chapter03

Arnold Schwarzenegger is an (Austrian-born) American icon who exudes an aura of testosterone from his very persona. Not only did Schwarzenegger win the Mr. Universe bodybuilding contest seven times, but he and his rippling physique also defined the role of the macho, Hollywood, male action star in films like Commando, Last Action Hero, Terminator, and Conan the Barbarian. His roles have typified masculine stereotypes such as strength, decisiveness, protectiveness, and conquering. As the sword-wielding Conan, Schwarzenegger paraphrased the words of Genghis Khan, words that epitomize the primary, driving (if not frightening) evolutionary imperatives of men—mate competition, territorial control, resource gain, and sexual rewards: “Happiness lies in conquering your enemies, in driving them in front of you, in taking their property, in savoring their despair, in raping their wives and daughters.”1

From the worlds of muscle contests and male action hero movies, Schwarzenegger zip-lined into American politics and became the Republican governor of California. With maleness so central to his previous career choices, one may wonder whether his choice of political party had anything to do with his hyper-masculinity. There is research on this question. Interestingly, while liberals are far overrepresented in Hollywood, one study found that right-wing orientation was far more prevalent among Hollywood stars who play male action heroes.² These men of brawn included Schwarzenegger as well as Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, and five-term National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston, among others. In this study, right-wing orientation—as measured by things like political donations, party support, and support for military actions—was exorbitantly more prominent among action stars (56.3 percent) than among dramatic actors (4.2 percent), and the researchers also found that actors who leaned Right were actually more physically formidable than those who leaned Left.

Perhaps more telling, during Schwarzenegger's tenure as California governor, he repeatedly referred to Democrats as “girlie men.” While the phrase was originally a joke from a Saturday Night Live skit (poking fun at Schwarzenegger himself), it had such resonance that Schwarzenegger used it, for example, while campaigning for George H. W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and in 2004 as governor during budget fights with the California legislature.3

The stereotype that political liberalism reflects a feminine orientation, and conservatism a masculine one, has been around for some time, and research on gender stereotypes has revealed interesting findings. Political scientist Nicolas Winter, for instance, looked at US survey data from the American National Election Study from 1972 to 2004.⁴ The researcher and his team examined the types of responses people gave in describing the Democratic and Republican parties and coded the responses into stereotypically positive masculine traits (e.g., “A military man; a good military/war record…. [The research participant] speaks of party/candidate as good protector(s); will know what to do”), and negative masculine traits (e.g., “Not humble enough; too cocky/self-confident…. Unsafe/unstable; dictatorial; craves power; ruthless”). The researchers also developed codes for stereotypically positive female traits (e.g., “Generous, compassionate, believe in helping others…. Listens [more] to people; takes [more] into consideration the needs and wants of people”), and negative stereotypes (e.g., “Speaks of party/candidate as bad protector[s]; won't know what to do…. Doesn't believe in work ethic; believes in people being handed things / in government handouts”). Overwhelmingly, the researchers found that voters used more masculine stereotypes to describe GOP candidates and more feminine stereotypes to describe Democrats.

One study systematically assessed the connection between gender and partisanship. Political scientist Monika McDermott collected the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) from 780 Americans, along with a series of questions about their political beliefs and behaviors. The BSRI is one of the most widely used instruments to assess gendered psychology. For feminine traits the BSRI asks participants to rate how much the following descriptors apply to him or her: “understanding, sympathetic, warm, loves children, compassionate, gentle, eager to soothe hurt feelings, affectionate, sensitive to needs of others, tender.” Masculine traits are captured by the following descriptors: “willingness to take risks, forceful, strong personality, assertive, independent, leadership ability, aggressive, dominant, willing to take a stand, defends own beliefs.”5

What McDermott found was that men and women who scored high on femininity were significantly more likely to identify as Democrat, and that men and women who scored high on masculinity were more likely to identify as Republican.⁶ Among those studied, vote choices in the 2008 US presidential and 2010 congressional elections were similar—“masculine” men and women voted Republican; “feminine” men and women voted Democrat. In this study there were sex differences too, along the same lines, but not as strong as the gender differences. While McDermott's study seems to corroborate the observations made by so many pundits in the popular media, far less has been proffered about why gender-based partisan differences exist.

As I elaborate in later chapters, these differences go far deeper than stereotypes, or societal gender role expectations, tying directly into reproductive strategies. Conservatism, I argue, is a male-centric strategy shaped significantly by the struggle for dominance in within-and-between group mate competitions, while liberalism is a female-centric strategy derived from the protracted demands of rearing human offspring, among other selective pressures. These aren't fixed or unitary strategies—that is, they can be adopted, or rejected, or even adapted tactically, depending on social and environmental circumstances, and both men and women can employ more or less male- or female-typical approaches. I explore this adaptability further in chapter 7 and explain conditions in which different pathways are taken. For now, let's take a moment to consider one evolutionary mechanism by which reproductive strategies can diverge within either of the sexes.

Frequency-dependent selection is an evolutionary process by which the fitness of some phenotypes depends on their frequency relative to the frequency of other phenotypes within a population. Take for example Uta stansburiana, a small reptile native to the western regions of Mexico and the United States, and more commonly called the side-blotched lizard. In a population of these lizards, there are different throat color polymorphisms among males, corresponding to different mate competition strategies. Males with orange throats have higher testosterone, are highly aggressive, and defend expansive territories with large harems of females. Males with blue throats are less aggressive and control smaller territories. Males with yellow throat stripes, which mimic receptive females, do not control territory. Instead, disguised as female lizards to avoid attack, they infiltrate other males’ territories and mate with their females.⁷ The fitness of all three morphs is dependent on the fitness of the others. The aggressive orange males are more energetic, and good at stealing mates from the blues, but are more susceptible to cuckoldry by the yellow-striped males and have lower survival rates overall. The blues defend a smaller harem and are usually better at defending against the yellow-striped, but they're prone to having their females stolen by oranges. Moreover, in response to the death of a nearby blue, the yellow-striped sometimes morph into blue and take over his behavior patterns.⁸ These dynamic interactions, which keep the three polymorphs in existence, reflect what biologists have called the rock-paper-scissors game of male mating strategy.⁹ And so, it is fair to say that being aggressive, amassing territory, and mating with as many females as possible is a male-oriented strategy among these lizards. But not all lizards take this tack. Similarly, not all females are inclined to mate with the orange guy and may use different tactics as well.

The same holds true for politics. Not all men enact a conservative strategy, nor do all women enact a liberal strategy. But we do see sex-based leanings. Imagine two bell curves, one tilting toward the (political) Right for men, and another to the Left for women, with significant overlap between the curves. And so frequency-dependent selection may be one force behind sex and gender differences in both mating strategies and politics. Among humans, there are profound societal or cultural processes that impact gender, mating, and politics, but they are not divorced from biology. Indeed, the tendency toward psychological differences between men and women, as well as between conservatives and liberals, are represented by distinct differences in brain structure and function.

Before we explore the evolved purposes for these differences, let us consider prior research that has attempted to understand the typical “male brain.” British developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has developed an intriguing theory about autism spectrum disorders. He argues, convincingly, that autism, which is far overrepresented in males by a ratio of ten to one, is an extreme variant of the “male brain.”10 Here, I use many of the cognitive, emotional, and social differences between males and females that Baron-Cohen draws upon to prove his point about autism as a means to understand the very same kinds of differences between liberals and conservatives. I use his framework for several reasons. First, the differences examined by Baron-Cohen are specific, measurable, and supported by empirical research. Second, to understand individual differences, looking at extreme examples of a particular trait can make those differences emerge from the intuitive and often reflexive social backdrops against which they are so often camouflaged from everyday view. Third, I build on Baron-Cohen's existing framework because it has established that there even can be such a thing as an “extreme form of the male brain.”

Now, before we go any further, let me just acknowledge that evoking a heuristic used to understand psychopathology in order to explain political psychology risks giving the impression that I am pathologizing certain political ideologies. To the contrary, the range of diversity among the world's population of humans, including the personality traits that underlie our political diversity, has endowed us with great adaptability, allowing us to survive the incredibly harsh environments of our ancestral past. In fact, like other kinds of genetic diversity, it is fair to say that such diversity is one of the reasons why we, the naked apes, didn't dissolve away into extinction.

Here too, lest we also worry about the social implications of using the term male brain as a heuristic, it is also important to understand that men and women's brain morphology and function exhibit vastly more similarities than differences. Even so, existing differences have meaningful implications for our political psychology. Studying those differences in no way makes a rational case for gender inequality—something those making the moralistic fallacy may fear, and those making the naturalistic fallacy may seek to force upon others.

With all this being said, let's examine Baron-Cohen's argument. First, he clarifies that not all females have the female-typical brain and not all males have the male-typical brain, but that there are certain quantifiable, male-typical extremes evidenced in those with autism spectrum disorders. As it turns out, the numerous and important differences between females and males that Baron-Cohen uses to explain autism sequelae are glaringly present between liberals and conservatives on nearly every difference. Here I briefly pair together those differences for comparison and use some that have not been explicitly listed by Baron-Cohen.

THEORY OF MIND

One rather extraordinary talent of the human brain is imputing mental states to others, to have theory of mind (other minds), or to mindread—to understand that others have thoughts, intentions, emotion states, and so on. Compared to other animals, humans are the undisputed world champions at this remarkable skill. We are able to perform feats of mindreading acrobatics, such as “he knows that I know that she knows (something),” so easily that we take the skill for granted, with the notable exception of those suffering from autism. The inability to “read minds,” what Baron-Cohen has described as mindblindess,11 is one of the hallmarks of autism.

Theory of Mind: Differences between Women and Men

There is ample research demonstrating that women outperform men on theory of mind (ToM) tasks and that these differences are evidenced early in life. Studies have found, for example, that preschool-age girls perform better at understanding others’ false beliefs (the understanding that another person can hold an erroneous belief about something, a skill requiring ToM)¹² and at understanding others’ emotions.¹³ Other research found that girls in grades 4–12 score higher than boys on social understanding tasks.¹⁴ Yet other research has found sex differences in secondary-school students (age twelve), with girls performing better on ToM tasks,¹⁵ and there is evidence that this difference is visible by three years of age.¹⁶ Moreover, some research suggests that the female advantage in ToM tasks may continue into adulthood.¹⁷ In sum, the evidence shows that women are typically much better at understanding the minds of others.

Theory of Mind: Differences between Liberals and Conservatives

While to date few studies directly measuring differences in this ability between liberals and conservatives have been conducted, two neuroimaging studies offer a preliminary look literally inside the political brain. One study measured gray-matter volume and found that those who self-identified as liberal exhibited greater volume in the anterior cingulate cortex while conservatives exhibited greater brain volume in the amygdala.¹⁸ The anterior cingulate cortex is a brain region considered to be an integrative hub for social interactions, implicated in both theory of mind and feeling the pain of others. The amygdala, as previously noted, is the fear center of the brain. Another study examined fMRIs of Republicans and Democrats while performing a risk-taking game. As in the previous study, researchers found that Republicans showed greater activation in the amygdala, and Democrats in the anterior cingulate insula, a brain region also activated during ToM tasks.19 The authors point out that this region of the anterior cingulate insula is adjacent to a central hub for ToM, the temporal parietal junction.²⁰ And so mindreading differences between liberals and conservatives may ultimately be a function of differences in brain structure.

EMPATHY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

One corollary of mindreading is the capacity for empathy, to feel what another person is feeling. While women leading men in this capacity is an intuitive assumption, it is one with the backing of empirical research. Research finds that women show more comforting behaviors than men, even to strangers; share emotional distress with their friends more than men; and that girls from one years of age show more empathy to others’ suffering than boys—through sad looks, comforting gestures, and making more sympathetic vocalizations.²¹ More directly, women score higher than men on questionnaires specifically designed to measure empathy.²² In people with autism, the ability to experience empathy is usually impaired.²³

EMPATHY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

The liberal penchant for empathy is seen in the tendency to do things like join Greenpeace to save baby seals, or to feel sadness and moral outrage when loggers saw down the forests of Amazonian Natives, basically all the stuff that makes conservatives roll their eyes and think, Run along and hug a tree or something. Or perhaps more illustrative—during the 2016 US presidential race, campaign buttons, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia were circulating among the Right, saying, “Trump for President: Fuck Your Feelings.” Research confirms these stereotypes. Studies find that liberals show more signs of distress about violence and suffering than conservatives, and tend to score higher on empathy measures with statements such as, “Other people's misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal,” or “When I see someone being treated unfairly, I sometimes don't feel very much pity for them” (both reverse-scored).24 By default, conservatives show relatively less distress about suffering and score lower on empathy measures.

DIFFERENCES IN FACIAL EXPRESSIONS BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

Humans have far more facial muscles than any other animal (a whopping forty-three in total), which, through a nuanced and nearly infinite array of facial expressions, allows us to send and receive a stunning volume of social information. Research finds that women are far more skilled than men at decoding facial expressions, as well as other nonverbal forms of expression, such as tone of voice.²⁵ This reflects a higher level of theory of mind, where more incoming information is being processed to infer intention, meaning, emotion states, and so on, which facial expressions convey brilliantly. This female skill of using faces as communication channels can be detected early; for example, from birth girls look longer at faces than boys, whereas boys look longer at inanimate objects.²⁶ Women are also more accurate and faster than men at identifying emotional facial expressions.²⁷ Further, women are even better than men at basic facial detection skills, such as detecting pictures of faces embedded in drawings with other objects, and identifying faces they had previously seen.²⁸ Research also finds that women show greater facial expressivity than men.29 Thus the ability to send and receive information through the human visage is more pronounced in females. People in the autism spectrum, which, again, favors males by a ten-to-one ratio, have a difficult time decoding and making meaningful facial expressions.

DIFFERENCES IN FACIAL EXPRESSIONS BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

While to date there is a dearth of research examining possible links between partisanship and decoding facial expressions, some research finds that conservatives are less facially expressive than liberals. For example, when people make facial expressions, their facial muscles contract and emit electrical current. Researchers have been able to quantify facial expressivity by attaching muscle sensors to subjects’ faces and measuring facial electrical activity, a technique known as electromyography (EMG). In one study, researchers gathered data on subjects’ political orientations, hooked up their faces to EMG sensors, presented them with a series of negative and positive images, and then measured their facial responses. Facial expressivity was high in women, regardless of political orientation, and overall women were more emotionally expressive than men. Liberal men, the researchers found, were as facially expressive as women. What stood out in this study was that the faces of male conservatives, on the other hand, were essentially nonreactive.³⁰ In another study, researchers measured expressivity, using the “Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire,” which includes items such as, “Whenever I am feeling positive emotions people can see exactly what I am feeling” and “What I'm feeling is written all over my face.” Similar to the EMG studies, the researchers found that Democrats scored higher than Republicans.³¹

LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

Adding to findings that women tend to be better at nonverbal communication, a significant body of research shows that women tend to have better language skills. Girls develop vocabularies faster than boys,32 and tend to master bilingualism more than boys.³³ Research has also found that girls exhibit greater activation in linguistic areas of the brain while performing language tasks.³⁴ Some research finds that girls retain their advantage in language skills well into their primary and secondary school years,³⁵ and even into later adulthood, for instance in verbal memory skills,³⁶ and word fluency.³⁷ In keeping with Baron-Cohen's theory, both expressive and receptive language skills are commonly impaired in those with autism.

LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

Language differences are also seen in the direction we have been observing, according to political ideology. A 2001 Gallup poll indicated that those who identified as being liberal are more likely to be bilingual than moderates or conservatives.³⁸ Other studies have found that liberals score higher than conservatives on verbal ability tests,³⁹ and on vocabulary tests.⁴⁰ Lower verbal ability has also been associated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation,⁴¹ two constructs highly related to conservative ideology that we will discuss later.

EYE GAZE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

An important and highly developed ability in humans is joint attention—the ability to follow another person's eye movement, which allows us to infer things like intention and interest, and to perform other kinds of mindreading. This ability can be observed in the research lab by showing subjects cartoon pictures of faces with averted eyes, and it can be measured by examining how strongly the subjects’ eyes are drawn to the direction of the picture's gaze—known as gaze cuing. Across different kinds of cuing tasks, research finds that men process eye gaze less efficiently than women and do not orient toward gaze as strongly.42 Research has also found stronger joint attention skills in twelve-month-old female infants as compared to twelve-month-old male infants,⁴³ and that overall male infants make less eye contact than female infants.⁴⁴ Accordingly, those in the autism spectrum, who Baron-Cohen says possess extreme variants of the “male brain,” do poorly at gaze cuing.⁴⁵

EYE GAZE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

Research has found that, like the differences between women and men on eye-gaze direction tasks, liberals show a greater response to gaze cuing than conservatives.⁴⁶ One study examined directional cuing using not only illustrations of eyes but also arrows pointing in a particular direction—a common research tool used to study the impact of nonsocial direction cues.⁴⁷ The researchers found that conservatives showed lower cuing effects in response to eye gaze, but not to arrows, suggesting that conservatives are less responsive specifically to social directional cuing.

EGALITARIANISM VERSUS COMPETITIVENESS BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

A large volume of research shows that females are generally more concerned with fairness, and males more concerned with dominance hierarchies. These tendencies are observable early. Young girls, for example, tend to share and take turns far more than boys, whereas boys tend to be more competitive. One study found that girls exhibited turn-taking twenty times more than boys, and boys exhibited competitive behaviors fifty times more than girls.48 Further, when put together, boys often quickly form dominance hierarchies, and this pre-primed social dynamic is measurable in early childhood.⁴⁹ Summarizing this dynamic captured by studies on language use between boys and girls,⁵⁰ Joyce Benenson writes, “When speaking to one another, young boys issue directives, command others, insult them, tell jokes at others’ expense, ignore what someone else just said, disagree with another's point, call one another names, brag, tell stories highlighting their own accomplishments, curse, threaten others, use direct statements, and generally behave in a domineering fashion toward one another.”⁵¹ Researchers find that young girls, on the other hand, generally spend more energy trying to solve differences with using politeness, tact, and diplomacy.⁵²

Boys are also more inclined toward intergroup dominance. Research finds, for example, that young boys playing in sports teams tend to never let the losing team forget the outcome of the game, whereas girls more often try to make the players feel equal and deemphasize who won or lost.⁵³ Intergroup dominance among males continues into adulthood and is seen everywhere from professional sports teams to street gangs to militaries.

EGALITARIANISM VERSUS COMPETITION BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

It is no secret that liberals in the United States more strongly back policies like equal pay for women, affirmative action, and antidiscrimination laws, policies supported by the worldview that all people have equal worth, equal potential, and the fundamental right to equal opportunities. Nor is it shocking to learn that liberals demonstrate against things like corporate abuses of power, unfair banking practices, and colonialist exploitations in third-world countries. One well-known example was the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, which grew as a resistance to economic inequality, corruption, and greed emerging from the financial sector. The rallying cry for this movement was “We are the 99 percent,” referring to unequal wealth distribution in the United States between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population. One small but illustrative survey found that 80 percent of protesters self-identified as slightly to extremely liberal, 15 percent identified as moderate / middle of the road, whereas 6 percent rated from slightly to extremely conservative.54 Other research more definitively confirms the primacy of fairness concerns in liberals. Using a scale measuring agreement on unambiguous statements like, “When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly,” one large international study (34,476 subjects) found that while across the political spectrum people care about moral fairness, fairness concerns are reliably higher among those identifying as liberal.⁵⁵

Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with social hierarchies, tend to oppose policies such as affirmative action, and participate little (as we saw above) in efforts to redirect social wealth. Researchers have found that conservatives tend to score higher on the social dominance orientation scale,⁵⁶ which was designed to measure exactly what the name suggests; the measure includes statements like, “It's probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom,” and, “If certain groups of people stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems.”

COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES: PREFERENCE FOR CLOSED, RULE-BASED SYSTEMS BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

In addition to overall differences in the preference for social hierarchy, men and women generally process information differently, with men showing a tendency to prefer what Baron-Cohen describes as “closed systems”—systems that are predictable, factual, rule-based, knowable, and to some extent controllable, such as computers. For this reason, men generally tend to perform better at math, physics, and engineering, and are far overrepresented in those fields. Here let us again avoid the pitfall of confusing increased likelihood with determinism, or some preposterous conclusion that such research means (or even intends to argue) that women can't excel in these fields—they can, and often do. Indeed, studies find that sex differences in these areas are small, and more visible primarily on the extreme ends of ability and achievement.57 But differences remain, and we continue to look into the gaps for the wealth of understanding they provide. It is striking that while sociocultural factors may explain some of these sex variances, a fairly substantial body of research has found higher autism traits among those in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields than those in non-STEM fields.⁵⁸

People with “extreme male brains” may be especially gifted at things like engineering, writing coding language, or doing physics; however they tend to get confused and overwhelmed by ambiguity. Human beings are “open systems” with highly variable (and therefore less predictable) patterns than, say, math or computers. For this reason human interaction often causes distress in those with autism. As Baron-Cohen explains it, in social interactions (higher-functioning) individuals with autism attempt to “work out a huge set of rules of how to behave in each and every situation, attempting to develop a mental ‘manual’ for social interaction of ‘if-then’ rules. It is as though they are trying to systemise social behaviour when the natural approach to socialising should be via empathizing.”⁵⁹ As a result, those in the autism spectrum tend to prefer solitude, along with clear rules in the home, at school, or in their mental activities, such as writing coding language or doing physics.

A corollary is that people with autism tend to prefer neatness and order. They will arrange their personal effects in a line or meticulously categorize them according to color, purpose, size, or some other rule-based category. Often those with autism can immediately detect if something has been misarranged, which tends to cause immensely more stress than it would those without the disorder.

COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES: PREFERENCE FOR CLOSED, RULE-BASED SYSTEMS BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

One measure of preference for open versus closed systems may be the field of academic study or vocation. English, the social sciences, and the humanities have been found to correlate with both professors’ and students’ liberal orientations—perhaps not surprising since these fields are highly person-focused (focused on open systems)—whereas conservatives are more represented in vocational studies and the applied sciences.60

Conscientiousness, another Big Five personality trait has been consistently associated with political conservatism.⁶¹ Among other things, the factor tends to involve concern about orderliness, control of one's environment, and a preference for planned (rather than spontaneous) behavior. Some sample conscientiousness items from the Big Five personality index: “I am always prepared; I pay attention to details; I like order; I follow a schedule; I leave my belongings around (reverse scored); I often forget to put things back in their proper place (reverse scored).” As mentioned in the prior chapter, one study found that conservatives also tend to keep their living spaces neater and more organized than liberals.⁶²

Related to a preference for closed systems is cognitive rigidity, or lower cognitive complexity. A highly robust research finding is that conservatism is related to less tolerance for ambiguity and lower aptitude for integrative complexity—the ability to grasp alternative perspectives or dimensions, and to synthesize those varying perspectives into a cohesive framework.⁶³ As one hypothetical, simplified for the sake of clarity: All immigrants are criminals, instead of reasoning, “Some immigrants may commit crimes. But many do not, and there are a variety of factors that may lead to such behaviors.”

DIFFERENCES IN SOCIAL RULES BETWEEN FEMALES AND MALES

Developmental research finds that compared to girls, boys seem to be obsessed with rules. For instance, research has found that boys choose to engage in rules-oriented play more than girls, and when disputes arise they spend a great deal of time trying to renegotiate the rules and enlist the counsel of respected peers on rulemaking. On the other hand, girls usually spend more time playing turn-taking games that rely little on formal rules, and if those rules are broken, they often stop playing. Further, research finds that when boys and girls play together, boys stick to rules far more than girls, and while they quarrel more than girls, they appear to enjoy the quarrelling, especially when the point of contention concerns making, breaking, or following rules.64 Even when boys seem to be disregarding a particular set of rules, they are often following another set. One study found that while girls tend to respond to rules set by teachers, boys tend to ignore rules set by both teachers and girls but naturally form their own complex set of rules and follow them with intense focus.⁶⁵ Joyce Benenson notes that not only have sports competitions involved complex rules for thousands of years (which are still predominantly the realm of men) but that even when men break the broader rules of society, they often follow a strict set of rules established by the criminal element or by militias.⁶⁶ As I will discuss in chapter 5, this focus on rules is a by-product of the evolutionary pressure to form male coalitions.

DIFFERENCES IN SOCIAL RULES BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

Compared to liberals, conservatives are far more rules oriented. One study of political views among Europeans, for example, asked subjects to rate how much the views of a hypothetical person reflect their own, on statements like, “He believes that people should do what they're told. He thinks people should follow rules at all times, even when no one is watching.” Conservative ideology predicted rule following.67 This is a fairly robust research finding across the literature. In the United States, for example, conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of conscientiousness, which includes indices of rule following.⁶⁸ In many ways, the conservative tendency to be rule oriented links with several other predictors of conservatism. For example, conservatives tend to value traditionalism, a dedication to existing ways of doing things, including following established rules, and conservatives are inclined to resist social change more than liberals.⁶⁹ A fairly emphatic example of rules orientation among conservatives is the greater tendency to favor harsher punishment for rule breakers, such as the death penalty or longer prison sentences.⁷⁰

In summary, our examination of the cognitive, affective, language, social, and even brain morphology differences found between women and men vividly mirror the same differences between liberals and conservatives. Once again, the use of Baron-Cohen's framework is to establish a base of empirical support to our gendered political psychology hypothesis, rather than to pathologize conservatism. In fact, the differences we see across gender, sex, and partisanship exist today because of the adaptive functions they once served the lives of our ancestors.

EVOLVED UTILITY

The value of evolutionary science is not only in the understanding that differences exist but also in the evolved purposes that those differences serve. Such insights illuminate the origins of our political divisions and hopefully also expand our capacity to bridge them. In the previous chapter we considered how natural forces, such as germs and genetic diseases, were selective pressures shaping the personality differences that undergird our orientations. Throughout this book, we will also examine the pressures shaping the sex and gender differences that in turn give us “masculine conservatism” and “feminine liberalism.” To start, and to make better sense of the science above, let us consider the pressures that gave us differences in ToM.

Most evolved traits have multiple influences. One common explanation for greater ToM in women is that women have generally been tasked with interpreting the needs of offspring, who as infants are incapable of expressing their needs through language, and who remain in dependency for a far greater stretch than the young of other species. As one example of this ability put to use, women are more likely to hold infants in the face-to-face position than men,71 and as we saw above, women's brains appear to be far better at reading facial expressions. We have also seen that another output of ToM, the ability to experience empathy—to understand and share another's emotional experience—is also found between men and women (and between conservatives and liberals). That the marathon of provisioning and care required for human offspring should demand empathy is intuitive, as is that women would command a comparatively greater capacity to empathize. Indeed, in keeping with our gendered political brain hypothesis, empathic men (who, as noted, also tend to be liberal) tend to have lower testosterone and make better fathers than high-testosterone men, as we will explore in greater detail in chapter 7.

Conversely, there is evidence to suggest that less empathy among men has fitness benefits, aiding in male mate competition (which is often violent) and in facilitating killing in warfare.⁷² Once again, it is important to remember here that natural selection doesn't particularly care what traits get passed on to the next generation. It is a mindless algorithmic process in which traits that provide an advantage get passed on. Sometimes the advantage can involve experiencing empathy, at other times suppressing it. It is not difficult to see how empathy might be a liability in the heat of battle, or how burying empathy would help men to kill their competitors and live to pass on male genes coding for staving empathy, particularly for men of the outside tribe.

Even men's overrepresentation in STEM fields may reflect the pressures of a violent ancestral environment. Across the globe, males show an advantage on spatial tasks as compared to women,⁷⁴ and research finds that spatial abilities are critical for STEM fields, for example, architecture, engineering, robotics, or other domains that require the ability to mentally rotate objects in three-dimensional space.⁷⁵ This ability has long been hypothesized to be an offshoot of adaptations for hunting and defense, both of which make use of projectile weapons, which require spatial abilities for effective use.⁷⁶ Indeed, research finds a relationship between spatial tests and throwing accuracy, with men being consistently better at hitting their target than women.⁷⁷ These sex differences are seen early; by three years old, boys outperform girls on throwing speed, accuracy, and distance, and there is no other motor performance skill in which boys excel so much in the early years.⁷⁸ And as we discussed, there is a significant relationship between conservatism, masculinity, and spatial abilities, along with so many other adaptations geared for using violence to survive a harsh, ancestral environment. We will continue to explore these connections.

In all, the stereotypes about liberalism having a feminine quality and conservatism a masculine one have empirical backing and are rooted in our neuropsychology, which was shaped by selective pressures of the natural and social environments of our ancestors. In turn, our evolved political orientations reflect those pressures. While there have been bounteous explanations for what drives our political stances, few have as much explanatory power as the strategies we employ to survive and reproduce. In the next chapter we will come to understand how these strategies underlie the often contentious divide between liberals and conservatives on social equality versus hierarchy in human affairs.