The neurobiology of authoritarianism

[Raze]

1 hour ago, aurum said:

I've already answered this. There have not been rapid shifts.

Society has always been deeply authoritarian and mostly still is.

If you want to point to cherry-picked examples of rapid changes like Germany, those are still explainable. Conditioning, distribution and unique survival pressures / conditions can account for those within a model where authoritarianism is correlated to brain strucutre.

This is objectively not true. It’s actually normal and common for governments to rapidly shift to and from authoritarian. There are endless examples in history and even recently. I’m not cherry-picking.

The conditions and survival pressures as the reason is true, but that shows how the idea it’s because of neurobiology is nonsense, if that was the case it would be consistent, not shifting rapidly as a result of survival pressures. 

Edited Wednesday at 08:01 PM by Raze

[Joshe]

4 hours ago, aurum said:

You are deeply understating the significance.

No doubt people are more suggestible to certain narratives due to brain, but that still puts the power in the hands of the narrative, not the brain. Obviously. 

So the question is, how much weight does biology actually carry.

I’m open to it being something like 90/10 or 95/5, if not higher, with biology as minor and context, conditioning, and environment primary.

So if that's “deeply understating,”, are you suggesting something like 30%-50%? 

[aurum]

6 minutes ago, Joshe said:

So if that's “deeply understating,”, are you suggesting something like 30%-50%? 

More.

I'll say 80/20 in favor of biology over societal narratives. 

But also, ultimately a distinction between biology and mind has to breakdown. They will feed into each other, without a clear dividing line. Mind and biology are a strange loop. 

[Joshe]

3 hours ago, aurum said:

More.

I'll say 80/20 in favor of biology over societal narratives. 

But also, ultimately a distinction between biology and mind has to breakdown. They will feed into each other, without a clear dividing line. Mind and biology are a strange loop. 

You trolling me? You went from "interesting correlation" to 80/20 biology. lol. 

Brains are predisposed to like sugar. But if they knew nothing about it and were never exposed to it, they’d never crave it, never seek it, and never develop beliefs or behaviors around it. The sugar predisposition would be inert, dormant, unactivated potential, until someone came along and showed them sugar. 

And that’s one of the most biologically hardwired preferences we have. If something that deeply rooted needs activation to become real, it goes without saying a tendency toward something far more abstract, like authoritarianism, needs even more external input to take shape.

Sugar preferences activate instantly after exposure. Belief systems don’t. They take time, reinforcement, and cultural scaffolding. Which makes it clear that environment and external input is the driving force, not the brain’s biology. 

 

 

Edited Thursday at 03:10 AM by Joshe

[aurum]

1 hour ago, Joshe said:

You trolling me? You went from "interesting correlation" to 80/20 biology. lol. 

"Interesting correlation" was never my position.

It feels consistent to me.

1 hour ago, Joshe said:

Brains are predisposed to like sugar. But if they knew nothing about it and were never exposed to it, they’d never crave it, never seek it, and never develop beliefs or behaviors around it. The sugar predisposition would be inert, dormant, unactivated potential, until someone came along and showed them sugar. 

And that’s one of the most biologically hardwired preferences we have. If something that deeply rooted needs activation to become real, it goes without saying a tendency toward something far more abstract, like authoritarianism, needs even more external input to take shape.

Sugar preferences activate instantly after exposure. Belief systems don’t. They take time, reinforcement, and cultural scaffolding. Which makes it clear that environment and external input is the driving force, not the brain’s biology. 

The sugar analogy is faulty since even if you personally had never been exposed to sugar, you would still seek out sources of high glucose like sugar. So you are not waiting around ambivalently. You are completely played by your biology to find and eat sugar before you even know what it is.

The whole thing I'm arguing here is that authoritarianism is not just an abstract belief system you pick up from society. It's more fundamental than that.

[Joshe]

16 hours ago, aurum said:

The sugar analogy is faulty since even if you personally had never been exposed to sugar, you would still seek out sources of high glucose like sugar. So you are not waiting around ambivalently. You are completely played by your biology to find and eat sugar before you even know what it is.

The whole thing I'm arguing here is that authoritarianism is not just an abstract belief system you pick up from society. It's more fundamental than that.

The structure of the analogy is what's important: 

Latent predisposition → exposure → activation → expression

Craving glucose ≠ craving a Snickers.

Drive doesn’t create its own expression. Drive looks for a solution.

The solution it finds depends on:

• What’s available
• How it’s framed
• What gets reinforced

You're kind of proving my point by saying the result of craving a snickers bar is not the same as craving glucose. 

Craving order/certainty ≠ embracing authoritarian ideology.

The mind needs exposure, repetition, framing, and buy-in to embrace an ideology. So, if biology can’t produce authoritarianism on its own, then biology can't be the primary driver. Which means you should, at most, be at 50/50. 

But even that is too high because how do you explain the billions of Christians around the world? Do they all share a specific brain structure that predisposes them to Christianity, or were they born into cultures that taught it to them? 

For the billions of Christians, the same specific brain structures is not a constant, but external influence is. Cause belongs to what can best explain the result across variation. The main constant is the input, not the biology.

Edited Thursday at 10:01 PM by Joshe

[aurum]

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

Drive doesn’t create its own expression. Drive looks for a solution.

The solution it finds depends on:

• What’s available
• How it’s framed
• What gets reinforced

You're kind of proving my point by saying the result of craving a snickers bar is not the same as craving glucose. 

Craving order/certainty ≠ embracing authoritarian ideology.

The point is the drive is more fundamental than any ideology.

I don't see how that helps your position.

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

The mind needs exposure, repetition, framing, and buy-in to embrace an ideology. So, if biology can’t produce authoritarianism on its own, then biology can't be the primary driver. Which means you should, at most, be at 50/50.

No, this is faulty.

Ideology that goes with authoritarianism is the justification for biology and survival.

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

Do they all share a specific brain structure that predisposes them to Christianity

YES

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

or were they born into cultures that taught it to them? 

For the billions of Christians, the same specific brain structures is not a constant, but external influence is. Cause belongs to what can best explain the result across variation. The main constant is the input, not the biology.

External influence is mostly window dressing.

Which is why we have religions across all cultures that are fundamentally so similar, even though their external core can look quite different.

[Joshe]

22 hours ago, aurum said:

External influence is mostly window dressing.

Structured belief systems only exist because of external influence. Which already means external influence is at least 50%. Then, given everything we know about how malleable the human psyche is and the nature of thoughts and beliefs and how they shape perception, it’s obvious that external influence is a major factor in what gets expressed. This bumps it up to at least 70%. Once you factor in everything else we know about conditioning and reinforcement, it probably pushes it to 90%. But don't just take my hunch for it. Here's some science:

Identical Twins Study - Hatemi et al., 2014 — published in Behavioral Genetics.

• They looked at over 12,000 twin pairs across five countries.
• They found that about 40% of political ideology is genetic.
• The other 60% comes from environment — culture, exposure, reinforcement, life experience.
• This is with identical twins. Same DNA. Same basic brain wiring. Usually raised in the same home.
• If biology was the dominant driver, twins raised together would almost always land on the same beliefs.
• But they split all the time, authoritarian vs libertarian, religious vs secular.
• Sixty percent of the difference between them is explained by the environment.
• Even identical wiring cannot duplicate belief systems.
• When you get to non-identical siblings or strangers, the split is even wider.
• Biology biases emotional needs. It does not build political ideologies.
• Belief systems have to be constructed. 

The fact that twins ideologically split 60% of the time proves you're wrong. If they split 60, what do you think the number would be for unrelated people? Maybe something like this: 

Edited yesterday at 01:10 AM by Joshe

[aurum]

41 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Structured belief systems only exist because of external influence. Which already means external influence is at least 50%. Then, given everything we know about how malleable the human psyche is and the nature of thoughts and beliefs and how they shape perception, it’s obvious that external influence is a major factor in what gets expressed. This bumps it up to at least 70%. Once you factor in everything else we know about conditioning and reinforcement, it probably pushes it to 90%. But don't just take my hunch for it. Here's some science:

Identical Twins Study - Hatemi et al., 2014 — published in Behavioral Genetics.

• They looked at over 12,000 twin pairs across five countries.
• They found that about 40% of political ideology is genetic.
• The other 60% comes from environment — culture, exposure, reinforcement, life experience.
• This is with identical twins. Same DNA. Same basic brain wiring. Usually raised in the same home.
• If biology was the dominant driver, twins raised together would almost always land on the same beliefs.
• But they split all the time, authoritarian vs libertarian, religious vs secular.
• Sixty percent of the difference between them is explained by the environment.
• Even identical wiring cannot duplicate belief systems.
• When you get to non-identical siblings or strangers, the split is even wider.
• Biology biases emotional needs. It does not build political ideologies.
• Belief systems have to be constructed. 

The fact that twins ideologically split 60% of the time proves you're wrong. If they split 60, what do you think the number would be for unrelated people? Maybe something like this: 

Clever rebuttal but it still has a lot of problems.

The chart is misleading because you cannot scale biological influence in that way. You are operating on an assumption that "if biology accounted for only 40% of political beliefs in identical twins, then it must be way less for normal people". But that's incorrect.

Twin studies are designed precisely to estimate how much genetics contributes to variance in a trait across everyone, using twin comparisons as a tool. So if we take these studies at face value, you would have to conclude 40% biological influence for everyone, not just identical twins. Which is still a huge effect, and would show that biology has a significant influence on your political positions, even if it's still less causal than environment. 

In fact, the study you actually referenced is extremely clear that there is profound link between biology and political ideology.

A few quotes:

Quote

 

"Almost forty years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30-60% 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."

"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 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."

"More than half a century of research in genetics, neuroscience and psychology has demonstrated that human behaviors, including social and political attitudes, are influenced by genetic and neurobiological factors"

"Additional twin and extended kinship studies which included parents, non-twin siblings, spouses, and twins reared apart confirmed these earlier results and found that most individual political attitudes were influenced by a combination of genetic effects (which explain between 30 and 60% of variance) and environmental influence . In this way, children resemble their parents because of their genetic relatedness as much as parental upbringing and social environments."

"The notion of a genetically informed model of attitudes and ideology...presented a fundamental challenge to the dominant rational choice and behaviorist social science paradigms...Yet despite the growing body of evidence that genetic factors play an important role in the development and maintenance of political attitudes, the role of genetic influences on individual differences remains largely absent in the greater discourse on political ideology."

"In summary, the findings suggest that while genes undoubtedly matter in the aggregate for the development of political attitudes, individual common variants will have small effects on ideology. Hunting for a single “political gene” is a fruitless endeavor...Future studies, which focus on detecting and understanding the full range of rare and common variants influencing ideology, including examinations of copy number variation, genetic expression and epigenetic pathways, will only serve to further elucidate the genetic influence on ideology and explicate the pathways that account for a substantial portion of how ideologies are formed and maintained in a world where both genes and environment interact and remain in continuous dialogue to guide human behavior.

 

That last quote is particularly significant, because it supports what I have been trying to say from the beginning. There is still much to be understood about how biology influences your political ideology. 

Heritability is likely to be underestimated when it comes to measuring a downstream disposition like authoritarianism. So the full extent of biological influence on political cognition is still being uncovered, and it is likely stronger than early estimates suggest, not weaker.