Subcultures of Reproduction
Pair-bonding and Copulation Frequency
As we have noted before, relative to the Liberals, Conservatives are heavily organized around reproduction. To review some of our previous findings, Conservatives are more spread out than Liberals, preferring suburban and rural environments to urban life. They also live in larger homes and maintain a higher square footage per person--even though their family sizes are greater than the Liberals. They drive bigger cars, and have a special affinity towards SUVs and full-size trucks. Liberals tend to drive smaller cars, even in those cases where their incomes are higher than Conservatives.
2002 White Fertility Rates by 2004 Electoral Victory
(Red=Bush, Blue=Kerry) (Source: Steve Sailer/National Center for Health Statistics)Conservatives produce more children, and have a greater propensity towards offspring entitlement. That is, they are more concerned with providing an economic advantage for their children, which translates directly into the reproductive yields of their own offspring.
Conservatives are also more likely to be involved in social groups that promote child-rearing, and consequently more likely to be involved in social relationships in their local neighborhoods. The political world of the Conservative female is a much smaller place than the Liberal female, and more focused on church and other local social groups that facilitate reproduction. The Conservative males also exhibit this tendency, though not nearly as pronounced.
The Conservative males have a particular orientation towards exploration and exploitation of economic resources than do the Liberal males, which again, facilitates their higher levels of reproduction. The Conservative males produce more things, which again supports their higher reproductive rates. They also move themselves around their habitats more than do the Liberals.
Our initial evidence, although certainly not conclusive, indicates that Conservatives engage in more dominance behaviors than Liberals. This is to be expected, as the more dominant members of all primate species have higher reproductive rates than the members at the low end of the dominance hierarchy.
Conservatives are also more likely to organize into hierarchical social groups. This is directly related to reproduction, as the more dominant members have more offspring, and unstable dominance hierarchies contribute to low fertility rates, as is also found in other species.
Though speculative, the religious Conservatives seem to be more behaviorally organized around their olfactory systems. They report better senses of smell than do the Liberals--the significance being that they are more susceptible to the olfactory management of their reproductive behavior. (See Sexuality, Religiosity, and the Olfactory System).
This olfactory orientation is reproductively proactive in multiple ways. First, the Conservatives report stronger preferences for the odor of newborn babies, and this preference also strongly correlates with their level of religiosity.
How this odor preference relates to the desire to have children (and subsequent negative attitudes on abortion) is not yet clear, but we suspect positive correlations on both counts. We also suspect that this Conservative olfactory orientation helps in maintaining the stability of their sexual relationships, as Conservatives report higher rates of physical attractiveness to their partners over a longer period of time than do the Liberals.
Evolutionarily speaking, the olfactory system preceded the visual and auditory systems in facilitating sexual arousal, and also the subsequent recognition and care of offspring. It also appears to have been adapted into long-term sexual arousal with the same partner. The Conservatives also report higher rates of heterosexuality than any of the other political cohorts, and this again may be partially attributable to the olfactory system, although we believe there are several disparate factors causing this elevation.
Pair-Bonding and Sexual Encounter Frequency
In our most recent survey, Conservative males reported higher rates of heterosexual pair-bond relationships than did the Liberals males. There was no statistically significant difference between Liberal and Conservative females, as seen in the graph below.
Heterosexual Relationships and Number of Sexual Encounters Per Week by Political and Gender Cohorts For males, pair-bonding increases steadily as one goes from left to right in the political spectrum. The Nonpolitical (those that have no political orientation) report the lowest rates of pair-bonding in both females and males. However, they also report the highest copulation frequency if they happen to be in a relationship.
Overall, the Conservatives report higher copulation frequencies than Liberals, in both genders. The Conservative females have more sex than the Liberal females. The Conservative males maintain a slight edge over the Liberal males. However, when this is factored by their greater propensity to be in a heterosexual relationship, the Conservatives are having significantly more sex than the Liberals.
Sexual Encounter Frequency by Age Cohort
In last month's edition, we noted that changes in sexual preference strongly favored heterosexuality during the highly reproductive 25-34 age group. The 25-34 age group is also the most sexually active. In the table below, we've combined the Very Liberals in with the Liberals and the Very Conservatives in with the Conservatives.
Number of Sexual Encounters Per Week
Female
(Very Liberals are combined with the Liberals, and the Very Conservatives are combined with the Conservatives)The table above shows some interesting trends. In the females, the Conservatives consistently report having more sexual encounters across all age cohorts. In the males, the Liberals report higher rates (if they have a partner) in the Under 25 cohort, and drop off consistently as they age. The Conservative males start slowly in the Under 25 age group, increase sharply in the 25-34 age group, and drop off more slowly than the Liberals as they age.
Discussion
Conservatives are more likely to form in heterosexual pair-bonds than any of the other political cohorts. They are also more likely to engage in heterosexual sex, and more likely to maintain those elevated rates of copulation throughout their lives than are the Liberals.
The Conservatives exhibit so many pro-reproductive behaviors that they can shift whole populations politically rightward over a relatively short period of time, as has occurred with the Caucasians in the United States since World War II.
The emerging picture of variations in human reproductive behavior places Conservatives and Liberals at the center. How could we have expected that these two approaches to politics and religion were actually reproductive strategies in disguise?
Their integrated model of population growth and territorial dispersion is founded on a rather dynamic model of cognitive variation, and this variation contributes to both economic development and a high degree of subculturalization, which has served the major function of territorial dispersion, and ultimately asymmetric reproductive rates within these subcultures.
Indeed, highly organized religious groups are more able to disperse into new territories and tightly manage social behavior in stressed environments. It seems like humans, within a large population, will segment into religious subgroups for the maintenance of reproductive rates and the subsequent preparation for migration into new territories. This process has led humans to disperse over more territory than any other land animal.
The religious subcultures that migrate will typically improve their birth rates. The rigid cognitive control in highly organized religious groups facilitates this process, as these groups move in unison, and are more likely to settle new territories than the less organized Liberals.
After Babel
Racial Categorization and Preference
We have collected 2,927 responses to our Ethnic and Religious Attitudes survey, and our results certainly indicate that people exhibit large variations in their propensity towards categorizing the behavior of others using racial, religious, and political cues. Overall, 73% of our respondents indicated some level of racial prejudice, which varied from a high of 82% among the Very Conservative females, to a low of 55% for the Nonpolitical males. Surprisingly, the Liberals indicated some level of racial prejudice at a higher rate than did the Nonpolitical, or people that are politically "agnostic".
In general, people that indicated a higher level of behavioral categorization, or "stereotyping", were also more likely to isolate their life within their own racial, religious, and political groups. In our survey, we asked questions to reveal the ways that people classify other people, and how much their lives are "organized" around those classifications.
For example, we asked if they knew the religious orientation of their favorite musical artist, the race of their favorite athlete, the race they are most attracted to, the religious orientation of their partner, the race of their favorite actor, the race that is the most competitive, the racial, religious, and political compositions of their neighborhoods, the specific races and religions they have dated, etc, etc, etc.
In short, we attempted to detect both their propensity to apply racial, religious, and political classifications to behavior, and the propensity to organize their life around those classifications. We further assigned numeric values to their responses that reflected the relative magnitude of those propensities.
For example, if the respondent indicated they have a particular race they are most physically attracted to, six points would be added to their total racial categorization score. If the respondent happened to be of the same race that they were most attracted to, then ten points would be added to their racial preference score. If the respondent's race was different, then no points would be added to their racial preference score.
We scored the other questions similarly, maintaining separate accumulators for religious, racial, and political classifications and preferences. Then we also requested that our respondents rate their own level of racial prejudice.
So how did our political and religious cohorts rate? Let's first take a look at the self-assessments of their own level of racial prejudice.
Self-Assessed Racial Prejudice by Political Affiliation
We asked our 2,927 respondents to give a self-assessment of their level of racial prejudice, on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being the highest. We primed them that the "average" level of racial prejudice was a "3". The results by political cohort are in the graph below.
Self-Rating of Racial Prejudice by Political Affiliation
(F=Female, M=Male) (NP=Nonpolitical, VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, LB=Libertarian, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)As you can see, all the political cohorts rated their level of racial prejudice to be less than the "average" level of "3". Remarkably, the female and male patterns are almost mirror images of each other, and the females rated their level of racial prejudice to be slightly higher than males, on average.
Among the females, the Very Liberals reported the lowest rates of racial prejudice (0.99). The Liberals were slightly higher (1.10), followed by the Libertarians (1.28) and the Nonpolitical (1.29). The Moderates jumped to 1.53, and the Conservatives (1.65) and Very Conservatives (1.72) had the highest self-ratings of racial prejudice among the females.
Among the males, the Very Liberals again had the lowest self-rating of racial prejudice at 0.92. The Nonpolitical (1.10) were next, and the Liberals were slightly higher at 1.14. The Libertarians jumped to 1.23, and the Moderates were higher still at 1.29. The Conservatives jumped sharply to 1.63, and the Very Conservatives were higher still at 1.71.
The Conservatives of both genders reported the highest self-rating of racial prejudice, followed by the Moderates. Let's now take a look at the impact of religiosity on self-ratings of racial prejudice.
Self-Assessed Racial Prejudice by Religiosity
The data was summarized by level of religiosity and displayed in the graph below.
Self-Rating of Racial Prejudice by Religiosity
(F=Female, M=Male)On average, the rate of self-reported racial prejudice increases with the level of religiosity, with an interesting drop-off in the Very Religious, in both genders. The Areligious (those indicating that they never think about religion), the Agnostics, the Atheists, and the Spiritual, all reported lower rates of racial prejudice than did the Little Religious or Moderately Religious.
But as religiosity reaches its highest level, racial prejudice seems to decrease down to the levels reported by the non-religious cohorts. We'll discuss this phenomenon later, but first, let's take a look at how we rated our political and religious cohorts based on their responses to the many racial questions in our survey.
Racial Prejudice Scores by Political Affiliation
Based on the responses to our survey, we constructed a point system to reflect the propensity to categorize people into racial groups, and the propensity to prefer one's own racial group when it came to social behavior in general. Our survey contained 26 different racial questions which were scored up to a maximum of 134 on our categorization scale and 185 on our preference scale. How did our political cohorts do in our scoring system?
In the above graph, we see that both racial categorization and preference scores increase as one goes from left to right on the political spectrum. Also note that females and males have remarkably similar scores in aggregate, and also across political cohorts.
Our ratings also correlate quite closely with the self-ratings of racial prejudice in the first graph.
Racial Prejudice Scores by Religiosity
Our ratings of racial categorization and preference are broken out by the level of religiosity in the graph below.
In the above table, we see that both racial categorization and preference scores increase with the level of religiosity, except for the Very Religious, which score lower than the Moderately Religious in both genders. However, the Very Religious are still elevated relative to all the non-religious categories. These results also correlate well with the self-rating of racial prejudice by level of religiosity discussed earlier.
However, when we combine political and religiosity cohorts together, these results paint a slightly different picture, as will be discussed next month.
Discussion
The Conservative's higher rate of self-reported racial prejudice correlates well with our computed racial categorization and preference scores. We also see a corresponding elevation in the Religious relative to the Nonreligious, as is expected, due to the high correlation between conservatism and religiosity. As expected, the Liberals and the Nonreligious had the lowest racial categorization and preference scores, along with the lowest rates of self-assessed racial prejudice.
We also note an interesting drop-off in both self-assessed racial prejudice and racial categorization and preference scores among the Very Religious, at least relative to the Moderately Religious. The Little Religious and Moderately Religious had the highest racial categorization and preference scores among the religiosity cohorts.
To be continued.
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Brack and Zhang, November 2006
Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
Zhang@neuropolitics.org
608
Nemesis
Ingroup Affiliation and Outgroup Antagonism
While a patriotic or religious rally can be quite rewarding for many Conservatives, it can be a rather disturbing event for Liberals. Their uneasy feeling runs deep, as they subconsciously relate such events to some form of ingroup or outgroup conflict.
But why do the Liberals feel that way? What is so disturbing about a group of people unifying their beliefs and behaviors? Do close social groups result in more antagonistic relationships with external social groups? Do tight social bonds facilitate aggressive tendencies towards outsiders? Further, is this a neurological phenomenon of social vertebrates in general?
Let's take a brief look at how animals choose their allies and enemies.
Kinship Recognition, Allies, and Enemies
Kinship recognition is the ability to determine the "genetic distance" in others, which is a remarkable feat performed by invertebrates and vertebrates long before the invention of DNA testing. Obviously, for kinship recognition to be so pervasive across the animal kingdom, its survival value must be sky high.
The inclusive fitness theory proposed by Bill Hamilton would explain the evolutionary value of kinship recognition and the corresponding affiliative behaviors among genetically close individuals. But how do organisms know who they are closely related to?
Simple organisms employ chemical sensing mechanisms to resolve genetic distance in others, and typically engage in more "affiliative" behaviors towards genetically close organisms, although "affiliative" in the context of lower animal behavior usually means they aren't as likely to fight with or eat each other.
The phylogenetically ancient chemical sensing system would eventually evolve into an olfactory system, which is still active in human bonding, kinship recognition, sexual arousal, and mate selection. But as the auditory and visual processing systems began to dominate the evolving central nervous system, they would develop new approaches to resolving genetic distance.
Early Childhood Memory Imprinting and Adult Social Behavior
New approaches were necessary, as the numbers of genes expanded with organism complexity, and meiotic shuffling made the chemical sensing systems less reliable in the resolution of genetic distance. In some species, there is evidence that instinctual visual cues augment chemical sensing mechanisms in allorecognition.
But things would get more complex still, as the evolving central nervous system would store neural "templates" or specially located memories of tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual cues, and this "templating" would be especially sensitive during infancy and early childhood.
An excellent example of the sensitivity of the infant "templating" window is in cats, who will maintain affiliative social relationships with humans if exposed to physical contact during the first nine weeks after birth. After this window, it becomes very difficult for cats to socialize with humans.
But for humans, this infantile imprinting window extends much longer, to about six years of age. The early human neural "templates" promote both affiliative behaviors and incest avoidance towards those individuals encountered during that stage.
How these early memories modulate adult social behavior is highly speculative, and may take eons to define, but there is some evidence that the left temporal lobe, and the left hippocampus and amygdala in particular, maintain autobiographical memories better than the right. The significance of the left temporal lobe is that it is a primary religious area of the brain. We can only speculate, but the "left-brained" Conservative's adult social behavior may be more susceptible to early childhood neural "imprints" than is the "right-brained" Liberal's.
While adult social behavior seems to be influenced by these early childhood imprints, their impact most likely varies considerably from individual to individual. Humans are much more flexible than the average vertebrate in their social behavior, as the human neocortex has an especially complex approach to affiliation and antagonism, which can interchange with minor changes in environmental and social stress.
Food Deprivation and the Breakdown of Dominance Hierarchies
Any social group that seeks to maintain stability in its dominance hierarchy would be well-served by maintaining an adequate supply of food for all parties. Food deprivation seems to be the primary cause for the elimination of dominance hierarchies and pro-social behaviors among the social vertebrates.
The apparent "niceness" that cannibalistic species maintain towards close kin is only relative, as they will consume their brethren just as soon as starvation sets in. In species with hierarchical social structures, including humans, food deprivation breaks down the dominance hierarchies.
For example, rats maintain stable dominance hierarchies that control a given territory and function to quickly ward off and attack "intruder" rats. But when faced with food deprivation, rats become less concerned with intruders and focus their ire on the dominant rats.
Predation and the Evolution of Dominance Hierarchies
Dominance hierarchies are the predominate organizational approach of social species, including humans. But they have their origins in predation behavior, which would tap into the neural mechanisms associated with both attack and predator avoidance. The neural networks associated with submissive behavior seem to run through the ventromedial hypothalamus. This region can instantly switch behavior from defensive to submissive, which serves to defuse the aggressive behavior in a dominant adversary. Once the dominant animal perceives the behavior as submissive, it ceases the aggression.
Interestingly, animals have developed multiple modes of fighting, one of which involves minimizing the impact of damage to the opponent. Attacks between animals within the same ingroup involve less harmful body parts than attacks on outgroup members. The lower impact of ingroup fighting maintains the dominance hierarchy while avoiding serious damage to ingroup members. In humans, this reduced mode of fighting is expressed in competitive sports.
But the establishment of a dominance hierarchy involves a period of repeated competitive altercations among the group members which lowers the overall food consumption and reproductive rates of the group. Once the dominance relationships have been established, both food consumption and reproductive rates resume to normal.
After the dominance hierarchy is set, the introduction of a foreign animal will result in many potentially fatal attacks from the ingroup. An animal with no defined dominance status within the ingroup is typically treated with much animosity. The animus disposition to outsiders seems to be an innate behavior, and is moderated considerably as neocortex volumes increase.
Correlation Between Ingroup Affiliation and Outgroup Antagonism
Among many primates, higher rates of ingroup affiliation correlate with higher rates of antagonistic behaviors towards outgroups. This is the evolutionary result of resource and sexual competition, as a close-knit coordinated band of primates is much more effective in waging resource competition with neighbors.
Ingroup affiliative behaviors increase during competition with outgroups, and the more severe the competition, the stronger the tendency. This is common in humans, as evidenced in both warfare and athletic competition. Primates under stress cooperating against a common adversary formulate attachments that are neurologically analogous to romantic bonding.
This response typically involves a reduction in the functioning of the serotonin system, which, in humans, is typically diminished as a prelude for reproductive behaviors. Serotonin reductions also occur in conflict situations, as this increases the level of competitiveness with the adversary.
The stress response also charges the dopaminergic system, which facilitates both bonding towards cooperative partners and the associated release of the social bonding neuropeptides, such as vasopressin and oxytocin, which again are closely related to both romantic and offspring bonding behaviors.
The Liberal Advantage in Large Group Formation
We have been puzzled for some time by what seemed to be a substantial evolutionary advantage for the Conservatives--the tendency to organize in hierarchical social groups and wage resource competition and warfare. The only survival value that Liberals seemed to have was to minimize the damage from intergroup conflict.
However, we had missed their most obvious advantage-- their propensity to rapidly form into very large social groups. This has obvious advantages in intergroup competition and warfare, as the Liberals are more proficient at forming coalitions with groups with a wider range of genetic and cognitive diversity than are the Conservatives. Liberals, on average, form into larger, more loosely organized social groups than Conservatives.
The Liberals seem to be adept at expanding their group sizes to match competition from outgroups. That is, they seek to increase the size of their groups to be comparable with competing outgroups. The Conservative's propensity for "cognitive coordination" within their groups places a lower or negative value on "cognitively uncoordinated" groups, and a corresponding tendency to prefer smaller social groups.
The Liberal propensity for large group formation seems to be related to the functioning of the serotonergic and noradrenergic systems. Both these neurotransmitter systems facilitate affiliative behaviors and reduce competition in large groups. Conversely, Conservative behavior is more influenced by the dopaminergic system, which promotes tight social bonds and socially controlled behavior, and functions better in smaller and more genetically homogenous groups.
The relationship between these three monoamine neurotransmitter systems and social behavior is still not well understood, but they are stacking up as key influences in ingroup bonding and outgroup hostility, which has undoubtedly been shaping the human gene pool at a rapid pace.
Interestingly, the optimal human defensive configuration may be an intermingled group of Conservatives, which readily form into hierarchical groups to facilitate warfare, and Liberals, which rapidly form coalitions to match the sizes of hostile outgroups.
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Exclusion from Heaven, Exclusion from Earth
"...the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."
President BushOne of the more interesting results from our recent Ethnic and Religious Attitudes survey was that Christians and Muslims had similar results in a number of cognitive attributes. This seemed odd, since these two groups, to quote President Bush, are engaged in "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."
However, the secular Liberals have yet to join in on this ideological war, as their attitudes towards Christians are substantially worse than their attitudes towards Muslims. (See our September 2006 edition). The Liberals are for now content to remain on the sidelines in this religiously-tainted conflict.
But as the American Conservative Christians and Muslims seem to be on a collision course with the fate of world hanging on a string, they share one interesting theological attribute that may be revealing something fundamental about the nature of their earthly conflict--they share a common exclusionary model of heaven.
In our survey, we asked the following question: If you are moral, but don't believe in God, will you go to heaven? Both the Conservative Christians and Muslims were about eight times more likely to answer No than Yes, which set them quite apart from the other religious groups. The Conservative Christians and Muslims were remarkably similar in their mandate for the belief in God as a prelude for heavenly rewards.
But does this more exclusionary model of heaven correspond to more exclusionary models of earthly social behavior? Let's take a look at some of the results from our Religious and Ethnic attitudes survey. As discussed in the adjacent article, we asked 59 questions about how our respondents categorized people into religious, racial, and political groups, and how much they organized their lives around those categorizations.
After assigning numeric values to the various responses to those 59 questions, we produced aggregate categorization and preference scores for race, religion, and political affiliations for each respondent. In the table below, we are displaying the average scores for those respondents answering No and Yes by religion.
If you are moral, but don't believe in God, will you go to heaven? Racial Categorization and Preference Scores by Religion
Racial Categorization Score
As seen above, those indicating No had both a higher propensity to categorize people based on racial cues and a greater propensity to prefer their own racial groups. The only exceptions are the Muslims responding Yes, which were not statistically significant due to their low sample size. Belief in a deity as prerequisite to entrance into heaven correlates with the use of racial cues to categorize people, and also the preference for one's own racial group.
