- Economists: 'People vote their pocketbooks' People: 'Yep' Sociologists: 'People vote their identities' People: 'Yep' Evolutionary psychologists: 'Also, people sometimes vote for their perceived reproductive & genetic interests' People: WHAT KIND OF CYNICAL MONSTERS ARE YOU?
Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the voting booth.
"What are you doing here?" one asks.
"My wife made me come," the other says.
The first economist gives a confirming nod. "The same."
After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: "If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I'll never tell anyone I saw you." They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.
Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost - in time, effort, lost productivity - with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your "civic duty." As the economists Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, "A rational individual should abstain from voting."
The odds that your vote will actually effect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislature that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years - a 1910 race in Buffalo - was decided by a single vote.
But there is a more important point: the closer the election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands - most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.
Still people do continue to vote, in the millions. Why? Here are three possibilities:
1. Perhaps we are just not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that our votes will affect the outcome.
2. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.
3. Perhaps we have been socialized into the voting-as-civic-duty idea, believing that it's a good thing for society if people vote even if it's not particularly good for the individual. And thus we feel guilty for not voting.
But wait a minute, you say. If everyone thought about voting the way economists do, we might have no elections at all. No voter goes to the polls actually believing that her single vote will affect the outcome, does she? And isn't it cruel to even suggest that her vote is not worth casting?
This is indeed a slippery slope - the seemingly meaningless behavior of an individual, which, in aggregate, becomes quite meaningful. Here's a similar example in reverse. Imagine that you and your 8-year-old daughter are taking a walk through a botanical garden when she suddenly pulls a bright blossom off a tree.
"You shouldn't do that," you find yourself saying.
Why not?" she asks.
"Well," you reason, "because if everyone picked one, there wouldn't be any flowers left at all."
"Yeah, but everybody isn't picking them." she says with a look. "Only me."
In the old days, there were more pragmatic incentives to vote. Political parties regularly paid voters $5 to $10 to cast the proper ballot; sometimes payment came in the form of a keg of whiskey, a barrel of flour or, in the case of an 1890 New Hampshire Congressional race, a live pig.
Now as then, many people worry about low voter turnout - only slightly more than half of the eligible voters participated in the last presidential election - but it might be more worthwhile to stand this problem on its head and instead ask a different question: considering that an individual's vote almost never matters, why do so many people bother to vote at all?
The answer may lie in Switzerland. That's where Patricia Funk discovered a wonderful natural experiment that allowed her to take an acute measure of voter behavior.
The Swiss love to vote - on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years...so a new option was introduced: the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn't the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by mail.
From a social scientist's perspective, there was beauty in the setup of this postal voting scheme: because it was introduced in different cantons (the 16 state-like districts that make up Switzerland) in different years, it allowed for a sophisticated measurement of its effects over time.
Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm: the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly. An economic model would therefore predict voter turnout to increase substantially. Is that what happened?
Not at all. In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons.
The finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting - which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.
But why is this the case? Why on Earth would fewer people vote when the cost of doing so is lowered?
It goes back to the incentives behind voting. If a given citizen doesn't stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother vote? In Switzerland, as in the U.S., "there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls," Funk writes. "As long as poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn't, the benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of community."
In other words, we do vote out of self-interest - a conclusion that will satisfy economists - but not necessarily the same self-interest as indicated by our actual ballot choice. For all of the talk of how people "vote their pocketbooks," the Swiss study suggests that we may be driven to vote less by financial incentive than a social one. It may be that the most valuable payoff of voting is simply being seen at the polling place by your friends or co-workers.
Unless, of course, you happen to be an economist.
The Central Six also predict social, political, and religious attitudes fairly well. Liberals are only a little brighter than conservatives on average, but they tend to show significantly higher openness (more interest in novelty and diversity), lower conscientiousness (less adherence to conventional social norms), and high agreeableness (more widespread empathy and "bleeding hearts"). Conservatives show lower openness (more traditionalism and xenophobia), higher conscientiousness (family-values moralism, sense of duty, civic mindedness), and lower agreeableness (more hard-headed, hard-hearted support for their self-interests and national interests). However, since the traditional left-right political spectrum has only one dimension, and the Central Six has six dimensions, it is more accurate to describe the complete range of human political attitudes using the Central Six. For example, the 1960s New Left was basically more open (freethinking) than the 1930s Old Left. Fascists can be seen as basically lower-intelligence conservatives with lower stability (more fear, distress, anxiety, and neuroticism) and even lower agreeableness (more aggressive interests in warfare, torture, and genocide). Libertarians can be viewed as basically higher-intelligence liberals with slightly higher conscientiousness (faith in social reciprocity and work ethic), lower agreeableness (distaste for conspicuous sympathy displays), and an extra dollop of extraversion (self-reliant surgency).
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller, p.169
Does vulnerability to parasites also predict differences in openness, extraversion, and individualism across individuals, even within the same culture? To put a finer point on it: do U.S. Republicans and U.K. Conservatives hold the values that they do, not as a function of rational political convictions, but because they unconsciously assess that they have weaker immune systems? Some recent studies suggest so. The evolutionary researchers Dan Fessler, David Navarette, and Mark Schaller have found that "perceived vulnerability to disease" - an individuals self-rated susceptibility to getting colds, infections, and communicable diseases - does predict that individual's xenophobia. Also, looking at photographs of parasites and disease symptoms has been shown to make people more xenophobic, at least temporarily. A final piece of evidence relies on the fact that women's immune systems grow adaptively weaker during first-trimester pregnancy, so that their bodies don't reject the fetus as an alien parasite. Women in the first trimester also show higher xenophobia, as if they unconsciously realize that their weaker immune systems will have more trouble fighting off new infections from outsiders; this xenophobia becomes weaker as their immune systems become stronger in the second trimester. More generally, people's openness, extraversion, and individualism tend to peak in young adulthood when their immune systems are strongest, and tend to decline throughout middle age as their health declines.
All this research suggests that there are surprisingly strong connections between parasite loads, immune systems, personality traits, and political attitudes - connections that have profound implications for understanding the nature of openness, the reasons why it varies across people and cultures, and the way that consumers try to unconsciously display their levels of openness. These connections also have surprising implications for economic and political policy. For instance, the best way to promote democracy, science, secularism, peace, ethnic harmony, free trade, and tourism in developing nations may be to reduce their parasite load through better medicine and sanitation. As foreign policy tools, immunizations and mosquito nets may be stronger than diplomacy, trade agreements, economic sanctions, loans, warfare, or propaganda, because these simpler measures increase openness, extraversion, and individualism more effectively, and reduce xenophobia and ethnocentrism more quickly. Medecins sans Frontiers and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may be promoting the cultural liberalization of developing nations more effectively than the UN, WTO, and World Bank combined. Indeed, Randy Thornhill has argued that this liberalization-through-parasite-reduction is exactly what happened in the United States and Europe during the twentieth century. The baby boomers, for example, were not only the first generation in the United States to grow up benefiting from broad-spectrum childhood immunizations, but were also the first generation to show a sudden massive increase in interracial tolerance, internationalism, openness, and individualism, as manifest in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the New Left, the psychedelic revolution, the sexual revolution, and the "Me" generation. The conservative backlash benefited from the disco-era genital herpes epidemic and especially from the 1980s AIDS crisis, which increased everyone's perceived vulnerability to communicable disease.
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller, p. 212-213.
I Score Low On Extraversion, Low On Agreeableness, Medium On Conscientiousness, Medium To High On Neuroticism, And High On Openness. I Like My Steaks Medium-Rare!
Young adults of both sexes often devote massive amounts of time, money, and energy to signaling their agreeableness through their ideologies. For example, at Columbia University in 1986 there was a sudden upsurge of conspicuous agreeableness one spring. Hundreds of college students took over the campus administration building and demanded that the university sell off all of its stocks in companies that do business in South Africa. (This was in the days of apartheid, when Nelson Mandela was still in jail and blacks could not vote.) The spontaneity, ardor, and near-unanimity of the student demands for divestment seemed puzzling. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two weeks in support of political freedom for poor black strangers living in a country eight thousand miles away? The campus conservative newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the protest as an annual springtime mating ritual, with Dionysian revels punctuated by political sloganeering about this year's arbitrary cause. The cartoon seemed patronizing at first, but later it seemed to contain a grain of truth. Although the protests achieved their political aims, only inefficiently and indirectly, they did promote very efficient mating among young men and women who claimed to share similar political ideologies. Everyone seemed to be dating someone they'd met at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin, and the protest ended just in time for the students to study for semester exams. Yet the sexual relationships facilitated by the protest lasted for years in some cases.
Humans are ideological animals. We show strong motivations and capacities to learn, create, recombine, and disseminate value-laden idea systems, often with a righteous contempt for any empirical evidence that would undermine them. Yet it has always seemed hard to envision a survival payoff for conspicuous ideologies that scoff at empirical reality. Fortunately, costly signaling theory does not demand survival payoffs, only social and reproductive payoffs. If a conspicuously displayed ideology correlates reliably with a certain set of personality traits that are socially and sexually desired, then the ideology's empirical truth is irrelevant. Indeed, the most empirically misleading and self-handicapping ideologies might often make the most reliable personality indicators.
The vast majority of people in modern societies have little political power, yet they do have strong political convictions that they broadcast insistently, frequently, and loudly when social conditions are right (political protests, dinner parties, second dates). This behavior is puzzling to economists, who regard any ideological behavior - even voting - as an expenditure of time and energy that has little political benefit for the individual. But if we view the individual benefits of expressing political ideology as usually not political at all, but rather as social and sexual, we can shed light on a number of old puzzles in political psychology. Why do hundreds of questionnaires show that men are, on average, more conservative, more authoritarian, more rights oriented, and less empathy oriented than women? Why do people usually become more conservative as they move from young adulthood to middle age? Why do more men than women run for political office? Why are most ideological revolutions initiated by young single men?
LISTEN FROM 10:50 - 15:30 THEN FROM 28:15 - 32:56!
Adults, especially when young, tend to treat one another's political orientations as proxies for personality traits. Conservatism is read as indicating an ambitious, self-interested personality that will excel at protecting and provisioning a sexual partner. Liberalism is read as indicating a caring, empathetic personality that will excel at child care and relationship building. Given the well-documented, cross-culturally universal sex differences in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men, the expression of more-liberal ideologies by women and more conservative ideologies by men is not surprising. Men use political conservatism to (unconsciously) advertise their likely social and economic dominance; women use political liberalism to advertise their nurturing abilities. The shift from liberal youth to conservative middle age reflects a mating-relevant increase in social dominance and earning power, not just a rational shift in one's self-interest.
More subtly, because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of social imitation and strategizing, not just as a process of simple optimization, given a particular set of self-interests. This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if it cared deeply about the political fate of a country that it virtually ignored the year before. The consensually accepted way to display agreeableness simply shifted, capriciously and quickly, from one political issue to another. Once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes toward apartheid were the acid test for whether one's heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid.
What can we do to improve society if most people treat political ideas as courtship displays that reveal their advocates' personality traits, rather than as rational suggestions for improving the world? The pragmatic, not to say cynical, solution is to work with the evolved grain of the human mind by recognizing that people respond to policy ideas not just as concerned citizens in a modern polity, but also as hypersocial, status-seeking primates. This view will not surprise political marketers (pollsters, spin doctors, speechwriters), who make their living by exploiting out lust for ideology, but it may surprise social scientists who take a more rationalistic view of human nature. Nonetheless, to understand a great deal of consumer behavior, we have to acknowledge the fundamentally ideological nature of many purchasing decisions, and the way that everyone uses products, in various ways, to advertise his or her personality traits.
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller, p. 246-250.
| Voting for McCain and… | r-value | p-value |
| Extraversion | .10 | .50 |
| Agreeableness | .28 | .05 |
| Conscientiousness | .41 | .00 |
| Neuroticism | (.17) | .23 |
| Openness | (.46) | .00 |
THIS EXCERPT FROM A BLOG SUMMARIZES GEOFFREY MILLER'S CHAPTER FROM SPENT ON OPENNESS PERFECTLY. SO READ IT. READ IT ALL.
Why is Openness negative at its extreme? (Miller has remarked before this in Spent that despite what one might think, one of the other 6 psychological traits he covers, IQ, essentially has no bad amount to have - you have to be in the top percentile before IQ starts being a potential negative, and much marketing is covertly appealing to people's desires to look smart.) On the potential biological negatives of novelty-seeking:
Each person's lymphocytes learn to fight off the particular varieties of parasites that are common within his own local group, which gives him an immunological memory of the parasites he has already encountered. (Immunization is simply the process of teaching the lymphocytes about a new kind of pathogen by exposing them to safer, deactivated forms of the pathogen.) However, the immune system's learned parasite resistance is highly localized, People from other kin groups, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, or races-even if they live just a few miles away-may host other varieties of parasites that evolved slightly different ways of being transmitted to hosts, infecting them, and making them sick.Recent research shows something very curious: group Openness inversely correlates with parasite load, even after controlling for all the obvious confounds like health and longevity. (I haven't looked up this research yet; he attributes it to "Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill at University of New Mexico, and Mark Schaller and Damian Murray at University of British Columbia".)
Thus, any interaction with outsiders brings a high risk of acquiring a new kind of parasite that may be especially hard for one's locally adapted immune system to fight off. The higher the parasite load the greater the number, variety. and severity of parasites surrounding one's local group the higher that risk is and the more cautious people should be about strangers. They should develop a more proactive "psychological immune system" to avoid getting their mouths, noses, genitals, or skin anywhere close to potential sources of infection. They should be much more averse to contact with other groups, including not just their human members, but also their food, clothing, shelters, animals, social customs, hygiene practices, and purification rituals-anything associated with possible parasite transmission. In other words, people in high-parasite regions will benefit from becoming more xenophobic (fearful of out-groups) and ethnocentric (focused on their own in-group).
For example, in a 2008 paper. Schaller and Murray suggested that openness and extraversion would be lower in territories where people suffer from higher parasite loads. They gathered data on average Big Five Five personality scores from three previous studies that had each analyzed thirty,three, fifty, or fifty-six of the ninety-eight territories for which the parasite loads were known. Across the seventy' one territories for which had both parasite-load data and personality data, they that people from territories with the highest parasite load indeed had substantially lower openness and extraversion scores on average.Incidentally, a good deal of LW's userbase could be described as 'young adults'; and it does seem relatively rare for old people to become transhumanists, as opposed to young or very young people. The next step, some anthropological observations which certainly look as if they are costly signalling something:
For the twenty-three territories where Big Five scores could be averaged across all three previous studies (yielding the most accurate estimates), the correlations were guite strong: -.6 between parasite load and openness, and about the same for extraversion. These correlations remained substantial even after controlling for differences across territories in average annual temperature, distance from the equator (absolute latitude), life expectancy, GDP per capita, or political attitudes (individualism versus collectivism).
Collectivists make stronger distinctions between in-group and out-group, are warier of contact with strangers and foreigners, and highly value tradition and conformity. Relatively "collectivist" cultures include China, India. and countries in the Middle East and Africa; relatively "individualist" cultures include the United States and the nations of western Europe, especially Scandinavia. The researchers gathered data on average individualism/collectivism scores from four previous studies that had each analyzed sixty, eight, fifty, eight, fifty-seven, or seventy territories for which parasite loads were known. Across the ninety-eight territories, the various measures of collectivism correlated strongly with current parasite load (correlations ranging from .44 to 59), and even mare strongly with historical parasite load from about a century ago (correlations ranging from .63 to .73).... Even controlling for the four variables known from previous research to predict collectivism across cultures--life expectancy, population density, GDP per capita, and the Gini index of economic inequality-parasite load still predicted collectivism quite strongly.
The evolutionary researchers Dan Fessler, David Navarette, and Mark Schaller have found that "perceived vulnerability to disease" - an individual's self-rated susceptibility to getting colds, infections, and communicable diseases--does predict that individual's xenophobia. Also, looking at photographs of parasites and disease symptoms has been shown to make people more xenophobic, at least temporarily. A final piece of evidence relies on the fact that women's immune systems grow adaptively weaker during first-trimester pregnancy, so that their bodies don't reject the fetus as an alien parasite. Women in the first trimester also show higher xenophobia, as if they unconsciously realize that their weaker immune systems will have more trouble fighting off new infections from outsiders; this xenophobia becomes weaker as their immune systems become stronger in the second trimester. More generally, people's openness, extraversion, and individualism tend to peak in young adulthood when their immune systems are strongest, and tend to decline throughout middle age as their health declines.
Especially in areas with high parasite loads [eg. Papua New Guinea?], many tribal people open their skin to infection when they arc young adults, through scarification or tattooing or forced genital mutilation, to show that their immune systems are strong enough to survive the wounds. (The 5,300-year·old body of "Otzi the iceman," discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991, had fifty-seven tattoos.) If you are a healthy, energetic young male or woman covered in well-healed self-inflicted scars, despite living in a high·parasite area, you have credibly demonstrated that your health is very strong. Potential mates and friends may not consciously understand the connections between costly signaling theory, microscopic parasites, scarification using unsterilized tools, and individual differences in the number and efficiency of the lymphocytes that constitute the adaptive immune system. However, they can unconsciously assess that you would not be looking healthy or energetic after having endured so many cuts if you were weak and sickly. Biologists such as W. D. Hamilton and Anders Moeller have argued that in many other animal species, sexual ornaments have evolved as indicators of parasite resistance.The final step - applying this idea to us:
In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes. So, instead of opening our bodies to ambient germs, we open our minds to ambient culture, to determine if we can stay sane throughout the onslaught. When you see teenagers and young adults posting their interests in music, books, and film on their MySpace websites, consider the costly signaling principles at work. If they have exposed themselves to a lot of death metal, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Lynch, and they are still sane enough to sustain a reasonable conversation through email or instant messaging, they have credibly proven their openness and psychosis-resistance....Certain extreme ideas may present minimal danger to those with strong antipsychosis defenses, who can therefore afford to act highly open. But those same ideas may present genuine dangers to those with weaker defenses, who must minimize their openness. If these outlandish speculations have any merit, then people who are low in openness prefer to associate with One another in part to protect their sanity. They seek out communities, jobs, lifestyles, malls, friends, and products that will not challenge their antipsychosis defenses. They prefer the familiar to the novel, the conventional to the radical the predictable to the challenging. They prefer goods and services that are heavy on matter and habit, and light on cognition and imagination.They move to comfortably anti-intellectual communities: rural towns or ethnically homogeneous suburbs around provincial cities, such as Indianapolis, Indiana. or Augsburg, Germany; large, progressive, multicultural cities are just too threatening. In this way, the less-open can thrive for years in meme .. excluding bubbles. avoiding as much as possible disturbing thoughts and social encounters. For them the unexamined life is ... the easiest way to avoid psychosis.
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| Why Was Che Guevara, Like Most Social Activists And Politicians Who Hold RadiCal, Unconventional, Eccentric Views And Ideologies, Sexually Attractive To The Opposite Sex? Why Did These Social Activists And Politicians Acquire And Espouse These Radical, Unconventional, Eccentric Views And Ideologies In The First Place? Start Reading From "He's A Rebel, But In A Good Way." |
"The Rebel" - Cellskini
"Was I Born A Killer, A Rebel From The Ghetto?!" - Lil C.S. Lewis
"Was I Born A Killer, A Rebel From The Ghetto?!" - Lil C.S. Lewis
"Born Rebel...Rebel Devil" - Grape Fruit Street South Park!
"I'm Different, I'm Different...Look Back At It, Look Back At It" - 2 Chain
TELL 'EM CHE!
