Read on to find out how insights from Evolutionary Psychology can be applied to politics…

“during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war…Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice… and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

-Thomas Hobbes

“mankind are one community, make up one society distinct from all other creatures. And were it not for the corruption, and viciousness of degenerate men, there would be no need of any other; no necessity that men should separate from this great and natural community, and by positive agreements combine into smaller and divided associations”

Many classical political theorists had something to say about the nature of man, but most of their claims were based on untested assumptions. Today, this trend continues as some modern political scientists develop conclusions or even plans of action whose validity rests on unproven speculations about human nature. Evolutionary psychologists, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides had this to say about such claims:

Many people think it is sensible to ask whether human nature is inherently “good” or “bad,” and believe the answer has implications for the law…this way of framing the question is incoherent: it is a value judgment, devoid of any claims about how the mind works. To be useful to citizens and lawmakers, a claim about human nature needs to be a claim about how the mind actually works: about the design of programs that process information, allowing us to learn, reason, feel, judge, and react. Human nature is not inherently good or bad: it is, “inherently,” a collection of programs, which execute their functions. The real question is: Which programs reliably develop in the human mind, and how do they process information? Evolutionary psychology seeks to answer this question. Accurate answers, when they are eventually arrived at, will have implications for lawmaking.

Tooby and Cosmides are right to point out that in order to understand human nature, one must go beyond analyzing current and historical trends and begin asking questions about why certain aspects of human nature exist to begin with. Evolutionary psychology is an approach which provides a way to test claims about human nature.

Evolutionary psychologists operate under the premise that the human mind was “designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Tooby & Cosmides).” Under this view, much of past and current human behavior is a result of the interaction of evolved adaptations and learning. Not all traits are adaptations, but likely candidates include traits that “(a) are complexly specialized for solving an adaptive problem; (b) reliably develop in all normal human beings; (c) develop without any conscious effort and in the absence of formal instruction; (d) are often applied without any awareness of their underlying logic, and (e) are distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently (Tooby & Cosmides).” (for more information read this great primer on Evolutionary Psychology).

In order to uncover the design, number, and nature of human adaptations, evolutionary psychologists examine current information and information about our evolutionary past. Fossil evidence shows that our ancestors lived in small, nomadic bands consisting of family members, friends, and competitors and subsisted by hunting and gathering. Therefore, our earliest ancestors faced adaptive problems associated with living in a tightly knit social group. Over time, adaptations that successfully solved these problems evolved and the genes that regulated these adaptations spread until they were present in all members of the species. These adaptations include what Tooby and Cosmides refer to as “moral heuristics,” which they describe in the following passage:

To negotiate that intimate social world, evolution equipped our minds with moral heuristics: decision rules that generate intuitions about fairness and justice, punitiveness and approval, right and wrong. Each was designed by natural selection to operate in a different type of ancestral social situation, and each is triggered by cues that, in an ancestral past, indicated that type of situation was occurring. Political debate in the present is often a struggle over how to characterize events in terms of these ancestral situation-types, because alternative framings trigger different evolved moral heuristics. Once triggered, a moral heuristic produces intuitions about what course of action would be virtuous or immoral, as well as intuitions about the likely consequences of taking that course of action. These intuitions motivate lawmakers and citizens to enact laws promoting or even mandating certain courses of action. But the mismatch between the ancestral world and current conditions is so great that laws that seem virtuous to our hunter-gatherer minds often have unanticipated social consequences that are disastrous, and laws that seem morally dubious can be engines of social welfare.

As an example of moral heuristics, consider our moral intuitions regarding sharing. Our early ancestors had to decide who to share their resources with and when to share them. Although reciprocity played a large part in determining sharing behavior, other environmental factors like the role of luck and effort in obtaining the resource were also important. For instance, meat tends to be shared with all group members, but food obtained through gathering is usually only shared with immediate family members. From a survival standpoint this kind of behavior makes sense. Gathered foods are consistently available and can be obtained through effort alone, so sharing gathered foods is costly to the individual and offers little personal benefit. However, meat is scarce and a successful hunt involves a great deal of luck, so sharing meat offers great long term personal benefit, despite the immediate cost. If one group member has a successful kill and shares the meat with others, he guarantees that when he is not so lucky, others will reciprocate and share their meat with him. Thus, he sacrifices short term gain for long term stability.

Our moral intuitions often seem to guide political debate without our awareness. Consider the debate about offering aid to the homeless. Instead of discussing how giving aid to the homeless will affect overall social welfare, the debate between politicians and citizens tends to focus on whether or not homeless people deserve help. The side supporting aid asserts that the homeless are merely victims of bad luck or illness, while the side opposing aid claims that homeless people are lazy, and thus do not deserve aid. It is not hard to see that these moral intuitions about giving aid to others mirror our ancestors’ decision rules for sharing food. The problem with this kind of “gut” decision making is that “Our minds are not equipped with moral intuitions designed to promote general social welfare, even in the contexts for which they evolved (Tooby & Cosmides).” Natural selection “choses” traits that promote the survival and reproduction of the individual, not the group. Although evolution may have equipped us with traits like empathy that may promote social welfare, these traits were not selected for because they were good for the group. They were selected for because they were good for the survival/reproduction of the individual (or, more specifically his or her genes).

In order to create political policies that promote social welfare, we must learn to question our moral intuitions and conduct in depth analyses that provide information about the consequences of different political actions. Evolutionary Psychologists can uncover various moral heuristics, but their findings will only influence the decisions of political actors if they understand how moral heuristics affect their actions and why relying on them might not always be the best way to improve social welfare.

*This post was heavily influenced by Tooby and Cosmides article “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics, and the Law”