This is a common scene on many city streets and may be one that is familiar to you. When you look at the man with the sign, do you feel empathy? Anger? Frustration? Why do you think he is in this situation? What would need to happen for him to be economically secure? What do you feel when you look at the woman? How do you think she came to be financially secure? If you walked past the man in this photo, would you stop to talk with him or give him money if you had any to spare? Would you support paying higher taxes if it assisted low-income people in your community? Would you vote for a politician who supported fining people who ask for money in public places?

Do you think these women are working? One or both of them? What is your assessment based on? If you are like many people, you may be quicker to perceive the women on the right looking at a computer monitor as working than the woman pictured on the left who is feeding her children breakfast. Despite differences in how these two forms of labor are perceived, both are, in fact, work.

Modernization theory leads us to expect that religion will decline and disappear, as science and education advance and fact based explanations replace religious faith based explanations. But the expected trend of religious decline and disappearance has not come about, even when revolutions bring communist regimes to power and the official government position becomes atheist and antireligious. In discussing explanations for the continued centrality of religion in major societies, first the evolutionary roots of religion are considered in this chapter. One group of researchers believe that religion evolved as an adaptation, a behavior that confers advantages on an organism or species to become more successful in its environment. A competing explanation is that religion is a byproduct of human cognitive architecture. Also discussed are explanations of religion that focus on collective processes, such as Marxs idea of religion serving as the opium of the people, helping them to cope with the pains of everyday life. A similar idea underlies Terror Management Theory, which describes religion as a mechanism for people to cope with the knowledge that they are going to die. The continuity of religion is also associated with continuity in other domains of behavior.

Almost all psychological research relevant to revolutions focuses on the conditions in which collective action takes place to topple the ruling regime; almost no attention has been given to what happens after revolutions. Psychologists have homed in on relative deprivation, perceived injustice, identity processes, morality, and related factors as important in collection mobilization. But no serious attention has been given to the question of why after regime change almost all revolutionary governments fail to change mass behavior in line with their revolutionary ideals. The concept of political plasticity is applied in this chapter to explain this failure. Change at the macropolitical and macroeconomic levels can come overnight with the signing of a radical new constitution, but change of actual behavior in line with the ideals of the new constitution takes a much longer time, if it is possible at all. An example is the efforts of the Soviet communists to change behavior in line with their economic and political ideals of collective ownership and collective motivation.

Looking to the future, one of the factors that sustains continuity in human behavior is the eternal presence of potential dictators. Individuals with the personality characteristics of dictators are always present in all human groups. When the springboard to dictatorship becomes available, these potential dictators step forward to try to spring to absolute power. The eternally present potential dictator acts as a limiting factor on political plasticity so that progress toward democracy remains stunted, and at times there are reversals from democracy to dictatorship. But the potential dictator is not powerless as to when and how the springboard to dictatorship comes into place. As shown in this chapter, potential dictators use, and sometimes help manufacture, crisis incidents that create societal chaos – then they put themselves forward as the only individuals who can solve the crisis. Hitler used as his crisis incident the 1933 fire at the Reichstag building, Khomeini used the 1979–1980 invasion of the American Embassy in Tehran and the taking over of fifty American diplomats, Putin used the 1990 bombings of apartments in Moscow. In each case, the potential dictator helped to create a crisis, then used the crisis to spring to power. Trump attempted the same in the United States on January 6, 2021.

Hardwiring inside individuals (almost exclusively in the brain) has been studied extensively in psychological science, but hardwiring outside individuals has received scant attention. Hardwiring outside individuals consists of the total ways of life of human beings, including the built environment, societal organization, and formal institutions, as well as informal culture, narratives, and all form of communications, leader–follower relations, and cultural carriers. As discussed in this chapter, this external hardwiring is already present when the individual comes into this world, and it continues (with some degree of change) after the individual has departed. Formal hardwiring such as blackletter law and constitutions often continue over centuries, with little change in key areas – for example, through originalist interpretations of constitutions. When revolutionary constitutions are introduced, there is often a huge gap between the aspirations of the constitution and the behavior of the population, which tends to continue as before. Cultural carriers are an important part of external hardwiring, sustaining continuity

Imagine Sara, a Black woman in her 30s living in Chicago. Her parents faced discrimination in employment and in housing, and Sara spent most of her childhood in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, with under-resourced schools, police surveillance, and little access to fresh fruit and vegetables or other nutritious foods. Looking further back into Sara’s family history reveals generations of ancestors enslaved and, after the legal end of slavery, other ancestors still facing racial discrimination that foreclosed many options in life. Sara’s mother was often depressed, and her parenting was sometimes harsh and unresponsive to Sara’s needs. Like her own mother, Sara continues to face discrimination as she struggles to move out of her impoverished neighborhood.