Résumé

Humans have evolved sophisticated psychological mechanisms tailored to solve enduring adaptive problems of social life. Many of these social problems are political in nature and relate to the distribution of costs and benefits within and between groups. In that sense, humans are, by nature, political animals. In the talk, I will discuss and present evidence on how psychological adaptations designed for ancestral social life continues to shape how modern people make decisions on mass political issues. A key argument is that our biological nature prompts us to reason about mass politics as if it was played out in ancestral small-scale groups and, therefore, political decisions come to be strongly influenced by seemingly irrelevant factors such as individual differences in male upper-body strength and short-term fluctuations in hunger.

Référence

Michael Bang Petersen (Aarhus University), « The Ancestral Logic of Politics: Biology, Evolution and Political Decisions », IAST General Seminar, Toulouse : IAST, 6 novembre 2014, 15h30–16h30, salle MF323.