Please recommend sources on the evolution of political impulses and thinking
In preparation for the March meeting topic, Your Political Brain, please recommend any resources you have found particularly enlightening about why humans evolved political thinking. Also, please share references about how brain functions lead to political perceptions. I’m assuming political perceptions result from more fundamental cognitive orientations, and that those arise in part from one’s genetics and in part from environment (during development and afterward).
Let’s use the following description from Wikipedia:
Politics is the process of making decisions applying to all members of each group. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance— organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (this is usually a hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities. (Wikipedia)
This description places political thinking in the realm of the brain’s/mind’s social processing.
Following are some candidate resources for our discussion preparation:
Edward’s recommendations
- The Republican Brain (video, 21:45 – Chris Mooney, Jonathan Haidt, Chris Hayes)
- Chris Hedges’ review of Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind
- George Lackoff’s cognitive science perspective
- Brain differences between liberals and conservatives (magazine article)
Mark’s recommendations
- The origin of politics: an evolutionary theory of political behavior (academic article)
- Authoritarianism (Wikipedia)
- How right-wing authoritarian is your mind? Not sure? Take the test
- The book on authoritarianism (quoted by John Dean, former Nixon attorney)