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Whether or not the meek shall inherit the earth is still much in doubt. However, the adaptation of social submissiveness into early Christian doctrine is not. Christianity was originally a religion of the poor, promoting tolerance for earthly oppression and subsequent compensation by heavenly rewards. But the social submissiveness promoted in early Christianity was also accompanied by a kinder and gentler deity, one that even sacrificed himself for his followers, as opposed to the angry and vengeful God of the Old Testament.

Overt Human Dominance Behavior Unleashed By The Protection of a Moving Automobile

Christianity would reduce God’s human-like dominance behavior and at the same time promote non-violent social behavior. The survival value of social submissiveness is quite positive for a new religion, particularly in the first century Roman "protectorate" of Judeah. But the Christian introduction of a loving, self-sacrificing God would help to promote the spread of Christianity. The oppressed Christians removed the oppressive behavior from their God.

Unfortunately, removing oppressive behavior from other humans wouldn't be as easy. Primate dominance and submissive behaviors are as old as primates themselves, and humans have inherited more than their fair share. This innate tendency for dominance has been well documented in children as young as two. As any parent can attest to, kids readily use aggression and violence in disputes over toys. As soon as dominance is established within groups of young children, violence is minimized.

Adult dominance behavior has surprisingly (and suspiciously) been given a free pass from psychological scrutiny, perhaps related to the unusually political nature of scientific research. But a trickle of studies have yielded some interesting results. It seems that the resolution of dominance and deference, more commonly referred to as submissiveness, is hard-wired into our genes.

Humans will adjust their vocal frequency patterns to match those of what they perceive to be more dominant humans during conversations. Humans adjust their gait to match dominants. Humans utilize more mental resources in tracking the behaviors of the more dominant members. Humans generate more cortisol in their presence. Humans adjust their eye-contact patterns based on dominance-submission assessments. All this is done subconsciously, and is the product of millions of years of primate evolution.

But the developing primate brain would challenge overt violence-based dominance behaviors, and therefore change the way they were executed. Chimps would precede humans in the usage of complex social alliances to safely execute dominance. As the primate brain grew, violence-based dominance became difficult without organized social alliances. In humans, dominance would become difficult (and dangerous) to maintain without some form of benefit for both the dominant and submissive parties.

This would tend to limit the usage of dominance behaviors to workplace or family environments, where some benefit could be obtained even for subordinate members. Both of these environments are engaged in the control of resources. Dominance, for our purposes, is defined as resource-control.

Practicing overt dominance behaviors outside of these social groups is dangerous, and humans generally have well-adapted behavioral inhibition mechanisms to properly select the time and place to engage in dominance. The automobile, as seen above photo, would provide a safe haven for the overt display of dominance behaviors (not to mention the blogosphere).

Dominance behaviors are related to some form of resource-control, and the reproductive advantages of socially dominant primates is substantial. Primate dominance displays are designed to increase the perceived physical prowess and threat assessments from competing conspecifics, and humans have done much to adapt these into more subtle and less aggressive behaviors while maintaining the same dominance impact.

The question is, are dominance behaviors practiced equally by Conservatives and Liberals?

One such primate dominance behavior inherited by humans is maintenance of eye contact. Maintaining eye contact is a common dominance behavior throughout the primate world. However, we must be careful here, as eye contact is also utilized to resolve emotional states in others and also to convey affiliative attitudes. Extracting competitive versus affiliative motivations for maintaining eye contact is not easy.

We asked the 2,485 respondents to our survey how frequently do you maintain eye contact during conversations?

Eye Contact: Constantly (in Red), More Than Half the Time (in Yellow) (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male)

In the above graph, we see the constantly and more than half of the time responses by political and gender cohorts. The Conservatives in both genders are more likely to maintain constant eye contact during conversations. The females, on average, were more likely than males to maintain constant eye contact.

However, this does not distinguish whether this elevation in Conservative eye contact is an expression of a subtle form of dominance behavior or an enhanced tendency for affiliation and resolving emotional states in others. To shed some light on this, let's look at how eye contact correlates to rank within the workplace. In the graph below, we see the percentages of those respondents that report higher than average rank within their workplace. In this graph, we combined the Very Conservative cohort into the Conservative cohort, and the Very Liberal cohort into the Liberal cohort.

Higher Than Average Rank At the Workplace: (Less=Less than half eye contact, Half=Half eye contact, More=More than half eye contact) (L=Liberal, C=Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male)

In this graph, we see the remarkable correlation between eye contact and rank at the workplace. Those with the lowest rates of eye contact achieve the lowest ranks, on average. Those with the highest rates of eye contact achieve the highest ranks. The Conservative females with less eye contact did not report a single case of being in the upper echelons of their workplaces.

Interestingly, the Conservatives with less eye contact were much less likely to achieve higher ranks than were the Liberals with less eye contact. On the other hand, the Conservative males with more eye contact were the undisputed kings of the workplace.

This is evidence that the elevation in eye contact has dominance overtones, at least for males. But this is to be expected, as the Conservative male's greater propensity to organize into hierarchical social groups is facilitated by dominance behaviors. While the Conservative females have reported, on average, a greater tendency to ascend into the higher ranks at their workplaces, it is not as pronounced and conclusive as the Conservative male trend.

The Liberals are also using dominance behaviors successfully at the workplace, as indicative of their correlation between workplace rank and eye contact. But on average, Liberals were less likely than Conservatives to report this key behavior.

The controversial issue of variations in Conservative and Liberal dominance behaviors will certainly not be resolved with the very limited evidence we have gathered. We have only controlled for one well-established primate dominance behavior, maintenance of eye contact, and the possibility that there are dominance behaviors practiced more by Liberals is quite good. For example, Liberals curse more than Conservatives, and public cursing may have dominance overtones.

It is probable that the Conservative ascent into higher ranks at the workplace may not only be related to their greater tendency towards dominance behaviors, but also their greater tendency for submissive behaviors towards dominant members. The elevated acceptance of the rich and powerful by the Conservatives may be indicative of this propensity. Interestingly, the low ranking Conservatives reported the lowest eye contact levels of any political cohort--even lower than the Liberals.

Conservatives indeed may be better at executing both dominance and submissive behaviors than are the Liberals. The enhanced tendency of the male Conservatives to organize into hierarchical social groups is certainly facilitated by alternating displays of dominance and submissive behaviors in the appropriate situations.

Obvious examples of this are military organizations, which exhibit overt dominance and submissive behaviors, plainly visible social ranks, high rates of intragroup competition, and elevated threat assessments from external groups. It is no coincidence that military organizations have a substantial majority of Conservatives, and further evidence of the Conservative male's tendency to organize into hierarchical social groups.

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The Hemisphericity of Fascism and Communism

Hemisphericity is the tendency to favor the cognitive style of the brain's left or right hemisphere. The vertebrate brain is a paired-organ, and each hemisphere is specialized in both sensory-motor and cognitive functionality. This difference is illustrated in the following artwork.

The Left and Right Brain Drawings of the Triangle on the Left

The drawing on the left of the triangle consisting of tiny squares was requested to be redrawn by a split-brain patient. The drawing in the middle was done by the patient's left hemisphere, and the drawing on the right was done by the right hemisphere.

The left hemisphere did not see the overall shape of the individual parts. The right hemisphere did not see the individual details within the overall shape. This difference is indicative of two different views of the world, one based on a categorization system that supports the relative organization of objects (the left hemisphere), and one based on a coordinate system providing an internal neural analog map of the external world (the right hemisphere).

The differences in hemispheric cognition are substantial, and provide the foundation for variations in political, religious, and economic behavior, which has been proposed in Brack and Zhang's Hemisphericity Theory of Political Orientation.

In our Spring 2006 survey, we detected a strong correlation between hemisphericity and the "forced" preference of fascism and communism. By "forced", we mean that the respondents were asked to choose one of the following three alternatives--anarchy, fascism, and communism.

We also controlled for hemisphericity, assigning each respondent into one of three possible hemispheric orientations based on their responses: left-brained, right-brained, or bilateral. In the graph below, we see the "forced" preferences for fascism versus communism. These results were weighted for an equal number of Conservatives and Liberals, and include the Moderate, Libertarian, and Apolitical respondents.

"Forced" Preference for Communism (in Blue) versus Fascism (in Red) (Left=Left Hemispheric Preference, Right=Right Hemispheric Preference, Bilateral=No hemispheric preference) (F=Female, M=Male)

As can be seen, the preference for communism versus fascism is a function of hemisphericity. Females, in general, have a stronger preference for communism over fascism than do males (males would have higher preferences for anarchy, which is not shown). The female preference for fascism would be highest in the "left-brained" females, and would decrease as the hemisphericity rating shifted towards the right hemisphere.

The "left-brained" males would favor fascism over communism, and the males with no hemispheric preference would favor communism over fascism. The "right-brained" males had a very strong preference for communism over fascism.

Interestingly, the left-hemisphere's categorization, reward-seeking, and monosemantic nature seems to favor fascist social organizations. The right-hemisphere's coordinate mapping, reward-inhibition, and polysemantic nature seems to favor communist social organizations.