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Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

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Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

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Evolutionary Theory and Political
Behavior
MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN and LENE AARØE

Abstract
Political behavior is behavior aimed at regulating access to resources: Who is
recognized to get what, when, and how? Evidence across a number of disciplines
shows that humans over evolutionary history have evolved sophisticated abilities to
engage in political behavior through status seeking and coalition formation in order
to attract resources to themselves, their kin, and their allies. As demonstrated by
recent research, this evolutionary history of politics continues to shape how modern
individuals behave in modern mass politics and prompt people to derive their
political attitudes from ancestrally relevant factors such as upper body strength
and short-term fluctuations in hunger. Important areas for research lies ahead in
(i) understanding how evolution has given rise to individual variation in political
behavior, (ii) investigating the extent to which the evolved psychology of humans
biases modern political behavior, and (iii) strengthening the ties between this
emerging application of evolutionary theory and more traditional research on
political behavior.

INTRODUCTION
Political behavior is behavior aimed at regulating access to resources: Who
is recognized to get what, when, and how (Laswell, 1950)? If social behavior
is about playing the game, political behavior is then about determining the
rules of the game being played. For example, while many social animals
can engage in cooperative exercises, only political animals can negotiate
and change the rules regulating the surpluses flowing from these exercises.
Humans are such political animals but other species are political too. In
essence, any species with individually conflicting interests and cognitive
capacities for what De Waal (1996) terms “a sense of social regularity”
have politics. Conflicts of interest constitute the key driver of political
behavior and the sense of social regularity (i.e., shared social expectations)
constitutes the key target of political behavior. Political behavior is thus
behavior seeking to enforce one’s interests by pushing the shared sense
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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of regularity into greater alignment with one’s interest. Animals that are,
presumably, political in this sense include a range of nonhuman species such
as chimpanzees and dolphins (e.g., De Waal, 1982).
In this essay, we focus on political behavior in humans. Yet, the observation that political behavior is zoologically widespread is important because
it provides a prima facie case that political behavior in both human and nonhuman animals emerges from psychological mechanisms that are biologically instantiated and, as any other complex biological design, evolved by
natural selection. This is critically important for the study of political behavior across all disciplines. If relevant psychological mechanisms are evolved
biological adaptations, they are designed to carry out particular functions
(Williams, 1966). Through the use of evolutionary theory, researchers can
come to know the functions and structures of these psychology mechanisms
and, ultimately, build precise testable hypotheses about political phenomena.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The suite of psychological mechanisms underlying political behavior
must encompass both mechanisms for evaluating current resource access
and mechanisms designed for engaging in activities that change access
(Petersen & Aarøe, 2012). Foundational research in evolutionary theory has
explored the structure of both types of mechanisms.
ADAPTATIONS FOR POLITICAL JUDGMENT: EVALUATING RESOURCE ACCESS
In understanding the psychological mechanisms that underlie people’s
intuitive evaluations of resource distributions, more general research on
the evolution of social preferences has provided an important basis. Natural selection, of course, must have selected for a substantial degree of
self-interest and, hence, a preference that more rather than less resources
flow to the self. But, in addition, natural selection has selected for a number
of pathways through which we are concerned with the welfare of others.
These preferences in turn seem to influence the way that people evaluate
resource allocations in the domain of politics.
Hamilton’s (1964) demonstration of the fitness advantages of helping
kin (due to shared genes) provides the basis for understanding political
phenomena such as kin nepotism. Even more important for the evolutionary
study of political behavior was the demonstration by Trivers (1971) of the
fitness advantages of reciprocal cooperation. While Hamilton’s work helped
researchers understand preferences for providing resources to kin, Trivers’
work helped researchers understand the conditions that regulate human
preferences for providing resources to non-kin—a more pervasive category

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in most political settings. According to Trivers’ model, people are motivated
and capable of harvesting cooperative surpluses from interactions with
non-kin but keep a keen eye on whether they are receiving less from the
cooperative enterprise than they contribute (i.e., whether they are being
“cheated”). Upon detection of cheating, cooperation is withdrawn. Research
in experimental psychology has since provided strong demonstrations
of the fine-tuned psychological mechanisms underlying both cooperative
motivations and cheater-detection abilities (for reviews, see Cosmides &
Tooby, 2005). The general implication for the study of political behavior is
that people intuitively favor resource distributions where people’s resource
levels are aligned with their efforts to contribute to collective enterprises
and, in particular, that individuals oppose schemes that imply that they
themselves receive less than they have contributed. In the study of politics,
this has been used to explain the structure of institutions for collective action
(Ostrom & Walker, 2005). It has also been used to explain attitudes toward
social welfare recipients that are highly influenced by whether a recipient is
putting in effort to alleviate his or her own need (Petersen, 2012).
Because cooperation requires stable exchange systems, cooperation
evolved to operate within groups and, as a consequence, a range of evolved,
psychological mechanism for group facilitation and group navigation exists
(Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). As demonstrated by foundational research in
social psychology, these mechanisms prompt individuals to continuously
track the group membership of other individuals (Kurzban, Tooby, &
Cosmides, 2001) and to preferentially share resources with ingroup individuals (e.g., Yamagishi & Mifune, 2008). Again, these mechanisms also
influence political assessments of resource distributions such that individuals prefer resource access schemes that favor ingroup members at the
expense of outgroup members. For example, studies of cross-national levels
of ethnic heterogeneity and support for redistribution of income show that
as heterogeneity increases people become more opposed to sharing their
income (Alesina & Glaeser, 2004).
ADAPTATIONS FOR POLITICAL BEHAVIOR: CHANGING RESOURCE ACCESS
Factors such as self-interest, kinship, reciprocity, and group membership
provide the foundations of our evolved psychology for evaluating political
distributions of resources. In addition, we have an evolved psychology
designed to bring these distributions into alignment with our preferences.
Of key importance in this regard is the existence of hierarchies based on
dominance and prestige (Cheng, Tracy, & Henrich, 2010). As in many other
social species, humans intuitively recognize differences in status and accept
(within limits) that individuals of higher status have greater leverage in

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negotiations. As a consequence, one key focal point in political conflicts
is status conflicts and, hence, conflicts about power to influence resource
access.
For humans and a select number of other social animals, the key tool in such
conflict is coalitions. One of the first explicitly evolutionary studies of political behavior was De Waal’s (1982) study on politics among a troop of chimpanzees. This study documented how different male chimpanzees, through
careful crafting of coalitions, climbed the hierarchical ladder in order to influence resource distributions and, in particular, access to females. Humans use
similar tactics to regulate a wider range of resource distributions and gain
significant political leverage through their allies. In fact, humans are probably unique in the extent to which strength in numbers (coalitional power)
outweighs the role of physical strength of the individual (Von Rueden, Gurven, & Kaplan, 2008).
The sophisticated human abilities for navigating and forming coalitions
and the resulting tight relationship between coalitions and political power
have had profound effects on the evolution of human political behavior.
While coalitions have helped ambitious individuals gain power, coalitions
have also enabled lower ranking individuals to revolt against overly ambitious (and overly self-serving) individuals. As argued by Boehm (2000),
the constant possibility of the formation of coalitions “from below” have
generated a zoologically unrivaled selection pressure for the evolution of an
egalitarian orientation in humans and a resentment of exploitive leaders.
Today, these orientations continue to shape political dynamics as civil wars
erupt and autocracies are revolted against when exploitation becomes too
severe or the number of high-ranking positions become too few (see, e.g.,
Acemoglu & Robinson, 2000; Urdal, 2006).
For humans, not just individuals but also coalitions are organized in
hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). As a consequence, political behavior is
not just about achieving status for oneself but about achieving status—and,
hence, recognized decision-making power—for the coalition that one is part
of. A number of complex human political phenomena emerge from these
coalitional competitions for status such as moral outrages to deteriorate
opposing groups and epistemic band-wagoning whereby individuals adopt
the epistemic attitudes of their group in order to signal group membership
and loyalty (Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). The most severe expression of these
competitions is collective violence in the form of war. Both chimpanzees
and humans engage in war or raids to secure tangible resources from other
groups such as food, territory, and mates. For human individuals and
groups, resources gained from war also include status and, hence, political
power.

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RECENT RESEARCH
Recent advances in the study of the evolutionary origins of political behavior have focused on dissecting the structure of specific evolved mechanism
for political behavior and narrowly defining the input they seek out and the
output they deliver. Furthermore, a key concern of these recent advances has
been whether it makes a difference for modern political behavior that it rests
on evolved, biological underpinnings. In this way, scholars are increasingly
moving from providing evolutionary explanations of well-known political
phenomenon (e.g., war) to deriving novel predictions from the evolutionary
perspective.
THE ANCESTRAL LOGIC OF MODERN POLITICS
An increasing set of studies have focused on the fact that biological evolution is a slow process and, hence, that the structure of biologically evolved
psychological mechanisms is determined by past rather than current environments (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). For the study of politics, this is important as there is a range of differences between the environments of ancestral
and modern politics. Ancestrally, politics was played out between and within
small groups of foragers of perhaps 25–200 individuals with Stone Age technology (Kelly, 1995), while today politics is played out between and within
large-scale, highly technologically advanced societies with several millions
inhabitants. As a consequence, one way to identify the importance of biological evolution is to model ancestral environments and investigate whether
factors that were adaptively important in these environments continue to
shape political behavior even if these factors are rationally irrelevant today.
Using this logic, upper body strength is one factor that has been identified
as politically important and it has been demonstrated that for males upper
body strength—a factor that ancestrally would have increased the likelihood
of prevailing in conflict—correlates positively with modern support for war
(Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2009) and self-serving policies (Petersen, Sznycer
Sell, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2013). While many modern political outcomes are
determined through the electoral dynamics of representative democracy,
individuals still reason as if outcomes were determined in direct face-to-face
competition in which physical strength would partially determine who
would prevail.
Another illustrative, ancestrally relevant factor that continues to shape
modern political cognition is hunger. Our foraging ancestors regularly
experienced periods of hunger. For humans, a key evolved strategy to buffer
against fluctuations in calorie access was to motivate others to willfully share
their food. By implication, the human mind should contain psychological
mechanisms designed to increase appeals to social sharing systems when

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hungry. Research has shown that these mechanisms extend their impact
even to novel sharing systems such as the modern welfare states. In essence,
short-term increases in hunger make people more supportive of social welfare (Aarøe & Petersen, 2013; Petersen, Aarøe, Jensen, & Curry, 2014). While
political scientists often have emphasized the role of economic resources
that change only slowly, this research in contrast shows that our welfare
attitudes change within an hour depending on short-term fluctuations in
caloric resources.
A third recent illustration comes from research on disease-avoidance
motivations and xenophobia. Ancestrally, modern “racial” differences did
not exist and differences in skin complexion would rather be the result of
infectious diseases (giving rise to symptoms such as rashes). Hence, the
mind should be geared to automatically tag people who look different as
potentially disease hosts (rather than carriers of different levels of harmless
melanin) and avoid them (Kurzban & Leary, 2001). In line with this, research
has shown that people who are more oriented towards avoiding diseases are
also more xenophobic (e.g., Faulkner, Schaller, Park, & Duncan, 2004). While
political scientists have emphasized economic and cultural competition as an
underlying cause of xenophobia, this research suggests that when foreigners
are described as “vermin” and a “pest” it literally expresses a concern about
pathogenic infection rather than economic or cultural concerns.
The underlying logic of these sets of studies is that researchers can predict the importance of seemingly irrelevant factors by considering the evolutionary history of politics. Human political psychology continues to bear
the marks of the particular features of ancestral political environments. In
this way, these studies have added significantly to the foundational research
on evolution and politics and clarified how evolution has shaped political
behavior and why an evolutionary stance is important.
INDIVIDUAL POLITICAL DIFFERENCES
The foundational research focused on human political universals such as
dominance hierarchies and coalition formation. However, inspired by the
fields of personality research and behavior genetics, recent research has
demonstrated that political judgments and actions vary substantially from
individual to individual. In particular, Haidt (2012) has provided strong
evidence that show how liberals and conservatives utilize different evolved
moral intuitions when thinking about politics and other research has shown
that differences in political attitudes correlate with more basic physiological
differences (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013). Furthermore, a range of recent
studies have consistently and cross-culturally documented that political
ideology is between 40% and 60% heritable (Hatemi et al., 2014). A number

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of other traits related to both political judgments and behavior such as
political participation have similarly been shown to be genetically heritable
(e.g., Fowler, Baker, & Dawes, 2008). These recent findings indicate that
there is no universally “best” political strategy. Rather, the fact that natural
selection has left politically relevant genetic variation suggests that different
political strategies, on average, have had equal fitness value over time.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The evolutionary study of political behavior is a novel field and, hence, most
discoveries have yet to be made and key obstacles have yet to be passed.
The key issues for future research on the issue of evolutionary theory and
political behavior can be divided into three parts: (i) investigating the precise relationships between the existence of universal, evolved psychological
mechanisms for political behavior and the large levels of individual differences in manifest political behavior; (ii) understanding the consequences of
the differences between ancestral and modern political environments; and
(iii) increasing the acceptance of evolutionary approaches to politics within
general social science. In this final section, we discuss each of these parts.
EVOLUTION AND POLITICAL INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
As described earlier, recent research has uncovered the existence of stable,
partly genetic individual differences in political judgments and behavior.
Evolutionary theory has most often been utilized to explain psychological
universals and, in this perspective, the existence of these individual differences could be viewed as puzzling. At the same time, it is important to
acknowledge that evolutionary theorists for the past 30 years have been
dissecting the many distinct pathways that can lead to adaptive existence
of individual differences in general (e.g., Buss, 2009; Tooby & Cosmides,
1990). Important research lies ahead in utilizing these accumulated insights
to understand the emergences of individual differences in the domain of
politics.
Part of the challenge is to understand the evolution of genetically heritable
political traits within populations. As argued earlier, the key insight is
that different political traits, on average, must have had equal fitness
value over time. Yet, multiple processes could balance the fitness values
of different political strategies. Frequency-dependent selection is one such
factor. Frequency-dependent selection for political traits would emerge if
the adaptiveness of one political trait (e.g., a hawkish strategy) depended
on the frequency of another trait (e.g., dovish strategies) in the population.
Under specific conditions, a consequence of frequency-dependent selection

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is the evolution of different morphs of the species (Heino, Metz, & Kaitala,
1998) and some authors have speculated that we can perhaps view liberals
and conservatives as different political morphs of humans (Hibbing et al.,
2013). Another factor that could uphold variation in politically relevant
genes is continuously fluctuating or “noisy” environments (McElreath &
Strimling, 2006; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). This latter account seems more
compatible with the fact that political ideology is normally distributed in
modern populations rather than bimodally distributed as would be the
case if discrete political morphs existed (Fiorina & Abrams, 2008). Teasing
apart these (and other) different evolutionary accounts of the emergence
of heritable differences in political behavior is an important step in future
studies. Hence, each of these different accounts carries with it different
observable implications that should be mapped out in detail and tested.
The other part of the challenge is to understand the role of the environment in the shaping of stable individual differences in political behavior.
As demonstrated in recent studies on individual differences in personality
(e.g., Lukaszewski & Roney, 2011; White et al., 2012), suites of mechanisms
exist for tailoring personal temperament and strategies to the exact circumstances facing the specific individual. In the domain of politics, examples in
point are the above-cited studies showing how political attitudes are calibrated to both contextual factors such as exposure to hunger and disease
threats and individual-level factors such as physical strength. More generally, adaptive political behavior is “state-dependent” or “facultative” behavior (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990), that is, behavior that matches the internal
and external contingencies of the political actor (Petersen & Aarøe, 2012, p.
808). We should expect our evolved psychological architecture to reflect this
and contain mechanisms for calibrating behavior accordingly. Using evolutionary theory to map the structure of these calibrational mechanisms and
identify the cues that they are geared to use during development and in the
present is a key important challenge for future studies. Ultimately, it holds
the promise of replacing mushy concepts such as “political socialization” and
“political learning” with clearly defined psychological processes.
EVOLUTIONARY MATCHES AND MISMATCHES IN MODERN POLITICS
The structure of adaptations is determined by past environments. This opens
the space for a range of important questions about how well human political
psychology is adapted to modern mass politics. In essence, these questions
relate to how modern environments are different from ancestral environments and how this affects the operations of evolved political psychology.
A first set of issues relate to the quality of policies that rest on evolved
moral and political intuitions. In the context of evolutionary matches and

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mismatches, one question in this regard is whether parts of our evolved
minds lead us to misapprehend certain features of modern environments
(Hagen & Hammerstein, 2006). If, for example, racially different immigrants
are mentally tagged as pathogen hosts (as a by-product of a hyper-vigilant,
disease-avoidance psychology) and therefore avoided and not allowed
entry, it entails opportunity costs in the form potentially missed gains in
productivity and innovation for a country. Another question relates to
whether our intuitions provide appropriate solutions. If we, for example,
are motivated to reduce crime (an evolved goal), are the solutions promoted
by a psychology designed for small-scale social groups those that will work
best in large-scale modern contexts (Petersen, Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides,
2010)? Such questions are important to address for future empirical research:
How widespread are misapprehension and ill-working intuitions? This
certainly does not mean that evolved mechanisms for political behavior
are always ill-working in modern politics. For example, in their pursuit
for votes, office, and policy, professional politicians make incredible use
of the coalition-forming and coalition-navigating abilities that have been
installed in us by evolution. In this case, there is a high degree of similarity
between the context of modern politics and ancestral politics. Coalitions are
at the center of both and, for politicians these coalitions are, to a large extent
negotiated in the kind of face-to-face interactions that have been pervasive
over evolutionary history.
A second set of issues relates to the informational differences between
ancestral and modern contexts in the domain of politics. In ancestral
small-scale societies, direct knowledge of and acquaintance with targets
of political decisions was the norm. Today, people have only indirect and
extremely limited knowledge of almost all political cases. The consequences
of this difference are only now beginning to be explored and constitute
important avenues for future research (Petersen, 2009; Petersen & Aarøe,
2013). One avenue relates to the deeper causes of political disengagement.
An evolutionary perspective suggests that in terms of psychology, we are
all political sophisticates (Schreiber, 2007). Issues of criminal justice, social
welfare, and immigration carry, for example, deep similarities to recurrent
adaptive problems of norm-violation, help-giving and ingroup–out-group
relations. Yet, for many people, modern politics fail to trigger the appropriate evolved mechanisms; not because they are impaired but because
the abstract, anonymous, and technical nature of mass politics imply that
relevant ecologically valid information does not reach the mechanisms
(Petersen & Aarøe, 2012). Another avenue relates to the fact that today
the political information provided to us has been carefully selected by
journalists and editors to fulfill specific news criteria and have often been
strategically provided to these by political elites in order to further their

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specific interests. This opens the way for the important study of whether
political and media elites increase their power if their messages target
evolved intuitions by placing emphasis on evolutionarily recurrent factors
and solutions. The a priori expectation would be that political messages that
fit our evolved intuitions should be more persuasive (e.g., Arceneaux, 2012).
A final set of issues relates to the emergence of large-scale societies themselves. Stable large-scale societies that are dramatically different from the
societies of the past have emerged from a complex interplay between an
evolved psychology designed for small-scale sociality and complex institutional change. How have political institutions successfully incentivized certain sides of human nature and succeeded in disincentivizing other sides
in order for this to happen? Which institutional features have been most
important and which psychological traits have they targeted? These are key
challenges for twenty-first century social science to solve.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE GENERAL STUDY OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
Biological approaches to the study of political behavior have found their way
into top-tier mainstream journals in diverse disciplines such as biology, psychology, and political science. Yet, for some researchers, it might seem overly
complicated to appeal to long evolutionary processes when explaining modern political behavior. At a glance, Occam’s razor—the principle of utilizing
the simplest explanation possible—seems to go against evolutionary explanations. Yet, while evolutionary explanations might seem complicated from
the perspective of a single discipline, they can easily emerge as the simplest
explanations by considering the totality of interdisciplinary evidence.
For example: Why are physically stronger males more politically
self-interested (cf. Petersen et al., 2013)? Is this the result of an adaptation that is designed to regulate assertiveness on the basis of strength or is it
simply because strong kids “learn” in the schoolyard that they can get their
way? While the latter explanation for some might seem as a simpler account,
it fails to account for why other organisms react in the same way (after all,
spiders, frogs, crickets, deer, etc., don’t spend much time in school yards);
the existence of sophisticated mechanisms for detecting strength in others;
the incredibly large sexual dimorphism in strength; that preverbal infants,
social intuitions about who will prevail in a conflict are guided by cues,
for instance, to strength. Evolutionary theory provides a single explanation
accounting for all these observations across all these disciplines (Sell, Hone,
& Pound, 2012).
One key practical challenge for the spread of the application of evolutionary theory to the study of political behavior, then, is to help other researchers
appreciate the role of interdisciplinary evidence in evaluating theories of
political behavior. This does not mean that specific studies of evolutionary

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theories should not be concerned with providing the strongest possible
evidence on their own and the provisioning of cross-cultural evidence is
in particular important here (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But it
means that the role of evolutionary theory in the study of political behavior
is part of a larger, more general reorientation about what science is.
The success of an interdisciplinary stance in the natural sciences suggests
that this stance too will be worthwhile in the social sciences including in the
study of political behavior (Wilson, 1999). To paraphrase the evolutionary
biologist, George Williams (1966, p. 16): Is it not reasonable to anticipate that
our understanding of the human political mind would be aided greatly by
knowing the purpose for which it was designed? If so, to get to know that
purpose, there is no other tool available than evolutionary theory.
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psychology of food-sharing: Short-term hunger increases support for social welfare. Political Psychology, 35(6).
Schreiber, D. (2007). Political cognition as social cognition: Are we all political sophisticates?. In W. Russell Neuman, G. E. Marcus, M. MacKuen & A. N. Crigler (Eds.),
The affect effect: Dynamics of emotion in political thinking and behavior (pp. 48–70).
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sell, A., Hone, L. S., & Pound, N. (2012). The importance of physical strength to
human males. Human Nature, 23(1), 30–44.
Sell, A., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2009). Formidability and the logic of human anger.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(35), 15073–15078.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (2001). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy
and oppression. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of personality,
58(1), 17–67.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2010). Groups in mind: The coalitional roots of war and
morality. Human morality and sociality: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives,
91–234.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly review of biology,
35–57.
Urdal, H. (2006). A clash of generations? Youth bulges and political violence. International Studies Quarterly, 50(3), 607–629.
Von Rueden, C., Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2008). The multiple dimensions of
male social status in an Amazonian society. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(6),
402–415.
White, A. E., Kenrick, D. T., Li, Y. J., Mortensen, C. R., Neuberg, S. L., & Cohen, A.
B. (2012). When nasty breeds nice: Threats of violence amplify agreeableness at
national, individual, and situational levels. Journal of personality and social psychology, 103(4), 622.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection: a critique of some current evolutionary thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, E. O. (1999). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. London, England: Vintage
Books.
Yamagishi, T., & Mifune, N. (2008). Does shared group membership promote altruism? Fear, greed, and reputation. Rationality and Society, 20(1), 5–30.

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Michael Bang Petersen is Professor in the Department of Political Science,
Aarhus University in Denmark. He received his PhD in 2007. His primary

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

research focuses on how human evolutionary history influences the way people reason about modern mass politics. Specific topics he has published on
include attitudes about social welfare, immigration, redistribution, criminal
justice, and political parties. His work has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, American Political Science Review, American Journal of
Political Science, and Journal of Politics. His academic affiliations include the
Center for Evolutionary Psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University. Together with
Lene Aarøe, he codirects The Politics and Evolution Lab.
LENE AARØE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Lene Aarøe is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science
& Government, Aarhus University in Denmark. She received her PhD in
2010. Her field of research is political psychology. A key motivation in her
work is to investigate how the psychological imprints of ancestral living in
hunter-gatherer groups shape political attitudes and communication effects
in modern mass democracies.
Specific topics she has published on include attitudes about social welfare,
immigration, and political parties. Her work has appeared in journals such
as Psychological Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and Political Communication. She is affiliated with the Interacting Minds
Centre at Aarhus University and, together with Michael Bang Petersen, codirects The Politics and Evolution Lab.

RELATED ESSAYS
Social Epigenetics: Incorporating Epigenetic Effects as Social Cause and Consequence (Sociology), Douglas L. Anderton and Kathleen F. Arcaro
Telomeres (Psychology), Nancy Adler and Aoife O’Donovan
Kin-Directed Behavior in Primates (Anthropology), Carol M. Berman
The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian
F. Codding
Genetics and the Life Course (Sociology), Evan Charney
Sexual Behavior (Anthropology), Melissa Emery Thompson
Genetic and Environmental Approaches to Political Science (Political Science),
Zoltán Fazekas and Peter K. Hatemi
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement (Psychology), David C. Geary and Daniel B. Berch
Genetics and Social Behavior (Anthropology), Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran

Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

15

An Evolutionary Perspective on Developmental Plasticity (Psychology), Sarah
Hartman and Jay Belsky
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian Kandler et al.
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Evolutionary Perspectives on Animal and Human Personality (Anthropology), Joseph H. Manson and Lynn A. Fairbanks
Behavioral Heterochrony (Anthropology), Victoria Wobber and Brian Hare



Evolutionary Theory and Political
Behavior
MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN and LENE AARØE

Abstract
Political behavior is behavior aimed at regulating access to resources: Who is
recognized to get what, when, and how? Evidence across a number of disciplines
shows that humans over evolutionary history have evolved sophisticated abilities to
engage in political behavior through status seeking and coalition formation in order
to attract resources to themselves, their kin, and their allies. As demonstrated by
recent research, this evolutionary history of politics continues to shape how modern
individuals behave in modern mass politics and prompt people to derive their
political attitudes from ancestrally relevant factors such as upper body strength
and short-term fluctuations in hunger. Important areas for research lies ahead in
(i) understanding how evolution has given rise to individual variation in political
behavior, (ii) investigating the extent to which the evolved psychology of humans
biases modern political behavior, and (iii) strengthening the ties between this
emerging application of evolutionary theory and more traditional research on
political behavior.

INTRODUCTION
Political behavior is behavior aimed at regulating access to resources: Who
is recognized to get what, when, and how (Laswell, 1950)? If social behavior
is about playing the game, political behavior is then about determining the
rules of the game being played. For example, while many social animals
can engage in cooperative exercises, only political animals can negotiate
and change the rules regulating the surpluses flowing from these exercises.
Humans are such political animals but other species are political too. In
essence, any species with individually conflicting interests and cognitive
capacities for what De Waal (1996) terms “a sense of social regularity”
have politics. Conflicts of interest constitute the key driver of political
behavior and the sense of social regularity (i.e., shared social expectations)
constitutes the key target of political behavior. Political behavior is thus
behavior seeking to enforce one’s interests by pushing the shared sense
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of regularity into greater alignment with one’s interest. Animals that are,
presumably, political in this sense include a range of nonhuman species such
as chimpanzees and dolphins (e.g., De Waal, 1982).
In this essay, we focus on political behavior in humans. Yet, the observation that political behavior is zoologically widespread is important because
it provides a prima facie case that political behavior in both human and nonhuman animals emerges from psychological mechanisms that are biologically instantiated and, as any other complex biological design, evolved by
natural selection. This is critically important for the study of political behavior across all disciplines. If relevant psychological mechanisms are evolved
biological adaptations, they are designed to carry out particular functions
(Williams, 1966). Through the use of evolutionary theory, researchers can
come to know the functions and structures of these psychology mechanisms
and, ultimately, build precise testable hypotheses about political phenomena.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The suite of psychological mechanisms underlying political behavior
must encompass both mechanisms for evaluating current resource access
and mechanisms designed for engaging in activities that change access
(Petersen & Aarøe, 2012). Foundational research in evolutionary theory has
explored the structure of both types of mechanisms.
ADAPTATIONS FOR POLITICAL JUDGMENT: EVALUATING RESOURCE ACCESS
In understanding the psychological mechanisms that underlie people’s
intuitive evaluations of resource distributions, more general research on
the evolution of social preferences has provided an important basis. Natural selection, of course, must have selected for a substantial degree of
self-interest and, hence, a preference that more rather than less resources
flow to the self. But, in addition, natural selection has selected for a number
of pathways through which we are concerned with the welfare of others.
These preferences in turn seem to influence the way that people evaluate
resource allocations in the domain of politics.
Hamilton’s (1964) demonstration of the fitness advantages of helping
kin (due to shared genes) provides the basis for understanding political
phenomena such as kin nepotism. Even more important for the evolutionary
study of political behavior was the demonstration by Trivers (1971) of the
fitness advantages of reciprocal cooperation. While Hamilton’s work helped
researchers understand preferences for providing resources to kin, Trivers’
work helped researchers understand the conditions that regulate human
preferences for providing resources to non-kin—a more pervasive category

Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

3

in most political settings. According to Trivers’ model, people are motivated
and capable of harvesting cooperative surpluses from interactions with
non-kin but keep a keen eye on whether they are receiving less from the
cooperative enterprise than they contribute (i.e., whether they are being
“cheated”). Upon detection of cheating, cooperation is withdrawn. Research
in experimental psychology has since provided strong demonstrations
of the fine-tuned psychological mechanisms underlying both cooperative
motivations and cheater-detection abilities (for reviews, see Cosmides &
Tooby, 2005). The general implication for the study of political behavior is
that people intuitively favor resource distributions where people’s resource
levels are aligned with their efforts to contribute to collective enterprises
and, in particular, that individuals oppose schemes that imply that they
themselves receive less than they have contributed. In the study of politics,
this has been used to explain the structure of institutions for collective action
(Ostrom & Walker, 2005). It has also been used to explain attitudes toward
social welfare recipients that are highly influenced by whether a recipient is
putting in effort to alleviate his or her own need (Petersen, 2012).
Because cooperation requires stable exchange systems, cooperation
evolved to operate within groups and, as a consequence, a range of evolved,
psychological mechanism for group facilitation and group navigation exists
(Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). As demonstrated by foundational research in
social psychology, these mechanisms prompt individuals to continuously
track the group membership of other individuals (Kurzban, Tooby, &
Cosmides, 2001) and to preferentially share resources with ingroup individuals (e.g., Yamagishi & Mifune, 2008). Again, these mechanisms also
influence political assessments of resource distributions such that individuals prefer resource access schemes that favor ingroup members at the
expense of outgroup members. For example, studies of cross-national levels
of ethnic heterogeneity and support for redistribution of income show that
as heterogeneity increases people become more opposed to sharing their
income (Alesina & Glaeser, 2004).
ADAPTATIONS FOR POLITICAL BEHAVIOR: CHANGING RESOURCE ACCESS
Factors such as self-interest, kinship, reciprocity, and group membership
provide the foundations of our evolved psychology for evaluating political
distributions of resources. In addition, we have an evolved psychology
designed to bring these distributions into alignment with our preferences.
Of key importance in this regard is the existence of hierarchies based on
dominance and prestige (Cheng, Tracy, & Henrich, 2010). As in many other
social species, humans intuitively recognize differences in status and accept
(within limits) that individuals of higher status have greater leverage in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

negotiations. As a consequence, one key focal point in political conflicts
is status conflicts and, hence, conflicts about power to influence resource
access.
For humans and a select number of other social animals, the key tool in such
conflict is coalitions. One of the first explicitly evolutionary studies of political behavior was De Waal’s (1982) study on politics among a troop of chimpanzees. This study documented how different male chimpanzees, through
careful crafting of coalitions, climbed the hierarchical ladder in order to influence resource distributions and, in particular, access to females. Humans use
similar tactics to regulate a wider range of resource distributions and gain
significant political leverage through their allies. In fact, humans are probably unique in the extent to which strength in numbers (coalitional power)
outweighs the role of physical strength of the individual (Von Rueden, Gurven, & Kaplan, 2008).
The sophisticated human abilities for navigating and forming coalitions
and the resulting tight relationship between coalitions and political power
have had profound effects on the evolution of human political behavior.
While coalitions have helped ambitious individuals gain power, coalitions
have also enabled lower ranking individuals to revolt against overly ambitious (and overly self-serving) individuals. As argued by Boehm (2000),
the constant possibility of the formation of coalitions “from below” have
generated a zoologically unrivaled selection pressure for the evolution of an
egalitarian orientation in humans and a resentment of exploitive leaders.
Today, these orientations continue to shape political dynamics as civil wars
erupt and autocracies are revolted against when exploitation becomes too
severe or the number of high-ranking positions become too few (see, e.g.,
Acemoglu & Robinson, 2000; Urdal, 2006).
For humans, not just individuals but also coalitions are organized in
hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). As a consequence, political behavior is
not just about achieving status for oneself but about achieving status—and,
hence, recognized decision-making power—for the coalition that one is part
of. A number of complex human political phenomena emerge from these
coalitional competitions for status such as moral outrages to deteriorate
opposing groups and epistemic band-wagoning whereby individuals adopt
the epistemic attitudes of their group in order to signal group membership
and loyalty (Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). The most severe expression of these
competitions is collective violence in the form of war. Both chimpanzees
and humans engage in war or raids to secure tangible resources from other
groups such as food, territory, and mates. For human individuals and
groups, resources gained from war also include status and, hence, political
power.

Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

5

RECENT RESEARCH
Recent advances in the study of the evolutionary origins of political behavior have focused on dissecting the structure of specific evolved mechanism
for political behavior and narrowly defining the input they seek out and the
output they deliver. Furthermore, a key concern of these recent advances has
been whether it makes a difference for modern political behavior that it rests
on evolved, biological underpinnings. In this way, scholars are increasingly
moving from providing evolutionary explanations of well-known political
phenomenon (e.g., war) to deriving novel predictions from the evolutionary
perspective.
THE ANCESTRAL LOGIC OF MODERN POLITICS
An increasing set of studies have focused on the fact that biological evolution is a slow process and, hence, that the structure of biologically evolved
psychological mechanisms is determined by past rather than current environments (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). For the study of politics, this is important as there is a range of differences between the environments of ancestral
and modern politics. Ancestrally, politics was played out between and within
small groups of foragers of perhaps 25–200 individuals with Stone Age technology (Kelly, 1995), while today politics is played out between and within
large-scale, highly technologically advanced societies with several millions
inhabitants. As a consequence, one way to identify the importance of biological evolution is to model ancestral environments and investigate whether
factors that were adaptively important in these environments continue to
shape political behavior even if these factors are rationally irrelevant today.
Using this logic, upper body strength is one factor that has been identified
as politically important and it has been demonstrated that for males upper
body strength—a factor that ancestrally would have increased the likelihood
of prevailing in conflict—correlates positively with modern support for war
(Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2009) and self-serving policies (Petersen, Sznycer
Sell, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2013). While many modern political outcomes are
determined through the electoral dynamics of representative democracy,
individuals still reason as if outcomes were determined in direct face-to-face
competition in which physical strength would partially determine who
would prevail.
Another illustrative, ancestrally relevant factor that continues to shape
modern political cognition is hunger. Our foraging ancestors regularly
experienced periods of hunger. For humans, a key evolved strategy to buffer
against fluctuations in calorie access was to motivate others to willfully share
their food. By implication, the human mind should contain psychological
mechanisms designed to increase appeals to social sharing systems when

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

hungry. Research has shown that these mechanisms extend their impact
even to novel sharing systems such as the modern welfare states. In essence,
short-term increases in hunger make people more supportive of social welfare (Aarøe & Petersen, 2013; Petersen, Aarøe, Jensen, & Curry, 2014). While
political scientists often have emphasized the role of economic resources
that change only slowly, this research in contrast shows that our welfare
attitudes change within an hour depending on short-term fluctuations in
caloric resources.
A third recent illustration comes from research on disease-avoidance
motivations and xenophobia. Ancestrally, modern “racial” differences did
not exist and differences in skin complexion would rather be the result of
infectious diseases (giving rise to symptoms such as rashes). Hence, the
mind should be geared to automatically tag people who look different as
potentially disease hosts (rather than carriers of different levels of harmless
melanin) and avoid them (Kurzban & Leary, 2001). In line with this, research
has shown that people who are more oriented towards avoiding diseases are
also more xenophobic (e.g., Faulkner, Schaller, Park, & Duncan, 2004). While
political scientists have emphasized economic and cultural competition as an
underlying cause of xenophobia, this research suggests that when foreigners
are described as “vermin” and a “pest” it literally expresses a concern about
pathogenic infection rather than economic or cultural concerns.
The underlying logic of these sets of studies is that researchers can predict the importance of seemingly irrelevant factors by considering the evolutionary history of politics. Human political psychology continues to bear
the marks of the particular features of ancestral political environments. In
this way, these studies have added significantly to the foundational research
on evolution and politics and clarified how evolution has shaped political
behavior and why an evolutionary stance is important.
INDIVIDUAL POLITICAL DIFFERENCES
The foundational research focused on human political universals such as
dominance hierarchies and coalition formation. However, inspired by the
fields of personality research and behavior genetics, recent research has
demonstrated that political judgments and actions vary substantially from
individual to individual. In particular, Haidt (2012) has provided strong
evidence that show how liberals and conservatives utilize different evolved
moral intuitions when thinking about politics and other research has shown
that differences in political attitudes correlate with more basic physiological
differences (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013). Furthermore, a range of recent
studies have consistently and cross-culturally documented that political
ideology is between 40% and 60% heritable (Hatemi et al., 2014). A number

Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

7

of other traits related to both political judgments and behavior such as
political participation have similarly been shown to be genetically heritable
(e.g., Fowler, Baker, & Dawes, 2008). These recent findings indicate that
there is no universally “best” political strategy. Rather, the fact that natural
selection has left politically relevant genetic variation suggests that different
political strategies, on average, have had equal fitness value over time.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The evolutionary study of political behavior is a novel field and, hence, most
discoveries have yet to be made and key obstacles have yet to be passed.
The key issues for future research on the issue of evolutionary theory and
political behavior can be divided into three parts: (i) investigating the precise relationships between the existence of universal, evolved psychological
mechanisms for political behavior and the large levels of individual differences in manifest political behavior; (ii) understanding the consequences of
the differences between ancestral and modern political environments; and
(iii) increasing the acceptance of evolutionary approaches to politics within
general social science. In this final section, we discuss each of these parts.
EVOLUTION AND POLITICAL INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
As described earlier, recent research has uncovered the existence of stable,
partly genetic individual differences in political judgments and behavior.
Evolutionary theory has most often been utilized to explain psychological
universals and, in this perspective, the existence of these individual differences could be viewed as puzzling. At the same time, it is important to
acknowledge that evolutionary theorists for the past 30 years have been
dissecting the many distinct pathways that can lead to adaptive existence
of individual differences in general (e.g., Buss, 2009; Tooby & Cosmides,
1990). Important research lies ahead in utilizing these accumulated insights
to understand the emergences of individual differences in the domain of
politics.
Part of the challenge is to understand the evolution of genetically heritable
political traits within populations. As argued earlier, the key insight is
that different political traits, on average, must have had equal fitness
value over time. Yet, multiple processes could balance the fitness values
of different political strategies. Frequency-dependent selection is one such
factor. Frequency-dependent selection for political traits would emerge if
the adaptiveness of one political trait (e.g., a hawkish strategy) depended
on the frequency of another trait (e.g., dovish strategies) in the population.
Under specific conditions, a consequence of frequency-dependent selection

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

is the evolution of different morphs of the species (Heino, Metz, & Kaitala,
1998) and some authors have speculated that we can perhaps view liberals
and conservatives as different political morphs of humans (Hibbing et al.,
2013). Another factor that could uphold variation in politically relevant
genes is continuously fluctuating or “noisy” environments (McElreath &
Strimling, 2006; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). This latter account seems more
compatible with the fact that political ideology is normally distributed in
modern populations rather than bimodally distributed as would be the
case if discrete political morphs existed (Fiorina & Abrams, 2008). Teasing
apart these (and other) different evolutionary accounts of the emergence
of heritable differences in political behavior is an important step in future
studies. Hence, each of these different accounts carries with it different
observable implications that should be mapped out in detail and tested.
The other part of the challenge is to understand the role of the environment in the shaping of stable individual differences in political behavior.
As demonstrated in recent studies on individual differences in personality
(e.g., Lukaszewski & Roney, 2011; White et al., 2012), suites of mechanisms
exist for tailoring personal temperament and strategies to the exact circumstances facing the specific individual. In the domain of politics, examples in
point are the above-cited studies showing how political attitudes are calibrated to both contextual factors such as exposure to hunger and disease
threats and individual-level factors such as physical strength. More generally, adaptive political behavior is “state-dependent” or “facultative” behavior (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990), that is, behavior that matches the internal
and external contingencies of the political actor (Petersen & Aarøe, 2012, p.
808). We should expect our evolved psychological architecture to reflect this
and contain mechanisms for calibrating behavior accordingly. Using evolutionary theory to map the structure of these calibrational mechanisms and
identify the cues that they are geared to use during development and in the
present is a key important challenge for future studies. Ultimately, it holds
the promise of replacing mushy concepts such as “political socialization” and
“political learning” with clearly defined psychological processes.
EVOLUTIONARY MATCHES AND MISMATCHES IN MODERN POLITICS
The structure of adaptations is determined by past environments. This opens
the space for a range of important questions about how well human political
psychology is adapted to modern mass politics. In essence, these questions
relate to how modern environments are different from ancestral environments and how this affects the operations of evolved political psychology.
A first set of issues relate to the quality of policies that rest on evolved
moral and political intuitions. In the context of evolutionary matches and

Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

9

mismatches, one question in this regard is whether parts of our evolved
minds lead us to misapprehend certain features of modern environments
(Hagen & Hammerstein, 2006). If, for example, racially different immigrants
are mentally tagged as pathogen hosts (as a by-product of a hyper-vigilant,
disease-avoidance psychology) and therefore avoided and not allowed
entry, it entails opportunity costs in the form potentially missed gains in
productivity and innovation for a country. Another question relates to
whether our intuitions provide appropriate solutions. If we, for example,
are motivated to reduce crime (an evolved goal), are the solutions promoted
by a psychology designed for small-scale social groups those that will work
best in large-scale modern contexts (Petersen, Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides,
2010)? Such questions are important to address for future empirical research:
How widespread are misapprehension and ill-working intuitions? This
certainly does not mean that evolved mechanisms for political behavior
are always ill-working in modern politics. For example, in their pursuit
for votes, office, and policy, professional politicians make incredible use
of the coalition-forming and coalition-navigating abilities that have been
installed in us by evolution. In this case, there is a high degree of similarity
between the context of modern politics and ancestral politics. Coalitions are
at the center of both and, for politicians these coalitions are, to a large extent
negotiated in the kind of face-to-face interactions that have been pervasive
over evolutionary history.
A second set of issues relates to the informational differences between
ancestral and modern contexts in the domain of politics. In ancestral
small-scale societies, direct knowledge of and acquaintance with targets
of political decisions was the norm. Today, people have only indirect and
extremely limited knowledge of almost all political cases. The consequences
of this difference are only now beginning to be explored and constitute
important avenues for future research (Petersen, 2009; Petersen & Aarøe,
2013). One avenue relates to the deeper causes of political disengagement.
An evolutionary perspective suggests that in terms of psychology, we are
all political sophisticates (Schreiber, 2007). Issues of criminal justice, social
welfare, and immigration carry, for example, deep similarities to recurrent
adaptive problems of norm-violation, help-giving and ingroup–out-group
relations. Yet, for many people, modern politics fail to trigger the appropriate evolved mechanisms; not because they are impaired but because
the abstract, anonymous, and technical nature of mass politics imply that
relevant ecologically valid information does not reach the mechanisms
(Petersen & Aarøe, 2012). Another avenue relates to the fact that today
the political information provided to us has been carefully selected by
journalists and editors to fulfill specific news criteria and have often been
strategically provided to these by political elites in order to further their

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

specific interests. This opens the way for the important study of whether
political and media elites increase their power if their messages target
evolved intuitions by placing emphasis on evolutionarily recurrent factors
and solutions. The a priori expectation would be that political messages that
fit our evolved intuitions should be more persuasive (e.g., Arceneaux, 2012).
A final set of issues relates to the emergence of large-scale societies themselves. Stable large-scale societies that are dramatically different from the
societies of the past have emerged from a complex interplay between an
evolved psychology designed for small-scale sociality and complex institutional change. How have political institutions successfully incentivized certain sides of human nature and succeeded in disincentivizing other sides
in order for this to happen? Which institutional features have been most
important and which psychological traits have they targeted? These are key
challenges for twenty-first century social science to solve.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE GENERAL STUDY OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
Biological approaches to the study of political behavior have found their way
into top-tier mainstream journals in diverse disciplines such as biology, psychology, and political science. Yet, for some researchers, it might seem overly
complicated to appeal to long evolutionary processes when explaining modern political behavior. At a glance, Occam’s razor—the principle of utilizing
the simplest explanation possible—seems to go against evolutionary explanations. Yet, while evolutionary explanations might seem complicated from
the perspective of a single discipline, they can easily emerge as the simplest
explanations by considering the totality of interdisciplinary evidence.
For example: Why are physically stronger males more politically
self-interested (cf. Petersen et al., 2013)? Is this the result of an adaptation that is designed to regulate assertiveness on the basis of strength or is it
simply because strong kids “learn” in the schoolyard that they can get their
way? While the latter explanation for some might seem as a simpler account,
it fails to account for why other organisms react in the same way (after all,
spiders, frogs, crickets, deer, etc., don’t spend much time in school yards);
the existence of sophisticated mechanisms for detecting strength in others;
the incredibly large sexual dimorphism in strength; that preverbal infants,
social intuitions about who will prevail in a conflict are guided by cues,
for instance, to strength. Evolutionary theory provides a single explanation
accounting for all these observations across all these disciplines (Sell, Hone,
& Pound, 2012).
One key practical challenge for the spread of the application of evolutionary theory to the study of political behavior, then, is to help other researchers
appreciate the role of interdisciplinary evidence in evaluating theories of
political behavior. This does not mean that specific studies of evolutionary

Evolutionary Theory and Political Behavior

11

theories should not be concerned with providing the strongest possible
evidence on their own and the provisioning of cross-cultural evidence is
in particular important here (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). But it
means that the role of evolutionary theory in the study of political behavior
is part of a larger, more general reorientation about what science is.
The success of an interdisciplinary stance in the natural sciences suggests
that this stance too will be worthwhile in the social sciences including in the
study of political behavior (Wilson, 1999). To paraphrase the evolutionary
biologist, George Williams (1966, p. 16): Is it not reasonable to anticipate that
our understanding of the human political mind would be aided greatly by
knowing the purpose for which it was designed? If so, to get to know that
purpose, there is no other tool available than evolutionary theory.
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Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2000). Democratization or repression? European
Economic Review, 44(4), 683–693.
Alesina, A., & Glaeser, E. L. (2004). Fighting poverty in the US and Europe: A world of
difference. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Arceneaux, K. (2012). Cognitive biases and the strength of political arguments. American Journal of Political Science, 56(2), 271–285.
Boehm, C. (2000). Conflict and the evolution of social control. Journal of Consciousness
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MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Michael Bang Petersen is Professor in the Department of Political Science,
Aarhus University in Denmark. He received his PhD in 2007. His primary

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research focuses on how human evolutionary history influences the way people reason about modern mass politics. Specific topics he has published on
include attitudes about social welfare, immigration, redistribution, criminal
justice, and political parties. His work has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, American Political Science Review, American Journal of
Political Science, and Journal of Politics. His academic affiliations include the
Center for Evolutionary Psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University. Together with
Lene Aarøe, he codirects The Politics and Evolution Lab.
LENE AARØE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Lene Aarøe is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science
& Government, Aarhus University in Denmark. She received her PhD in
2010. Her field of research is political psychology. A key motivation in her
work is to investigate how the psychological imprints of ancestral living in
hunter-gatherer groups shape political attitudes and communication effects
in modern mass democracies.
Specific topics she has published on include attitudes about social welfare,
immigration, and political parties. Her work has appeared in journals such
as Psychological Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and Political Communication. She is affiliated with the Interacting Minds
Centre at Aarhus University and, together with Michael Bang Petersen, codirects The Politics and Evolution Lab.

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