Research has shown that people tend to make judgments about facial attractiveness very quickly. (See here.) This suggests people tend to use simple heuristics that may well be hard-wired.

Research apparently shows that even babies prefer to stare at beautiful faces. Note, too, how illustrated children's literature (and now movies) usually portrays virtuous or heroic characters as beautiful or handsome, while evil or villainous characters are ugly, often very ugly, and much to be feared. So there may be an element of social conditioning here, at least for children beyond infancy.

An interesting observation in the report of the research just mentioned, about the quickness of making judgments, is that "It seems that pretty faces 'prime' our minds to make us more likely to associate the pretty face with a positive emotion." ("Priming" is a hot topic in current psychological research.) So, comparatively speaking, a face that isn't "pretty" would be associated with less positive emotions. That alone would be enough to influence voting choices, if "everything else" is assumed to be equal.

There are different possible factors that may enter into such a judgment. So let's consider further what factors and heuristics might be used in judging facial attractiveness. It would be quite interesting to know how the various factors about to be mentioned perhaps have different effects on political choice.

A small number of factors are often suggested. One of the oldest is that the property of "youthfulness" is associated with attractiveness. That makes plenty of evolutionary sense, as fertility, reproductive capacity, and ability to nurture children all decline with age after the beginning of adulthood. It should be noted that youthfulness should be especially salient in the judgment of young people – such as the experimental subjects (college students, average age 19.5) in the research under discussion

A more recent suggestion is that "symmetry" is important, as that would tend to indicate general healthiness. (Recent research here.) That makes sense, too, but does it have any reasonably apparent relevance to voting decisions?

"Symmetry" is probably a looser criterion than in an older and fairly well-known theory of attractiveness, often called simply the "averageness" hypothesis. This holds that average phenotypes in a population are judged more attractive than phenotypes with notably atypical features. An average value on a particular facial metric (such as width of nose or chin) is considered to be what is "normal", yet for most features all to be close to average might be fairly unusual.

So "averageness" is used in a somewhat special sense here – literally, as having size and proportion of most important facial features being close to the overall average. Probably faces that have "averageness" in this sense are fairly rare, which might add to the quality of "attractiveness". So "averageness" as a descriptor of faces is not the same as "common" or "ordinary" or "typical".

Since averages of many faces will wipe out most asymmetry (e. g. some part being off center), an averaged face will be symmetrical. So facial symmetry is a more common characteristic than averageness. A symmetrical face could still have features that are far from average values in size or position.

Since facial symmetry will be more common in a population than faces that have the property of averageness (in the special sense used here), averageness is a more stringent criterion for attractivness. Consequently, a voter who perceives one candidate's face as more attractive than the candidate's opponent is making a more significant discrimination, which could have higher weight in the final choice. Indeed, two candidates might have equally symmetrical faces, or at least faces that are difficult to distinguish in terms of symmetry, yet differ considerably in averageness and hence (perhaps) in attractiveness.

And so, to the extent that people actually judge attractiveness based on averageness rather than symmetry, it will be more likely that judgment affects a voting decision. In other words, we would expect on these general considerations that attractiveness is more likely to affect voting decisions if the criterion is actually "averageness".

There is some amount of research supporting the idea that averageness is the important criterion for attractiveness, such as findings that images created by averaging photographs of many individuals tend to receive higher ratings for attractiveness. So at least for the sake of discussion, let's assume there's some validity to this notion.

Deviations from averageness do not imply deviations from symmetry, so they would not be expected to have the stronger negative implications for overall health and (hence) fertility that asymmetry does, so there would be a smaller indication of "riskiness". It would therefore be harder to understand the evolutionary importance of judging the riskiness of another person based on attractiveness if averageness is the underlying consideration. Is it possible that averageness is important in judging riskiness for other evolutionary reasons – reasons that apply to evaluating others in more general contexts than the context of mate selection?

Yes, I think so. As I wrote in my previous post, "people who are considered attractive within a population are those who are most 'typical' or 'average'. Or inversely, least atypical, least different from the largest number of people in the population. People who are considered less attractive have facial features that vary a lot from the norm, such as lips that are too thin or too thick (compared to the average), eyes too far apart or too close together, eyebrows that are too sparse or too bushy."

The evolutionary rationale at work here is that people who appear too "different" from the norm are more likely to belong to a different, more genetically distant tribe. Such people are probably less likely to deserve trust, and might even be "dangerous".

I think this matter of perceived trustworthiness vs. potential "danger" in the eyes of voters could be rather important, especially if it is unconsciously inferred from perceptions of a candidate's attractiveness. I've written more on that here, not too long ago, so I won't repeat it now.

More generally, I see conscious and unconscious issues of fear and perceived danger as especially important factors in a voter's attitudes towards, and relationship with, government. This is because, as a matter of both philosophy and sociology, one of the primary reasons for the existence of governments is to "protect" citizens from a variety of potential evils, whether they be dishonest businesspeople, common criminals, foreign and domestic terrorists, or whatever. I've written a lot more about that here.

The question, then, is whether the research now under discussion supports the idea of a connection between fear and voting behavior, or is even relevant to it. To be honest, the relevance is somewhat tentative, since it relies on the idea that there is a negative correlation between the attractiveness of a political candidate and whether a voter feels fear associated with the candidate at some level. It would be very interesting to see more research that addresses this issue more directly.

Regarding the present research itself, I have a few reservations as well. For example, the experimental participants were university students of average age 19.5 years. Quite possibly many of the participants had never even voted in a governmental election, and they certainly did not have a few decades of adult experience – with politicians, elections, and actual government performance – that could shape and inform their voting decisions. It's not surprising that individuals with little adult experience would base decisions on appearance factors.

Aside from that, there's also the question of whether the socioeconomic demographics of university students would skew the results from what would be found in the electorate as a whole. And then there's the whole other issue of possibly relevant cultural differences between the U. S. and other democratic countries.

So there's reason to suspect that typical, experienced voters, even in the U. S., might produce rather different results in a similar sort of experiment.

Here's the research paper, with some of the abstract:

The Political Gender Gap: Gender Bias in Facial Inferences that Predict Voting Behavior

Contrary to the notion that people use deliberate, rational strategies when deciding whom to vote for in major political elections, research indicates that people use shallow decision heuristics, such as impressions of competence solely from a candidate's facial appearance, when deciding whom to vote for. Because gender has previously been shown to affect a number of inferences made from the face, here we investigated the hypothesis that gender of both voter and candidate affects the kinds of facial impressions that predict voting behavior.

Joan Y. Chiao, Nicholas E. Bowman, Harleen Gill (2008). The Political Gender Gap: Gender Bias in Facial Inferences that Predict Voting Behavior PLoS ONE, 3 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003666

Update on 11/24/08: I have extensively reworked the discussion about "attractiveness" and its relationship to "symmetry" and "averageness". One would like to see more experimental evidence to sort out these factors in general and specifically as to how they affect voting choice.

Tags: political science, political psychology, voting

Hobgoblins, devils, and politics

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.     -- H. L. Mencken

Political Attitudes Are Predicted By Physiological Traits, Research Finds (9/18/08)

Alford and his colleagues studied a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs. Those individuals with "measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War," the authors wrote. ...

In a later session, they were attached to physiological measuring equipment and shown three threatening images (a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and an open wound with maggots in it) interspersed among a sequence of 33 images. Similarly, participants also viewed three nonthreatening images (a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child) placed within a series of other images. A second test used auditory stimuli to measure involuntary responses to a startling noise.

The researchers noted a correlation between those who reacted strongly to the stimuli and those who expressed support for "socially protective policies," which tend to be held by people "particularly concerned with protecting the interests of the participants' group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats." These positions include support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Biblical truth, and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.

It's this election season's well-timed release of a poli-psy research study connecting political behavior with behavior in general. And why shouldn't a particular type of individual behavior have something in common with other types?

Perhaps the main resistance to such a connection comes from the optimistic notion that ideological choices are somehow more "rational" and carefully thought out than other types of choices – like preferences for particular fragrances, colors, or ice cream flavors.

Or, at least, that political opinions are based on real-life experience rather than on whatever it is that shapes physiological responses.

We've been over similar ground a few times before. See here, here.

So what to make of this study? Political scientists generally accept that there are personality factors that correlate with political beliefs. Personality factors usually have both genetic and developmental roots. The genetic roots will also usually be expressed in various physiological attributes of an individual.

Just as genetic factors affect personality and behavior and physiology, it isn't unreasonable to suppose that personality and behavioral tendencies affect political beliefs. (Causation may well go in the other way, too, from beliefs to personality and behavior.) So it's not unreasonable that physiological attributes may also correlate with beliefs.

As far as this research is concerned – it's interesting, but quite a bit more data and research will be needed for a persuasive case.

Here's the actual abstract of the study:

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

Unsurprisingly, given what time of the year it is, this research has received its share of media attention. For example:

Ideology in Your DNA? Not Quite (9/19/08)

The study had its limitations — the sample size was small and all of the subjects were white Nebraskans — but it’s still a small step toward a greater understanding our ever-increasing ideological divide, even if the answer doesn’t lie in our genes.

That political beliefs per se are not in our genes is obvious. What's in our DNA got there over the last 3 or 4 billion years, and the part that's specifically human, over the last 200,000 or so years. Contemporary ideologies were not around for most of that time. But what was around was a world that was usually hazardous to an organism's existence, so consequently a whole panoply of predispositions evolved to efficiently deal with threats. Of course, all individuals of a given species don't have exactly the same predispositions, because different strategies can be effective even in similar situations.

However, there is research that shows, based on twin studies, the probable existence of some genetic factors that correlate with political belief. For example:

Political Views May Be Genetically Influenced, Twin Study Shows (2/6/08)

Research by Rice University professor of political science John Alford indicates that what is on one's mind about politics may be influenced by how people are wired genetically.

Alford, who has researched this topic for a number of years, and his team analyzed data from political opinions of more than 12,000 twins in the United States and supplemented it with findings from twins in Australia. Alford found that identical twins were more likely to agree on political issues than were fraternal twins.

On the issue of property taxes, for example, an astounding four-fifths of identical twins shared the same opinion, while only two-thirds of fraternal twins agreed.

Not coincidentally, Alford is a co-author of the Science paper we're discussing. He also makes a good common-sense case for the role of genetics in understanding political opinion and behavior:

Alford believes that political scientists are too quick to dismiss genetics; rather, he believes genetics should be studied and taught along with social-environment influences.

"It has been proven that genetics plays a role in a myriad of different human interaction and makeup," said Alford. "Why should we exclude political beliefs and attitudes?"

Even more to the point, there are studies that show that the emotion of fear – fear of death, specifically – influences political opinion. In particular, the opinions that people express can be influenced by whether or not thoughts of death are on their minds. For example:

Fear of death may factor into who we vote for (12/21/05)

Authors of a study published in the latest issue of Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy believe that voting behavior should be the result of rational choice based on an informed understanding of the issues. But using research based on the 2004 presidential election, they found that people may vote with their hearts, rather than their heads. Their findings demonstrated that registered voters in a psychologically benign state of mind preferred Senator Kerry to President Bush, but Bush was more popular than Kerry after voters received a subtle reminder of death.

(Another news report on this: here.)

Again, it shouldn't be all that surprising that having a fear of death in their minds could affect people's political opinions. After all, a fear of death certainly affects religious opinions. Death, speculation about an individual's fate after it occurs, and the fear of it, are central features of most religions. Religions generally compete among themselves to tell self-promotional stories about the favorable rewards that will accrue after death to true believers of the religion. And those religions which promise the most attractive rewards generally are the most successful.

Speculations about the evolutionary and social origins of religious belief generally assign an important role in those origins to human concerns and fears of death, and the way religious beliefs are constructed to help cope with those fears.

So if fear, and the ways that an individual typically deals with it, play a big role in religious opinion, why not in political opinion also? Of course, this would also explain well-known correlations between the religious and political beliefs of people. Religion and politics consist of ideologies with a lot of overlap.

As long as we're speculating, we may as well go all in and take note of important similarities between government and religion. In particular, government and religion are both social institutions created to deal with fears inherent in social living. Religion is primarily concerned with the fear of death itself, in any form, and secondarily with behavior of others or oneself that might threaten an individual's welfare. The latter concern is the province of "morality".

[Added 6/16/09: Here's Bertrand Russell's take on this: "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes." - from Why I Am Not a Christian]

Government has these same two concerns, but generally in reverse order – except for extremes such as homicidal behavior and warfare. Government usually deals with less dire threats, but most political philosophers agree that one of its primary functions is to allay fears of the Hobbesian "war of all against all".

So government and religion are twin institutions that developed from the same seed – fear. Sometimes they are even Siamese twins, in theocracies and states with theocratic elements.

Let's go back now to the psychology of fear, and the question of how much role genetics may play in the experience of fear, physiological signs of fear, and hence a possible connection with political attitudes.

This is quite an interesting question in itself, and there is recent research that's relevant:

Mice Missing 'Fear' Gene Slow To Protect Offspring (9/15/08)

First, he discovered a gene that controls innate fear in animals. Now Rutgers geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky has shown that the same gene promotes "helicopter mom" behavior in mice. The gene, known as stathmin or oncoprotein 18, motivates female animals to protect newborn pups and interact cautiously with unknown peers.

This "fear gene" is highly concentrated in the amygdala, a key region of the brain that deals with fear and anxiety. Shumyatsky's newest finding could enhance our understanding of human anxiety, including partpartum depression and borderline personality disorders.

Here's a blog post on the research and here's the research abstract:

Stathmin reveals dissociable roles of the basolateral amygdala in parental and social behaviors

Innate parental behaviors and adult social interactions are essential for survival of the individual along with the species as a whole. Because these behaviors require threat assessment of the environment, it is plausible that they are regulated by the amygdala-associated neural circuitry of fear. However, the amygdala is not a single anatomic and functional unit, and nuclei of the amygdala have multiple inter- and intra-connections. This poses a question as to the exact role of different amygdala nuclei in these behaviors and the mechanisms involved. The basolateral complex of the amygdala nuclei (BLA) is particularly interesting in this regard: although the BLA role in forming memories for learned fear is established, the BLA role in innate behaviors is not well understood. We recently demonstrated that mice without an inhibitor of microtubules, stathmin, a gene enriched in BLA-associated circuitry, have deficiency in innate and learned fear. Here we show that the deficiency in fear processing in stathmin−/− females leads to improper threat assessment, which in turn affects innate parental care and adult social interactions.

Below are some blog commentaries on the political attitudes paper of Hibbing, Oxley, et al. It's interesting that these bloggers have expertise in biology, psychology, and neuroscience, but none seem to have a professional political science perspective (as some of the paper's co-authors do).

Some of these blog posts correctly point out methodological reasons why the study cannot be construed to "prove" a hypothesis. However, that does not seem to have been the intention of the researchers who did the study. I think they were more interested in finding plausible evidence for the hypothesis, as a first step to pursuing their ideas in more depth.

• The Biology of Politics: Is It For Real?
  
• Conservatives Are Neurotic and Liberals Are Antisocial
  
• Conservatives have more fear
  
• A spider on your face won't stop me from criticizing this article
  
• Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes
  
• Does anxiety lead to religiosity and conservative politics?
  

Additional news reports:

• Some Political Views May be Related to Physiology (9/18/08) – NSF press release
  
• Left, Right; Obama, McCain: It may not be what you think (9/18/08) – University of Nebraska press release
  
• The Politics of Fear (9/18/08) – ScienceNOW
  
• Politics in the body? (9/18/08) – The Scientist
  
• Are you a born conservative (or liberal)? (9/19/08) – Los Angeles Times
  
• Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists (9/18/08) – Wired
  
• Spiders, Maggots, Politics (9/18/08) – Newsweek
  
• Conservatives Have Stronger Startle Reflexes? (9/18/08) – National Geographic
  
• Political conservatives more jumpy: study (9/19/08) – ABC (Australia)
  
• Study: calm people are liberal, skittish are conservative (9/19/08) – Cosmos Magazine
  
• Political views 'all in the mind' (9/18/08) – BBC
  
• Voting Republican may be a survival response (9/18/08) – New Scientist
  
• Are you more likely to be politically left or right if you scare easily? (9//18/08) – Scientific American
  

D. R. Oxley, K. B. Smith, J. R. Alford, M. V. Hibbing, J. L. Miller, M. Scalora, P. K. Hatemi, J. R. Hibbing (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Science, 321 (5896), 1667-1670 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Tags: political science, political psychology

Whom Do We Fear Or Trust?

Whom Do We Fear Or Trust? (8/5/08)

A pair of Princeton psychology researchers has developed a computer program that allows scientists to analyze better than ever before what it is about certain human faces that makes them look either trustworthy or fearsome.

In doing so, they have also found that the program allows them to construct computer-generated faces that display the most trustworthy or dominant faces possible.

Such work could have implications for those who care what effect their faces may have upon a beholder, from salespeople to criminal defendants, the researchers said.

There's another category of people who have a similar concern – politicians. Hmmm... salespeople, criminal defendants, politicians... lots in common there, no? What's missing from this list... preachers, TV political pundits, military officers... pretty long list.

Unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to run any large society, much less a modern one, without government and government officials, so we're stuck with politicians for some time to come, I'd guess. Well, at least that provides political scientists and researchers into aberrant psychology something to keep busy with.

The research described in the press release above isn't directly about politicians, but it's a sequel to work of the principal investigator (Alexander Todorov) that is:

Who Will Win An Election? Snap Judgments Of Face To Gauge Competence Usually Enough (10/22/07)

A split-second glance at two candidates' faces is often enough to determine which one will win an election, according to a Princeton University study.

Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov has demonstrated that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election returns. Todorov has taken some of his previous research that showed that people unconsciously judge the competence of an unfamiliar face within a tenth of a second, and he has moved it to the political arena.

His lab tests show that a rapid appraisal of the relative competence of two candidates' faces was sufficient to predict the winner in about 70 percent of the races for U.S. senator and state governor in the 2006 elections.

Other reports on this research: here, here.

Duh. At first glance all he's saying is that people tend to make snap judgments about a candidate's competence... and those candidates go on to win the election. That's not surprising, especially if one hypothesizes that voters tend not to go much beyond their snap judgment. And perhaps that is a valid conclusion, though hardly a welcome one.

In fact, Todorov had already published research showing that people make snap judgments about trustworthiness of people in general:

Snap Judgments Decide A Face's Character, Psychologist Finds (8/22/06)

We may be taught not to judge a book by its cover, but when we see a new face, our brains decide whether a person is attractive and trustworthy within a tenth of a second, according to recent Princeton research.

Princeton University psychologist Alex Todorov has found that people respond intuitively to faces so rapidly that our reasoning minds may not have time to influence the reaction -- and that our intuitions about attraction and trust are among those we form the fastest.

OK, if Todorov's research is sound, people make snap judgments about whom they will trust or fear. So it would be useful to know more precisely what factors those judgments are based on. His latest research has tried to do just that. Quoting again from the latest press release:

Based on this data, the scientists found that humans make split-second judgments on faces on two major measures -- whether the person should be approached or avoided and whether the person is weak or strong.

From there, using a commercial software program that generates composites of human faces (based on laser scans of real subjects), the scientists asked another group of test subjects to look at 300 faces and rate them for trustworthiness, dominance and threat. Common features of both trustworthiness and dominance emerged. A trustworthy face, at its most extreme, has a U-shaped mouth and eyes that form an almost surprised look.

An untrustworthy face, at its most extreme, is an angry one with the edges of the mouth curled down and eyebrows pointing down at the center. The least dominant face possible is one resembling a baby's with a larger distance between the eyes and the eyebrows than other faces. A threatening face can be obtained by averaging an untrustworthy and a dominant face.

This is all rather discouraging. What is not addressed (yet) is how accurate such snap judgments are, especially as regards trustworthiness and competence of political candidates.

It's hardly as though perspicacious people haven't been thinking about such issues for a very long time, of course. If I knew Plato better, I'm sure there'd be some choice observations in there somewhere to cite. Sort of goes along with what he said about the kind of judgments of reality made by people who can observe only shadows on the walls of a cave.

But another astute observer of human nature did have something to say about judging the intentions of people just from studying faces:

There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 4. This is spoken by King Duncan, regarding the Thane of Cawdor, who has just been executed for treason. Macbeth enters right after this remark, and Duncan makes him the new Thane. Slow learner, that Duncan.)

Interestingly, one of Todorov's conclusions is that the kind of face people find most trustworthy is one that features, basically, a smile. Here's Shakespeare's take on that, in words he gives to Hamlet:

O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain
(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

I have addressed previous similar studies along the same lines (by other investigators) here and here.

Discouraging? Yes. Especially so if this research were to accurately describe most of the electorate. But perhaps it would be better to look at whether there are subsets of the electorate that behave quite differently. Perhaps it would work to divide the (potential) electorate into those who have at least some interest in and knowledge of politics and government, and those who don't and basically don't give a damn.

In particular, there is some evidence that "undecided" voters, those who can't make up their minds until just before voting (if they vote at all) don't simply have a difficult time making a careful judgment. Instead, many "undecideds" are actually "low-information" voters, who don't follow politics very closely, and don't especially enjoy the process. Here are some (obviously partisan) anecdotal observations on this from the 2004 election.

If this is correct, then we can write off maybe 40-50% of the potential electorate as a random factor which is basically uninformed about and uninterested in details of politics and government. If they vote at all, their votes will be based largely on impressionistic factors of appearance, charisma, or group identity – snap judgments from the physical appearance of candidates, perhaps. Although many of them won't vote, those that do might make up perhaps 10% of the total, and they are fully capable of swinging any election in one direction or another.

It is often said that a deciding factor in the 1960 presidential election was that in the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon, the latter was recovering from illness, looked weak, and had a decided 5 o'clock shadow. Nixon lost the popular vote by only 120,000 votes. Given how things turned out after Nixon came back to win the office in 1968, the judgments people made in 1960 may not have been so bad. But still such judgments seem like little more than a coin toss.

Further reading:

Poli Psy? – September 2000 online Scientific American article about the "shallowness" of criteria some voters use in voting decisions

The functional basis of face evaluation – June 2008 research article in PNAS about the research described in the first-mentioned press release

Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes – June 2005 research article in Science by Todorov et al on the relationship between neotenous appearance and perceived competence

Appearance DOES Matter – June 2005 commentary in Science on the preceding article

Tags: political science

Study Lights Up The Political Brain

Since we've been looking at political science a bit recently (here and here), perhaps a little more might not be out of order. One interesting thing about the studies discussed so far is that they rely largely on experimental techniques of classical psychology – subjects pushing buttons when presented with various stimuli, for example.

One wonders whether more modern techniques have been used, such as fMRI. The answer: a little, but not very much, apparently. The following seems to be part of what may be the most noteworthy effort:

Emory Study Lights Up The Political Brain

When it comes to forming opinions and making judgments on hot political issues, partisans of both parties don't let facts get in the way of their decision-making, according to a new Emory University study. The research sheds light on why staunch Democrats and Republicans can hear the same information, but walk away with opposite conclusions.

The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months prior to the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the researchers found was striking.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

There probably isn't going to be much disagreement that political appeals in democracies (or most other governmental arrangements) are based a lot more on emotion than on reason and logic. It's hardly a new idea. However, what is intriguing is the possibility that fMRI and similar brain-scanning techniques can eventually reveal, for example, what kinds of emotional appeals work best with different personality types, when (if ever) rational mechanisms in the cortex become involved, and so forth.

Further information:

Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election – abstract of the research paper (sub. rqd. for full access)

Drew Westen – The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation – recent (6/2007) book

Tags: political psychology