Evolutionary Psychology

The following is my first-week reaction paper from a Fall 2006 class, Biological Approaches to Political Behavior, taught by Professors John Hibbing and Kevin Smith.

Evolutionary psychology offers a framework for generating hypotheses about the causes of human behavior that will help bring about a much-needed unification of the sciences and answer lingering questions about our nature. This paper offers ideas for research using evolutionary psychology and notes some of its limitations.

Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow’s chapter, “Introduction: Evolutionary Psychology and Conceptual Integration,� calls on social scientists to explain contemporary human behavior by linking it with actions that would have led to reproductive success, and thus furtherance through evolutionary natural selection, during the Pleistocene epoch of early human development. This approach is challenging and potentially fruitful in that it requires scholars to try drawing a causal arrow that extends all the way from our hunter-gatherer past, through the Agricultural, Industrial and other revolutions to the present Information Age. The authors’ “evolutionarily derived task analysis� method, an engineering approach to social inquiry, provides aid in this imposing task. Pinker’s book The Blank Slate, meanwhile, offers a point-by-point defense of the approach against attacks from proponents of environmental behavioral explanations, while Alford and Hibbing propose a theory for explaining why our “selfish genes� often lead us to cooperate. Their article is “The Origin of Politics: An Evolutionary Theory of Political Behavior.�

Evolutionary psychology offers an alternative to rational choice and behavioralist explanations of nonvoting and free riding. While rational choice takes preferences as given, evolutionary psychology goes deeper. In this case it would ask: Is it adaptive to be lazy, to expend the minimum effort necessary to ensure survival? The obstacle to action used to be exhaustion brought on by insufficient caloric intake. With time and energy for food collection limited, on what should the organism focus? Do hibernating animals store more fat than they need? Do squirrels keep working collecting nuts until they can’t any more, or do they stop when they have enough? Barriers to action at the polls today are different – bad weather, work schedules, the effort to learn about the issues. But are nonvoters making an adaptive choice to be lazy? If “the minimum effort necessary to ensure survival� can be extended to the survival of democracy, then we can see why people would not vote in ordinary elections – because the system will continue without their effort. But if democracy were about to disappear absent sufficient support in a plebiscite, perhaps people would vote. Analyzing the decision not to vote through Alford and Hibbing’s “wary cooperation� lens, we could hypothesize that people don’t vote because the action – completely individual, and taken in private – doesn’t activate our innate tendency toward cooperation. If the action were taken in public, so noncooperators in the voting effort could be identified and punished, perhaps voting would increase. Inventing a way to identify people voting out of selfish motives should have the same effect.

The problem with requiring that all behavioral explanations lead back to adaptations that would have served well in the Pleistocene is that not everything interesting about political behavior today can be taken back to the Pleistocene. Take candidate appearance, for example, a nontrivial matter in today’s media-driven campaigns. How do we explain the Nebraskan, and perhaps the American, preference for clean-shaven candidates? Gubernatorial candidate Stormy Dean’s failure was attributed in the press in part to his facial hirsuteness, perhaps leading the previously bearded current candidate, David Hahn, to run for the razor. Viewers thought Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow made him look shady in the televised debate with John F. Kennedy, and no major candidate for U.S. president has run bearded since 1948. Compare this preference for facial hairlessness with that of Muslim society, which requires all its men, and necessarily especially its leaders, to sport beards. Finding a Pleistocene preference for unbearded leaders would bump up against this difficult cultural difference, as well as (I’m no anthropologist, so I’m assuming) the lack of sufficiently effective facial hair-removal tools in that epoch. It seems, in other words, that every leader would have been hairy in that age, if only for lack of a way to relieve himself of that hair.

One could brave the politicized academic minefield Pinker describes by hypothesizing a gender difference in support for bald candidates. One would hypothesize that women would vote more for U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson because his full head of hair makes him look like better mating material than his shiny-domed challenger, Pete Ricketts. But one would then run into the Blank Slate/Ghost in the Machine/Standard Social Science Model proponents, who resist any non-environmental explanation for behavior. These proponents would shout the poor evolutionary political scientist down at conferences and conspire against him or her at the tenure committee meeting, leaving the poor young scholar penniless and consequently unable to attract a mate with either wealth or status. One could say, then, that studying evolutionarily adaptive explanations for behavior is not itself an adaptive behavior for the pre-tenured.