I’m almost always surprised by the spectrum of political responses to events and circumstances around the world. The political animal, it seems, is very different from me. I don’t need a fusillade of analysis to understand a Supreme Court decision, or an indictment, or an economic event. I don’t want to be glad handed an interpretation meant to soothe me or align me with a tribe. I just need facts and am willing to hold labeling and castigation at arms length while looking at the matter in as dispassionate a manner as I can summon. Even when I feel a jolt of irreverence or schadenfreude or disgust, I try to maintain neutrality in my initial analysis. I am boringly optimistic, too, which seems quaintly outdated in an America that keeps getting richer and more powerful but acts like a caged animal in raging from one crackpot stimulus to another.
But why are so many of our fellow citizens like that? It is easy to be dismissive—those freakin’ idiots!—but there may be something deeper at play. For example, in many human predispositions and even illnesses we have recent studies that show that insofar as there is a clear genetic channel, the range of genes involved is so enormous that we can’t really nail down any single or distinctive causal factor. The terms for this are polygeny and pleiotropy and they simply mean that many alleles are involved, interact with one another, and likely interact with the environment during development. Most mental illness (and here) as well as gayness are current examples of this. Our understanding may change, of course, but for now we have the unsurprising realization that we are very complex animals. This complexity in the underlying biological switching machinery means, in turn, that we get a great spectrum of behavior and diversity in our responses to the problem of existence, as well.
In politics there is an interesting alternative to the idea that we form our political alignments based on some kind of rational calculus around achieving social goods. Instead, while our preferences in the pursuit of happiness are shaped by our individual and social backgrounds, there may also be ways in which our biological predispositions reflect our evolved backgrounds. For instance, if there were a range of polygenic and pleiotropic genes that, given the proper shuffle, might promote trust between people and, with another shuffle, might promote a more fearful response to others, we can imagine how this might affect the political dispositions of the recipients of those genes later in life.
But how this might have happened requires looking at our social ancestry, specifically in terms of how humanity figured out ways to live together. After all, that’s what politics really amounts to. Reciprocal altruism is the process by which almost all biological socialization works, according to one theory. It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma game: I work with you insofar as I trust that we both benefit. Our minds evolved to support this game, and it requires building a predictive model of those around us and monitoring them for slip-ups, for deceit, and for evidence that they really are as good as we hope they are. It’s the essence of love, as well, where at its best there is only charity and caring for another or others.
How genes press us to responding to threats within this altruistic game is one way that liberals and conservatives may differ. They got different shuffles, it seems. The Social Risk Hypothesis (SRH) by Jost et al. suggests how this translates into politics. From Jordan Mansell’s 2018 “Social cues and ideology: Unpacking the adaptive significance of liberal-conservative behavioral differences“:
Adopting a dispositional approach to behavior and ideological orientation, Jost’s model assumes that ‘‘individuals gravitate’’ toward the ideas and behaviors that ‘‘match’’ or ‘‘resonate’’ with their own psychological needs, or sensitivities. Based on this model, Jost hypothesizes that conservative orientations are favored by individuals possessing strong needs to manage the effects of threat and uncertainty and to simplify the conditions of their external environment. By comparison, a liberal orientation is favored by individuals with lower psychological needs to balance the effects of threat or uncertainty but a greater desire to maintain an egalitarian social environment.
Mansell’s paper explores the notion that heritable traits may be involved in setting up this threat/response differential. Mansell considered the underlying heritability a “phenotypic gambit,” which is a clever way to say that we don’t know the exact mechanics of heritability, but we can probe the consequences of it nonetheless. He explored this model via an experiment where liberals and conservatives engage in a trust-based game (with money involved). Liberals tended to maximize their gains by increasing trust with game partners in response to positive cues, while conservatives tended to minimize losses by decreasing their trust in response to negative cues. The politics of the players aligned with how they responded to uncertainty: with fear or with leaning into trust.
It’s easy to treat these kinds of results as reflected in a range of current social commentary. For instance, the gnawing fear of grand conspiracies on the right might align with a general trait of lower trust in political opponents and unknown social forces. There is also the “inverse golden rule” that conservative Christians seem to hold: do unto others as you fear they might do to you. Conversely, the liberal desire to rank institutional failures and entrenched racism, ablism, etc. as a leading candidate for social ills arises from a desire to increase the trust among people by righting perceived inequalities and building an improved framework for interaction. For the conservative, that may never be possible because our true natures prevent ever achieving sufficient trust. Society is more Burkean: veiled and uncertain, with unforeseen consequences at every junction.
There may also be an extension of this theory to the gap in happiness between liberals and conservatives. While conservatives tend to report being more happy than liberals, there is some indication that liberals tend to act more happily. The outward expressions might reflect a greater desire for social trust-building because moody, fearful types are only interesting to other fearful sorts. But everyone likes (and likes to work with and be around) positive (and even boringly optimistic) sorts of people. So the tit-for-tat goes round and round, with trust, fear, and this complex background bubble of genetic predispositions.
Edits as always