Some would argue there is a global movement afoot to study “biopolitics.” More and more scholarly reports that help shape our understanding of the political domain from this perspective are filling the pages of research journals. This is an important era of increasing scholarly interest in the intersection of the political and biological worlds and the rapidly evolving analytical innovations available to explore this still under-explored domain. With the arrival of these new opportunities comes a new editorial team at Politics and the Life Sciences (PLS). It is a team that extends its appreciation to the Council of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences for the trust they put in it to steer the journal forward at this interesting and critical time. As well, it is a team that expresses its heartfelt gratitude to its immediate predecessors, Tony Wohlers, Maggie Kosal, and their editorial colleagues, for their determined leadership of the journal over the last three years and the easy transition they facilitated for the new team. They clearly laid a firm foundation for the next stage of the development of the journal.

My interest in biopolitics took a circuitous route. My guiding interest in studying politics is the study of democratic representation. Democracy is a special institution. It holds out the hope that we can resolve our differences in a peaceful way by letting the governed govern themselves. As a graduate student, I was immediately taken by Anthony Down’s (1957) theory of democracy. It just made so much sense. People hold preferences that are ordered and coherent. They derive utility from outcomes. Government policy should, therefore, reflect the distribution of policy preferences that maximizes the utility of the most people. Easy peasy, right?

Research links liberal and conservative ideological orientations with variation on psychological and cognitive characteristics that are important for perceptual processes and decision-making. This study investigates whether this variation can impact the social behaviors of liberals and conservatives. A sample of subjects (n = 1,245) participated in a modified public goods game in which an intragroup inequality was introduced to observe the effect on individuals’ tendency toward self-interested versus prosocial behavior. Overall, the contributions of neither liberal- nor conservative-oriented individuals were affected by conditions of a general intragroup inequality. However, in response to the knowledge that group members voted to redress the inequality, levels of contribution among liberals significantly increased in comparison to the control. This was not true for conservatives. The results provide evidence that differences in ideological orientation are associated with individual differences in social cognition.

Building on a growing body of research suggesting that political attitudes are part of broader individual and biological orientations, we test whether the detection of the hormone androstenone is predictive of political attitudes. The particular social chemical analyzed in this study is androstenone, a nonandrogenic steroid found in the sweat and saliva of many mammals, including humans. A primary reason for scholarly interest in odor detection is that it varies so dramatically from person to person. Using participants’ self-reported perceptions of androstenone intensity, together with a battery of survey items testing social and political preferences and orientations, this research supports the idea that perceptions of androstenone intensity relate to political orientations—most notably, preferences for social order—lending further support to theories positing the influence of underlying biological traits on sociopolitical attitudes and behaviors.

Vaccine trials for infectious diseases take place in a milieu of trust in which scientists, regulatory institutions, and volunteers trust each other to play traditional roles. This milieu of trust emerges from a combination of preexisting linkages embedded in the local and national political context. Using the case of failed vaccine trials in Hohoe, Ghana, we explore this milieu of trust by employing the concept of tandems of trust and control, with a particular focus on the perceived characteristics of the disease and the linkages formed. An analysis of qualitative interviews collected in Hohoe following the West Africa Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016 shows that the trust/control nexus in vaccine trials precedes the implementation of those trials, while both the characteristics of Ebola and the political context shaped the formation and breakdown of relationships in the trial network.

Knowledge of evolutionary influences on patterns of human mating, social interactions, and differential health is increasing, yet these insights have rarely been applied to historical analyses of human population dynamics. The genetic and evolutionary forces behind biases in interethnic mating and in the health of individuals of different ethnic groups in Latin America and the Caribbean since the European colonization of America are still largely ignored. We discuss how historical and contemporary sociocultural interactions and practices are strongly influenced by population-level evolutionary forces. Specifically, we discuss the historical implications of functional (de facto) polygyny, sex-biased admixture, and assortative mating in Latin America. We propose that these three evolutionary mechanisms influenced mating patterns, shaping the genetic and cultural landscape across Latin America and the Caribbean. Further, we discuss how genetic differences between the original populations that migrated at different times into Latin America contributed to their accommodation to and survival in the different local ecologies and interethnic interactions. Relevant medical and social implications follow from the genetic and cultural changes reviewed.

This article presents a discussion of neurocognitive hacking and its potential for use at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of cyber conflict. Neurocognitive hacking refers to the ability to activate specific neural areas of the brain, via subliminal or supraliminal stimuli, to shape the behavioral outcomes of an adversary. Research suggests that awareness of mortality-related stimuli has neural correlates in the right amygdala and left anterior cingulate cortex and mediates negative behavior toward out-group members, including unconscious discriminatory behavior. Given its in-group/out-group dynamic, the phenomenon could be exploited for use in information operations toward target populations, specifically ones that are multiethnic, multicultural, or multireligious. Although development of the theoretical framework behind neurocognitive hacking is ongoing, mortality-related stimuli are proposed to activate one’s unconscious vigilance system to further evaluate the locus and viability of the suspect stimuli. Research suggests that the subsequent discriminatory affective reactions directed toward out-group members are representative of automatic heuristics evolved to protect the organism in the event a stimulus represents a more serious threat to survival. Therefore, presenting mortality-related stimuli over computer networks to targeted audiences may facilitate the ingestion of tailored propaganda or shaping of specific behavioral outcomes within a population, including sowing division in a target community or weakening support for a specific political regime.

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the number of studies employing psychophysiological methods to explain variation in political attitudes and behavior. However, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of physiological data present novel challenges for political scientists unfamiliar with the underlying biological concepts and technical skills necessary for utilizing this approach. Our objective in this article is to maximize the effectiveness of future work utilizing psychophysiological measurement by providing guidance on how the techniques can be employed most fruitfully as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing methods. We develop clear, step-by-step instructions for how physiological research should be conducted and provide a discussion of the issues commonly faced by scholars working with these measures. Our hope is that this article will be a useful resource for both neophytes and experienced scholars in lowering the start-up costs to doing this work and assessing it as part of the peer review process. More broadly, in the spirit of the open science framework, we aim to foster increased communication, collaboration, and replication of findings across political science labs utilizing psychophysiological methods.