Who Killed JFK?
Belief Bias and Cognitive Flexibility to Socially-Authoritative Information Sources
Who Killed JFK? Lee Harvey Oswald? The Mob? Fidel Castro? The CIA? As intriguing as these possibilities are, they may not be as politically important as how the question is asked.
At issue here is not who killed JFK, but how humans formulate and adjust their opinions. In our Spring 2006 survey, we tested the phenomenon of attitudinal priming, whereby we deliberately tried to steer the response by taking advantage of the natural tendency for people to use socially-authoritative cues to determine what to believe.
We prepared two socially-authoritative preparatory sentences to promote the validity of either the Conspiracy Theory or the Lone Gunman Theory in the JFK assassination.
One half of our 2,485 respondents were primed with the following sentence prior to responding to the Who Killed JFK question:
In 2003, ABC News presented a computer simulation that sup-ported the Warren Commission's findings that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman.The other half were primed with the following statement designed to establish the credibility of the Conspiracy Theories:
In 1979, the House Committee on Assassinations said that President Kennedy was killed by a probable conspiracy.Did this simple priming of the Who Killed JFK question have an impact on the responses? Before we get to this, let's see how our political cohorts thought about the JFK assassination in general.
Who Killed JFK? (Blue=Conspiracy, Red=Lone Gunman) (L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LT=Libertarian, C=Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male)As can be seen in the above graph, the Conspiracy Theories are more popular than Lone Gunman Theories with the Liberals, Moderates, and Libertarians (the Not Sure responses are sizable, but are not shown). Only the Conservatives favor the Lone Gunman Theories.
This orientation of the Conservatives towards the Lone Gunman Theories appears to partially related to their tendency towards cognitive unambiguity. Those Conservatives that rated lower on our cognitive-unambiguity scale, (similar to the average Liberal), were more likely to believe in one of the Conspiracy Theories.
But we must add that the variations in attitudes on Who Killed JFK question are rather unusual. For example, the Atheists had an elevation in their preferences for Lone Gunman Theories that were almost as high as the Very Religious. Further, those people reporting lower eye contact, an indicator of social submissiveness, also had an elevation in their preferences for the Lone Gunman Theories.
The older generation was more skeptical, as the 40 and over age group was more likely to believe in a Conspiracy Theory than were the people Under 40, across all political cohorts. Even though most people favor Conspiracy Theories, this may point to a secular attitude shift on the JFK assassination, tending towards the Lone Gunman Theories. However, the Under 40 people are still more likely to believe in a Conspiracy Theory, just not as much as do the 40 and over group.
Attitudinal Priming
Overall, the responses to our deliberate priming of the Conspiracy Theory was mixed, and only appeared in the Conservatives and Liberals. The Moderates and Libertarians were not swayed. The overall Conspiracy Theory priming score was 1.05. This means that for all those selecting the Conspiracy Theory: 1.05 people selected it after viewing the pro-Conspiracy priming statement for every person selecting it after viewing the pro-Lone Gunman priming statement. (This number is not weighted by the relative numbers in the political cohorts).
However, the priming for the Lone Gunman theory appeared to work across most of our cohorts. The overall Lone Gunman Theory priming score was 1.23. This means that for all those selecting the Lone Gunman Theory: 1.23 people selected it after viewing the pro-Lone Gunman priming statement for every person that selecting it after viewing the pro-Conspiracy priming statement.
In the table below, we see the priming scores by political cohort and gender.
Conspire Priming Score
Liberal Female Moderate Female Libertarian Female Conservative Female Liberal Male Moderate Male Libertarian Male Conservative Male Totals As can be seen in the above table, among the females, the Liberals had the highest overall priming scores. That is, they were more likely to adjust their opinion to match the priming statements. The Conservative females had a propensity to adjust their opinion towards the Conspiracy Theory, and no such propensity to adjust it towards the Lone Gunman Theory.
However, the Moderate and Libertarian females were more likely to adjust their opinions towards the Lone Gunman Theory, and no propensity towards the Conspiracy Theory. We must add that the Liberal females were the only cohort that passed statistical significance tests.
Among the males, the Liberals exhibited the highest overall priming scores, and a strong elevation towards the Lone Gunman priming statement. The Conservative males mirror the Conservative females with their higher propensity for the Conspiracy Theory priming.
Both the Conservatives and Liberals had higher priming scores in the direction opposite to their general opinions. That is, the Conservatives, on average, believe in Lone Gunman Theories, but were more responsive towards Conspiracy Theory priming. The Liberals generally believe in Conspiracy Theories, but were more responsive towards Lone Gunman priming. This was true for both males and females.
The Moderates did not respond to Conspiracy Theory priming, but were quite responsive to Lone Gunman priming, again emulating the Liberal and Conservative tendency for priming in the direction opposite to their general opinions.
Belief Bias
The tendency to maintain a belief in the face of contradictory evidence is referred to as belief bias, and has been a common subject of two of the most important researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience, Vinod Goel and Raymond Dolan.
Charging Reason with Emotion: The Medial Prefrontal Cortex (in Green)Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Goel and Dolan have located emotionally charged "hot" reasoning and emotionally neutral "cold" reasoning in two regions of the prefrontal cortex that have also been implicated in religious disposition (see the adjacent article). The ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is highly active during emotionally charged reasoning, and was also active during the d'Aquili-Newberg meditative states. During this heightened activity of the VMPFC, activity in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is suppressed.
During emotionally neutral reasoning, the DLPFC is activated and the VMPFC is suppressed. The functioning of the DLPFC and the VMPFC during emotionally charged and emotionally neutral reasoning is reciprocal, as they appear to form a gateway for adding and subtracting emotional valence to cold reasoning.
The medial prefrontal cortex has been associated with personal moral decision making. But Goel and Dolan found that belief bias is also associated with one of the brain's primary regions promoting religiosity--the left temporal lobe.
The left temporal lobe is also more likely to maintain belief stability over time, which is a common attribute of religious disposition. But Goel and Dolan might have found its nemesis--the right lateral prefrontal cortex. The right lateral prefrontal cortex seems to inhibit the belief bias that is strongly promoted by the left temporal lobe.
As noted in the adjacent article, the right prefrontal cortex is not very accommodating to religious belief, and one of the reasons why the "right-brained" Liberals, on average, have such low rates of religiosity when compared to the Conservatives.
The Conservatives tend to exhibit the cognitive characteristics of the left hemisphere, and the left temporal lobe carries a lot of weight with the left prefrontal cortex and its mutual interconnections with the medial region, which provide the emotional valence to cold reasoning.
Discussion
Humans are genetically programmed to look for certain cues in evaluating what to believe, which are often independent of the reality of the belief. One of those cues is the number of people that share a belief. This phenomenon is seen in emerging religions, which tend to grow slowly until they reach a certain proportion of the population, at which time they explode.
Christianity maintained a very low but steadily growing proportion of the Roman population until about 300 C.E., when they jumped from 10% to 56% of the population in just 50 years. The conversion to Islam would exhibit similar patterns of exponential growth after a achieving a threshold population proportion near the 10% level.
Religions are invariably organized around public belief displays that utilize this human tendency for belief reinforcement by the social acceptance of their belief system. This show of numbers helps to stabilize and enforce their personal religious beliefs. It is important for religions with small numbers to isolate themselves from society, or face extinction due to the tendency for humans to abandon poorly accepted religious beliefs.
But the stronger Liberal propensity to adjust beliefs towards more socially-authoritative information sources is rather interesting. No doubt the Liberals would not have been primed towards the Lone Gunman Theories had we only cited the controversial Warren Commission report. Adding the more recent ABC News computer simulation would add believability to the Lone Gunman Theory.
In our test, the Liberals exhibited the lowest belief stability of any political cohort. Their beliefs were highly malleable to socially acceptable information sources. This is consistent with the fact that Liberals score very high on cognitive ambiguity scales--higher than all the other political phenotypes.
It is also consistent with the Liberal's general shift towards right hemispheric cognitive styles, and their heavy adaptation of the right prefrontal cortex in the reduction of both belief bias and religiosity.
The Conservatives exhibited much higher belief stability, consistent with their general left hemispheric cognitive styles that are frequently facilitated by the religious left temporal cortex.
Except for the Libertarian males, all of the political cohorts exhibited some tendency towards cognitive flexibility in response to socially acceptable information sources, which interestingly, were opposite to their general beliefs. However, only the Liberal cognitive flexibility was statistically significant.
The Darwin Code
The neurological machinery of transcendence may have arisen from the neural circuitry that evolved for mating and sexual experience......Andrew Newberg
The theory that religiosity may have been built on top of neurosexual networks may seem a bit unusual given the strong moralistic content of religious doctrine. But as Andrew Newberg noted, there is a suspicious commonality of words used to describe both religious and sexual states: bliss, rapture, ecstasy, etc. Neural evolution exhibits a strong tendency to locate the excitation and inhibition of a particular behavior into the same area of the central nervous system. But is there an area in the brain where religiosity and sexuality are co-located?
The Ark of the Covenant: Persinger's Helmet Magnetically Induces Electric Current that Stimulates Religious SensationsPersinger's Temporal Lobe Theory of Religiosity
The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious disposition from the study of temporal lobe disorders, including epilepsy. Michael Persinger has formally proposed a theory of religiosity centered on the temporal cortices, stating "the God Experience is an artifact of transient changes in the temporal lobe."
There is substantial evidence to back his hypothesis. Temporal lobe epileptics have high rates of religiosity, which are heightened during seizures. Temporal lobectomies also result in a significant decrease in religiosity.
Persinger invented a helmet (in the above picture) that will generate electromagnetic (EM) fields that can induce electric current targeted at specific neural regions. When Persinger's Helmet is targeted at the right temporal lobe, it produces the sensation of a negative "presence", sometimes interpreted as demonic by those with religious predispositions. (The right hemisphere is very prone to negative emotional states, and the left hemisphere to positive states).
God, the Sense of Self, and The Left Temporal LobeHowever, when targeted at the left temporal lobe, it produces the sensation of a benevolent "presence", sometimes interpreted as god by the religious. Persinger noted that religious sensations were correlated with asymmetric theta wave activity in the left and right temporal cortices. That is, religiosity seemed to be promoted by activated left temporal theta activity that is out of sync with right temporal theta activity.
Persinger related these stronger "sense of self" feelings to a belief in God. In other words, God was related to a heightened "sense of self" relative to the external world, and a function of asymmetric electrical activity in the left and right temporal cortices.
Interestingly, Persinger's Helmet also produces sexual arousal when the EM fields are targeted at the amygdala, which coincidentally is buried within the inferior temporal cortex, not far from the temporal locus of the religious sensations.
The d'Aquili-Newberg Theory of Meditative States
But Persinger's temporal cortex model of religiosity is not the only neurological model of religious experience. The aforementioned Newberg and the late Eugene d'Aquili dealt with another type of religious experience--meditative states. These meditative states are similar to Persinger's supernatural experiences, and do share some common neural substrates.
The d'Aquili-Newberg neurological model of meditative states includes the parietal, prefrontal, and inferior temporal cortices (which was the key region in Persinger's model).
The d'Aquili-Newberg model has an interesting centerpiece involving neurons that are programmed to fire only when viewing objects within a person's reach. Other neurons fire when objects are outside that reach. The d'Aquili-Newberg model makes use of this fact, implicating its importance in the development of the sense of self as opposed to rest of the world, which was also a prominent feature of Persinger's model. This distinction is subsequently broken down during deep meditative states, resulting in a sensation of oneness with the universe.
The Prefrontal Cortex and the Very Religious
The d'Aquili-Newberg model's incorporation of the prefrontal cortex, (Beauregard would identify the orbito and medial regions), which initiates these deep meditative states, has led to some religiously promotive literature implicating religiosity as a cognitively advanced feature of the prefrontal cortex.
However, our survey results are not consistent with this view. We have tested almost 7,500 survey respondents with a variety of visuospatial tests, and found that strong religious beliefs lead to substantial reductions in visuospatial reasoning, primarily in females. This reduction also occurs to a lesser extent in males, especially those with predispositions towards conventional good versus evil religious models.
While we must be careful with our assertion, as these tests were administered via the internet, the performance reductions of the Very Religious are too substantial and too consistent across all of our surveys to be explained by testing methodology problems.
Since visuospatial reasoning is facilitated by the prefrontal cortex (along with the temporal, parietal, and occipital cortices), one interpretation of these visuospatial performance deficits is related to the diminished influence of the prefrontal cortex in the Very Religious, on average.
This is also consistent with Persinger's "temporal lobe" personality type, of which hyper-religiosity is a one of the common behavioral traits. But we have detected other evidence that also implicates a reduction of prefrontal region's cognitive importance in the Very Religious: extroversion and olfactory efficiency.
The Very Religious are more likely to describe themselves as extroverted than are the Non-Religious, and this is indeed another indication of a reduction of the overall cognitive influence of the prefrontal cortex. Introverts are more likely to adapt the slower-acting and behaviorally-inhibiting prefrontal cortex, and are correspondingly less religious than extroverts, on average.
The Very Religious also report a stronger sense of smell, on average, than the Non-Religious. We must take care in the interpretation of our survey results, since this is self-reported. However, as studies have shown, people that self-report high olfactory efficiency do indeed test better in laboratory-controlled settings. Higher olfactory efficiency is also evidence of a stronger temporal orientation of the Very Religious, on average.
The Prefrontal-Temporal Religious Debate
The inhibition of religiosity being waged in the prefrontal cortex has run into a bit of a snag. The prefrontal cortex, in neurological terms, is a big place, and has been associated with both the promotion and the inhibition of religious disposition.
Prefrontal promotion and inhibition of religious disposition seems to be associated with ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), respectively. As noted by d'Aquili and Newberg, there is substantial evidence that the medial and orbital regions of the prefrontal cortex are activated in meditative-like religious states (see the discussion on Belief Bias in the article on the left).
These prefrontal regions have a high axon-to-cell body ratio, which implies a wide network of information integration, including numerous interconnections with the temporal cortex. But what are the prefrontal and temporal cortices talking about?
While the medial and the politically-hot orbital prefrontal regions are major players in the cross-talk, the specific functions of these afferent and efferent neural connections is not well known. But it certainly lends itself to a model of mutual activation.
The medial prefrontal-temporal connections are intriguing, as they may be instrumental in language processing. But much of the prefrontal-temporal cross-talk involves the selection of behaviorally relevant stimuli for extended analysis.
There is no cognitive evidence that the Very Religious are selecting environmental targets any differently than the Non-Religious, but this certainly cannot be discounted, as to our knowledge, it has never been researched.
But the visuospatial deficits in the Very Religious may indeed be related to asymmetries in visual working memory coordination between the inferior temporal cortex and the prefrontal cortex. Visual working memory is the temporary scratchpad holding visual images for cognitive operations such as mental reversal or rotation.
A model of diminished prefrontal working memory functionality certainly fits with the visuospatial performance deficits in the Very Religious, particularly the females that think constantly about god, which scored only at chance in our surveys.
But the elevation of extroversion and sense of smell in the Very Religious supports a more general reduction in the influence of the prefrontal cortex, and a more general elevation in the influence of the temporal cortex, as in Persinger's "temporal" personality type.
Discussion
The results from our surveys demonstrate some interesting reproductive behaviors of the Very Religious, and in particular the religious females: they think less about sex, they have more sex, they had their first child at a younger age, and they have more children when compared to the Non-Religious.
Ironically, they have more negative emotional responses to sexual words and pictures than the non-religious. This is also correlated with a deficit in visuospatial reasoning, an elevation in levels of extroversion, and an enhanced sense of smell. All of these are indicators of Persinger's "temporal lobe" personality.
The Very Religious have a substantial reproductive advantage over the non-religious, and this appears to be facilitated by the stronger influence of the temporal cortex in their behavior.
The prefrontal cortex is highly involved in behavioral inhibition, which promotes introversion and reduces violent and anti-social behavior. But is also tends to inhibit reproduction. Advanced educational levels, lower rates of religiosity, and lower birth rates are no coincidence.
But the prefrontal and temporal cortices take up a lot of neural tissue, and this simple view does not do justice to their complex mutual interconnectivity, not to mention their respective interconnectivity to the rest of the central nervous system. The emerging picture of religiosity, like sexuality, is likely to be spread over a wide array of neural components.
But there are more questions than answers. First, is Persinger's "sensed presence" a common cognitive characteristic in the Very Religious? Do they actually feel the presence of God? Are the Very Religious approximating the "meditative states" of the d'Aquili-Newberg model during their prayer sessions?
One of Persinger's speculations is that the experience of God has its origins in the temporal access to normally inaccessible infantile parental images. According to this view, God is based heavily on genetically-programmed infantile parental images that can only be retrieved in adulthood by the temporal cortex.
While this is admittedly a wild speculation, the heavy use of parental terminology (i.e. Father and Mother) in religious canon is certainly consistent with this hypothesis.
But as importantly, humans are exhibiting reproductive polymorphism. They are practicing different reproductive strategies within the same population--a common behavior of many animals. This reproductive polymorphism between the Very Religious and Non-Religious is facilitated by their variations in prefrontal and temporal cortical activity levels.
We have yet to discuss the left and right hemispheric asymmetries in religious behavior, which are the foundation of the variations between religiosity and spirituality. The Liberals are much more likely to refer to themselves as spiritual when compared to the Conservatives.
Also, the left prefrontal cortex is more tolerant of religiosity than the right prefrontal cortex. The right lateral prefrontal cortex seems to be a major anti-religious region in the brain, and the nemesis of the left temporal cortex. In part, this explains the "right-brained" Liberal's lower and the "left-brained" Conservative's higher tendency towards religiosity.
More interesting still is the ability of the Very Religious to reverse the stimulating impact of sexually arousing words. This may be a window into how the behavioral inhibition mechanisms of Very Religious work. These mechanisms may be asymmetrically distributed in the temporal cortex, as opposed to the Non-Religious, who are more likely to favor behavioral regulation circuitry in the prefrontal cortex. The Very Religious and Non-Religious are using different areas of their brains to regulate their social behavior. Perhaps this explains the strangeness to which they view each other's beliefs.
Ironically, Darwin may be religiosity's best friend. Religiosity is a cognitive by-product of evolution, and has been facilitating the functions of behavioral inhibition and social organization while maintaining high reproductive rates. The prefrontal cortex's upward growth spiral has stalled while the prefrontal and temporal cortices engage in their struggle for control over the limbic system. Unless the prefrontal cortex can find a way to out-reproduce the temporal cortex, it will be stalled for a long, long time.
_____________________________________________________
Brack and Zhang, June 2006
Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
Zhang@neuropolitics.org
435
The Evolution of Political Behavior
The great diversity of human political orientation is one of evolution's more interesting mysteries. Where did all the modern-day Conservatives, Liberals, Moderates, and Libertarians come from? Why is there so much diversity of political and religious orientation? Has human evolution quietly produced a wide spectrum of political cognitive styles to provide multiple adaptive solutions to environmental and populational stresses?
The Great Rift Valley: What was there about this geologic area that was so important in human evolution?The geographic distribution of the 6.5 billion humans that inhabit this planet is wider than any other mammal. Modern humans seem to have a single point of origin, as the DNA trail places those origins back into one of the major geological phenomema in earth's recent history--the Great Rift valleys in Africa. Anthropologists would argue over the approximate date of the appearance of the first anatomically modern homo sapiens--anywhere from 400,000 to 100,000 years ago. But these archaic homo sapiens were behaviorally quite boring compared to modern-day humans.
Something big happened to the human gene pool about 50,000 years ago, and the evidence again points towards the Great Rift valley, although at that same time, early homo sapiens were distributed throughout Asia. What was it about this part of Africa that seemed to promote and propagate major primate mutations more effectively than other regions? The substantial geologic and climatic changes in this area were adapted into many theories of hominid speciation. But this most recent change was not morphological-- it was cognitive. More specifically, it was human creativity--both practical and artistic.
The rapid innovations in tool design would have a corresponding impact on population density, as homo sapiens were now doing something rather extraordinary among the hominids--they were increasing the food yield of a given area of land, even before the advent of agriculture.
Primates never had many choices when it came to distributing themselves over a given territory. Prior to the great cognitive leap of about 50,000 years ago, humans followed the usual primate rule of constant population density.
Humans were well adapted for territorial dispersion and their small kinship-based social organizations were frequently smaller than 100 individuals--which were correspondingly effective in maintaining behavioral regulation. Humans behave themselves better in small, genetically close kinship groups.
However, hunter-gatherer group size is a hotly debated topic among anthropologists, due to the strong tendency for hunter-gatherers to form smaller sub-groups and disperse quickly to reduce resource competition. The hunter-gatherers walked a very fine line between moderating resource competition with improved sexual selection, and their highly variable population densities would accommodate both.
Conservatives, Liberals, and Populational Sustainability
But humans were doing more than just maintaining a delicate balance between resource competition and sexual selection--they were spreading out all over the planet. At the center of this human diaspora was populational sustainability, or the ability of the local habitat to support the local population.
Populational sustainability was key in the evolution of many behavioral traits that are found in modern day Conservatives and Liberals. Natural selection accelerates during periods of resource scarcity, which occur when populations either expand beyong the carrying capacity of their local habitats or those habitats are depleted.
Obviously the modern-day Liberal's environmentally sensitive attitudes are inherited from this evolutionary behavioral adaptation against habitat depletion. Ancient populations that were confined to fixed areas, by choice or otherwise, were well served by environmental sensitivity, as well as by moderating their reproductive rates to match the carrying capacity of the local habitat.
But the modern-day Conservative's greater organization towards sustaining reproductive rates corresponds to a stronger preference for low-density populations. This low-density Conservative preference is best seen in the Conservative voting patterns of rural and suburban communities. This ancient reproductive polymorphism would lead to the migration into new areas, and substantially contributed to the human diaspora that populated the far reaches of the earth.
As seen in recent history, populations that expand into new territories are usually more politically conservative than their populations of origin. They also tend to have higher birth rates. The modern-day Conservative-Liberal environmental debates are the echoes of this ancient natural selection for these behavioral polymorphisms.
But the early hunter-gatherer societies were cauldrons for the natural selection of other behaviors that translate into modern-day conservativism and liberalism, and would set the stage for their adaptation into the next great shock in human social organization-agriculture.
Genetic Distance and Social Behavior
Hunter-gatherer societies, with their relatively equitable resource distributions, are often considered to be havens for liberalistic behaviors. However, they were actually more reflective of the fact that conservatism and liberalism are harder to detect in small groups. The small group behavior of Conservatives, Liberals, Moderates, Libertarians, and other modern-day political phenotypes is more similar than their large group behavior.
This behavioral symmetry in small-group behavior would break down in large groups. Liberalism and conservatism would become obvious in larger groups, where people have to organize their behavior in the context of a wider genetic distance and lower or no direct social contact with other group members.
Humans would display a larger spectrum of social behaviors in their interactions with genetically distant group members, from the very affiliative to the very competitive. This leads to an ominous question about human social behavior: do stronger familial behaviors correlate with stronger competitive behaviors with non-family or genetically distant individuals?
The evolution of social structures on the island of Sicily may be an extreme example of this phenomenon, where affiliative behaviors are centered on genetic closeness, and strong competitive behaviors prevail with genetic distance. This odd mixture of strong affiliative familial behavior with strong anti-social behavior would be the center of much public interest in the mafia.
The Breakdown of Pro-Social Behaviors in Large Groups
As hunter-gatherer groups passed about 100 individuals, more organized and authoritarian social structures popped up quickly. Maintaining pro-social behavior after the group size passed 100 members was problematical across many cultures. This phenomenon is seen in the modern-day Hutterites, who farm communally in South Dakota, and who regard 150 members as the limit for their respective groups sizes due to the break down in behavioral regulation mechanisms without an organized police force.
Some estimates have placed the upper limit of the number of individuals that humans can keep track of at about 250 people. People store valuable information on others, such as genetic distance, threat assessments, cooperativeness, competitiveness, skill sets, intelligence assessments, dominance assessments, etc.
Maintaining updated personal information across 250 people takes so much time and so many neural resources that humans typicially maintain much smaller active personal inventories, and rely heavily on more general categorization mechanisms, such as family of origin, ethnicity, occupation, or religion, to better handle the large quantity of social information that can no longer be based on individual reference.
It is interesting that the average human group size predicted by some primate neocortex size models is about 150, which is not far from the critical mass point for behavioral regulation without the introduction of authoritarian agents. This prediction is based on the fact that average group size in primates seems to be a function of neocortex volume.
Cognitive Polymorphism
In large groups, humans are faced with social decision making involving group members with little or no direct contact. Empathetic behaviors, which were effective within small groups and families, were compromised in large groups.
The adaptation of authoritarian agents into large groups would help solve the problem of anti-social behavior, but widespread authoritarianism was divisive, and would tend to split up groups of hunter-gatherers.
Fortunately, humans would inherit and expand upon some proto-moralistic primate behaviors such as attitudinal reciprocity. Attitudinal reciprocity is the tendency to mirror the cooperative and competitive dispositions of others. Attitudinal reciprocity is common in primates, and would form the basis for proto-morality in humans.
This, when combined with social empathy, would provide the foundations for pro-social behaviors in large groups, without the widespread incorporation of authoritarianism. For hunter-gatherers, this was critical as group sizes exceeded 100 individuals.
But evolution has done something very remarkable with humans. It retained and encouraged cognitive polymorphism. Cognitive polymorphism is the tendency for a population to exhibit multiple cognitive views of the world. Cognitive polymorphism is founded not only on the asymmetric cognitive styles of the right and left hemispheres, but also on the substructures within those hemispheres.
This cognitive specialization would take advantage of the extraordinary abilities of humans to communicate via language. The human brains could now specialize, and the variety of cognitive specializations of a large group of humans was much more evolutionarily valuable than everyone thinking the same way. Evolution did not want us to all think the same way.
But this cognitive polymorphism was not just cultural, it was genetic. These cognitive polymorphisms also would favor particular behavioral inhibition mechanisms that would maintain pro-social behavior in large groups. The Liberal's propensity towards social empathy was located more in the right hemisphere, and the Conservative's propensity towards religiosity more in the left, and proto-morality was also shifted towards the left hemisphere.
________________________________________
Politics StinksPerfume, Cologne, and Political Affiliation
As if we didn't already suspect it, something does not smell quite right about politics. We have captured some interesting variations in the behaviors of Conservatives and Liberals, and this one ranks right up there.
If you happen to smell the odor of perfume emanating from a nearby female, she's about twice as likely to be Very Conservative as she is to be Very Liberal. It seems that the female Conservatives are more likely to wear perfume than the Liberals.
In the graph below, we see the percentages of our 2,485 survey respondents that wear perfume or cologne frequently:
Wearing Perfume or Cologne Frequently: (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male)The wearing of perfume or cologne is a positive function as one goes from left to right on the political scale, particularly in females. Males also exhibit this tendency, but to a much lesser degree than do females.
The cross-correlation analysis for those that wear perfume or cologne frequently was very interesting. One of the strongest correlations was with thinking about sex. Another strong correlation was with extroversion. Both females and males report much higher levels of extroversion than those that do not wear perfume or cologne.
The perfumed were also more likely to report an enhanced sense of smell, which itself correlates highly with extroversion. They were also more likely to report a slightly higher fear of negative evaluation from others. This particular result was unusual, as it broke the multicollinerity pattern with the other variables.
The idea that perfume wearing has dominance or territorial overtones has been proposed by some psychologists. Based on the recent findings that certain animals use pheromonal odor detection in the resolution of dominance, the possibility that some humans also use scent for dominance displays and dominance detection is probable.
The perfumed were more likely to maintain constant eye contact, an indicator that there may indeed be some dominance overtones associated with those that are more likely to project their modified odors onto the unsuspecting public. Interestingly, there was also an elevation in the "forced" preference for fascist social organizations, and a higher social valuation of the rich and powerful.
The good-smelling respondents also indicated higher job rankings in their workplace than the unperfumed, in both males and females. They were also more likely to be religious. They also were more shifted towards left-brained cognitive styles than were the natural smelling people.
