Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-tq7bh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-21T07:26:02.874Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A theory of how evolved psychology underpins attitudes towards societal economics must go beyond exchanges and averages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington  and
Lotte Thomsen
Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological and Behavioral Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. j.a.sheehy-skeffington@lse.ac.ukhttp://www.lse.ac.uk/PBS/People/Dr-Jennifer-Sheehy-Skeffington Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Lotte Thomsen
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway. lotte.thomsen@psykologi.uio.nohttp://www.sv.uio.no/psi/english/people/aca/lottetho/index.html
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We applaud Boyer & Petersen for the advancement of an ultimate explanation of the dynamics of folk-economic beliefs and the political actions linked to them. To our mind, however, key inference systems regulating societal interaction and resource distribution evolved for more core relations than those of proportionate exchange, and situational factors are not the only constraints on how such systems produce economic beliefs

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 41 , 2018 , e187
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Blake, P. R., McAuliffe, K. & Warneken, F. (2014) The developmental roots of fairness: The knowledge-behavior gap. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(11):559–61.Google Scholar
Brown, D. E. (1991) Human universals. McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Cummins, D. (2005) Dominance, status, and social hierarchies. In: Handbook of evolutionary psychology, ed. Buss, D., pp. 676–97. Wiley.Google Scholar
Enright, E. A., Gweon, H. & Sommerville, J. A. (2017) To the victor goes the spoils: Infants expect resources to align with dominance structures. Cognition 164:8–21.Google Scholar
Fiske, A. P. (1992) The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review 99(4):689–723. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.99.4.689.Google Scholar
Gazes, R. P., Hampton, R. R. & Lourenco, S. F. (2017) Transitive inference of social dominance by human infants. Developmental Science 20(2).Google Scholar
Green, E., Thomsen, L. & Sidanius, J., Staerkle, C. & Potanina, P. (2009) Reactions to crime as a hierarchy-regulating strategy: The moderating role of social dominance orientation. Social Justice Research 22:416–36.Google Scholar
Ho, A. K., Sidanius, J., Kteily, N., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Pratto, F., Henkel, K., Foels, R. & Stewart, A. (2015) The nature of social dominance orientation: Theorizing and measuring preferences for intergroup inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109(6):1003–28.Google Scholar
Ho, A. K., Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., Levin, S., Thomsen, L., Kteily, N. & Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2012) Social dominance orientation: Revisiting the structure and function of a variable predicting social and political attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38(5):583–606.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M. & Napier, J. L. (2009) Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology 60:307–37.Google Scholar
Kandler, C., Bleidorn, W. & Riemann, R. (2012) Left or right? Sources of political orientation: The roles of genetic factors, cultural transmission, assortative mating, and personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102(3):633–45.Google Scholar
Kteily, N. S., Cotterill, S., Sidanius, J., Sheehy-Skeffington, J. & Bergh, R. (2014) “Not one of us” predictors and consequences of denying ingroup characteristics to ambiguous targets. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40(10):1231–47.Google Scholar
Kteily, N. S., Sheehy-Skeffington, J. & Ho, A. K. (2017) Hierarchy in the eye of the beholder: (Anti-)egalitarianism shapes perceived levels of social inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 112(1):136.Google Scholar
Kunst, J. R., Fischer, R., Sidanius, J. & Thomsen, L. (2017) Preferences for group dominance track and mediate the effects of macro-level social inequality and violence across societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 114(21):5407–12. Available at: http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1616572114.Google Scholar
Liu, S., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Spelke, E. S. (2017) Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions. Science 24:1038–41.Google Scholar
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1867/1990) Capital: A critique of political economy. Penguin Books. (Original work published in 1867).Google Scholar
Mascaro, O. & Csibra, G. (2012) Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(18):6862–67.Google Scholar
Mascaro, O. & Csibra, G. (2014) Human infants' learning of social structures: The case of dominance hierarchy. Psychological Science 25(1):250–55.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B., Sznycer, D., Sell, A., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2013) The ancestral logic of politics: Upper-body strength regulates men's assertion of self-interest over economic redistribution. Psychological Science 24(7):1098–103.Google Scholar
Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1994) Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(4):741–63.Google Scholar
Pun, A., Birch, S. & Baron, A. S. (2016) Infants use numerical groups size to infer social dominance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 113:2376–81.Google Scholar
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004) Social status and health in humans and other animals. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:393–418.Google Scholar
Sapolsky, R. M. (2017) Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. The Bodley Head.Google Scholar
Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2016) Human nature in society. British Academy Review 28 (Summer 2016), pp. 46–49. Available at: https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/BritishAcademyReview28.pdfGoogle Scholar
Sidanius, J., Cotterill, S., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Kteily, N. & Carvacho, H. (2016) Social dominance theory: Explorations in the psychology of oppression. In: Cambridge handbook of the psychology of prejudice, ed. Sibley, C. G. & Barlow, F. K., pp. 149–87. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sidanius, J. & Kurzban, R. (2013) Toward an evolutionarily informed political psychology. In: The Oxford handbook of political psychology, 2nd edition, ed. Huddy, L., Sears, D. O., & Levy, J. S., Part I, Ch. 7, pp. 205–236. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sidanius, J. & Pratto, F. (1999) Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thomsen, L. & Carey, S. (2013) Core cognition of social relations. In: Navigating the social world: What infants, children, and other species can teach us, ed. Banajii, M. & Gelman, S., pp 17–22. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thomsen, L., Frankenhuis, W. E., Ingold-Smith, M. & Carey, S. (2011) Big and mighty: Preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance. Science 331(6016):477–80.Google Scholar
Thomsen, L., Green, E. G., Ho, A. K., Levin, S., van Laar, C., Sinclair, S. & Sidanius, J. (2010) Wolves in sheep's clothing: SDO asymmetrically predicts perceived ethnic victimization among white and Latino students across three years. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36(2):225–38.Google Scholar
Thomsen, L., Green, E. G. & Sidanius, J. (2008) We will hunt them down: How social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism fuel ethnic persecution of immigrants in fundamentally different ways. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44(6):1455–64.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990) On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality 58(1):17–67.Google Scholar
Ziv, T. & Sommerville, J. (2016) Developmental differences in infants' fairness expectations from 6 to 15 months of age. Child Development 88:1930–51.Google Scholar