November 2015 Evolutionary Psychology and Political ... - PURE

November 2015

Evolutionary Psychology and Political Psychology: How to use Evolutionary Psychology to Theorize about Political Psychology

Michael Bang Petersen Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark Email: [email protected]

Chapter prepared for Steven Peterson & Albert Somit (Eds.), Handbook on Biology and Politics, Edward Elgar Publishers.

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There is no ground as fertile as the imagination of a social scientist when it comes to conjuring up explanations and hypotheses for social phenomenon. 1 Researchers working within the area of political psychology - a focal field in this chapter - are no exception. For example, a robust finding within political psychology is that people's attitudes towards welfare policies reflect notions of deservingness: people oppose welfare benefits to recipients perceived as lazy (the undeserving) but support benefits to recipients perceived as unlucky (the deserving). Some researchers have argued that the association between laziness and being undeserving reflects a particular feature of American individualist culture (Gilens, 1999); others that it reflects a logic that people learn from the operations of welfare institutions with means-testing (Rothstein, 1998); yet others that it reflects conservative ideological reasoning (Skitka & Tetlock, 1993); a finally, some have argued that it reflects a universal feature of how humans reason about help-giving in social groups (Oorschot, 2006; Petersen, 2012). Similar disagreements about the proper explanation exist for most other types of political phenomena. Political psychology is, in other words, a wild growing bed of mutually inconsistent hypotheses. This might not necessarily be a problem. Any complex social phenomenon is governed by a large, multitude of factors. Also, this state of research might seem consistent with Popper's (1959) understanding of the context of discovery: that during the process of hypothesis-formulation there are no rules except to let your imagination run wild. Yet, there is reason to be hesitant. If anything goes, how do you as an individual researcher make a choice about which hypotheses to pursue and which to abandon? 1

This chapter is a substantially revised version of an article published in the journal, Political Psychology. The full reference for the original article is: Petersen, M. B. (2015). Evolutionary Political Psychology: On the Origin and Structure of Heuristics and Biases in Politics. Political Psychology, 36(S1), 45-78. Political Psychology is published by Wiley on behalf of the the International Society for Political Psychology.

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Should one rely on intuition? No. Gut feelings and intuitions might be good guides when navigating the world but not necessarily for the scientific understanding of the world as reflected in massively counter-intuitive and extremely successful theories such as evolution by natural selection in biology and quantum mechanics in physics. Should one rely on the published record then? Ideally, yes. And this was to a large extent also Popper's argument: we can be imaginative at the hypothesisformulation stage, because the process of scientific testing will weed out the wrong hypotheses from the correct ones. But as the evidence is growing that the empirical results in the published record cannot easily be replicated, the published record becomes less of an ideal guide (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). This problem is intensified by the fact that most single empirical findings are theoretically overdetermined (i.e., can be explained by a number of different theoretical approaches) and, hence, provides limited guidance on which theoretical framework will best predict the next set of important findings. Only by triangulating a very large number of (correct) findings can we achieve sufficient guidance. Rather than letting intuition run free, an individual researcher makes the best decisions about whether to believe in (and potentially invest empirical resources in) a particular hypothesis by being constrained as much as possible by the available body of knowledge. Not just by a few published studies and arguments within ones own field but, literally, by the entire body of scientific knowledge. If a theory within political psychology is consistent with the facts produced by, for example, economics, sociology, general psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and anthropology, it establishes a solid prima facie reason for believing that it is true. Wilson (1999) referred to this process of constraining the universe of theoretical possibilities through interdisciplinarity as the process of consilience. Because the sciences are placed in an

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ordered hierarchy - physics cannot violate the laws of mathematics, biology cannot violate the laws of physics, psychology cannot violate the laws of biology and the social sciences cannot violate the laws of psychology - we can fruitfully constrain hypotheses at lower levels of sciences by considering the higher levels. Using interdisciplinarity in this way to constrain hypothesis-generation does not just provide a partial solution to the individual problem of deciding whether to pursue a particular hypothesis, it also provides a partial and often overlooked solution to the collective problem of the replication crisis: that many published empirical findings are false (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Better methods training and a change of publication incentives have been (justifiably) called for. But increased training in and awareness of how to formulate and evaluate hypotheses in the light of preexisting knowledge writ large will be just as important in solving the crisis. However, one key problem for interdisciplinarity is what we can call the bridging problem. How one can make knowledge from higher-order disciplines - such as physics and biology - bear on theories within political psychology? How can one bridge disciplines? In one sense the problem seems trivial: as long as our theories in political psychology does not require extrasensory perception, time travel at will or other phenomenon that violates current physical or biological knowledge, things are fine. In another sense the problem seems intractable: how can one use concepts that was developed to describe and predict the activity of atoms, genes or neurons to formulate theories about political behavior that are directly useful for, e.g., formulating public policy? To be useful, interdisciplinarity needs to balance between these two extremes. Insights from different disciplines needs to be integrated in a way that (1) provide real constraints on the space of theoretical possibilities within the lower-order discipline

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and (2) provide these constraints directly on a level of analysis that is useful for the given discipline. Meeting these constraints are the core challenge in the bridging problem. In the case of political psychology and the social sciences in general, one of the most important approaches that meets these requirements, and serves as a bridge between the natural and social sciences, is an approach termed evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the study of psychology that contains a coherent toolset for generating testable and useable hypotheses about human behavior directly from knowledge within evolutionary biology (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This chapter introduces this toolkit with a special focus on how to apply it for generating hypotheses about political psychology.

Bridging Politics and Evolution: The Concept of Psychological Mechanisms Many theories within political psychology are organized around some concept of a psychological mechanism. Theories of affective intelligence, for example, focus on anxiety as a mechanism that is activated when it identifies cues that suggest that a habit (e.g., routinely voting for a specific party) is ill-founded and, when activated, creates a motivation to search for further information in order to established new and better, founded habits (Marcus et al., 2000). Theories of partisan reasoning - to take another example - focus on mechanisms that are activated when information that threatens held beliefs are encountered and, upon activation, engage in effortful, critical scrutiny of the information with the goal of countering it (Taber & Lodge, 2006). A psychological mechanism is, simply said, a neurally-instantiated activity that processes information. When a specific set of information that meets the input

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conditions of the mechanism, the mechanism activates, evaluates the information and delivers a pre-defined output contingent on the input. Figure 1 provides a schematic depiction. The input to a psychological mechanism is always informational but that information can be in the form of sensory information about the external world (is that a person lurking in the dark shadow?), physiology-related signals within the organism (signals reflecting hunger, thirst or fatigue) or the output of other psychological mechanisms (e.g., mechanisms for regulating sexual arousal that receives input from mechanisms for estimating levels of kinship that the attractive person of the opposite sex is in fact a sibling, leading to an immediate decrease in arousal, see Lieberman et al., 2007). Similarly, the output can take multiple forms cognitions, feelings, or information delivered to other mechanisms - but, in the end, the target of that output is behavioral: some behavior is more likely when the mechanism is activated.

- Figure 1 about here -

Allowing us to understand the operations of psychology as the operations of mechanisms is one of the crowning achievements of cognitive psychology. If a political psychological theory is not already crouched in the language of mechanisms, it can easily be recast in this language. It is the convenient and useful level of analysis for political psychology. Essentially, a theory of political psychology is a set of predictions about the specific kinds of input-output relationships that are generated by psychological mechanisms with political relevance. Importantly, making these predictions in a consilient manner is the core focus of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology focus directly on psychological mechanisms as the level of

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analysis and provides an approach for applying insights from evolutionary biology when generating predictions about the structure of psychological mechanisms (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; see also Barrett, 2014).

Evolutionary Psychology: Psychological Mechanisms as Adaptations Evolutionary biology is concerned with the evolution of organisms by accounting for why and how species-typical traits emerge. The primary mechanism for explaining the emergence of such traits is natural selection. Natural selection promotes traits in organisms that are specifically designed to solve particular reproductive problems. These problems are sometimes called adaptive problems and refer to any problem in the species' past that influences reproduction (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The traits— the selected solutions—are called adaptations. Traits that increase reproduction in the particular environment of the species will spread through its population and, in this way, adapt the species to its environment. Adaptations have dedicated functions and are well-designed to carry out those functions (Williams, 1966). The heart is a physiological adaptation that is designed with the function to pump blood. The eyes are physiological adaptations that are designed with the function to provide the brain with visual information concerning the external world. Pumping blood and getting visual information into the brain are important functions. The eyes, however, also provide an illustration of what might be considered another type of and no less important adaptations: Psychological adaptations (Barrett, 2014; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The function of the eyes is to provide information that can be subsequently judged and provide a basis for decisionmaking. This is not a physiological function but rather a psychological or cognitive one. Many adaptive problems require that psychological functions are reliably

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executed. For example, to avoid people with malicious intents, adaptations designed to predict those intentions from observable cues are needed and, upon detection, these adaptations need to interlock with adaptations designed to facilitate avoidance behavior. More generally, the solution to many adaptive problems requires the existence of psychological mechanisms that allow organisms to take a specific set of actions (let us call it X) in a particular type of situation (let us call it Y). How does natural selection solve this great engineering problem of designing organisms to take action X in situation Y? We can break this task down into two subtasks (Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett, 2005). One subtask is representational, that is, about generating an accurate internal representation of the particular situation facing the organism and, hence, identifying whether the situation is Y or Z—or rather Q. Another subtask is motivational, that is, about getting the organism to take that very specific action (within the universe of almost unlimited types of actions) that provides a fitnessincreasing—adaptive—response given the particular individual and environmental contingencies and, hence, facilitate the behavior X if the situation is indeed Y. Essentially, when thinking about how natural selection has influenced the psychological mechanisms of humans and any other organisms—that is, shaped the structure of the representational and motivational systems—the question we should ask ourselves becomes: how could you design a robot that could solve the two tasks of representation (the problem of identifying situation Y) and motivation (the problem of eliciting behavior X in situation Y)? Everything that is vital to reproductive success must be preprogrammed (including mechanisms for the developmental and environmental calibration of traits) before the organism is set loose.

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This

distinction

between

representational

and

motivational

systems

corresponds closely to the distinction between the input and the output side of psychological mechanisms. A psychological mechanism is undergirded by sets of representational and motivational systems with the representational systems determining the mechanism's input side and the motivational systems determining its outputs.

The Input Side: Representational Systems Accurate representations are vital (Kurzban, 2012); firstly, because inaccurate representations often can imply death. When a lion is approaching you, you must accurately detect the situation and its inherent danger. Second, because inaccurate representations—even if not lethal—will involve opportunity costs. Inaccurately overestimating the sexual interest of a potential mate, for example, involves the opportunity cost of not pursuing other, more realistic opportunities. At the same time, accurate representations are difficult to obtain. Often, the true nature of the adaptive problem is first revealed with certainty when it is too late. You can only be certain that the movement in the long grass was indeed a predatory cat once it has jumped out to attack; similarly, you can only be certain that the potential mate was not attracted to you once they went home without you. Adaptive problems must be detected and solved before becoming problems. Consequently, natural selection has had to “solve” the engineering feat of building representational systems that are able to make predictions about the situation (“Is this X?”) under informational uncertainty from indirect cues. Evolutionary psychology (as well as cognitive psychology and developmental psychology more broadly) posits that there is only one efficient solution to this

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problem: the evolution of content-rich representational systems (Delton & Sell, 2014; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Efficiently identifying situations with adaptive significance requires that our minds are equipped with related concepts, such as “predator”, “mate”, “edible object”, “cooperation partner”, “leader”, “kin”, “cheater”, “enemy” and so forth, complete with lists of the cues that activate the concept for representing the situation (and evolved mechanisms for adding—“learning”—further cues to the concept) (see Barrett, 2014; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This existence of evolved, content-rich representational systems is supported by enormous amounts of evidence, including studies of prepared learning in non-human animals (Seligman, 1970), studies of pre-verbal infants (Thomsen & Carey, 2013), studies of split-brain patients (Gazzaniga, 2014), and studies of artificial intelligence (Carruthers, 2005). An illustration of the existence of representational systems with political relevance comes from analyses of the adaptive problem of resource conflict. Conflicts of interest over resources (such as food and mates, and immaterial resources, such as status) have been ancestrally recurrent. Evolutionary biologists and animal behavior researchers have developed sophisticated models for dealing adaptively with such conflicts. The best-validated model is the asymmetric war of attrition model, which basically argues that any organism in a conflict situation should gauge the relative fighting ability of its opponents (Hammerstein & Parker, 1982). If this is gauged as lower, then an escalation of the conflict is adaptive; if gauged as higher, then a withdrawal is adaptive. This model has been validated across a range of different species, including frogs and spiders (Kelly, 2008)—and have recently been applied to humans (Sell, Cosmides & Tooby, 2009; Petersen, Sznycer, Sell, Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). For humans—in particular, under ancestral circumstances with limited weapon technology—a key feature of fighting ability must have been physical strength.

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Hence, in order to solve the problem of adaptive conflict behavior, there is reason to expect humans to have evolved dedicated representational systems to gauge the physical strength of others. This has indeed been validated. Humans are exceptionally good at accurately predicting the physical strength of even ethnically and racially different others from a range of cues in the body, face (Sell, Cosmides, Tooby, Sznycer, von Rueden, & Gurven, 2009), and voice (Sell, Bryant, Cosmides, Tooby, Sznycer, von Rueden, & Gurven, 2010). Even pre-verbal infants utilize physical size to predict who prevails in conflicts (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011). And—reflecting the key role of physical strength under ancestral circumstances—representations of physical strength seem to serve as overarching representations of relative fighting ability such that people represent another person as physically stronger if this person carries a weapon (Fessler, Holbrook, & Snyder, 2012) or if they themselves are physically restrained (Fessler & Holbrook, 2013a) and as physically weaker if they themselves are in a group of friends (Fessler & Holbrook, 2013b). In sum, to solve the adaptive problem of whether a conflict situation involves a stronger or weaker opponent, humans predictably have representational systems for estimating relative strength, and this is indeed the case.

The Output Side: Motivational Systems The existence of evolved representational systems allows the organism to identify the adaptive problems inherent in a situation. Yet problems do not merely need to be identified, they must be solved. That is, the representational systems must convey their representations to other systems capable of propelling the organism to take the specific action that helps solve the adaptive problem at hand. Obvious examples of such motivational systems are the emotions, with all of the cognitive and

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physiological changes they induce (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000). As sophisticated adaptations, emotions do not merely motivate the individual to take a particular action, they optimize the individual for taking that action. This should not be all too unfamiliar to political psychologists. For example, research addressing the role of anxiety in politics has specifically been arguing and demonstrating that the emotion of anxiety does not just make people avoid the object of anxiety but also prepares people to update their habitual response to these objects by increasing the processing of information, increasing information searches and decreasing their reliance on previously formed habits (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000). Further illustration comes from research on the psychology underlying the adaptive solution of conflict situations. Hence, as argued above, this requires a representation of the relative fighting ability of the self and the opponent. Importantly, however, it also requires that these representations guide behavior by serving as input to motivational systems that will regulate aggression upwards or downwards, depending on whether the self is represented as weaker or stronger than the opponent. Recent research has identified anger as a key emotion in this regard (Sell, Cosmides & Tooby, 2009). When a weaker individual seeks to claim a resource from a stronger self, anger in the self is triggered and, as a result, a range of processes is activated which further the goal of incentivizing withdrawal. When angry, for example, people are likely to signal the value of a resource to them (and, hence, their willingness to fight), derogate the strength of the other, signaling fighting ability (both verbally and by displaying physical cues of strength, such as size and facial masculinity) and ultimately engage in direct cost imposition (Sell, 2011); all processes that serve to get a weaker person to withdraw from the resource.

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Analyzing Politics: Identifying Domains and Mechanisms The key thing when evaluating and generating predictions from the perspective of evolutionary psychology is the identification of the relevant adaptive problem. It is the features of this problem that determines the input and output features of any psychological mechanism selected to functionally solve the problem. Analytically, one can move both ways between psychological mechanism and adaptive problem. One can identify an adaptive problem and, through analysis of the features of the problem, make predictions about the existence and structure of a psychological mechanism (i.e., the input it scans for and the output it generates) by considering what psychological features are needed to solve the specific adaptive problem. Specifically, this involves three sets of interlinked theoretical analyses (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992): a task analysis (what are the features of the adaptive problem?), a solvability analysis (can the proposed psychological mechanism solve this problem?), and an evolvability analysis (is it plausible that this psychological mechanisms could evolve under the conditions that have been present throughout human evolutionary history; e.g., does the existence of the mechanism require the existence of conditions - technological, social etc. - that were unlikely to be present under ancestral circumstances?). One can also move from the identification of a psychological mechanism towards identifying the specific adaptive problem this mechanism evolved to solve. This has been referred to as reverse-engineering (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992): by picking apart the mechanism, scrutinizing its individual components, one can identify in broad terms the kind of problem it seems to fit. Such a process of reverse-engineering, however, will often be followed by the three before-mentioned analyses in order to generate new, testable predictions about yet unrecognized structural features of the mechanism: if Y is really the adaptive problem mechanism X evolved to solve, mechanism X

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should also expose features Q, Z and P. After all, most researchers are mainly interested in the application of evolutionary psychology to the extent it generates novel, testable predictions about current psychological responses.

The Proper and Actual Domains of Political Psychological Mechanisms Modern humans evolved in small groups of about 30-200 individuals on the East African Savanna between 100.000-200.000 years ago. They subsisted on hunted meat and gathered fruits, plants and roots and survived using stone-age technology. A number of features of this natural and social ecology are unchanged from then until now such as the need to acquire calories, friends and mates. This makes it relatively straightforward to identify the relevant adaptive problem that has selected for the psychological mechanisms that are involved in meeting these needs today. The default expectation would be that the psychological mechanisms that we use to, e.g., form friendships today are the same mechanisms that evolved ancestrally for friendship formation. Unfortunately, in the case of politics and for the political psychologist, the identification of the relevant adaptive problem is more difficult. The life of our ancestors was a social life and it was also a political life. Politics is commonly conceptualized as the process of determining access to resources: Who is recognized to get what, when and how (Laswell, 1936)? In that sense, our ancestors have faced numerous political problems: how should foraged food be divided, how should access to mates be regulated, how should we deal with exploiters that steal food, who should determine where the band head to next and how should we approach the band we observed across the hill.

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While politics has been with our species for several hundred of thousands of years, the context of politics has changed dramatically within the last 10,000 years (Petersen & Aarøe, 2012). Today, we live in mass societies, are interacting with millions of anonymous and unknown strangers, are making political judgments about political issues that arise from novel technologies (e.g., genetically-modified food) or issues with high levels of macro-economic and legal complexity (e.g., welfare benefits). So, if a researcher is interested in studying the psychological mechanisms underlying opinions about genetically-modified food or welfare benefits, how do the researcher identify the relevant adaptive problems that have structured the set of psychological mechanisms (most often there are multiple) that individuals today use to form these opinions? Essentially, the dilemma is this: Without the identification of an adaptive problem there is no way to generate consilient predictions about the inputs to and the outputs of the psychological mechanisms but given the novelty of at least some political issues there are no immediately apparent adaptive problems that corresponds to the issues. To address such dilemmas, Sperber (1996) has introduced a distinction between two types of "domains" of a psychological mechanism. One domain is referred to as the proper domain. This is the adaptive problem that selected for the psychological mechanism and has determined its features. This is essentially what we have focused on in the above. The other domain is referred to as the actual domain. These are the actual features of the present world that the mechanism is used for processing. The proper and actual domain of a mechanism can be completely overlapping as in the case of friendship formation. Or the actual domain can include a much broader range of situations than the proper domain. In politics, this will often be the case.

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The fact that mechanism can be designed to only activate in the face of a very narrow range of cues (given the input conditions of the mechanism) but still come to process a wide-ranger of situations than initially selected for is a direct consequence of the way natural selection works and the types of psychological mechanisms it can produce. The mechanisms of the human mind (or the mind of any other animal) does not and cannot directly perceive or identify adaptive problems. Instead, the mechanisms have been selected to activate certain sets of responses (cognitive, emotional and behavioral) when the mechanisms detect cues that over human evolutionary history have statistically predicted the presence of a situation with fitness consequences (however, miniscule). It is the presence of these cues rather than the presence of the adaptive problem that activates the mechanisms. If today, in the modern world, we encounter these cues the corresponding mechanisms will be brought online - whether or not these mechanisms motivate fitness-enhancing behavior. Pornography is an obvious non-political example: cues of nudity and sexual arousal activate mechanisms for arousal in the mind of the viewer - not because this is particularly adaptive but because these cues disclosed the presence of a reproductive opportunity ancestrally. Pornography is part of the actual domain of human mating psychology but not part of its proper domain. A genuine political example relates to the above-described representational and motivational adaptations designed to navigate conflict situations. Physical strength was ancestrally important in these situations. In contemporary politics, however, outcomes are determined by the number of seats in parliament held by different factions, not physical strength. Still, physical strength continues to guide political behavior. Physically stronger males are more inclined to support war as a solution to international conflicts (Sell, Cosmides & Tooby, 2009), they are more

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supportive of dominating other groups (Price, Kang, Dunn, & Hopkins, 2011) and they are more self-interested in terms of their political opinions on issues of redistribution (Petersen, Sznycer, Sell, Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). For wealthy males, opposition to redistributing wealth to the poor increases with strength. For males who are poor, higher strength increases support for acquiring wealth from the rich (i.e., redistribution). The structure of the psychological mechanisms that guide intuitions of political conflict reflects, in other words, an origin in which resources needed to be seized and defended, in part through physical force. As consequence, modern political issues that are surrounded by cues of conflict (e.g., international relations, race relations and redistribution) activate these mechanisms and become part of the actual domain of the mechanisms.

Identifying the Proper Domains of Human Political Psychology The first challenge for the evolutionary political psychologist interested in understanding the psychology that structures opinions on a particular political issue is therefore to identify the cues that surrounds that issue. These cues (or parts of them) constitute the actual domains of the multiple mechanisms that are involved in producing opinions on and behaviors relating to the issue. The second challenge then is to make inferences from these cues to evolutionarily relevant counterparts and, through that, build hypotheses about the actual domain - i.e., the adaptive problem that a particular mechanism evolved to navigate. By identifying the adaptive problem, hypotheses on the structure of the involved representational and motivational systems can be built. One example of this is research on attitudes about genetically modified food. While this is a novel issue, it is surrounded (in, e.g., public debates) by cues that signal an evolutionarily recurrent threat. Foods that have changed from their natural

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condition into something else by exposure to an external substance have over evolutionary history been reliably associated with infection-risk. Consistent with that researchers have shown that people who are in general more worried about disease are also more opposed to genetically modified foods (Prokop et al., 2013). The evolutionary political psychologist as consequence needs to be both well versed in political analysis and in evolutionary theory. We cannot develop completely models of the cues that our psychology is exposed to without understanding the dynamics of institutions, media systems and political elites. But we cannot develop completely models of the psychological responses that these cues give rise to without understanding the evolutionary process that has shaped our psychology.

An Illustration: The Evolutionary Psychology of The Deservingness Heuristic To illustrate this analytical process, we can focus on research on social welfare attitudes. This is one of the best researched areas within political science from an evolutionary perspective. The single best predictor of opposition to welfare spending among Americans is agreement with the statement "welfare recipients are undeserving" (Gilens, 1999: 93). The importance of this so-called deservingness heuristic for welfare attitudes is a very robust phenomenon and has been replicated in numerous studies also in samples outside of United States (e.g., Oorschot, 2006; Petersen, 2012; Petersen et al., 2012). These studies also show that the key precusor of the judgment that welfare recipients are underserving is the perception that they are lazy. If welfare recipients are seen as lazy, they are seen as undeserving. If they are are seens as unlucky, they are seen as deserving.

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Multiple explanations have been provided for the deservingness heuristic and the association it generates between perceiving the recipients as lazy and being opposed to welfare. Gilens (1999) argues that the association is an example of cultural learning and emerges in highly individualistic cultures such as the US. Rothstein (1998) argues that the association is learned from certain institutional arrangements. Specifically, it is argued that liberal welfare states with extensive means-testing make people think about welfare in terms of whether recipients fulfill the necessary criteria and, hence, deserve the benefits. Skitka and Tetlock (1993) point to the hypothesis that the association could be part of a conservative ideological script and, hence, linked to an individual’s political ideology. Finally, Oorschot (2006: 38) have suggested that perhaps the deservingness heuristic is not necessarily tied to any particular culture, institution or ideology but rather emerges because of "its functionality for the survival of social groups". The question is: can we evaluate these diverse theories by using a consilient, evolutionary approach? And can this evaluation provide new insights on the structure of the deservingness heuristic?

The Proper Domain of the Deservingness Heuristic Approaching the deservingness heuristic from an evolutionary perspective requires us first to identify the cues that it elicits it. We can begin by look at the overall issue of welfare. If we abstract away the multiple legal complexities, it is about people in material need who are requesting benefits from the larger collective that have been produced by the others members of this collective. We can get further insights about looking at the specific cues that seem to regulate the deservingness heuristic: are welfare recipients lazy or unlucky? That is, do their need reflect that they have not

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been willing to pay the costs of alleviating themselves from this need or - have they indeed tried by failed due to circumstances beyond their own control? The deservingness heuristic thus operates in a domain related to whether people are willing to pay costs in order to receive benefits. The actual domain of this psychological mechanism includes the modern welfare state. Its proper domain, however, was most likely cooperation decisions in small-scale face-to-face interactions. The problem of whether people are trying to extract benefits without paying the costs thus closely resembles a crucial adaptive problem in the evolution of cooperation: the problem of cheaters, also often referred to as free-riders. Providing benefits to non-kin is, ceteris paribus, fitness reducing. However, as multiple evolutionary models have shown cooperation can evolve to the extent it is reciprocal. If organism A helps organism B when B is in need and if organism B returns the favor when A is in need, this provides overall fitness benefits to both parties. For each organism, however, there is a fitness benefits to be harvested if the organism can reap a little more from the interaction than it puts in: if it can get away with free-riding subtly on the other organism's effort. This constitutes a fitness cost to the cheated organism and the evolution of cooperation requires the existence of fine-tuned abilities to detect cheaters and deal swiftly with them by withdrawing cooperation and disincentivising further cheating (e.g., using punishment). These abilities have all been carefully documented in humans (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). According to this cue analysis, the deservingness heuristic involved in attitude formation within the actual domain of social welfare issues is a psychological mechanism that evolved to facilitate cooperation within the proper domain of smallscale social interaction. This most direct test of this has been a study using a memory confusion protocol to demonstrate that people think about the provisioning of social

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welfare using the same psychological categories that they use to think about smallscale help-giving between friends (Petersen, 2012). This explanation stands against traditional political science explanations for the origins of the deservingness heuristic. If this mechanism evolved to facilitate cooperation, it should - as other products of evolution - reliably develop in all phenotypical normal humans. It is not something learned by particular individuals in particular cultures, welfare states or with particular ideological leanings. Consistent with this, it has been demonstrated to operate similarly in Danes and Americans (Petersen, 2012; Aarøe & Petersen, 2014), conservatives and liberals (Petersen, 2012; Petersen et al., 2012) and, more generally, across all the countries with available data in World Values Survey (although the effects are not significant in 1 out of 49 countries) (Petersen et al., 2012). The analysis that the proper domain of the deservingness heuristic is evolutionarily recurrent small-scale cooperation has in itself helped generate novel observations about, for example, the heuristic's universal nature. The real purpose of this analysis, however, is to generate novel, testable predictions about the representational and motivational systems underlying the heuristic and, hence, in shedding new light on the input that activates the heuristic and the output it delivers. We now turn to two illustrations of how this can be achieved. The key is here to ask: how would the psychological mechanism be able to solve the adaptive problems tied to its proper domain?

The Representational Systems of the Deservingness Heuristic To the extent the proper domain of the deservingness heuristic is ancestral reciprocal help-giving, the important inputs to this mechanisms would be cues that over evolutionary history have statistically correlated with situations in which a need does

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not reflect a lack of effort. Being a victim of accidents, expressing gratitude, having contributed previously are examples. Potentially, however, effort cues are not the only cues that could be relevant. If the deservingness heuristic was learned in modern, highly technical societies, attending to the competences or skill-set of the recipient could also be potentially important. In the case of competent individuals, the marginal benefit of their work for society will be greater relative to the work of incompetent individuals and, hence, putting extra pressure on the competent could be a rational judgmental short-cut in modern society. Relatedly, social psychologists have argued that the key dimension underlying help-giving decisions are considerations about "controllability", i.e., whether the needy individual has control over his or her need. In this regard, it has been argued that chronic dispositions related to competence such as intelligence are not something that individuals are themselves responsible for (Weiner, 1995). Hence, if a person is in need because of incompetence, then people will be motivated to support help. An analysis of the adaptive problem of reciprocal cooperation, however, leads to different expectations. In this perspective, help-giving decisions are regulated by a logic of social exchange. In an exchange system, competent individuals are better investment objects. If anything, from an evolutionary perspective, people (if given a choice) should be more supportive of helping a competent individual in need than an incompetent individual. At the same time, however, there is little reason to expect that competence is a key input to representational systems designed to identify cheaters. Ancestrally, a relevant competence cue could be actual foraging success. If cheaters were not making an effort to forage, they would return with less from their expeditions and, hence, this foraging success could be a relevant cue. Yet, evolutionary analysis suggests that this cue is inferior for two reasons (Petersen et al.,

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2012; Delton et al., 2012). First, the random variation in foraging success makes it difficult to gauge whether an individuals’ lack of success stems from a lowering of the costs spend foraging or from a string of bad luck. Second, studies of living foragers show that individuals differ in their foraging competence (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005) and, hence, some has consistently less success than others without this necessarily being the results of parasitic motivations. A number of studies document that high food producers obtain, for example, more mating opportunities and greater offspring survivorship and, hence, seem to be repaid in other currencies than food (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005). Hence, from the perspective of a high producer in a smallscale group with a limited number of available social partners, it can pay off to share with incompetents. Yet, emphasizing the key role of motivation cues, this is only the case if these individuals have genuine motivations and, hence, are motivated to repay in another currency. In brief, competence is not an information-rich cue in the context of cheater-detection and, to the extent the deservingness heuristic emerges from representational and motivational systems related to cheater-detection, we should not expect this heuristic to utilize such cues. One universal cue of competence - and one often used in social psychological studies - is intelligence (Weiner, 1995). Hence, colleagues and I have focused on perceptions of the intelligence of welfare recipients in order to test whether the deservingness heuristic is geared towards utilizing competence cues as input. In one classical work on deservingness judgments in welfare attitudes, Gilens (1999) provided preliminary evidence on the effects of intelligence perceptions. He examined the partial correlations between, on the one hand, support for welfare and, on the other hand, stereotypes about the laziness and intelligence of Afro-Americans. Only laziness stereotypes had a direct effect on welfare support. In a range of samples -

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including nationally representative samples - in both Denmark and the United States, we have since replicated this lack of an effect of competence on emotional reactions towards welfare recipients (Petersen et al., 2012; Petersen & Aarøe, 2013). Hence, while perceptions of laziness have strong effects on feelings of anger and compassion towards welfare recipients, perceptions of competence have no direct effect on these feelings. Using an experimental design, this difference in the effects on emotional reactions towards welfare recipients of laziness and competence cues has furthermore been replicated in a Peruvian sample; thereby strengthening both the internal and cross-cultural validity of the relationship (Dahl-Nielsen, 2011). Hence, by dissecting which kinds of cues would be adaptive to consider in the context of the proper domain, one can build testable predictions about how a psychological mechanism operates in an actual domain of modern politics. In the particular case investigated here, both evolutionary analysis and empirical data converge on the notion that the representational systems underlying the deservingness heuristic are not designed to seek out competence cues.

The Motivational Systems of the Deservingness Heuristic As argued above, one of nature's key solutions to the problem of motivation are the emotions and, hence, an evolutionary perspective on the motivational systems of the deservingness heuristic implies that emotions will play a crucial role in the operations of the heuristic. To motivate long-term investments in reciprocators, a likely candidate emotion is compassion. Compassion elicits motivations to confer benefits on individuals who we value but who are in need and cannot, here and now, reciprocate (Batson et al. 1995). When a cheater is identified, there are several potentially

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relevant emotions and negative emotions such as anger, contempt and disgust all entail diminished investments in the object of the emotion. At the same time, however, the motivational outputs of these emotions differ on a key dimension. Ancestrally, there would only be limited number of potential valuable social relationships in ancestral small-scale groups and, hence, it would be important not just to dismiss strategic cheaters but to re-educate them. Only in severe cases should individuals feel compelled to shun the target altogether. In line with this, a number of anthropological accounts report that while individuals who do not share sometimes are ostracized, they are allowed re-entry in the community if their sharing levels increase (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005). This suggests that the detection of cheaters in a sharing situation should trigger anger rather than disgust and contempt. Anger is optimally geared for punishment and, as repeatedly demonstrated in experimental economics, punishment - or credible threats hereof - are a key tool for up-regulating cooperative motivations in others (Sell et al., 2009). In contrast to anger, contempt and disgust seemingly facilitates avoidance (Haidt, 2003). If exchange partners have been a scarce resource over human evolutionary history, the activation of the motivational systems of disgust and contempt would, in other words, intensify this scarcity whereas anger could potentially widen the exchange system. While an evolutionary perspective highlights anger and compassion in particular as crucial output of the deservingness heuristic, a traditional political science perspective provide no particular reason why emotions should be important. Furthermore, even if emotions were believed to play a role, a goal of expressing moral disapproval of undeserving recipients could just as easily be reached with expressing contempt and disgust as with anger (see, e.g., Feather, 1999; Weiner, 1995). In fact, the most widely cited theory of emotions with political science,

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affective intelligence theory (Marcus et al., 2000), treats contempt, disgust and anger as a single emotion, aversion. In a first test of whether anger and compassion constituted core motivational systems undergirding the deservingness heuristic, a sample of Danish undergraduates participated in an experiment wherein they presented with one of three short vignettes (Petersen et al., 2012). The vignettes portrayed a social welfare recipient as lazy or as hard-working and, hence, the recipients in the vignettes differed in their degree of deservingness. Consistent with the predicted key role of emotions, the hard-working recipient activated high levels of compassion but low levels of anger and vice versa for the lazy recipient. Further analyses suggested that these emotions mediated the effects of deservingness cues on welfare support. This lends support to the notion that compassion and anger are tightly regulated by deservingness cues and, hence, constitutes a key output of the deservingness heuristic. A second test focused directly at discerning between anger and the alternative emotions of disgust and contempt as outputs of the deservingness heuristic (Petersen et al., 2012). A nationally representative survey of Danes and a sample of American undergraduates answered, first, a question about their perceptions of whether social welfare recipients are in general lazy or hard-working and, second, questions about their feelings of compassion, anger, disgust and contempt towards welfare recipients. Consistent with the evolutionary analyses of the origins and structure of the deservingness heuristic, the analyses demonstrated that there were only consistent significant correlations between the deservingness-related perceptions, on the one hand, and anger and compassion, on the other hand. In both the United States and Denmark, these correlations were substantial. And in both countries, perceiving welfare recipients as lazy lead to higher anger and lower compassion in both

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countries. The controlled correlations between deservingness perceptions and disgust and contempt were miniscule and no correlations with these alternative emotions were consistently significant across the countries.

Mapping the Deservingness Heuristic The above sections provide illustrations of how one can utilize evolutionary psychology to map the inputs that a psychological mechanism utilizes and the outputs it delivers. By going through similar analyses for other potential inputs and outputs one develop a detailed set of testable predictions of how any psychological mechanisms such as the deservingness heuristic operates. For the deservingness heuristic, Figure 2 shows a schematic map of some the psychological pathways that underlie it (for an elaborated discussion, see Petersen, 2015). The evolved function of the deservingness heuristic, we have argued, is to facilitate social exchange as insurance and, to this end, invest resources in individuals who are likely to reciprocate on future occasions and avoid investing resources in cheaters. Consequently, the trigger event activating the psychological systems underlying the deservingness heuristic is a request for help from a given individual (denoted Y in Figure 2). Such requests, first, activate a range of representational systems designed to identify cheaters and reciprocators, respectively, which then begin collecting the available information about the individual. The information that is extracted is the kind of information that would correlate with being a reciprocator over human evolutionary history, such as expressions of gratitude, being truly needy, being part of the same group, that Y has previously contributed in exchange situations, and that Y makes an effort to alleviate his own need (see also Oorschot, 2000).

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On the basis of such environmentally extracted cues, the cheater-detection systems build a representation of whether Y is cooperatively motivated toward the decision-maker, X. If this motivation is assessed as being high, a signal is sent to activate the particular system designed for social investments, compassion, which motivates the provision of benefits to Y. If the motivation is assessed as being low, the anger system is activated. The function of the deservingness heuristic is to recruit insurance, and the potential insurance partners available in the small-scale social world of our ancestors were limited. The anger system is designed to recalibrate the motivation of cheaters by withdrawing benefits and imposing costs (Petersen, Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2010; Sell, Cosmides & Tooby, 2009) and, hence, potentially recruit the cheater into the social exchange system. As far as our evidence suggests, this is the construction of the deservingness heuristic. This heuristic provides considerable structure to the welfare attitudes of modern individuals, enabling them to decide quickly whether to support welfare benefits for specific individuals or groups. But it is not a heuristic that citizens have learned in particular institutional, ideological or cultural environments. Rather, the structure of the heuristic seems optimized to recruit social insurance under ancestral circumstances and, because the cues surrounding modern welfare issues mimic adaptive problems related to insurance, the heuristic is automatically activated in the context of opinion formation on welfare issues.

- Figure 2 about here -

In this manner, by dissecting psychological mechanisms from an evolutionary perspective, generating maps of them and by adding to these maps as further

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theoretical analyses and evidence becomes available, we are able to build consilient and cumulative understandings of the structure of political psychology.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have addressed what I have termed the bridging problem in interdisciplinary analyses: that is, how do we bring insights from the natural sciences to bear on theories within the social sciences and, of particular interest here, theories about political psychology? One key approach that provides such as bridge is evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology focus on the exact level of analysis that political psychology gravitates towards - namely, psychological mechanisms - and does so in a way that allows one to utilize evolutionary biology to deductively derive testable predictions about the structure of these mechanisms. By applying a consilient approach to theories with political psychology, the goal is to provide theories that are maximally constrained by the cumulative scientific understanding of how the world works and, hence, much more likely to be correct a priori. It is important to note that the evolutionary political psychologist continuously needs to oscillate between two types of analyses: cue analysis and adaptationist analysis. The adaptionist analysis allows one to develop predictions about the functional structure of mechanisms by analyzing the features of adaptive problems. The cue analysis, in contrast, is concerned with identifying the cues that activate the psychological mechanisms and, hence, identifying the proper adaptive problem that the mechanisms evolved to handle. But the analyses of available cues are also extremely important after the psychological mechanism and its representational and motivational systems have been mapped. To know which specific emotion is

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activated in people at a specific time, we need to know which cues confront them here and now. In politics, this requires careful analyses of the institutional settings, the social networks, the media content and so forth within which particular resides. For this analyses an understanding of classical observations and studies within political science is crucial. Consilience is not the same as reductionism. Thus, we cannot reduce political psychology to evolutionary biology. Only by integrating the strengths of different disciplines can we arrive at a consilient understanding of the world. A final caveat is due. The utilization of consilient knowledge in this chapter appears easier than it is. Heated discussions about the correctness of facts, theories, conceptual definitions and operationalizations are not limited to political psychology. They appear across the sciences (and, in particular, the social sciences) and, at presently, these discussions often take place without considerations of the insights produced by higher-order disciplines. When seeking consilience, a deep fundamental challenge is therefore that political scientists cannot just look to psychology and psychologists cannot just look to biology; because these disciplines are not yet consilient themselves. The search for consilience is, as consequence, a search for patterns across numerous fields. A consilient-oriented political psychologist needs to seek out and appreciate observations from diverse disciplines such as anthropology, primatology, archaeology, evolutionary biology and psychology and be ready to search for and recognize the patterns in the observations produced in each of these disciplines. Pattern recognition is at the heart of interdisciplinarity. This is the situation at the present point in the cultural evolution of science. Hopefully in a future not too distant, however, the political psychologist will just be able to open a psychology textbook and the arguments and theories presented will already be constrained by the

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entire stock of consilient knowledge. Being able to constrain ones own imagination in this way would benefit the collective progress of science and the investment decisions of the individual researcher.

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Figure 1. A Schematic Representation of a Psychological Mechanism.

Informational Input

InformationProcessing

Behavioral Output

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Figure 2. A Schematic Representation of the Deservingness Heuristic.