Injustice, inequality and Evolutionary Psychology

Injustice, inequality and Evolutionary Psychology
Bruce G Charlton; 1997
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html


Abstract

As biological knowledge of "human nature" continues to grow, political theory and public  policy will increasingly need to take account of Evolutionary Psychology in order effectively  to pursue its goals. This essay stands as an example. Socio-economic differentials are  perceived to be unjust, but the reason for this is not obvious given the ubiquity of  stratification. It is suggested that "the injustice of inequality" has an basis in social  instincts that evolved to promote co-operation in small-scale, egalitarian hunter-gatherer  societies with immediate-return economies. Modern Homo sapiens has been  "designed" by natural selection to live in such societies, and has "counter-dominance"  instincts that are gratified by equal sharing of resources and an equal distribution of  resources.  However, there are also phylogenetically older "dominance" social instincts  (status-seeking, nepotism, mutual reciprocity) deriving from pre-hominid ancestors, and  these tend to create inequality under "modern" conditions of economic surplus. Therefore  human instincts and gratifications are intrinsically in conflict under contemporary  conditions. The radical implications of this analysis are explored. These include support  for a Berlin-esque view of politics as an endemic negotiation of irreducibly plural values;  a clarification of the deficiencies of right- and left-wing political theory; and a rationale for  politics to concentrate primarily on the "micro-level" psychology of subjective gratification  of individuals in their local context, rather than the conventional emphasis upon macro-level policies based on abstract statistical analysis of aggregated population variables. 

Muscularity and attractiveness as predictors of human egalitarianism

Muscularity and attractiveness as predictors of human egalitarianism
Michael E Price et al.; 2011
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~hsstmep/Price_et_al_2011_PAID.pdf


Abstract

In ancestral human environments, muscularity and height (in males) and physical attractiveness (in both sexes) would theoretically have correlated positively with one’s social status, and thus with one’s ability to benefit from social inequality. We therefore hypothesized that individuals who are more characterized by these traits would be less egalitarian (i.e., less likely to believe that resources should be distributed equally in social groups). We used a white-light 3D body scanner to extract anthropometric measurements from 118 participants, and our four egalitarianism measures included social dominance orientation and social value orientation. We found that as hypothesized, muscularity and waist–chest ratio in males, and self-perceived attractiveness in both sexes, tended to associate significantly in the predicted directions with the four egalitarianism measures; most of these correlations were of medium size. Neither height, nor two anthropometrically-assessed attractiveness measures (volume height index and waist–hip ratio), associated significantly with any egalitarianism measure in either sex. Egalitarianism has crucial social repercussions (e.g., taxes, welfare and civil rights), and results from the current study shed light on its origins.