Evolutionary Psychology and Politics with Hector Garcia

On Opinion

“A lot of the human behaviour that seems perplexing, irrational (like politics or religion) is often most effectively explained by Evolutionary Psychology”

We evolved to live in hunter-gatherer communities clustered in small units spread sparsely across the landscape. Existentially threatened by outsiders - who brought war as well as germs - humans evolved adaptive psychological behaviours to help negotiate our ancestral environment.

Evolutionary Psychology seeks to understand human psychological behaviour from that adaptive perspective. If we protect our children, fall in love, create social hierarchies - what were the evolutionary reasons to do so?

“Evolutionary psychology allows us to get sighted to our instincts”

Listen to Hector and Turi discuss what evolutionary psychology can teach us about our Politics.

• Evolutionary Basis for Conservatism and Liberalism
• The Politics of Sex: why men and women have different political tendencies
• Why there’s a correlation between conservatism and upper-body strength in men
• Why there’s a correlation between liberalism and greater facial expressiveness across both genders
• Simon Baron Cohen’s work on autism and the “essential male brain”
• Why Conservatives are from Mars and Liberals are from Venus
• How we can map our politics across the Big 5 Personality Test
• Why high-testosterone men tend to share less
• The evolutionary basis for Xenophobia and Xenophilia
• Why Conservatives love dominance hierarchies and Liberals spend all their effort trying to pull them down.
• Why Fear is such a big driver for conservatives (who tend to have a larger amygdala than liberals)
• What the difference between Chimps and Bonobos can teach us about the evolution of our politics
• How to explain the manifestation of strong man politicians, like Donald Trump, in evolutionary terms
• The idea of “Evolutionary Mismatch”: that certain types of behaviour today are a useless hold over from our hunter-gatherer ancestry (like a psychological version of the appendix)
• And why the Iroquois had a split leadership system: one for war (led by young men) and one for peace (led by the old and the women).

“Democracy is the answer, but it often needs tuning”

Works cited include:

• John Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Alford and their work on the Biology of Political Differences.
• Sir Simon Baron Cohen and his work on autism.

Hector Garcia

Hector Garcia is Professor in the department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas and a Clinical Psychologist working with veterans. He’s the author of Sex, Power and Partisanship and hosts a YouTube channel discussing those issues.

More on this episode

Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.

Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi

Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about

And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.