The politics of disease.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights a long-known but often neglected aspect of international relations: the ability of disease to challenge and change all aspects of security, as well as the ability of public policies to change the course of disease progression. Diseases, especially mass epidemics like COVID-19, clearly affect political, economic, and social structures, but they can also be ameliorated or exacerbated by political policies, including public health policies. The threat of pandemic disease poses a widespread and increasing threat to international stability. Indeed, the political implications of pandemic disease have become increasingly evident as COVID-19 has precipitated death, economic collapse, and political instability around the globe. Any pandemic disease can precipitate catastrophes, from increasing health care costs to decreased productivity. This theoretical discussion highlights the intertwined interactions between social, political, and economic forces and the emergence and evolution of pandemic disease, with widespread implications for governance and international security.

Enhanced cooperation increases the capacity for conflict.

Enhanced cooperation increases the capacity for humans to engage in large-scale warfare. This ability provides the foundation for male coalitionary behavior, leaving open the question of whether cooperation evolved in the same way, or for the same purpose, in females. Such coalitionary behavior entrains hierarchical forms of leadership that remain inherently unstable, providing a spark for conflict to emerge.

Examining American attitudes toward vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of negative and positive rights.

We examine the likely acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine in the period prior to political polarization around vaccine mandates. Two representative cross-sectional surveys of 1,000 respondents were fielded in August and December 2020. The surveys included items about the COVID-19 vaccine and vaccine mandates. Respondents self-identifying as liberal were the least likely to believe the vaccine had undisclosed harmful effects (p< .001), conservatives were the most likely (p < .001), and moderates fell in between. Individuals with a bachelor's degree were less likely to think the vaccine had undisclosed harmful effects than individuals without a bachelor's degree (p < .001), and 60.5% of those individuals did not support a government vaccine mandate. Political ideology was more often strongly associated with avoiding government involvement compared to education level. In summary, both liberal political ideology and higher education were significantly associated with endorsing intended vaccine uptake. We discuss these results in terms of positive versus negative rights.

Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis and presidential illness.

President Donald Trump's COVID-19 illness, and the treatments he received, raise serious concerns about the adequacy of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to handle cases of transient presidential incapacity. This is particularly challenging when the president refuses to acknowledge any impairment and resists any attempt to constrain his powers, even temporarily.

Introduction to the Special Issue-Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues.

We introduce the Special Issue on Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues. This issue of Politics and the Life Sciences is focused on the use of life science theory and methods to study political phenomena and the exploration of the intersection of science and political attitudes. This issue is the third in a series of special issues funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that adheres to the Open Science Framework for registered reports. Pre-analysis plans are peer reviewed and given in-principle acceptance before data are collected and/or analyzed, and the articles are published contingent upon the preregistration of the study being followed as proposed. We note various interpretations and challenges associated with studying the science of politics and discuss the contributions.

Breaking free How preregistration hurts scholars and science.

Pre-registration has become an increasingly popular proposal to address concerns regarding questionable research practices. Yet preregistration does not necessarily solve these problems. It also causes additional problems, including raising costs for more junior and less resourced scholars. In addition, pre-registration restricts creativity and diminishes the broader scientific enterprise. In this way, pre-registration neither solves the problems it is intended to address, nor does it come without costs. Pre-registration is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing novel or ethical work. In short, pre-registration represents a form of virtue signaling that is more performative than actual.

Key individuals catalyse intergroup violence.

Intergroup violence is challenging to understand: why do individuals cooperate to harm members of other groups when they themselves may be killed or injured? Despite progress in understanding the evolutionary and proximate mechanisms that underlie violence, we still have little insight into the processes that lead to the emergence of coalitionary aggression. We argue that an overlooked component is the presence of individuals who have a crucial role in initiating violence. In instigating intergroup violence, these key individuals may expect to face lower costs, receive greater benefits, or garner benefits that have a greater value to them than others. Alternatively, key individuals may be motivated by individual traits such as increased boldness, propensity for aggression or exploratory behaviour. Key individuals catalyse the emergence of coalitionary violence through one of several processes including altering the costs and benefits that accrue to others, paying a greater share of the startup costs, signalling privileged knowledge, or providing coordination, among other factors. Here we integrate diverse lines of empirical research from humans and non-human animals demonstrating that inter-individual variation is an important factor in the emergence of intergroup violence. Focusing on the role of key individuals provides new insights into how and why violence emerges. This article is part of the theme issue 'Intergroup conflict across taxa'.

Dispositional Fear and Political Attitudes.

Previous work proposes that dispositional fear exists predominantly among political conservatives, generating the appearance that fears align strictly along party lines. This view obscures evolutionary dynamics because fear evolved to protect against myriad threats, not merely those in the political realm. We suggest prior work in this area has been biased by selection on the dependent variable, resulting from an examination of exclusively politically oriented fears that privilege conservative values. Because the adaptation regulating fear should be based upon both universal and ancestral-specific selection pressures combined with developmental and individual differences, the elicitation of it should prove variable across the ideological continuum dependent upon specific combinations of fear and value domains. In a sample of ~ 1,600 Australians assessed with a subset of the Fear Survey Schedule II, we find fears not infused with political content are differentially influential across the political spectrum. Specifically, those who are more fearful of sharp objects, graveyards, and urinating in public are more socially conservative and less supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of death are more supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of suffocating and swimming alone are more concerned about emissions controls and immigration, while those who are more fearful of thunderstorms are also more anti-immigration. Contrary to existing research, both liberals and conservatives are more fearful of different circumstances, and the role of dispositional fears are attitude-specific.

Ethics in field experimentation: A call to establish new standards to protect the public from unwanted manipulation and real harms.

In 1966, Henry Beecher published his foundational paper "Ethics and Clinical Research," bringing to light unethical experiments that were routinely being conducted by leading universities and government agencies. A common theme was the lack of voluntary consent. Research regulations surrounding laboratory experiments flourished after his work. More than half a century later, we seek to follow in his footsteps and identify a new domain of risk to the public: certain types of field experiments. The nature of experimental research has changed greatly since the Belmont Report. Due in part to technological advances including social media, experimenters now target and affect whole societies, releasing interventions into a living public, often without sufficient review or controls. A large number of social science field experiments do not reflect compliance with current ethical and legal requirements that govern research with human participants. Real-world interventions are being conducted without consent or notice to the public they affect. Follow-ups and debriefing are routinely not being undertaken with the populations that experimenters injure. Importantly, even when ethical research guidelines are followed, researchers are following principles developed for experiments in controlled settings, with little assessment or protection for the wider societies within which individuals are embedded. We strive to improve the ethics of future work by advocating the creation of new norms, illustrating classes of field experiments where scholars do not appear to have recognized the ways such research circumvents ethical standards by putting people, including those outside the manipulated group, into harm's way.

To Go Forward, We Must Look Back: The Importance of Evolutionary Psychology for Understanding Modern Politics.

As new waves of populism arise and cause disruption around the globe, there is both great interest in attempting to explain the origin of this dynamic as well as a need to ameliorate its potentially destructive impact. Perhaps the greatest signal of seismic change is the global dismantling of American institutional control of the postwar world following the election of Donald Trump in the United States. In the wake of such dramatic changes, it may seem odd to turn to evolutionary psychology which looks deeply into the past to try to understand current events, but, in fact, modern technology has dramatically changed the shape of political communication in just such a way as to make politics more personal once again, increasing the need to understand and interpret modern politics through an evolutionary lens. In fact, current modern political turmoils demonstrate how important evolutionary themes are and how critical they remain to understand how current forms of populism tape into older tribal sentiments and drives. Modern technology allows for a form of interpretative politics that no longer need to be mediated by political institutions or larger social structures, including enduring ones such as marriage. Indeed, in any ways, as we have technologically advanced, we have also regressed to more immediate, emotional, and personal forms of political communication. And it is only in understanding the nature of that personal political psychology that we can begin to grapple seriously with the challenges of today, including the consequences of global populism.

Coalitional rivalry may hurt in economic exchanges such as trade but help in war.

Economic exchange constitutes the basis of many, but not all, aspects of human cooperation. The incentives overlap with, but remain distinct in important ways, from other fundamental aspects of cooperation, including the organization of collective violence for combat. The specific alignment of sometimes-conflicting goals helps inform the construction of political ideology.

The relationship between physical aggression, foreign policy and moral choices: Phenotypic and genetic findings.

Previous work has demonstrated that both leaders and other individuals vary in dispositional levels of physical aggression, which are genetically influenced. Yet the importance of individual differences in aggression for attitudes toward foreign policy or context-laden moral choices, such as sacrificing the lives of some for the greater good of many, has yet to be fully explored. Given the global importance of such decisions, we undertook this exploration in a sample of 586 Australians, including 250 complete twin pairs. We found that individuals who scored higher on Buss-Perry's physical aggression scale were more likely to support aggressive foreign policy interventions and displayed a more utilitarian moral calculus than those who scored lower on this scale. Furthermore, we found that the majority of variance in physical aggression lay in genetic factors for men, whereas the majority of the variance was in environmental factors for women. The source of covariation between aggression and political choices also differed between the sexes. A combination of genetic and environmental factors accounted for most of the cross-trait correlations among males, whereas common and unique environmental factors accounted for most of the cross-trait correlations among females. We consider the implications of our results for understanding how trait measures of aggression are associated with foreign policy and moral choices, providing evidence for why and how individuals differ in responding to complex social dilemmas. Aggr. Behav. 43:37-46, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Formation of raiding parties for intergroup violence is mediated by social network structure.

Intergroup violence is common among humans worldwide. To assess how within-group social dynamics contribute to risky, between-group conflict, we conducted a 3-y longitudinal study of the formation of raiding parties among the Nyangatom, a group of East African nomadic pastoralists currently engaged in small-scale warfare. We also mapped the social network structure of potential male raiders. Here, we show that the initiation of raids depends on the presence of specific leaders who tend to participate in many raids, to have more friends, and to occupy more central positions in the network. However, despite the different structural position of raid leaders, raid participants are recruited from the whole population, not just from the direct friends of leaders. An individual's decision to participate in a raid is strongly associated with the individual's social network position in relation to other participants. Moreover, nonleaders have a larger total impact on raid participation than leaders, despite leaders' greater connectivity. Thus, we find that leaders matter more for raid initiation than participant mobilization. Social networks may play a role in supporting risky collective action, amplify the emergence of raiding parties, and hence facilitate intergroup violence in small-scale societies.

Group behavior in the military may provide a unique case.

The optimal functioning of male coalitionary behavior in a military context may run contrary to some of the arguments about the importance of individual differentiation in Baumeister et al. Incentives become institutionally inverted within military contexts. Because the history of combat exerted powerful and sustained selection pressures on male groups, individual identification can work against the successful completion of collective action problems surrounding in-group defense in military contexts.

Genetic influences on political ideologies: twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations.

Almost 40 years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30 and 60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences. However, these findings have not been widely accepted or incorporated into the dominant paradigms that explain the etiology of political ideology. This has been attributed in part to measurement and sample limitations, as well the relative absence of molecular genetic studies. Here we present results from original analyses of a combined sample of over 12,000 twins pairs, ascertained from nine different studies conducted in five democracies, sampled over the course of four decades. We provide evidence that genetic factors play a role in the formation of political ideology, regardless of how ideology is measured, the era, or the population sampled. The only exception is a question that explicitly uses the phrase "Left-Right". We then present results from one of the first genome-wide association studies on political ideology using data from three samples: a 1990 Australian sample involving 6,894 individuals from 3,516 families; a 2008 Australian sample of 1,160 related individuals from 635 families and a 2010 Swedish sample involving 3,334 individuals from 2,607 families. No polymorphisms reached genome-wide significance in the meta-analysis. The combined evidence suggests that political ideology constitutes a fundamental aspect of one's genetically informed psychological disposition, but as Fisher proposed long ago, genetic influences on complex traits will be composed of thousands of markers of very small effects and it will require extremely large samples to have enough power in order to identify specific polymorphisms related to complex social traits.

The politics of presidential medical care. The case of John F. Kennedy.

Political concerns often compromise the delivery of high quality medical care in ways that can be both problematic and dangerous for political leaders. President John F. Kennedy's medical care offers a particularly rich exposition of the many ways in which these dynamics can play out and how additional factors can complicate matters, such as when the patient is himself duplicitous, when family members try to intervene in care, and when public exposure risks political future. This article examines the politics and management of Kennedy's medical conditions by the various physicians involved in his care and explores how these considerations may have compromised not only the quality of his care but, in turn, exerted an influence on his behavior. This happened not only through the downstream effect of his treatment on his thoughts and behavior but also through the tremendous allocation of time and attention that his care required--attention a healthier man would have been able to direct toward problems of greater national concern.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample.

Divorce represents the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we exploit a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. The results suggest that divorce can spread between friends. Clusters of divorces extend to two degrees of separation in the network. Popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, the presence of children does not influence the likelihood of divorce, but each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one's friends' marriages may serve to support and enhance the durability of one's own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends beyond those directly affected.

The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress.

For the greater part of human history, political behaviors, values, preferences, and institutions have been viewed as socially determined. Discoveries during the 1970s that identified genetic influences on political orientations remained unaddressed. However, over the past decade, an unprecedented amount of scholarship utilizing genetic models to expand the understanding of political traits has emerged. Here, we review the 'genetics of politics', focusing on the topics that have received the most attention: attitudes, ideologies, and pro-social political traits, including voting behavior and participation. The emergence of this research has sparked a broad paradigm shift in the study of political behaviors toward the inclusion of biological influences and recognition of the mutual co-dependence between genes and environment in forming political behaviors.