Psychology and Ideology. How Could Anyone (Except the Rich) Vote for George Bush? By Peter Prontzos (5/6)

III - THE POWER OF SITUATIONS

As a result of our evolution, human beings have the most “social” brain of any mammal.  As Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading researchers on primate behaviour, wrote:

There was never a point at which we became social: descended from highly social ancestors – a long line of monkeys and apes – we have been group-living forever… life in groups is not an option, but a survival strategy (de Waal, 4).

The evolutionary advantages of being able to practice complex forms of social cooperation are the primary reasons for the growth of the neo-cortex, which is central to our “higher” mental functions, and which is most developed in the human species.

One foundation of our social nature involves mirror neurons.  This discovery illuminates the very profound way in which people are connected to each other and also provides a neurological foundation for empathy, which is so central to being human that whenever we even think about hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion.  The mirror neural system also illuminates the profoundly social nature of our brains (Siegel, 2006A).

Another study demonstrated that empathy is a normal function of a healthy brain (de Waal believes that it developed out of maternal-infant bonding in mammals, op. cit).  It found that a person who has suffered an injury to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), were more willing to harm others than those whose brains were functioning normally.  As one researcher summed up: “Because of brain damage, they lack empathy and compassion” (ScienceDaily, 22 March 2007).

People are hard-wired for compassion and cooperation.  Not only is it natural to care for others, but nurturing relationships with family and friends are vital to our emotional and physical health.

Eric Fromm argued that we must consider how, in addition to the individual unconscious, cultures develop their own particular “social unconscious” in which political, economic, and cultural forces actively suppress certain “unacceptable” ideas and emotions, while promoting others (Fromm 1955).

There is wide agreement that the corporate media are a major factor in the construction of ideologies.  Kahneman notes that,

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media (op. cit.  p. 8).

This view that one’s social unconscious plays a significant role in determining one’s political views has been receiving support lately, as new research sheds light on how these unconscious forms develop.

For instance, “there is evidence that life experience as intangible as culture can also reorganize our neural pathways”.  Research shows that both younger Asians, and Westerners in general, view the world differently than older Asians, who grew up with less Western influence.  Psychologists using fMRI scans showed people 200 complex scenes, such as an elephant in a jungle or an airplane flying over a city…”  The lead researcher summarized the results: “An Asian would see a jungle that happened to have an elephant in it...Meanwhile a Westerner would see the elephant and might notice the jungle” (Binns, 2007).  The differences between younger and older Asians support the view that these results stem from cultural rather than genetic causes.

The fact that most people usually hold the same religious and political views as their parents is a reminder of how profound such early influences are.  Most children born to Muslims remained Muslim, and the same is true for Hindus, Christians, Jews, and so on.  By the same token, most children of liberal parents are liberal, while conservative parents generally produce children who lean to the right.

The effects of one’s environment can interact in a number of ways with one’s “nature” to affect attitudes towards other people.  For instance, a recent large-scale study (N = 15,874) in England,

found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice (Hodson, Busseri, 2012).

There are many ways, as noted above, in which natural empathy can be lost.  After all, biology is not destiny, except in the sense that it underlies the wide repertoire of human behaviour, which is more varied than in any other species.  Consider the immense variety of cultures that exist, and that have existed, and it is clear that our behavioural flexibility is vast.  The question of which of our potentials and behaviours are actualized depends on our past experiences as well as our current environment.  Phillip Zimbardo (who ran the [in]famous “Stanford Prison Experiment argues in The Lucifer Effect that:

we are born with a full range of capacities, each of which is activated and developed depending on the social and cultural circumstances that govern our lives…the potential for perversion is inherent in the very processes that make human beings do all the wonderful things that we do (Zimbardo, 2007).