Preface. A book review of: Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide.
Although Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” was brilliant, it didn’t address that politics must surely go back to the origin of modern humans 300,000 years ago.
Garcia’s book addresses this, looking at politics from an evolutionary point of view. One finding I thought quite interesting was why women tend to be more liberal and men more conservative as can be seen in the 2024 U.S. election, men favor right-wing extremist Trump 25 points more than women in North Carolina, 19 points more in Michigan, 20 points more in Wisconsin, and 12 points more in Georgia & Pennsylvania.
“Evolutionary psychology is a field that rests on the understanding that we humans have spent 99% of our history in small bands of hunter-gatherers, living in environments very different from those in which we currently reside. Survival in those environments was harsh, with perpetual threats from predators, starvation, disease, and violence from outside tribes. These are the environments in which our political predispositions evolved.”
Also see:Why we need more women leaders
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide. Prometheus.
Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. —Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968
A nation’s sinew begins to tear. Triumph in one group is met with fear and bewilderment in another. Old prejudices are reanimated; new ones are invented. The masses succumb to irrational forces, prodded to frenzy by politicians and the media. The nation is poised to devour itself. The controversial election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president polarized the United States more than any other time in its contemporary history. To those watching, it seemed remarkable, and yet the partisan division was a familiar enough scenario, even in the “United” States. The 1960s saw police and the right wing clash violently with the leftist counterculture and with the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. In the 1950s, McCarthyism drove the nation into repression, fearmongering, and political paranoia. Panic over Communism destroyed countless Americans’ careers, or saw them wrongly imprisoned for treason. A century before, the American Civil War drenched the nation’s soil with the blood of over 600,000 people.
All of these schisms have been grounded in partisan psychology. Such Left-Right divisions are old, seen all over the world, and, in some form or another, certain to continue.
But why are these periods of conflict so common across nations and history? To truly understand the turmoil of today we must look somewhere most of us are unaccustomed to looking—our primordial past. Our current political struggles are ancient, rooted in a time before we even had nations, and indeed before we were fully human. What I will show you in this book is that the difficulties we face forming cohesive societies in the modern era reflect psychological adaptations with a simple, ancient purpose—keeping our ancestors alive in savagely dangerous environments. All too often these adaptations are at odds with the environments in which we currently live. This mismatch between the ancient and the modern is at the core of what divides us along political lines.
To help us safely foray into this treacherous crossroads of gender, sex, and politics (as we move forward, religion will also cross this path), let us proceed with the understanding that in the grand scheme of human psychology, men and women, and liberals and conservatives, exhibit far more similarities than differences across innumerable psychological indices—daddies also worry when the children are sick, and mommies too bring home the bacon. Nevertheless, we venture into the slivers of difference, for those slim terrains abound with explanatory information about our evolved political psychology.
I’ll look at:
- how evolution programmed our minds with mating strategies to help us reproduce amid a fierce field of competition
- how men and women employ different strategies to achieve reproductive fitness (i.e., representation in the gene pool),
- how political partisanship arises from these sex-based approaches to perpetuating our genes.
- how all the hallmarks of political conservatism—its tribalistic flavor (us versus them), its emphasis on female sexual control, and its hawkish and territorial nature—are rooted in male mate competition, the ageless biological struggle for reproductive dominance.
Far exceeding the scope of any government sex scandal, male competition for women turns out to be the core driving force behind contentious political issues as wide-ranging as affirmative action, social welfare, gender equality, contraception, abortion, taxes, criminal law, and foreign policy. Even the winner-take-all mentality of conservative economic policy is based on male competition for mates.
The risk of being annihilated by the outside tribe—and the potential gains of taking over the rival tribe’s territory, resources, and women—forged the coalitionary psychology of men. Here I will show you how the militaristic logic embedded in that psychology maps squarely onto all the hallmark values of political conservatism. It is from the context of violent male mate competition, and its most heightened expression, war, that we are able to most fully understand the masculine tenor of conservative political psychology,
The roots of liberalism, too, are far older than we imagined, having arisen from the timeless effort to rein in dominant males and to prevent them from monopolizing resources and impinging on the evolutionary fitness of those with less power. More fundamentally, liberalism is based on the prodigious human task of rearing offspring, a critical survival enterprise championed by women, and provisioned by the “Mommy” parties of the world.
Yet there is striking evidence suggesting that male competition has impelled some women to adopt conservative ideals as a means of competing with other females, making alliances with dominant men, and producing sons who are themselves strong male competitors.
Evolutionary psychology is a field that rests on the understanding that we humans have spent 99% of our history in small bands of hunter-gatherers, living in environments very different from those in which we currently reside. Survival in those environments was harsh, with perpetual threats from predators, starvation, disease, and violence from outside tribes. These are the environments in which our political predispositions evolved. And because our current circumstances comprise only a blink of an eye in our evolutionary history, we retain psychological adaptations for that ancestral world. What this ultimately means is that the dark-suited men who represent us in government wield the power to steer the global economy, shift the parameters of human liberty, or unleash the devastating machinery of war, and they do so using Stone Age brains.
Today the political machine spans a vast, interconnected community of hundreds of nations around the globe, controlling billions of individual human beings. Adding vertiginous complexity to an unfathomable scope, politics are conducted with a stunning degree of bureaucratic intricacy, veined with deception, confounded by continuously shifting alliances, obscured by the conflicting commentary of partisan analysts, and steered by behind-the-scenes maneuvering of wealthy political stakeholders.
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One common pitfall is known as the moralistic fallacy, which occurs when we assume that undesirable qualities of nature simply cannot be true.
It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too depressing or reactionary.
The inverse of the moralistic fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy, assumes that what is natural must be moral or desired, and it is equally to be avoided. The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest.
As you may have guessed, political conservatives are more likely to commit this kind of fallacy. Examples may sound something like the following: men are naturally physically stronger than women, therefore women should be subordinate to men; warfare is instinctive, therefore it is acceptable. This fallacy is partly what makes liberals see conservatives as coldhearted and cynical. There are evolutionary reasons for adopting one or the other of these fallacies
The other challenge is in seeing psychological impulses that are usually hidden from conscious awareness—for example, becoming aware of the powerful drive to reproduce our genes, which we normally take for granted as simply the desire for a sexy partner, or love for our children. Eminent evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby refer to this phenomenon as instinct blindness. We are often blind to our evolved predispositions, which are so ancient that they work seamlessly in the background while directly affecting our foreground behaviors and ideologies. The evolved reasons for our political behavior can be counted among those difficult-to-see processes.
But don’t our politics simply reflect the values we’re taught as children or the political ideas we were exposed to? Aren’t they a matter of where we grew up or where we live? Most people tend to think of their political views as carefully considered choices they have made—perhaps reflecting the influence of particular experiences or people in their lives.
There’s no question that our cultural surroundings profoundly influence how we think, what we teach our children, and how we publicly express our political views.
Yet the picture is not as simple as we once thought. An increasingly large body of research is finding a genetic component to our political natures with 30–60% of the variance in our political preference is due to genetic factors.
Twin studies are one such branch of study. Identical twins, who share nearly 100 percent of their genes, show high concordance in their political orientations and more concordance than nonidentical twins, who share only half their genes. Even more revealing, however, are studies of twins reared apart. Research has found that monozygotic (identical) twins reared apart have virtually the same likelihood of sharing a political orientation as those reared together.
Our ability to adapt to environmental circumstances would seem to underlie at least 40% of the variance in how we normally behave politically. This adaptability is what makes human political psychology so complex; it’s also what allows the possibility of modifying our political stances when they no longer serve us.
Several historical factors have been identified that have been pulling the parties apart, for example, the rise of ideologically driven media interests (like Fox News) and conservative talk radio networks in the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of coalitions between economic conservatives and religious fundamentalists in the 1970s. Also influential was the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which spurred mass defection of white Southern Democrats to the Republican Party.
Parties fall along a Left-Right continuum that is itself exceptionally stable; the ability to identify oneself on the Left-Right dimension has been reliably demonstrated across nearly every human society.
The decision of Gnus on their migration to surge ahead through that dangerous river is not completely random. The ones that go first tend, on average, to have an inborn predilection for taking the first step. This trait, which as shorthand we can call risk-taking, has its benefits. Those who make it across will have less competition for the lushest, most nutrient-rich grasses, as well as the freshest drinking water.
Why then aren’t all gnus risk-takers? Because these same traits coding for risk-taking also land some wildebeest in the stomachs of crocodiles.
Back on the other end of the herd, queuing last in the rush across, are the lingerers. These wildebeest are less often food for crocodiles, but they also don’t enjoy the freshest, most nutritious grasses, or any of the other perks of being spunky, and this is why all wildebeest aren’t lingerers—because on average these gnus are likely to have poorer nutrition and in lean times may die of hunger or thirst more often than those at the spearhead. Notably, most of the wildebeest herd is somewhere in the middle.
This explanation is more illustrative than scientific. However, there is a growing body of science to show that humans, like other creatures of the natural world, share similar basic predispositions to approach or avoid. It is not possible to fully understand human politics without understanding the ancient dangers of the natural world that shaped these modern-day inclinations.
Big Five dimensions around the globe
One study, for example, found the Big Five in 50 societies and across six continents worldwide. The ubiquity of these findings strongly suggests that the Big Five patterns of interfacing with the world are genetically based universals.
If there were a human analogue to our first river-crossing wildebeest, it would probably be people high on openness to experience. This personality construct includes a general appreciation for novelty and adventure, things like world travel, trying new foods, listening to different kinds of music. Those with high “openness” are also described as abstract thinkers, creative, curious, imaginative, independent, and as being more sensitive to emotions. While the Big Five factors are generally considered distinct, there is a moderately high correlation between openness to experience and another dimension in the model, extroversion—the tendency to be talkative, to be assertive, to seek social interaction, and to have high social ability. Openness is also related to sensation-seeking, or a drive to experience sensations that are “varied, novel, complex and intense,” and by the readiness to “take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experiences.” While risk-taking is not a central feature of openness, the construct does correlate with measures assessing risk-taking tendencies.
Those scoring low on openness, on the other hand, are described as being closed to experience. Closed individuals tend to choose routine over new experiences, prefer predictability, and tend to be more traditional in their thinking. Think of the person who would rather stay at home, watching his or her favorite shows over the weekend, or dine at the same café that he or she always does.
Human personality traits, in particular openness to experience, reliably correlate with political orientation. In one revealing longitudinal study, researchers started by conducting personality assessments on nursery school children.6 Some children were described with adjectives such as “initializing,” “impulsive,” “curious,” “talkative,” “confident,” “openness in expressing negative feelings,” and “autonomous,” among other descriptors. Other children were described as “anxious when confronted by uncertainties,” “distrustful of others,” “indecisive and vacillating,” “ruminative,” “self-unrevealing,” “shy,” “fearful,” “neat,” “compliant,” and “adult-seeking.” Before we get hung up on how negative the adjectives describing the latter group of children sound, consider that, as in the case of the wildebeest lingerers, these personality traits arise directly from their survival utility. In any case, the traits described in these preschoolers were observable long before they developed what we could call political identities. Twenty years later, these same individuals were rated on their political orientation.
Preschoolers who rated as curious, impulsive, talkative, and so on reliably grew up to be liberals, whereas those who were described as shy, distrustful of others, compliant, and adult-seeking grew up to be conservatives. The ability of childhood personality traits to predict politics across such an impressive time span shows that genetic predispositions can influence our political orientations. Indeed, a large volume of research has found that openness is associated with tendencies like self-identifying as liberal, voting liberal, and supporting liberal policies.
It follows that this attraction to novelty and tolerance for complexity encourage not only overall liberalism, but also support for liberal social and economic policies, which typically involve new programs or interventions that overturn existing practices. Crucially, this personality dimension reflects openness not only to things like new policies or programs but also to other people.
Consider another study in which researchers rated how liberals and conservatives interacted with confederates (researchers posing as non-researchers). The researchers found that while conservatives tended to be reserved, socially distracted, and withdrawn, liberals smiled more and oriented their seats in the direction of the confederate more. In the same study the researchers examined offices and bedrooms of liberals and conservative for what they called “behavioral residue” of openness. They found that the personal spaces of conservatives were, on average, more likely to have group-oriented paraphernalia like American flags and sports teams memorabilia, which suggests an orientation toward people comprising one’s in-group—known people, rather than those in the out-group. Conservatives’ rooms were also neater, better organized, more conventional, and less stylish.
Personal spaces of more liberal subjects were more likely to contain books on travel, travel documents, international maps, cultural memorabilia, CDs that include world music and a wide variety of music, and an overall greater number and variety of books. Their spaces also were rated as more colorful and stylish. Again, a prominent thread in the tapestry of openness is an attraction to new people, new cultures, and traveling to distant lands (where you find new people). The attraction to and interest in outsiders, which we see so strongly among liberals, has been termed xenophilia.
Openness to new experiences, particularly to things like travel, puts us in contact with new people. Openness to new people allows us to interact with those we encounter in our travels and to exchange knowledge, goods, and technology. There is even research showing that liberals possess adaptations that allow them to be more open to eating a greater variety of foods, which would be valuable in novel environments or cultures. Moreover, sexual openness, a hallmark of being liberal, would allow us to exchange useful genes. Essentially, being liberal has its survival advantages.
Xenophobia
The opposite trait, xenophobia results not only in a dislike of outsiders but also a corresponding preference for in-group members and values. This preference often manifests as a sense of patriotism and loyalty.
The anti-out-group firestorm Trump created, along with his brash, strongman persona, did not go unnoticed by world leaders, particularly those in Europe, whose homelands bear the not-too-distant memory of charismatic Fascist leaders who exterminated millions of souls during World War II, using similar rhetoric. Former British prime minister David Cameron labeled Trump’s discourse as “divisive, stupid, and wrong.” French prime minister Manuel Valls said, “Mr. Trump, like others, stokes hatred.” German foreign minister Frank
By speaking openly and negatively against groups perceived as outsiders by his core base of conservative white Republicans, Trump was able to win their vote and ultimately the 2016 US presidential election. This momentous political event illustrates a highly consistent empirical finding—namely that conservative political ideology predicts prejudice against the outside group.
In study after study, conservatives report more negative attitudes and racial stereotypes than liberals.
Such correlations are found in other countries, with different out-group targets.
Being xenophobic and closed to experience (i.e., conservative) also would have had its survival advantages. For one, a tendency to prefer the company of the in-group would have made inbreeding more likely, which can increase altruism in a population by increasing the amount of shared genes. Too much outbreeding can also cause obstetric problems. Preeclampsia is a condition that can lead to a host of health problems in the pregnant mother, such as kidney and liver failure, and even death. One large study examining 23,358 pregnancies in Turkey found that women who were married to first or second cousins (which is common in the Muslim world) were far less likely to suffer from preeclampsia, whereas outbreeding women were 60% more likely to experience it.
Mating with local populations, who had had many generations to adapt to their environment, including time to develop resistance to local pathogens, would have produced better adapted offspring and restored needed genetic diversity to a population.
Other problems of outbreeding relate to immunology. Through natural selection, populations develop genetic immunities to local pathogens. But when humans begin breeding with outsiders whose immune systems were not adapted for their locality, the resulting offspring have less genetic resistance to those local diseases.
Further, mating with “foreigners” by definition involves exchanging bodily fluids, which can carry foreign diseases that could kill outbreeders. And here is where it gets interesting. If xenophobia among conservatives reflects an adaptation that helped our ancestors avoid contagious diseases from outsiders, we would also expect to see conservatives exhibiting more fear of contagion.
Xenophobia among humans—which ultimately results in things like separate water fountains, race riots, or even genocide—may at least in part be related to germs.
What may not be as intuitive is the reason for these connections. As it turns out, the pressures of deadly infectious and genetic diseases in our ancestral history drove both liberal and conservative psychologies and, as a means to survive those diseases, distinctive liberal and conservative mating strategies. One recessive copy of the cystic fibrosis allele is thought to help us resist a host of deadly diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. The right amount of outbreeding, then, brings the genetic diversity needed to roll with the punches of environmental change.
Migrations often brought violent conflict with outside groups, moving through dangerous environments like deserts or jungles, and encounters with predators, severe weather, famine, or disease, all of which culled populations and created bottlenecks where the genetic diversity of populations became constrained. Notably, bottlenecks often reduce genetic resistance to infectious disease.
Human survival is contingent not only on macro-level phenomena like mating, finding food, or not getting eaten but also on the epic microscopic wars within us.
The emotion of disgust, for example, is an adaptation that allows thinking, acting humans to help our cellular networks avoid pathogens. For instance, imagine what the consequences would be for a human who was unable to experience disgust when presented with feces. Many of the diseases that threaten humans are transmitted by other humans. Could fear of disease translate into fear of outsiders or even political conservatism? A large volume of research would suggest so.
Those with higher disgust sensitivity were more likely to see immigrants and foreign ethnic groups as less than human, as well as to score higher on measures strongly associated with political conservatism, such as social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism
Epidemiological maps around the globe to determine the prevalence of diseases such as leishmania, schistosoma, trypanosoma, malaria, filaria, leprosy, dengue, typhus, and tuberculosis. Not only did they find that openness to experience was greater where there was less disease but also that where disease was more prevalent, women in particular showed more sexual restraint. Men’s sexual openness, on the other hand, was not affected by local disease prevalence, which makes sense when you consider that women, typically on the receiving end of bodily fluids in sexual intercourse, may be at greater risk than men of contracting disease from an infectious partner. Conversely, Schaller and Murray found that in places with less infectious disease, women showed more interest in new sexual partners and more comfort with casual sex, showing a liberal-leaning openness to experience.
In the same vein, another study found that the farther away people are from the equator, where the climate is hotter and home to more pathogens, the higher they are in extraversion, a trait associated with liberal voting.
The natural world teems with dangers of many varieties, and conservatives may be more sensitive to all of them. In addition to conservatives being more closed to experience, and more sensitive to disgust, research finds that conservatives tend to be generally more fearful. Research continues to find that fear of other humans is strong among conservatives. One study, for example, found that when shown photos of people making ambiguous facial expressions, Republicans, far more than Democrats, will project threatening emotions like anger.
For a large span of our evolutionary history other animals were not the biggest threat to humans. Rather, other humans were—not only as vectors of disease but also as murderers. Danger from the lethal hands of humans may have been among the biggest selective pressures driving our personality differences and their associated political ideologies.
But this is only half the story; specifically men are the most dangerous humans. Even today men account for an astronomically higher percentage of all kinds of violence than women, and recent psychological research suggests that men have been so dangerous across evolutionary history that our brains are primed to fear them. Studies have shown that our brains are prepared to fear not simply outsiders but outside men. Men from the outside tribe were a prominent threat to our survival across the history of our species, and our brains “know” this.
So far we’ve explored how natural selection has left us with political preferences that originally took hold because they afforded our ancestors certain survival advantages. However, there are times at which a particular adaptation becomes a disadvantage when it no longer matches the current environment—known as an evolutionary mismatch. Our sedentary lifestyles combined with unfettered access to food sources that were scarce in our evolutionary past have resulted in epidemics of morbid obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and numerous other “mismatch diseases.
The concept of the evolutionary mismatch can help to illuminate the political challenges of our modern age. We evolved in small bands of competing tribes, in wild, uncertain environments where the competition between clans for scarce resources was often a zero-sum game (where one competitor’s gain/loss equals the other’s loss/gain). Across our history competition of this kind has led to staggering levels of human bloodshed.
Despite these gains, in many ways we remain closed, suspicious, tribalistic people straining to form a globalist union while using our Stone Age minds. Thus, one important question is, how xenophobic do we really need to be in the face of our unprecedented ability to sustain ourselves? Once again, evolutionary science suggests that another force behind our enduring political tribalism is an adaptation designed to help us avoid deadly pathogens. This adaptation was useful for more than 99% of our evolution when there was no such thing as sterilization, antibiotics, or vaccines. Thus our ancestors died from simple afflictions, such as the common cold, the flu, or diarrhea, with crushing regularity.
Under those conditions, developing a prejudicial psychology to help us avoid human vectors of disease was evolutionarily practical. But we have made profound strides in the field of immunology. Many pathogens that wiped out entire populations of humans have since been eradicated, and many that remain can be deflected with cheap, widely available vaccines. Despite that today we are exponentially safer from pathogens, our mastery over germs has existed over a mere eye blink of our history as a species, far too recently to erase germ-driven prejudice from our psychology. The question, then, is how much an adaption designed to protect us from germs serves us in the face of these advancements in medicine, particularly since xenophobia has created so much bloody conflict over our species’ history. The reasons why humans could not openly cooperate on a global scale, freely sharing resources, information, and technology to advance humankind seem to lie less on the practical than the emotional.
One study found that right-wing orientation was far more prevalent among Hollywood stars who play male action heroes. These men of brawn included Schwarzenegger as well as Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, and five-term National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston, among others. In this study, right-wing orientation—as measured by things like political donations, party support, and support for military actions—was exorbitantly more prominent among action stars (56.3%) than among dramatic actors (4.2%), and the researchers also found that actors who leaned Right were actually more physically formidable than those who leaned Left.
Perhaps more telling, during Schwarzenegger’s tenure as California governor, he repeatedly referred to Democrats as “girlie men. The stereotype that political liberalism reflects a feminine orientation, and conservatism a masculine one, has been around for some time. Overwhelmingly, the researchers found that voters used more masculine stereotypes to describe GOP candidates and more feminine stereotypes to describe Democrats.
For feminine traits one test asks participants to rate how much the following descriptors apply to him or her: “understanding, sympathetic, warm, loves children, compassionate, gentle, eager to soothe hurt feelings, affectionate, sensitive to needs of others, tender.” Masculine traits are captured by the following descriptors: “willingness to take risks, forceful, strong personality, assertive, independent, leadership ability, aggressive, dominant, willing to take a stand, defends own beliefs.
What McDermott found was that men and women who scored high on femininity were significantly more likely to identify as Democrat, and that men and women who scored high on masculinity were more likely to identify as Republican.
Conservatism, I argue, is a male-centric strategy shaped significantly by the struggle for dominance in within-and-between group mate competitions, while liberalism is a female-centric strategy derived from the protracted demands of rearing human offspring, among other selective pressures. These aren’t fixed or unitary strategies—that is, they can be adopted, or rejected, or even adapted tactically, depending on social and environmental circumstances, and both men and women can employ more or less male- or female-typical approaches.
Not all men enact a conservative strategy, nor do all women enact a liberal strategy. But we do see sex-based leanings. Imagine two bell curves, one tilting toward the (political) Right for men, and another to the Left for women, with significant overlap between the curves.
Lest we also worry about the social implications of using the term male brain as a heuristic, it is also important to understand that men and women’s brain morphology and function exhibit vastly more similarities than differences. Even so, existing differences have meaningful implications for our political psychology.
Not all females have the female-typical brain and not all males have the male-typical brain, but that there are certain quantifiable, male-typical extremes evidenced in those with autism spectrum disorders. As it turns out, the numerous and important differences between females and males that Baron-Cohen uses to explain autism sequelae are glaringly present between liberals and conservatives on nearly every difference.
One rather extraordinary talent of the human brain is imputing mental states to others, to have theory of mind (other minds), or to mindread—to understand that others have thoughts, intentions, emotion states, and so on. Compared to other animals, humans are the undisputed world champions at this remarkable skill. We are able to perform feats of mindreading acrobatics, such as “he knows that I know that she knows (something),” so easily that we take the skill for granted, with the notable exception of those suffering from autism. The inability to “read minds,” what Baron-Cohen has described as mindblindess,11 is one of the hallmarks of autism.
There is ample research demonstrating that women outperform men on theory of mind (ToM) tasks and that these differences are evidenced early in life. Studies have found, for example, that preschool-age girls perform better at understanding others’ false beliefs (the understanding that another person can hold an erroneous belief about something, a skill requiring ToM) and at understanding others’ emotions.
The evidence shows that women are typically much better at understanding the minds of others.
While to date few studies directly measuring differences in this ability between liberals and conservatives have been conducted, two neuroimaging studies offer a preliminary look literally inside the political brain. One study measured gray-matter volume and found that those who self-identified as liberal exhibited greater volume in the anterior cingulate cortex while conservatives exhibited greater brain volume in the amygdala.
The anterior cingulate cortex is a brain region considered to be an integrative hub for social interactions, implicated in both theory of mind and feeling the pain of others. The amygdala, as previously noted, is the fear center of the brain.
Research finds that women show more comforting behaviors than men, even to strangers; share emotional distress with their friends more than men; and that girls from one years of age show more empathy to others’ suffering than boys—through sad looks, comforting gestures, and making more sympathetic vocalizations. More directly, women score higher than men on questionnaires specifically designed to measure empathy. In people with autism, the ability to experience empathy is usually impaired.
The liberal penchant for empathy is seen in the tendency to do things like join Greenpeace to save baby seals, or to feel sadness and moral outrage when loggers saw down the forests of Amazonian Natives, basically all the stuff that makes conservatives roll their eyes and think, Run along and hug a tree or something. Or perhaps more illustrative—during the 2016 US presidential race, campaign buttons, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia were circulating among the Right, saying, “Trump for President: Fuck Your Feelings.” Research confirms these stereotypes. Studies find that liberals show more signs of distress about violence and suffering than conservatives, and tend to score higher on empathy measures with statements such as, “Other people’s misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal,” or “When I see someone being treated unfairly, I sometimes don’t feel very much pity for them” (both reverse-scored).24 By default, conservatives show relatively less distress about suffering and score lower on empathy measures.
Humans have far more facial muscles than any other animal (a whopping 43), which, through a nuanced and nearly infinite array of facial expressions, allows us to send and receive a stunning volume of social information. Research finds that women are far more skilled than men at decoding facial expressions, as well as other nonverbal forms of expression, such as tone of voice. This reflects a higher level of theory of mind, where more incoming information is being processed to infer intention, meaning, emotion states, and so on, which facial expressions convey brilliantly. This female skill of using faces as communication channels can be detected early; for example, from birth girls look longer at faces than boys, whereas boys look longer at inanimate objects.
Women are also more accurate and faster than men at identifying emotional facial expressions. Further, women are even better than men at basic facial detection skills, such as detecting pictures of faces embedded in drawings with other objects, and identifying faces they had previously seen. Research also finds that women show greater facial expressivity than men. Thus the ability to send and receive information through the human visage is more pronounced in females. People in the autism spectrum, which, again, favors males by a ten-to-one ratio, have a difficult time decoding and making meaningful facial expressions.
In one study, researchers gathered data on subjects’ political orientations, hooked up their faces to EMG sensors, presented them with a series of negative and positive images, and then measured their facial responses. Facial expressivity was high in women, regardless of political orientation, and overall women were more emotionally expressive than men. Liberal men, the researchers found, were as facially expressive as women. What stood out in this study was that the faces of male conservatives, on the other hand, were essentially nonreactive.
In another study, researchers measured expressivity, using the “Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire,” which includes items such as, “Whenever I am feeling positive emotions people can see exactly what I am feeling” and “What I’m feeling is written all over my face.” Similar to the EMG studies, the researchers found that Democrats scored higher than Republicans.
Adding to findings that women tend to be better at nonverbal communication, a significant body of research shows that women tend to have better language skills. Girls develop vocabularies faster than boys, and tend to master bilingualism more than boys. Research has also found that girls exhibit greater activation in linguistic areas of the brain while performing language tasks. Some research finds that girls retain their advantage in language skills well into their primary and secondary school years, and even into later adulthood, for instance in verbal memory skills, and word fluency. In keeping with Baron-Cohen’s theory, both expressive and receptive language skills are commonly impaired in those with autism.
A 2001 Gallup poll indicated that those who identified as being liberal are more likely to be bilingual than moderates or conservatives. Other studies have found that liberals score higher than conservatives on verbal ability tests, and on vocabulary tests. Lower verbal ability has also been associated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, two constructs highly related to conservative ideology that we will discuss later.
An important and highly developed ability in humans is joint attention—the ability to follow another person’s eye movement, which allows us to infer things like intention and interest, and to perform other kinds of mindreading. This ability can be observed in the research lab by showing subjects cartoon pictures of faces with averted eyes, and it can be measured by examining how strongly the subjects’ eyes are drawn to the direction of the picture’s gaze—known as gaze cuing. Across different kinds of cuing tasks, research finds that men process eye gaze less efficiently than women and do not orient toward gaze as strongly. Research has also found stronger joint attention skills in twelve-month-old female infants as compared to twelve-month-old male infants, and that overall male infants make less eye contact than female infants. Accordingly, those in the autism spectrum, who Baron-Cohen says possess extreme variants of the “male brain,” do poorly at gaze cuing.
Research has found that, like the differences between women and men on eye-gaze direction tasks, liberals show a greater response to gaze cuing than conservatives. One study examined directional cuing using not only illustrations of eyes but also arrows pointing in a particular direction—a common research tool used to study the impact of nonsocial direction cues. The researchers found that conservatives showed lower cuing effects in response to eye gaze, but not to arrows, suggesting that conservatives are less responsive specifically to social directional cuing.
A large volume of research shows that females are generally more concerned with fairness, and males more concerned with dominance hierarchies. These tendencies are observable early. Young girls, for example, tend to share and take turns far more than boys, whereas boys tend to be more competitive. One study found that girls exhibited turn-taking 20 times more than boys, and boys exhibited competitive behaviors 50 times more than girls. Further, when put together, boys often quickly form dominance hierarchies, and this pre-primed social dynamic is measurable in early childhood.
Summarizing this dynamic captured by studies on language use between boys and girls, Joyce Benenson writes, “When speaking to one another, young boys issue directives, command others, insult them, tell jokes at others’ expense, ignore what someone else just said, disagree with another’s point, call one another names, brag, tell stories highlighting their own accomplishments, curse, threaten others, use direct statements, and generally behave in a domineering fashion toward one another.”
Researchers find that young girls, on the other hand, generally spend more energy trying to solve differences with using politeness, tact, and diplomacy.
Boys are also more inclined toward intergroup dominance. Research finds, for example, that young boys playing in sports teams tend to never let the losing team forget the outcome of the game, whereas girls more often try to make the players feel equal and deemphasize who won or lost. Intergroup dominance among males continues into adulthood and is seen everywhere from professional sports teams to street gangs to militaries.
It is no secret that liberals in the United States more strongly back policies like equal pay for women, affirmative action, and antidiscrimination laws, policies supported by the worldview that all people have equal worth, equal potential, and the fundamental right to equal opportunities. Nor is it shocking to learn that liberals demonstrate against things like corporate abuses of power, unfair banking practices, and colonialist exploitations in third-world countries.
One large international study (34,476 subjects) found that while across the political spectrum people care about moral fairness, fairness concerns are reliably higher among those identifying as liberal.
As Baron-Cohen explains it, in social interactions (higher-functioning) individuals with autism attempt to “work out a huge set of rules of how to behave in each and every situation, attempting to develop a mental ‘manual’ for social interaction of ‘if-then’ rules. It is as though they are trying to systemize social behavior when the natural approach to socializing should be via empathizing.
As a result, those in the autism spectrum tend to prefer solitude, along with clear rules in the home, at school, or in their mental activities. A corollary is that people with autism tend to prefer neatness and order. They will arrange their personal effects in a line or meticulously categorize them according to color, purpose, size, or some other rule-based category. Often those with autism can immediately detect if something has been misarranged, which tends to cause immensely more stress than it would those without the disorder.
Conscientiousness is another Big Five personality trait has been consistently associated with political conservatism. Among other things, the factor tends to involve concern about orderliness, control of one’s environment, and a preference for planned (rather than spontaneous) behavior. Some sample conscientiousness items from the Big Five personality index: “I am always prepared; I pay attention to details; I like order; I follow a schedule; I leave my belongings around
Highly robust research finding is that conservatism is related to less tolerance for ambiguity and lower aptitude for integrative complexity—the ability to grasp alternative perspectives or dimensions, and to synthesize those varying perspectives into a cohesive framework. As one hypothetical, simplified for the sake of clarity: All immigrants are criminals, instead of reasoning, “Some immigrants may commit crimes. But many do not, and there are a variety of factors that may lead to such behaviors.
Developmental research finds that compared to girls, boys seem to be obsessed with rules. For instance, research has found that boys choose to engage in rules-oriented play more than girls, and when disputes arise they spend a great deal of time trying to renegotiate the rules and enlist the counsel of respected peers on rulemaking.
Research finds that when boys and girls play together, boys stick to rules far more than girls, and while they quarrel more than girls, they appear to enjoy the quarrelling, especially when the point of contention concerns making, breaking, or following rules.
Even when boys seem to be disregarding a particular set of rules, they are often following another set. One study found that while girls tend to respond to rules set by teachers, boys tend to ignore rules set by both teachers and girls but naturally form their own complex set of rules and follow them with intense focus.
This focus on rules is a by-product of the evolutionary pressure to form male coalitions.
Compared to liberals, conservatives are far more rules oriented. One study of political views among Europeans, for example, asked subjects to rate how much the views of a hypothetical person reflect their own, on statements like, “He believes that people should do what they’re told. He thinks people should follow rules at all times, even when no one is watching.” Conservative ideology predicted rule following. This is a fairly robust research finding across the literature.
Conservatives tend to value traditionalism, a dedication to existing ways of doing things, including following established rules, and conservatives are inclined to resist social change more than liberals. A fairly emphatic example of rules orientation among conservatives is the greater tendency to favor harsher punishment for rule breakers, such as the death penalty or longer prison sentences
One common explanation for greater ToM in women is that women have generally been tasked with interpreting the needs of offspring, who as infants are incapable of expressing their needs through language, and who remain in dependency for a far greater stretch than the young of other species. As one example of this ability put to use, women are more likely to hold infants in the face-to-face position than men,
There is evidence to suggest that less empathy among men has fitness benefits, aiding in male mate competition (which is often violent) and in facilitating killing in warfare.
Empathic men (who, as noted, also tend to be liberal) tend to have lower testosterone and make better fathers than high-testosterone men.
Intolerance for ambiguity would also be useful in dangerous environments, such as combat. When the stakes are life and death, it makes more sense to think in black-and-white terms.
Men are consistently better at hitting their target than women. These sex differences are seen early; by three years old, boys outperform girls on throwing speed, accuracy, and distance, and there is no other motor performance skill in which boys excel so much in the early years.
Liberals favor wealth equalization, conservatives the economic status quo. Going back in time before modern civilization, those higher on the dominance hierarchy had more territory, food, and mates. So conservatives, more likely men than wowemn, are keen on maintaining existing dominance hierarchies and monopolizing resources, and liberals, more likely women, prefer egalitarianism, which can be seen as a way to rein in males and impose limits on their ambitions.
This is seen in small tribes that have cultural taboos designed to keep men from rising up to violently monopolice resources, power, and women. It’s common for a !Kung tribesman who comes home with a large animal to denigrate it, call it a mouse. Young men who bring meat back and brag about it are put down, since others fear that if he starts to think himself a chief and other men servants, his pride will someday make him kill somebody. If a man can’t be reined in from his ambition and becomes violent, the group may agree to execute him.
Despite these efforts the men in many tribes have strikingly high murder rates, unequal resources, and more wives. At least before agriculture only so much hoarding could be done, but after that the ability to store grains and amass great wealth in one spot led to men achieving more power. In fact, not long after the introduction of agriculture began, it can be seen from DNA samples that one man reproduced for every 17 women. In the Inca, those men of the highest rank had 50 women, others 5, 15, 20 or 30.
Large-scale democracy is a very recent attempt in human history to equalize the vast power differences that had been common before.