[extropy-chat] Fundamental research and evolutionary psychology

[Keith Henson]

(This may have been lost in the switchover)

Fully a year ago I submitted an article to an SF magazine.  The article, 
"Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War," was rejected as 
being just too speculative.

I rewrote it as an academic publication and submitted it to the group that 
had published my previous "Sex Drugs and Cults" article on the 
web.  Unfortunately the principles involved became overloaded with off the 
Net projects and some months after I submitted it to them, they said they 
were not going to put any more time into the on line publication.

So if any of you wants a copy (20 pages in Word or html) or can suggest a 
home for it, please let me know.  It might eat some bandwidth even in 
text.  The Sex, Drugs and Cults article was downloaded around 250,000 
times.  (With a title like that, how could it miss?  :-)  )

In the mean time, one of my suggestions in the "Origin of War" article was 
to go looking with fMRI for the brain structures involved in suppressing 
reasoning when humans go into "war mode."

Something close enough has now been reported, especially if you make the 
case that "politics is just a continuation of war by other means."  :-)  I 
love Dr Westen's image of twirling the cognitive kaleidoscope!

http://www.rxpgnews.com/specialtopics/article_3287.shtml

*******************

Interesting Findings from fMRI Scans of Political Brains

Jan 25, 2006, 17:07, Reviewed by: Dr. Priya Saxena

"Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may 
reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in 
how to interpret 'the facts' "

By Emory University Health Sciences Center,

When it comes to forming opinions and making judgments on hot political 
issues, partisans of both parties don't let facts get in the way of their 
decision-making, according to a new Emory University study. The research 
sheds light on why staunch Democrats and Republicans can hear the same 
information, but walk away with opposite conclusions.

The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a sample of 
committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months prior to the 
U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and Republicans were 
given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening 
information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects 
underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the 
researchers found was striking.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally 
engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical 
psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network 
of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be 
involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in 
resolving conflicts." Westen and his colleagues will present their findings 
at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social 
Psychology Jan. 28.

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially 
finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted 
-- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and 
disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits 
involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their 
fix, Westen explains.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly 
engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the 
cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then 
they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative 
emotional states and activation of positive ones."

During the study, the partisans were given 18 sets of stimuli, six each 
regarding President George W. Bush, his challenger, Senator John Kerry, and 
politically neutral male control figures such as actor Tom Hanks. For each 
set of stimuli, partisans first read a statement from the target (Bush or 
Kerry). The first statement was followed by a second statement that 
documented a clear contradiction between the target's words and deeds, 
generally suggesting that the candidate was dishonest or pandering.

Next, partisans were asked to consider the discrepancy, and then to rate 
the extent to which the person's words and deeds were contradictory. 
Finally, they were presented with an exculpatory statement that might 
explain away the apparent contradiction, and asked to reconsider and again 
rate the extent to which the target's words and deeds were contradictory.

Behavioral data showed a pattern of emotionally biased reasoning: partisans 
denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no 
difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Importantly, in both their 
behavioral and neural responses, Republicans and Democrats did not differ 
in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control 
targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans 
responded to Bush.

While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, 
partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, 
indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation 
strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated 
with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and 
conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability.

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral 
prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning (as 
well as conscious efforts to suppress emotion). The finding suggests that 
the emotion-driven processes that lead to biased judgments likely occur 
outside of awareness, and are distinct from normal reasoning processes when 
emotion is not so heavily engaged, says Westen.

The investigators hypothesize that emotionally biased reasoning leads to 
the "stamping in" or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the 
participant's "revisionist" account of the data with positive emotion or 
relief and elimination of distress. "The result is that partisan beliefs 
are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen 
says.

The study has potentially wide implications, from politics to business, and 
demonstrates that emotional bias can play a strong role in decision-making, 
Westen says. "Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and 
politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a 
vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts,' " Westen says.

********************

(Sorry for posting the whole release, but I think this is one of the most 
important pieces of research I have seen in ages.)

Approaching these findings from an evolutionary psychology viewpoint, the 
question you need to ask is how in our evolutionary past would "emotionally 
biased reasoning" and inhibiting areas of the brain that are involved in 
rational thought have been useful to genes?  Not just useful, but so 
critical for gene survival for these mechanisms to have been harshly selected.

When first considered, it doesn't make sense; you are almost always going 
to make better decisions that lead to your survival using rational thinking.

And that is the key.

In our hunter-gatherer past there were times (times that led to an awful 
lot of gene selection) where personal survival was "contraindicated" by 
"your genes" in the "inclusive fitness" sense.

Inclusive fitness is perhaps the most important development in evolutionary 
biology in the past 50 years.  It is expressed in simple mathematics as 
formulated by William Hamilton.  As Hamilton put it, genes should have 
built into us the willingness to die if it would save more than two 
brothers, more than 4 half sibs and so on.  It explains bee behavior and 
why parents take horrible risks and sometimes die trying to save their 
children.

But it also explains why humans have the ability to suppress rational 
thinking as shown in Dr. Westen's fMRI study.  In our hunter-gatherer past, 
human populations (which have no serious predators) expanded.  When the 
populations periodically reached the ecological limits, psychological 
traits shut down rational thinking and upped the gain on xenophobic 
memes--then warriors from one band attacked another band.

While attacking other humans and taking a terrible chance of being killed 
or injured does not make sense from an individual or the genes in his body, 
genes "take a wider view" considering other copies.*   Thus genes for even 
suicidal behavior will become more common in the population if the loses 
from the suicidal behavior are more than compensated by better survival of 
copies of those genes in relatives.

Times when humans were not reaching the ecosystem limits, rational thinking 
and behavior were good for both the individual and the genes he carried in 
both the personal and inclusive sense.  But when game is in short supply, 
humans have an evolved ability to switch to non-rational thinking and 
behavior which is personally risky or destructive--though good for the 
copies of their genes in relatives, i.e., improves their inclusive fitness 
at a personal cost of even death.

I think this is what the Emory study is showing us--activation of "evolved 
in the stone age" mechanisms that originally functioned to induce warriors 
to a do or die effort that improved their inclusive fitness.

"The finding suggests that the emotion-driven processes that lead to biased 
judgments likely occur outside of awareness, and are distinct from normal 
reasoning processes when emotion is not so heavily engaged."

If you have ever wondered why so many irrational decisions are made in all 
phases of wars, here it is.

Keith Henson

cc Dr. Westen

*Metaphor language.  Genes, of course, don't have "a view."  What happens 
is that genes for X become more common in the population if inducing X 
increases the percentage of genes for X in future generations.