A critical understanding of our political orientations requires that we envision an existence that predates our own. Our distant ancestors made their living directly from a hostile and uncertain natural environment. As relatively small, slow, weak, naked apes, with limited technology, their survival was far more at the mercy of nature than ours today. The basic necessities of life were often scarce, and between-group competition for resources was savage, in ways that most of us can only imagine. Because of their greater size, strength, and aggression, men were often tasked with securing scarce resources for the tribe, which they regularly won through the instrumental violence of male coalitions. Above and beyond any risk of starvation or attack, evolution's pitiless algorithms have imparted males with fitness incentives to massacre men from the rival group, capture their women, and commandeer their territory. This was the game of living in the days of our predecessors. And the pressures of living this way gave the rest of the clan fitness incentives to promote the tribe's interests and to support the groupish, aggressive males at its ruddy spearhead. Clearly it is better to be on the giving than the receiving end of intergroup raids, and in such a treacherous environment, a psychological bias favoring the in-group would have its advantages. Such were the dynamics that gave modern humans our ancient tribalistic psychology and its contemporary expression through political parties.

While today most of us aren't presented daily with the life-or-death reality of needing one another, the urgency to turn inward to the group has been so essential that today our in-group biases can be irrational, sometimes taking primacy over our stated ideologies, our self-interest, or even our deepest moral principles. It is of great concern that our in-group biases blind us to corrective information and present barriers to rationally examining our political choices, for at their worst those blinders can turn a functioning society against itself.

BLINDNESS

Psychological researchers have demonstrated that we are far from natural Bayesian reasoners—that is, rational thinkers who start off with a hypothesis, then update our level of acceptance or rejection of that hypothesis based on incoming evidence. Rather, our thinking is clouded by an expansive array of biases that distort external reality. Of particular interest for political psychology is a kind of bias called motivated reasoning—the tendency to use reasoning strategies, such as rebutting factual information (or simply ignoring it), in order to arrive at a prior or emotionally preferred conclusion. Typically, this evading of information to self-delude is performed outside of conscious awareness, and is used to fend off negative emotions.

A growing body of research is revealing that voters’ decisions to support a given candidate or policy descend easily into the fog of motivated reasoning.1 Instead of updating one's position upon receiving new information, the voting populace deflects information in order to support emotionally preferred political stances. Indeed, research suggests that Donald Trump may have been onto something, figuratively speaking, when at a campaign rally in Iowa during the 2016 run for president he bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.”²

In one study conducted before the 2004 US presidential election, researchers presented highly partisan Republican and Democratic subjects with (partly fictional or edited) scenarios depicting either George W. Bush or John Kerry clearly contradicting their prior positions.3 For instance, a quote attributed to George W. Bush about Enron—an energy company run by CEO Kenneth Lay that became synonymous with corporate corruption when in 2001 its fraudulent financial practices were revealed—read,

First of all, Ken Lay is a supporter of mine. I love the man. I got to know Ken Lay years ago, and he has given generously to my campaign. When I'm President, I plan to run the government like a CEO runs a country. Ken Lay and Enron are a model of how I'll do that.

These quotes were followed by contradictory stances, such as, “Mr. Bush now avoids any mention of Ken Lay and is critical of Enron when asked.” Following this information, the researchers had subjects rate how much they felt the candidates had contradicted themselves and how much they agreed with an exculpatory statement. For example, “People who know the President report that he feels betrayed by Ken Lay, and was genuinely shocked to find that Enron's leadership had been corrupt.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found that both liberal and conservative subjects were less likely to agree that their candidate self-contradicted, and more likely to agree that the rival candidate did. They were also more likely to agree with statements that gave their preferred candidate a pass on his inconsistency. However, what is even more interesting about this study is that it was conducted in an MRI machine. The researchers found that while engaging in motivated reasoning, subjects’ brains were not activated in the regions associated with “cold” reasoning, or reasoning relatively free from emotional content, but in those parts associated with processing the experience of punishment, pain, fear, and the appraisal of threatening information.

One real-world example of motivated reasoning occurred when in 2018 it was revealed that Donald Trump had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels shortly after his third wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, and that Trump (or, reportedly, his attorney) paid Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet. Instead of rebuking Trump for so flagrantly violating such an assortment of cherished Christian values, Evangelicals widely gave Trump a pass.4 Even Tony Perkins—head of the Family Research Council, an Evangelical nonprofit that has spoken out against the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine on the basis that it gives women license to engage in premarital sex,⁵ and suggested to the Justice Department that the availability of pornography in hotels violates obscenity laws⁶—said only, “All right, you get a mulligan [a golf reference, where a player is allowed to replay a stroke]. You get a do-over here.”⁷

It is easy to see the moral hypocrisy in such scenarios without fully appreciating its underlying psychology. Here is where evolutionary theory can help us make better sense of our political biases. Motivated reasoning is a way to avert threatening emotions. A basic evolved function of emotions is to mediate our interactions with the environment. For example, if we see a poisonous snake, we may experience fear, which helps us to avoid being bitten. The problem with relying on emotional reasoning, however, is that the emotion centers of our brain are ancient, often outdated, and prone to false-positive appraisals. As noted in chapter 2, snake phobias persist at relatively high base rates even in environments where the probability of encountering a poisonous snake is practically nil.

But here the fear is not about snakes. The fear-driven motivated reasoning we see in politics is all too often tied to the instinctive need for tribal belonging. In the days of our distant ancestors, being rejected by the group would have been a death sentence. To put the need for the group into perspective, imagine how long it would take for the ravages of nature to kill you if you were dropped off naked and alone in the middle of the Serengeti. Moreover, the unity of the tribe was also necessary to survive other tribes. But today we carry our tribalistic psychology over into politics, despite living in increasingly interconnected societies in which insular thinking has arguably become more of a liability than an asset. And we have known for some time that group thinking can distort basic realities.

In a classic 1951 study, social psychologist Soloman Asch showed us just how much our brains can be influenced to conform to group consensus.8 Working in the aftermath of World War II, when much of the world was struggling to make sense of how ordinary people could have perpetuated the horrors of the Holocaust, Asch became interested in understanding the impact of social pressure to conform. He ran an experiment based on a visual task, presenting subjects with two cards. On the first card there was one black line. On the second card there were three black lines, one of which was obviously the same size as the line on the first card, the other two obviously different. The subjects’ task was to match the line on the first card according to length with one of the three on the second card. Easy enough.

But at this point, Asch sat eight men in a circle. Seven of those men were confederates instructed to match up the wrong lines. Asch arranged for the real subject in this experiment to always rate last, which meant that he was regularly put in the position of having to directly contradict the seven men before him. What Asch found is that while a majority of subjects (68 percent) responded correctly in the face of confederate mismatching, an astonishing percentage (32 percent) did not. When interviewed afterward, some “independent” subjects explained the social pressure to conform: “I do not deny that at times I had the feeling: ‘to go with it, I'll go along with the rest.’” One conforming subject replied, “I suspected about the middle [line]—but tried to push it out of my mind.” Asch concluded that those who understood they were wrong yielded due to an overwhelming need to not appear different or defective in the eyes of the group. Remarkably, a minority of the conforming subjects was completely unaware that the confederates’ answers were incorrect.

Importantly, Asch's findings suggest that conformity can be an unconscious impulse and that it can blind us to reality. His work also shows how at other times conformity may arise as a result of emotional pressure, all of which suggest that conforming to the group may have been important to survival in our evolutionary past. More research shows how our tribal blinders extend seamlessly into our political identities, and how easily we dispense with our deeply held convictions in order to belong.

For example, in one study, researchers presented highly partisan liberals and conservatives with two fabricated newspaper reports on welfare programs.9 One “program” was exorbitantly generous for the time, offering families with one child eight hundred dollars per month, two hundred dollars for every additional child, housing and daycare subsidies, job training, two years’ paid tuition at a community college, and two thousand dollars’ worth of food stamps. Another program, far more stringent than the first, was also presented to subjects—$250 monthly, fifty dollars for each additional child, partial medical insurance, and an eighteen-month limit with no possibility of reinstating aid. The researchers queried which of the programs subjects supported. Given what we have learned, you may already have some ideas about who supported which policy. However, before subjects rated their support, they were either told that House Republicans (or Democrats) strongly endorsed either of the two welfare policies (they were also told that the rival party rejected the policy). What the researchers found was that if subjects believed their political tribe supported the policy, they too supported it, even when it went against the well-established ideological stances of their respective party and presumably their own. In other words, liberals tended to support the stringent welfare policy if they believed House Democrats backed it, and conservatives supported the lavish welfare policy when told House Republicans backed it. Another experiment in the same study found that after presenting subjects with similar scenarios, and getting similar results, subjects reported believing that their own perspectives on government influenced them the most and that the perspectives of the lawmakers influenced them least, despite going with the group in a way that so obviously countered their values. Put more simply, the subjects were blind to their own tribalistic blindness.

Once again, ancient dangers shape contemporary fears, and the primeval risks of alienating the tribe underlie our contemporary political stance-taking. Conversely, conforming to group norms and behaviors demonstrates loyalty to the group, facilitates cooperation, and serves to inoculate against rejection by one's own clan. Essentially, our fraught history living in violently competing tribes makes it feel good to go with the group and terrible to go against it. Moreover, there appears to have been an advantage in such a lifestyle to blocking out information that would jeopardize our standing in the group, however factual, and to simply going with the momentum of the clan, however corrupt. However, it is fair to say that anytime an edifice of civilization has collapsed from the inside, our insular tribalistic psychology played a central role in eroding its pillars. But are there solutions? Does education hold the key? Let us consider this possibility.

HOW FEAR TRUMPS KNOWLEDGE

The relationship between education and partisanship is a complex one, but one of tremendous import. On the surface, one might think that the more education one receives, the more informed and rational one's choices will become. But in many cases, the rational parts of the mind that education nourishes remain under the control of primal, fear-based survival impulses, even when instilled with a greater volume of knowledge. To examine this dynamic, let us consider the ongoing debate in America over climate change.

Global Warming

First, let us acknowledge straightaway that global warming is a reality with virtually unanimous consensus in the scientific community, and that humans are accelerating global warming through the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Statistical climate predictions project an extended array of extreme weather phenomena: rising global temperatures, increased droughts, heat waves, desert expansion, rising sea levels, heavy rains, flooding, and hurricanes. Species extinction is also predicted, along with mass human migration from shorelines. If unabated, global warming is also predicted to diminish crop yields, threatening food security and resulting in societal unrest as humans compete for resources.

Given conservatives’ overall greater threat sensitivity, one might expect broad and impassioned acceptance of climate change on the political Right. But this is demonstrably not the case. In 2008, Pew Research, for example, found that despite near universal scientific consensus among the world's climate experts that global warming is caused by human activity, there was a deep divide in agreement on the subject between Republicans (27 percent) and Democrats (58 percent).10 Even more striking was the fact that the more educated Republicans were, the less they believed in climate change, and that the opposite trend was seen among Democrats; among non-college-educated Republicans, 31 percent agreed with the scientific consensus, whereas that number dropped down to 19 percent among Republicans with a college degree. Among non-college-educated Democrats, 52 percent agreed, and that number bumped up to 75 percent among college-educated Democrats.

Another study, looking at nearly a decade of Gallup poll data between 2001 and 2010, found similar results—liberals were more likely than conservatives to agree with the scientific consensus on climate change. This study also found that more education, and higher reported self-understanding of climate change, was associated with greater belief in global warming. But only among liberals. Once again that relationship was either negligible or negative for conservatives,¹¹ and other studies find this very same negative correlation.¹² These paradoxical results call to mind the words of historian Daniel Boorstin: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”¹³

But how do we acquire illusory knowledge, and how do we make sense of these data? How is it that Americans on the more fearful end of the natural curve are so prone to rejecting global scientific consensus on an issue that portends danger? And why is this more prevalent among the better educated? Tribalism—the pull to go with the group is the single best explanation for all these questions. So deep is the impulse to turn to the group when threatened that, faced with the dangers of climate change, the more ardent tribalists among us will make that turn even when the tribe offers no real protections but only simple, group-level denial. Among those with a greater in-group orientation, more education, it appears, gets swept up by motivated reasoning and simply makes people better at rationalizing the tribe's chosen stance.

But again, tribalism emits a familiar male scent, especially from the anti-climate-change position. An increasingly large volume of research is finding a negative correlation between environmentalism and preference for social hierarchy (social dominance orientation)14 and authority (right-wing authoritarianism).¹⁵ Given what we have learned about how these constructs are rooted in team-based male competition, it is perhaps not surprising to find that men are far less likely to embrace environmentalism than women,¹⁶ nor that a political ideology based on male competition would turn global warming into an us-versus-them issue. Indeed, climate change denial has become locked into a badge of tribal commitment.

Even conservative political operatives recognize anti-climate-change stances for what they are. Republican strategist Whit Ayres, who worked for Senator Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign, admits,

Most Republicans still do not regard climate change as a hoax. But the entire climate change debate has now been caught up in the broader polarization of American politics. In some ways it's become yet another of the long list of litmus test issues that determine whether or not you're a good Republican.¹⁷

As we might expect, accepting the science can get you ejected from the tribe. During his 2010 reelection campaign, Bob Inglis, a six-term Republican congressman from South Carolina, admitted on a local radio show that climate change was real. Using this admission to discredit Inglis's commitment to his tribe, his challenger Trey Gowdy smashed Inglis in the election by forty-two percentage points. Inglis later reported that “the most enduring heresy that I committed was saying the climate change is real and let's do something about it.”18

The thing that places climate change denial even more squarely within our tribal psychology is its very remedy. One study found that when environmentalism was reframed as patriotism, with statements like, “Being pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life. It is patriotic to conserve the country's natural resources,” those especially prone to justify in-group norms were more likely to adopt a pro-environmental stance.¹⁹

But how did an anti-climate-change stance become such an education-retardant conservative badge? Billionaires with stock in the petroleum industry have a vested financial interest in ensuring that we continue to burn fossil fuels unabated, and they have actively supported anti-climate-change propaganda. Those with the most to gain from the status quo have also ensured that conservative oil lobbyists and climate denialists are appointed to head key environmental cabinet positions. The propaganda keeps the anti-climate-change base loyal while the powerful, already so drenched in oil money, continue to amass profane fortunes. Crucially, in the days of our distant ancestors, when in-group biases resulted in resource gains, those gains were dispersed among the clan. Today, the windfall profits won by the petroleum industry are simply not passed on to those who deny climate change in support of the tribe. Their homes continue to get swept away by hurricanes and flooding, and their children continue to face a hotter, climatically turbulent future. All based on a ruse that abuses the Right's information-resistant tribal psychology.

As one piece of evidence that anti-climate-change stances are socially engineered, powerhouse conservative political consultant Frank Luntz has given written instructions on how to dupe the American electorate on climate change. In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush, titled “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America,” he advised, “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” He went on to write,

The scientific debate is closing [against us]…but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science…. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.20

At the time, this strategy relied on the general population's scientific naïveté. But even as the science of climate change has expanded, as noted above, acceptance of climate change has decreased among the conservative populace in America, and rejecting science has become a badge of tribal commitment. As it happens, the same tribalistic, fear-based motivated reasoning that results in climate change denial also results in denying evolution.

Evolution

In general, higher education is associated with greater acceptance of evolution.²¹ However, like climate change, this relationship is complex. Crucially, anti-evolutionary stances also show resistance to increasing education. For example, for those who take the stance that the Bible should be taken literally (stances concentrated among political conservatives), education is associated with decreasing acceptance of evolutionary principles, and the opposite for those taking non-literalist stances.²² Research has found similar influences for political identity. One study of Mormons—who among their religious counterparts in the United States report nearly the lowest acceptance that humans evolved as a result of natural processes23—found that as education increased so did acceptance of evolution, but once again only among liberals.²⁴ More educated Mormon conservatives tended to reject evolution.

It is concerning that politics-based rejection of science puts Americans behind the rest of the world. Research finds not only that public acceptance of evolution in the United States is significantly lower by comparison to other industrialized nations but also that acceptance has been on a slight decline since the 1980s.²⁵ This trend runs against the current of an ever-increasing knowledge base in the evolutionary sciences. Evolution has been politicized in the United States to an extent not seen in other westernized nations, and the Republican Party has developed creationism as a platform to consolidate their political base in red states. In other words, like global warming, Republicans have turned rejecting evolutionary science into a badge of tribal identity. And as education increases, conservatives or biblical literalists, to borrow from sociologist Joseph Baker, “are more likely to confront issues of evolution directly and reinforce their working knowledge of rhetorical defenses of creationism.”²⁶

Fear, tribalism, and rejecting evolutionary principles run deep together. Godless Darwinism challenges long-standing religious beliefs that, by promising eternal life, give human beings a salve for the terror of their own mortality. Indeed, a branch of research examining fear-based motivated reasoning, called terror management theory (TMT), has found ways to induce mortality fears in the lab. Many studies in this area have subjects write essays on their own death, whereas controls write innocuous essays on food or television. When death fears are experimentally primed, people gravitate more toward religion, God, and the belief in an afterlife.²⁷ The ability of religion to allay death fears is intuitive; many scholars, myself included, would argue that this is among religion's primary functions. But it is important to remember that religious worship is a tribalistic experience, and tribalism thrives on group consensus. Consider one example in 1 Corinthians among a nearly endless number of scriptures across religious traditions: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”28

And so in churches, mosques, synagogues, or any other place of worship, the faithful inject themselves with an emotionally potent sense of unity. In unison, the pious recite immortality scriptures, passages promising protection from death itself. Coming together to reject evolution, in this sense, is just another way of coming together in agreement against death, something intuitive to the human brain and an exercise regularly practiced in religious traditions. Yet being “perfectly united in mind and thought” can be dangerous, particularly when the thought is erroneous—from the notion that women should be burned as witches to the idea that climate change is a liberal conspiracy. Maintaining group consensus that evolution is false is also deeply concerning. Apart from dispensing with evolutionary science's crucial insights, waving it away creates other vulnerabilities.

HOW OUR EVOLVED PSYCHOLOGY IS USED TO EXPLOIT US

One fact that I wish to convey to all readers, liberal or conservative, is that if you fail to understand your evolved psychology, others will use it to exploit you. Typically this is achieved by prodding our evolved fears, particularly our inborn fear of outsiders. Moreover, there is empirical evidence to suggest that conservatives, those on the threat-sensitive end of the natural curve, may be more vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.

One study examining credulity, for example, presented subjects with a series of false statements connoting danger, such as, “Sharks pose a significant risk to beachgoers,” and “Terrorist attacks have increased in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001,” along with false statements with a positive valence, such as, “When flying on major airlines, you are more likely to be upgraded from economy to business class if you ask at the gate.”29 Subjects were then asked how much they felt the statements were believable. Conservative subjects were significantly more likely to believe false information than liberals when the misinformation posited a threat. This led the researchers to conclude that “some individuals are more sensitive to the possibility of threats, and correspondingly pay higher precautionary costs; other people are less sensitive to this possibility, and pay higher costs when hazards are encountered.”

The tendency to have a greater emotional or behavioral reaction to negative information, called negativity bias, is a universally shared trait shaped by the dangers of our ancestral environment. When our ancestors heard rustling in the bushes, it benefitted them to think, Bear, and respond accordingly, even when it was just the wind. In other words, negativity bias kept us alive in the cases when it really wasn't just the wind. It's not that liberals don't ever have this bias—it's just that conservatives have a greater tendency for it.

Unfortunately, negativity bias is also an easily manipulable trait, frequently used for profit by the sharks of the business world. One striking example comes from a company that owns a number of fake news sites, under the brazen moniker Disinfomedia. Disinfomedia's owner, Californian liberal Democrat Jestin Coler, peddles fake news stories for advertising dollars. Coler reportedly started the company to punish right-wing news outlets by selling them misinformation, with the goal of later exposing them for using it.³⁰ In keeping with the research above, Coler stated that he tried to write fake new stories for liberal outlets but was unsuccessful—that is, liberals wouldn't buy them. Here he boasts about how easy it was to bilk conservatives: “It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served.”

While Coler wouldn't disclose exact numbers, he stated that other fake news sites’ $10,000 to $30,000 monthly earnings apply to him. One example of his for-profit fabricated news is a story with an ominous headline reading, “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Clinton Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.”

A nascent but growing scientific literature is finding that Coler's observations were accurate—conservatives believe and share fake news on social media more than liberals. In one study examining “extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news and other forms of junk news” on Facebook and Twitter, a team of Oxford researchers found that the highest percentage of sharing and circulation of these kinds of misinformation was concentrated on the political Right, in particular by Donald Trump supporters, and extreme Right social media pages.31 Similarly, in a report summarizing the research on fake news, a team of Harvard scholars recently remarked that “while any group can come to believe false information, misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right.”³² This vulnerability is not limited to rejecting evolution or global warming. Falsehoods widely popularized by conservative media outlets and politicians have included ideas such as the Obama administration's healthcare included “death panels” to decide on euthanizing patients,³³ and that President Obama is a Muslim,³⁴ both of which were false but believed more commonly within the conservative Right. But again, if, as I suggest, conservatism evolved in response to the pressures of violent group-based male coalitions, falsehoods about death panels or about a black president being from the outside tribe's religion would have high incendiary value. Theoretically, those fears could be exploited to kill popular support for a healthcare plan by those with financial interests in seeing the plan fail.

In chapter 2, we examined research linking xenophobia and fear of pathogens to conservatism. Conservative radio show host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has demonstrated that he clearly understands these links, and he has used this knowledge in a conservative fear-for-profit scam. In one segment, he brought on a young man whom he introduced as Dr. Edward Group III, who claimed to be an MIT alumnus. As it turns out, Dr. Group was a chiropractor with no undergraduate degree and his MIT degree was flatly refuted by the university. Here is a transcript of “Dr.” Group selling Jones's supplement, “Harmful Organisms Cleansing Dietary Supplement”:

If you're suffering from abdominal pain, allergies, even like headaches, anemia, weakened immune system, gut problems, depression, hair loss, excess gas, muscle pain, nervousness, I mean all these things. If you look at some of these conditions, and then us opening up our borders, and all the other countries opening up their borders. You're just dealing with mass amount of parasites or harmful organisms. You can type in “refugees spreading disease,” I mean the CDC is going crazy right now.35

By intentionally tapping into our evolved fear of germs and outsiders, which is concentrated among his conservative viewership, Jones makes a fortune using preposterous claims to sell worthless products. (In describing a key ingredient in one of his supplements, Jones once stated, “This stuff is only found in comets…with trace amounts in blueberries.”)

Producing fear and subsequently providing a “solution” to force a behavior is a common grifter's technique, known by researchers as the “fear-then-relief social influence technique,” and it has been studied in the lab. Research has confirmed that subjects are more likely to comply with various requests when fear followed promptly by relief is experimentally manipulated.³⁶ Interestingly this manipulation impairs the ability to process emotional expressions in faces³⁷—a task on which conservatives perform more poorly than liberals but which is invaluable in detecting falsehoods. But again, the feared stimulus in this kind of manipulation is often the threat of an outside tribe, as we see in the case of Jones's bogus supplements.

During the 2016 presidential debates, Donald Trump frequently used this same misdirection tactic. In the example below, Trump was attempting to deflect attention away from a newly released recording of him bragging about grabbing women's genitals by highlighting the threat of ISIS, followed promptly by his promise to make America safe:³⁸

Moderator Anderson Cooper: You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?

Trump: No, I didn't say that at all. I don't think you understood what was said. This was locker room talk. I am not proud of it. I apologize to my family, I apologized to the American people. Certainly, I am not proud of it. But this is locker room talk. You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have them, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over and you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven't seen anything likes [sic] this. The carnage all over the world and they look and they see, can you imagine the people that are frankly doing so well against us with ISIS and they look at our country and see what's going on. Yes, I am very embarrassed by it and I hate it, but it's locker room talk and it's one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. We are going to defeat ISIS. ISIS happened a number of years ago in a vacuum that was left because of bad judgment. And I will tell you, I will take care of ISIS. We need to get on to much more important and bigger things.

At this point, Anderson Cooper ignores Trump's smoke screen and doggedly returns to the question at hand, but Trump quickly reverts to the threat of ISIS:

Cooper: For the record, are you saying that what you said on the bus 11 years ago, that you did not actually kiss women without consent or grope women without consent?

Trump: I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

Cooper: So for the record, you're saying you never did that?

Trump: Frankly, you hear these things. They are said. And I was embarrassed by it. But I have respect for women.

Cooper: Have you ever done those things?

Trump: And they have respect for me. And I will tell you, no I have not.

And I will tell you, that I'm going to make our country safe and we're going to have borders, which we don't have now. People are pouring into our country and they're coming in from the Middle East and other places. We're gonna make America safe again, we're gonna make America great again but we're gonna make America safe again and we're gonna make America wealthy again. Because if you don't do that, it just, it sounds harsh to say, but we have to build up the wealth of our nation. Other nations are taking our job and they're taking our wealth.

So it is that tyrants rise to power, as James Madison wrote, “on some favorable emergency.”39

The use of fear as a leverage point can be far more sinister. One notorious example concerns the Iraq War. In 2003, US troops were sent into Iraq based on faulty or manufactured intelligence reports that Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Because the move played upon the lingering fear of outsiders generated by the 9/11 attacks, which were less than two years fresh in the minds of the American populace, the invasion gained wide popular support. Here is how then president George W. Bush framed the threat on March 17, 2003: “We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over…. We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.”⁴⁰ What was not broadcast was the fact that then vice president Dick Cheney was also the former CEO of the mammoth energy company Halliburton, a company that Cheney failed to fully divest himself of after he assumed office. One Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, made nearly forty billion dollars in a no-bid contract for reconstruction, private security, and feeding the troops in Iraq. Cheney and his friends made a personal fortune off the Iraq War. To a great extent, the fear of attack was the wool pulled over the eyes of the American public, and it made many powerful men very rich. Indeed, TMT research conducted during this time found that when death fears were primed, subjects across the political spectrum were more likely to support Bush's foreign policy, and that reminders of 9/11 boosted support for Bush.41

The great irony is that outsiders can also harm us not just by invading but also by using our irrational fear of outsiders to make us turn on one another. Political orientation is so persistently tribal that it is frequently imputed based on patterns of online behavior—shopping habits, likes, browsing history, responses to seemingly innocuous online questionnaires or quizzes (e.g., “How well do you know your guns; test your firearms knowledge”). Foreign interests have made a new kind of warfare out of targeting specific internet users by launching politically divisive memes. This includes publicizing entirely fabricated stories about the opposing party or enflaming sensitive social issues around race, or guns, for example.

As one example, in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement formed in America to protest racially biased police killings. To support the movement, in 2016, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling at games during the national anthem. For its basis in equal rights, liberals widely supported this gesture, whereas those on the extreme Right railed that it meant Kaepernick was a traitor to the United States. Emboldened by Donald Trump's election, white supremacy groups began counter-protesting the Black Lives Matter movement at rallies, shouting racist taunts and waving Nazi and Confederate flags. The ensuing turmoil turned into fistfights in the streets and resulted in one young woman's death when a white supremacist sped his vehicle into a crowd of liberal protestors.⁴²

This rupture had some help. US intelligence agencies have linked fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to Russian bots. With knowledge of what is most likely to infuriate a liberal or conservative, the Russian government and possibly others have taken to spraying the fires of discontent with incendiary misinformation. In the Kaepernick case, bots blew up the controversy by spreading fake news and opposing memes (with hashtags such as #standforouranthem, and #takeaknee) across social media, making the posts look as though they came from American activists.43 Intel agencies also discovered that a flood of automated fake news stories about the candidates in the 2016 US presidential election was instrumental in Donald Trump's win, and that foreign bots continue to target socially divisive partisan issues in the United States. It is concerning that two billion individuals around the globe (close to one-third of the global human population) currently use Facebook and a high proportion use social media as a news source.⁴⁴ This spectacular connectivity amounts to a worldwide arid field ready to take flame. Even more concerning is that the flood of fake, divisive news so intelligently targets our evolved tribalistic psychology, already primed for taking irrational stances against the rival tribe and for deflecting corrective information.

BECOMING SIGHTED

Knowing what we now know about how tribalism can blind us, what do we do? In coming to the realization of how profoundly our public discourse is shaped by evolved and fear-driven biases, it becomes clear that education about how to manage those biases is an important part of the solution. (Note that in the discussion of education above, the findings merely spoke to the amount of education received, not the quality or content of that education.) One of the most important steps toward rational political decision-making would be to make critical thinking a mandatory component of public education. Without the ability to think critically, to be fiercely rational, we are simply far more vulnerable—to our most primitive instincts and to those who would commandeer them for their own uses. But what is critical thinking? Here is one description offered by an organization called, no less, the Foundation for Critical Thinking:

They [critical thinkers] are keenly aware of the inherently flawed nature of human thinking when left unchecked. They strive to diminish the power of their egocentric and sociocentric tendencies. They use the intellectual tools that critical thinking offers—concepts and principles that enable them to analyze, assess, and improve thinking…. They realize that no matter how skilled they are as thinkers, they can always improve their reasoning abilities and they will at times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices, biases, distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and taboos, self-interest, and vested interest.45

In other words, properly trained critical thinkers are able to better evaluate not only the information put before them but also their own responses to that information. Thus while our instincts can blind us to reality, critical thinking can help us to become sighted and to enjoy greater freedom—the freedom to not simply respond to our most reactive impulses but to pause, to consider.

Scientific inquiry must be primary among the intellectual tools used for critical thinking because it is arguably the best means to arrive at unbiased information. Although the scientific method is in no way perfect, it has built-in mechanisms designed to help its practitioners maintain objectivity in their quest for knowledge. Cognitive psychology is also key, offering a detailed study of our emotionally motivated biases. It is self-evident that if we don't understand our biases, we are more likely to enact them. Teaching students how to thoughtfully challenge authority figures is also invaluable. This was a central aim of the “denazification” efforts in post-WWII Germany intended to forestall the rise of another Hitler. These efforts gave the Germans a counterweight to the kind of primitive, unreasoned consensus that opens the door to despots.⁴⁶ In the (false) information age, a deep curriculum in information literacy—that is, how to obtain accurate facts amid a rising sea of false information⁴⁷—is increasingly essential. Political literacy would also be desired. Surveys consistently show that high numbers of Americans are ignorant to elementary facts about US government, such as the name of the vice president, the name of a single Supreme Court justice, or the specific rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.48

In reality, none of these measures, either alone or in combination, will completely erase motivated reasoning from the political realm. But there is little question that our educational shortcomings leave us literally more primitive in our thinking. Lastly, and perhaps most crucially, critical thinking must involve teaching the evolutionary sciences in the public school system, with a particular focus on evolutionary psychology. For its unmatched utility in exposing the ultimate reasons for what we think and do, including our political impulses, evolutionary science must have a protected place in the conversation about who we are.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Thinking is our most foundational adaptation as human beings. Once we commit ourselves to doing more of it, a crucial question becomes, “How do we achieve an effective balance between liberal and conservative adaptations in contemporary life, toward the goals of reducing conflict, increasing effective dialogue, and ensuring flourishing societies?” John Stuart Mill once remarked, “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”⁴⁹ This claim may have some basis in evolutionary science. Among humans, as among other animals, a spectrum of traits reflects a population's adaptability. Teddy Roosevelt once made a similar observation when he advised that we “speak softly, and carry a big stick.” As a diplomat, but also a fervent outdoorsman and naturalist, Roosevelt seemed to have a keen understanding of human and animal behavior. And he may have a point—we cannot dispense with the martial, acquisitive, territorial male imperatives of our human ancestry altogether, yet, because our enemies will not be allayed with compassion alone. But loudly chest-thumping while carrying a big stick is an invitation for trouble. To create functioning nations, and to adapt to an increasingly interconnected world, the face of a nation must employ great diplomacy and rise above its most primal impulses.

Since Mill and Roosevelt, psychological science has been steadily accelerating, and our understanding of our evolutionary psychology is beginning to blossom. As we have learned, our spectrum of political orientations reflects the pressures of an ancestral environment that, with the help of our technology, we have for the most part left far behind. But on an evolutionary timescale we were in that environment only yesterday, and we continue to operate using the ancient psychology that helped our ancestors survive. Without understanding the evolved purpose of our political spectrum, we handicap our ability to think rationally about which of our adaptations to put forward and which to scale back.

The need to see human offspring through their unparalleled period of dependency drove our capacity for compassion, to understand other minds, and to share. The need to immigrate to new lands, and to acquire new genes and technologies from outside groups, gave us xenophilia. We still need to raise human offspring. And as we continue to evolve into a global community of nations, entwining into a single interdependent economic, technological, and cultural network, our xenophilia may be more necessary than ever. Certainly, this impulse must know some limits. Opening the doors indiscriminately also lets in those who would do us harm, and extreme empathy would potentially blind us to real danger.

On the other end of the natural curve, the continuous and deadly threat of starvation, predators, human-borne pathogens, and murderous outside clans gave us fear of germs, a toleration for in-group hierarchies, a tendency for submitting to large and aggressive male authorities, group-oriented thinking, and even in-group moral biases that sometimes blind us to reality. Without our ability to form coalitions, with all their inherent biases, we likely would not have survived our ancestral past, when our existence was at the mercy of nature.

But today, nature is at our mercy. We have the great fortune of a large, thinking brain that allows us to harness the earth's energies in order to make the human experience more livable. Having in so many ways surpassed our ancestral environment, important questions remain. To what extent does it serve humanity to collaborate on a global scale, openly sharing technology, information, and wealth? To what extent do we more fully thrive in smaller, competing tribes? How do we organize our communities, societies, and global networks in order to ensure their stability? These are difficult questions to answer. We may be able to take lessons from some of our forebears.

The Iroquois had two forms of government. One was for wartime, the other for peace.50 The sachems, the peacetime leaders, men who were often elected by women, had total control over the internal affairs of the tribe. It was only when war erupted that the war leaders took over, with the sole purpose of dispensing with the enemy threat. When the enemy tried to negotiate a peace settlement, they did so with the sachems. If the terms were agreed upon, the war leaders stepped down and the female-elected sachems took the helm once again. This arrangement certainly seems intelligent. If we are going to make use of male adaptations for territorial gain, hierarchy, violence, and suppressing empathy, war is the time to do so. But holstering those men when wartime is over is a simple, yet brilliantly pragmatic strategy. Letting the warrior class among us administer civil affairs—we already know what happens. Driven by male primate reproductive ambitions, warrior-driven governments have historically been oppressive and misogynistic, prone to forming in-groups, promoting unhealthy respect for authority, and encouraging winner-take-all economic policies that destabilize societies and destroy our natural environment. Moreover, as a means to ensure the hierarchy remains unquestioned, these authoritarians have either forbidden questioning altogether or, more recently, crippled our ability to question by drowning us with false information. But questioning, no matter how difficult the answer, is the only way to keep evolving. Here I recall the words of Thomas Jefferson when he said, “There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”⁵¹

In all of this focus on what divides us, one intellectually gripping fact about humanity is that we appear to get along best when faced with an outside threat. This response, which has reliably been documented across the world's bloody conflicts, reveals just how far cooperation was shaped by male coalitionary psychology and its propensity for making war. The question remains, Can we truly come together in the absence of an outside enemy? Or will we be forever destined to create those enemies if for nothing more than the intoxicating sense of unity we experience when standing together? Could we transpose the hostile outside tribe for something else? Hunger? Ignorance? Human limitation? If we are ever to stop fighting one another, it will require understanding where we came from. Only then can we transcend the fears and sufferings of our Stone Age ancestors. Only then can we fully evolve into the worlds we create.