Neuropolitics.org Ezine
"The Ghost World of Liberals and Conservatives"
March 2007
The Stressed Electorate
Stress and the Iraqi War
It is certainly understandable for an American soldier, out on patrol in Ghazaliyah, one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods, to be under considerable stress. But what is going on in the minds of the people sitting in the comfort of their homes watching it on cable TV? Are they stressed too? And has this imperceptible, yet persistent stress resulted in the downfall of the Conservative government in America?
According to the results from our Iraqi War Attitudes Survey, the Liberal support for the war is almost completely gone, while the Moderates have shifted heavily against it. The Libertarians are holding support a little better than the Moderates, while the Conservatives are unique in their ability to support foreign warfare for long periods of time.
We asked the 3,501 respondents to our survey, do you feel any stress from the Iraqi War? The options to this question were never, rarely, sometimes, always, and every time I think about it. Those responses are broken down by political-gender cohorts in the table below.
Rarely
Some
timesDo you feel stress from the Iraqi War?
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)As can be seen in the above table, most people report feeling some level of stress from the Iraqi War. This is particularly true of females. As can also be seen, the perceived level of stress decreases as one goes from left to right on the political spectrum.
The Liberals, on average, report the highest rates of overall stress from the Iraqi war, while the Conservatives report the lowest. This is not surprising, as Liberals, on average, report the highest levels of general stress, and Conservatives, on average, report the lowest.
On average, females have lower rates of support for the Iraqi war than do males, but this varies by political cohort. Within the Liberal and Conservative cohorts, female and male support are nearly equal.
However, female support for the Iraqi war is significantly lower among both the Moderates and Libertarians. Coincidentally, the Moderate and Libertarian females report much higher levels of warfare stress than their male counterparts.
In the adjacent article, Every Picture Tells a Story, Conservative and Liberal stress from the Iraqi war seems to be triggered by different cues, as seen in the wide variation in emotional responses to our sample of five pictures.
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Surrogate Warfare
Conservatives, Liberals, and Sports
The American Conservative SportExcept for reproduction, modern sports may tell us more about the evolution of humans than any other behavior. Humans have evolved from a long line of animals that have adapted multiple modes of aggression, from subtle dominance displays to wars of extermination.
These multiple modes of aggression show up first in the invertebrates, who exhibit a surprising amount of discretion when it comes to picking a fight. Like ritualized reproductive behavior, ritualized fighting, its close cousin, has been observed across a wide spectrum of invertebrates and vertebrates, where the opponents deliberately engage in less deadly fighting techniques to minimize damage to their opponents, while still obtaining the resources they are competing for.
In modern-day societies, humans have carried this to the extreme, and as a result, their competition over resources rarely turns violent. Adult humans exhibit some of the lowest rates of intraspecies violence seen among the primates, especially given their remarkably high population densities.
But as the rate of violent death plummeted from the double-digit levels of human prehistory to less than 0.2% in modern societies, humans have been making up for the deficit by adding to their inventory of surrogate violence. This is more recently observed in the surge of violence in modern video games, movies, and sports. Eliminating these surrogate forms of violence will be as difficult as eliminating their positive impact on the dopamine reward system.
The way people react to their favorite sports team winning a championship is identical to the way our distant ancestors felt after they defeated an enemy in battle--testosterone levels increase and dopamine pumps through the neurons modulating reward. But what does our present appetite for sports tell us about our evolutionary prehistory? Further, what does it tell us about Conservatives and Liberals?
American Football
American football has a special status among the sports, as it is the only sport preferred by majorities in several of our political-gender cohorts. For Americans, no other sport comes close. It is also the sport that most closely resembles coordinated combat between small bands of males. The forces created by the numerous and violent collisions during a football game exceeds all other team sports.
We asked the 3,267 American respondents to our survey to choose their favorite sport, and those preferring American football are displayed in the graph below.
Favorite American Sport: Football
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)As can be seen, football was the favorite sport of the majority of American Conservative and Very Conservative males, and by a very wide margin over the next most popular sport, baseball. It was also selected first by American Liberal males, but not by a very wide margin over their next favorite, which was surprisingly soccer. The American Very Liberals actually preferred soccer over football. The Libertarian males selected football first, followed by hockey. The American Nonpolitical males selected football first, but at rates similar to Liberals. Soccer was their next most popular choice.
Among females, football was also very popular among the Very Conservatives, Conservatives, and Moderates, as it was their favorite choice by quite a margin. The other females were not as supportive, and football was not the first choice of American Very Liberals, Liberals, Libertarians, and Nonpoliticals.
American Football and Support for the Iraqi War
Support for the Iraqi war was stronger for both American Conservatives and Liberals if they indicated that American football was their favorite sport. In the graph below, we show the percentages of those supporting the war of those that selected football versus those that selected another sport.
Support for the Iraqi War: The Football Factor
(VL= Very Liberal, L=Very Liberal, VC=Very Conservative, C=Conservative) (M=Male, F=Female)Among both American Conservatives and Liberals, the preference for football and the support for the Iraqi War are correlated variables. Liberals that still support the war are few and far between, but if they do support the war, they are about 7 times more likely to indicate that football is their favorite sport. The Conservatives are about 11% more likely to support the war if football is their favorite sport.
Sports Preferences by Political Cohort
The table below displays the favorite sports selected by political-gender cohorts. We only included the top five sports selected.
Foot
ballBase
ballBasket
ballFavorite Sports of Americans by Political-Gender Cohorts
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)The above table shows some interesting trends. First, the American Conservatives tend to like football and baseball, and less inclined to prefer basketball, hockey, and soccer. The sports preferences of Liberals are more evenly distributed among all the sports. Remarkably, the American Liberals and the Nonpolitical have a high preference for soccer, something that the Conservatives do not share.
Discussion
What does the Conservative preference for football mean? Is it an indicator of their enhanced tendency to organize into hierarchical social groups and wage intergroup competition? Football is notable by highly organized and interdependent motions of all the players, and a large number of high energy collisions between opponents. It emulates human combat better than most other team sports.
The fact that the preference for American football correlates with support for the Iraqi war, even within the same political cohort, is certainly interesting. Also interesting was the fact that Conservatives that preferred football indicated that they would be more willing to risk their life to fight in the Iraq war than those Conservatives that preferred another sport.
However, we are going to hold our discussion on how political and religious affiliation relates to the phenomenon of sacrificing one's life for another day.
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Beauty, Economic Development, and the Slow Growing Human Brain
Beautiful Females, Big Cities, and Slow Growing Brains
What course would economic development have taken if there were no females? In a world consisting only of males, there would undoubtedly be fewer clothes, fewer shoes, fewer nice restaurants, smaller homes, more trucks, more guns, and a large number of golf courses.
In modern economies, the production of economic goods vastly exceeds the minimum necessary to sustain even an expanding population, which begs the question--why do humans persist in working instead of converting their increased productivity into more leisure time?
The strong influence of culture on economic behavior is seen in the wide differences in the average hours worked by country. In America, in 2002, the average worker toiled about 1,815 hours a year, while workers in the Netherlands spent only 1,340 hours at the job. While the average person in France works about 24% less hours than they did 40 years ago, the average American works about 20% more.
The factors contributing to the puzzling American obsession with work are no doubt numerous, but one doesn't have to look very long to find one the chief culprits--birth rates. The United States maintains unusually high birth rates for an industrialized economy, much higher than the Northern European countries, which coincidentally, spend much less time on the job.
However, birth rates do not account for all the idiosyncrasies of economic behavior. Globally, birth rates tend to be inversely proportional to level of industrialization.
In the social science of economics, not much is heard about evolution, which is ironic, as both Darwin and Wallace came up with the idea of natural selection while reading Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population, which proposes a catastropic disparity between human population growth and economic growth.
While modern day economic behavior has natural selection written all over it, a substantial proportion of it has been driven by the Darwinian principle of sexual selection, and runaway sexual selection at that.
Sexual selection has been implicated in the evolution of many human attributes, from the hairless body to the substantial human propensity for art and music. Whether these traits are survivally neutral is debatable, as they both seem to have positive survival value. Sexual selection promotes trait shifts in populations, and the traits that are not survivally neutral are subject to the ordinary rules of natural selection.
Runaway sexual selection was first articulated by Ronald Fisher, and simply put, is a process whereby a genetic trait is attractive to the opposite sex, and the resultant offspring contain both the genes for the desirable trait and the disposition towards attraction to that trait. Over time, this increase in the combinatorial probability of these genes can dramatically increase their overall presence in the population gene pool. For example, taller males are generally preferred by females, and the offspring of such a union will contain both the trait and the attraction to that trait.
The traits involved in modern economic behavior have been under severe evolutionary pressures, to say the least. Such phylogenetically ancient behaviors as predation, foraging, nest and shelter construction, agriculture, tool-making, territoriality, exploration, and storing food have been taken to extraordinary levels in humans.
The human species is notable by the unprecedented reproductive value of the males. Besides providing sperm, the males of most species have limited or no reproductive value. Humans are also notable by their unusually high degree of labor specialization, particularly between the sexes, which is mainly attributable to the long-term and substantial investment that human females make in child-rearing.
This long-term investment in human offspring is directly related to the longer time required for human brain growth. Coincidentally, females selected the males with higher energy yields of their economic behavior. Economic development is mostly about energy, whether it is the energy stored up in a gallon of gasoline, an item of food, or the energy saved by the human body while living in a warm house.
Human economic behavior has increased the energy utilization per person, which translates directly into longer periods of offspring investment and correspondingly longer periods for brain growth, not to mention the positive impact on population growth in general.
While females were highly specialized in foraging and nest construction, these behaviors were not adequate to support the energy investment required for human offspring. This would leave the males to fill the energy gap. The development of large scale irrigation systems, transportation systems, construction, mining, manufacturing, etc, were the domain of the male, and added dramatically to the energy yield of a habitat, and plugged the gap in the energy requirements of raising children and ultimately supporting the slow development of the human nervous system.
An economically productive male could actually support offspring investment to a higher degree than a female, and further, would send the human species down a pathway of reciprocal sexual selection, where both males and females were applying criteria in selecting mates.
Males were heavily selected for economic criteria, and females were heavily selected for a variety of reproductive fitness cues, such as hair and skin quality, breast size, lip color and shape, waist-to-hip ratio, etc. In short, females were selected for all those traits that currently are enhanced by the modern day cosmetic, dental, and plastic surgery industries.
Male wealth and female beauty have become reproductively intertwined, as seen in the elevated proportions of beautiful females in economically advantaged areas, such as the better parts of large cities. This process of runaway sexual selection has hidden the fact that it originally supported the high energy requirements of the slow growing human brain.
Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?
Conservatives and Liberals Respond to Images of the
Iraqi War
Soldier Holding Injured Child: On average, Conservatives reported slightly positive emotions in viewing this Photo, Liberals had negative emotionsIn our Iraqi Warfare Attitudes Survey, we asked the 3,501 respondents to rate their emotional reactions to five photos with content involving various aspects of the Iraqi conflict. We asked the Conservatives, Liberals, Moderates, Libertarians, and the Nonpolitical to rate each of these five photographs on a scale of -5 (the most negative emotional reaction) to +5 (the most positive). We also indicated that a response of zero indicated a neutral reaction to the photo.
The variation in responses were interesting, to say the least. The table below contains the average responses by political-gender cohort for the above photo (Soldier holding injured child).
Soldier Holding Injured Child: Emotional ratings of the above photo
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)The picture of the soldier holding the injured child had quite a mix of emotional responses. Females reported more negative emotional ratings than males. Among the females, the Very Liberals averaged the lowest rating overall, at -3.18. The Liberal females were second worst, with an average of -2.76. The Nonpolitical females were next, at -2.34, followed by the Moderate females (-2.23) and the Libertarian females (-1.85). Only the Conservative females had positive emotional ratings, with the Very Conservatives showing the most positive reaction, at +2.03, and the regular Conservatives were slightly positive at +0.59.
The male pattern was analogous, but less emotional than the female pattern, as among the males, the Very Liberals (-2.09) and Liberals (-1.93) males reported the most negative emotions. They were followed by the Nonpolitical males, at -1.10. The Moderate (-0.40) and Libertarian (-0.20) males were more neutral, and the Conservative (+1.10) and Very Conservative (+1.73) males reported positive emotions, like their female political counterparts.
Two Soldiers
Two Soldiers: Conservatives reported positive emotions in viewing this photo, Liberals were strongly negative
Two Soldiers: Emotional ratings of the above photo
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)The females were more emotionally responsive to the photo of the two soldiers than were the males. Among the females, only the Conservatives females reported positive emotions, while Liberals reported very negative emotions. The Nonpolitical, Moderate, and Libertarian females also reported negative emotions, though not as negative as the Liberals.
On the male side, the Liberals and Nonpolitical reported negative emotions, while the Moderate and Libertarians reported neutral emotions. The Conservative males again reported the highest positive ratings.
The Islamic Army
The Islamic Army: Conservatives reported very negative emotions, Liberals were not as negative
Islamic Army: Emotional ratings of the above photo
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)This was one of the more remarkable patterns of our five photographs, as it runs counter to the popular view that Liberals are more emotional than Conservatives. Conservatives can indeed exhibit stronger emotional reactions than do the Liberals, as long as it pertains to a prospective enemy. In fact, the Conservatives recorded the most negative emotional reaction that we encountered in this test. The Very Conservative females, at -4.73, came close to the maximum possible negative rating of -5. Note again that the females had stronger emotional reactions than the males.
The Liberals had negative ratings comparable to those of the photos containing American soldiers. While the site of armed soldiers, either American or Islamic, had similar emotional impacts on Liberals, the sight of armed soldiers would have opposite emotional impacts on the Conservatives, depending on whether they were American or Islamic. Also noteworthy is that the level of negative emotion towards the Islamic army increased as one went from left to right in the political scale. The Nonpolitical, or those that don't think very much about politics and have few opinions, had the lowest emotional response to a prospective enemy.
The Female Soldier
The Female Soldier: Conservatives reported very positive emotions in viewing this photo, Liberals were slightly positive
Female Soldier: Emotional ratings of the above photo
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)The Conservatives had their highest positive emotional rating on this photo, and it was also the only photo of a soldier that the Liberals had something other than a negative reaction to. However, the Liberal reactions were barely positive.
The American Coffin Picture
The American Coffin Picture: Liberals reported very negative emotions, Conservatives were not as emotional
American Coffin Picture: Emotional ratings of the above photo
(NP=Nonpolitical,VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian,C=Conservative,VC=Very Conservative)
(M=Male,F=Female)This Liberal males and females had their strongest negative reaction to this photo, as did the Nonpolitical. The Moderate females also had their strongest negative reaction. The Conservatives had negative reactions, but substantially less than the Liberals, and substantially less than their reaction to the Islamic Army photo.
Islamic Armies, American Coffins, and Support for the War
The two photos of most interest, and which created the most negative reactions among Conservatives and Liberals respectively, were the Islamic Army and American Coffin pictures. The Conservative reaction to the Islamic Army photo was substantially more negative than their reaction to the Coffin photo. In contrast, the Liberals were more upset by the Coffin photo.
In general, the relative reactions to these two photos are highly correlated with attitudes about the Iraqi War. If one reacted more negatively towards the Islamic Army photo than the American Coffin photo, then they were much more likely to support the war than vice-versa.
In the graph below, we see the emotional ratings of the Islamic Army and Coffin photos for those who support the Iraqi War versus those that are against it.
Reaction to Islamic Army photo (in RED) versus reaction to the American Coffin photo (in BLUE).As seen above, those against the Iraqi war reacted more negatively towards the American Coffin photo than they did the Islamic Army photo. Those supporting the Iraqi war had more negative reactions towards the Islamic Army photo than they did to the American Coffin photo. It is interesting to note that the difference in the negative emotional ratings for those supporting the war was very large.
But let's look at our individual political cohorts and see how their attitudes about the Iraqi war correlate with their reactions to the Islamic Army and American Coffin photographs. For this graph, we combined the Very Liberals in with the regular Liberals and the Very Conservatives in with the regular Conservatives.
Reaction to Islamic Army photo (in RED) versus reaction to the American Coffin photo (in BLUE) by Political Cohorts (C=Conservative, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian, NP=Nonpolitical)In the above graph, we see that across all political-gender cohorts, support for war occurred when the emotional rating for the Islamic Army photo was more negative than the American Coffin photo.
Conversely, for those opposing the war, the emotional rating of the American Coffin photo was more negative than the Islamic Army photo. The only exception were the Conservative males, who had still rated the Army photo to be worse, but not by as much as those Conservative males supporting the war.
Note that 19% of the Conservatives reported that they experienced positive emotions from looking at the Coffin picture. We suspect that this was due to the American flag. We presume they would have more negative reactions to actual pictures of dead Americans without the benefit of being covered by an American flag.
The Liberals were consistent in their distaste for photos of armed soldiers, and seemed to show little, if any, positive feelings for pictures of American soldiers over Islamic soldiers. Again, we suspect that their comparable negative ratings of photos of American soldiers were due primarily to the fact they were in Iraq. The Liberals were indeed the political cohort most disturbed by the photo of the American coffins.
Every picture tells a story, don't it?
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Brack and Zhang, March 2007
Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
Zhang@neuropolitics.org
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