by Robin Hanson
40Jones 2012.
41.
42Some group members may be worse off, e.g., alpha males who might otherwise be able to dominate the group. And everyone will be incentivized to selfishly cheat and evade the norms. But for most people, if it’s a decision about whether (a) to join the group and abide by the norms, or (b) to join a different group without any norms, they’ll be better off joining the stricter group.
43Sosis and Alcorta 2003.
44Kenrick 2011, ch. 10; Weeden, Cohen, and Kenrick 2008; Durant and Durant 1968.
45Even the prohibition on masturbation can be understood as a way to make early marriage more attractive.
46Kenrick 2011, 151–53.
47Brown 2012.
48Perhaps it’s a rehearsal for war. See McNeill 1997; Jordania 2011.
49Hutchinson 2014.
50Wiltermuth and Heath 2009.
51Ehrenreich 2007.
52Of course, many people do enjoy listening to sermons by podcast, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
53This is similar to the third-person effect we saw in Chapter 10, which is responsible for the efficacy of advertising and other forms of propaganda. As the editor for the website Upworthy put it, “You’re not preaching to the choir. You’re preaching to the choir’s friends” (Abebe 2014).
54On badges in a religious context, see Iannaccone 1992, 1998; Atran and Henrich 2010. More generally, badges can convey information about any underlying feature, not just group membership. For an overview, see Miller 2009, 116–19.
55This isn’t to deny that the specific form they take is, in part, determined by our cognitive quirks. But this section helps explain why religious beliefs, unlike other supernatural beliefs, aren’t weeded out by critical reflection, but are instead sticky, central features of religious systems.
56Of course, if we’re caught cheating, the outrage will be all the stronger.
57Transubstantiation is the belief that the crackers and wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ, while consubstantiation is the belief that they become flesh and blood only spiritually, while retaining all the physical properties of crackers and wine.
58Note that our word “faith,” which is often used in reference to religious belief, originally meant loyalty or trustworthiness (Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “faith,” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=faith).
59If there were substantive reasons to prefer one team over another—if the Dodgers were more entertaining, say, or gave $100 rewards to anyone caught wearing their apparel—then being a fan would reflect only your narrow individual interests, rather than your loyalty to a particular community.
60Evolutionary psychologists are quick to point out that humans aren’t “biological fitness maximizers.” If we were, we’d do a lot of things differently. No one would smoke, gamble, or watch pornography. We’d use a lot less birth control. Men would donate sperm at every opportunity, and women would donate their eggs. No one would ever adopt a child, no matter how much happiness it might bring, nor would we ever stop to smell the roses. Clearly, this doesn’t describe our species. Instead of explicitly trying to maximize reproductive success, we are “adaptation executors.” Our brains were built with various instincts that, in the ancestral environment, tended to help our ancestors leave more descendants.
CHAPTER 16
1Mansfield as quoted in Wehner 2014.
2Haidt: “Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences” (2012, 85). See also Caplan 2007.
3Haidt: “See review in Kinder 1998. The exception to this rule is that when the material benefits of a policy are ‘substantial, imminent, and well-publicized,’ those who would benefit from it are more likely to support it than those who would be harmed. See also D. T. Miller 1999 on the ‘norm of self-interest’ ” (2012, 85–6, footnote).
4At least, not in any straightforward way. See Caplan 2007.
5Gelman, Silver, and Edlin 2012.
6Churchill seemed to be quoting an unsourced aphorism. See Langworth 2011, 573.
7For those unfamiliar with the U.S. Electoral College system, here’s how it works. First, within each state, the candidate with the most votes is usually awarded all of that state’s “electoral votes.” These electoral votes are then tallied up (from all the states), and the candidate with the most electoral votes is elected president.
8Gelman et al. 2012.
9Gerber et al. 2009.
10In contrast, presidential elections (compared to midterm elections) draw out an extra 16 out of every 100 eligible voters (Gerber et al. 2009).
11Delli-Carpini and Keeter 1997. For what it’s worth, neither Kevin nor Robin can name their congressperson.
12“American Public Vastly Overestimates Amount of U.S. Foreign Aid,” WorldPublicOpinion.org, November 29, 2010, accessed April 26, 2017, http://worldpublicopinion.net/american-public-vastly-overestimates-amount-of-u-s-foreign-aid/.
13Althaus 2003; Kraus, Malmfors, and Slovic 1992.
14Caplan 2007.
15Converse 1964.
16Hall, Johansson, and Strandberg 2012.
17Bruce Yandle, for example, describes the crucial difference between regulating facets of production (bad) vs. regulating final outcomes directly (good). He also describes the costs and benefits of regulating at the federal vs. state levels. See Yandle 1983; Yandle 1999.
18Volden and Wiseman 2014.
19Note that there are ways to vote well that don’t require a voter to be informed about national issues. In “retrospective voting,” for example, you vote to re-elect the incumbent if your life improved (more than you expected) during the incumbent’s term, and otherwise you vote to replace the incumbent with someone else. If most voters did this, incumbents would have strong incentives to make people’s lives go well. But most voters are reluctant to put much weight on this voting strategy.
20Also suggestive is the fact of many consistent, smooth long-term trends in public opinion on policy. If opinion changes resulted mainly from new information, they would follow a random walk, wherein future changes are hard to predict from past changes.
21Technically, anger isn’t a “social emotion,” at least not by the strictest definition: “an emotion that requires the representation of the mental states of other people” (Wikipedia, s.v. “Social emotions,” last modified January 29, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_emotions).
22Merriam-Webster, s.v. “apparatchik,” accessed March 8, 2017, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apparatchik.
23Solzhenitsyn 1973, 69–70. Note that the quotation has been edited for length and clarity.
24Wikipedia, s.v. “Great Purge,” last modified February 22, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge.
25Dikötter 2010: China. Tudor and Pearson 2015: North Korea.
26Albright 2016.
27Huntington 1997, 174–5.
28Klofstad, McDermott, and Hatemi 2013.
29A 2010 survey analyzed in Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes (2012). In 1960, the figures were much lower: 5 percent for Republicans and 4 percent for Democrats. A Pew study in 2014 found the numbers to be 30 percent for conservatives and 23 percent for liberals (Pew Research Center 2014).
30Iyengar and Westwood 2015. See also Klein and Chang 2015; Smith, Williams, and Willis 1967.
31Klein and Chang 2015.
32Klein and Stern 2009. Across the United States, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is about 1. But among college professors the ratio is 5, and in the humanities and social sciences, it’s closer to 8. These latter ratios have doubled over the last 40 years. Economists are often distrusted by other academics in part because their ratio is a “conservative” 3. See also Cardiff and Klein 2005.
33Gross 2013.
34Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte 2005.
>
35Gerber et al. 2012
36Roberts and Caplan 2007 (not verbatim quotes).
37Note, however, that when people hold opinions they claim are “unpopular,” and yet express pride in their nonconformity, we should take their claims with a grain of salt. What looks “unpopular” to one audience is often an act of pandering to another, less visible constituency. To give just one example, Griskevicius et al. (2006) suggests that men might profess “unpopular” political opinions because nonconformity makes them more attractive to women. See also Kuran 1995, 31.
38Haidt 2012, 86.
39See, e.g., Brennan and Hamlin 1998; Schuessler 2000.
40Jones and Hudson 2000.
41This also explains why even people who don’t vote take the trouble to form—and more importantly, to discuss—their political opinions.
42Haidt 2012, 86.
43This is the old honest or costly signaling principle at work.
44A more colorful example is the website votergasm.org, where visitors can pledge to withhold sex from nonvoters for a week to four years following an election. See Sohn 2004.
45Cf. Steven Pinker’s remark: “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true” (2013, 286).
46Another factor that can lead to disagreement is having different goals. For example, one person might prioritize blue-collar jobs, while another person prioritizes economic efficiency. But political discourse often requires us to have the shared overarching goal of “the common good,” i.e., what’s best for all of us together. Or at least, we have to pretend that’s our goal.
47Mercier and Sperber 2011.
48Tavits: “Voters rewarded political parties for changing economic positions, but punished parties for changing other social positions . . . even those parties that make [social] policy adjustments that correspond to the preference shifts of voters lose votes” (2007).
49Poole and Rosenthal 1987; Voeten 2001.
50Poole and Rosenthal 2007; Voeten 2001.
51Wikipedia, s.v. “Party realignment in the United States,” last modified December 12, 2016, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_realignment_in_the_United_States.
52Poole and Rosenthal 2000.
53Costa and Kahn 2009.
54Abrahms 2008, 2011.
55This plausibly accounts for the attitude of many libertarians, for example. See also Griskevicius et al. (2006), who explain some kinds of nonconformity by an appeal to mating motives.
CHAPTER 17
1Of course, we also need to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Kevin once interviewed a college student whose body language seemed arrogant and dismissive, only to learn later, after rejecting the student for the job, that his impressions were entirely mistaken. He feels terrible about it to this day.
2Credit to Paul Crowley for this point.
3Frank, Gilovich, and Regan 1993. Cf. Goethe’s remark: “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” See also Stafford 2013.
4Stavrova and Ehlebracht 2016.
5Tocqueville 2013, sect. II, ch. 8; Smith 2013; McClure 2014.
6See Nowak and Highfield 2011.
7Farrell and Finnemore 2013.
8Hayek 1988.
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