Does an integration of ‘ecological rationality’ into conceptions of agency suggest that partisanship is the rule, not the exception?

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M.Sc POLITICAL SCIENCE

THESIS

CONTESTED KNOWLEDGE AND ALTERNATIVE FACTS

Does an integration of ‘ecological rationality’ into conceptions of agency suggest that

partisanship is the rule, not the exception?

By Sean Menzies

Political Science M.Sc (Political Economy)

Dr. Anne Loeber

The University of Amsterdam

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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i Abstract

Agency has long been a thorn in the side of social scientists, with methodological issues

concentrating around i) an inability to operationalise rationality and ii) harmonising the study of individual and group agency. This thesis seeks to decompose (i) by building a case for ‘ecological rationality’ that models rationality as a product of anthropological environmental demands, and then applying that model to unique situations. In this way, rationality is extracted from expectations of modern-day situations and understood a more temporally-expansive context. The fallacy of composition problem that concerns the tractability of tracing macro phenomena to its micro foundations (ii) leads us to conclude that the very identity of the individual is inseparable from the groups that surround her. Under certain conditions, the agent can undergo a process of

depersonalisation whereby conformity to group norms is induced; indeed, this is a frequent process that the agent is often unaware of even when confronted with evidence. We argue that this

tendency is the underlying cause of partisanship both at the individual- and group-level.

This paper goes on to present a model that builds on previous research to propose that partisanship levels ebb and flow depending on between-group perceived hierarchy. The model describes four scenarios that exemplify how this process is operationalised; the greater the reward/punishment for a group’s position in the hierarchy, and the larger the threat of other groups, the more salient partisanship is within a society. Finally, three historical examples of shifts in the political landscape are used to illustrate the model in action.

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Section 1: Introduction

The concept of agency has been the subject of investigation of many scholars spanning many disciplines in social science and philosophy. It stands to reason that any prescriptive research should ensure that their models of agents reflect the real world, whether concerning behaviour or

cognition. However, a great deal of research neglects this responsibility, either mischaracterising the rationality of agents or failing to appreciate environmental influences over time. Economics

embodies these oversights; the neoclassical school, couched in methodological individualism, continues to insist that man is a utility maximiser constrained only by the search for information (Gigerenzer 2010). Behavioural economics challenged homo economicus, providing evidence that we are guided not by rationality, but by a range of cognitive biases (e.g. Kahneman 2011). Even this field of research, however, describes the human mind as deviating from an abstract, ideal form of

‘rationality’ that shares its definition with something akin to homo economicus (Gigerenzer 2013); they do not pretend we are rational, but they attempt to pull us from our various biases towards the rational path. This is best encapsulated in Richard Thaler’s advocacy of nudging (Thaler & Sunstein 2009).

The research questions that guide this thesis are as follows:

1. To what extent do definitions of agency in political science include the possibility of a biological predisposition of agents towards ideological in-group conformity?

▪ Focusing on economics and political science, in what way are conceptions of agency incomplete?

▪ Does an understanding of biological agentic conformity address these gaps? 2. How can such a definition of agency be made operational in empirical political science

research?

▪ Methodologically, how can we understand the confluence between the individual and the group?

▪ Is there evidence of such an understanding from political history?

In section 2, the problem described in the opening paragraph will be expanded on in more detail. This theoretical framework will paint a picture of how agency has been depicted in order to identify the precise problems that need addressing; namely, agentic rationality and the analytical difficulty of understanding the relationship between the individual and the group. This section will conclude by

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tying together agentic issues and the notion of partisanship. Section 3 will begin the analysis of agency at the level of individual cognition. The aim of this section is to explore the notion of agentic rationality that has been inadequately dealt with by rational choice theorists and behavioural economists alike (see: section 3). We will be introduced to the rationality relativists who abandon the notion of rationality entirely in favour of a conception of agency that describes behaviour as the interaction between the individual and the environment. This section will conclude by connecting the brain thus described to political ideology through a presentation of research from political psychology. Section 4 will move beyond the individual to begin tracing the abstruse relationship between individual and group. We will see that individual identity is inextricable from group affiliation due to the human need to collectivise. Additionally, we will see how this need can

predominate cognition and induce the individual to conform under certain conditions. That is to say, when certain psychological and environmental conditions are in alignment, the individual thinks like the group, and the inner partisan is thus activated. It will emerge from this discussion that thinking at the group level derives from an individual need to form cohesive in-groups that do battle in the public space. This psychosocial ‘need’ creates what Gigerenzer would call a fast and frugal heuristic (e.g. Gigerenzer, Czerlinski & Martignon 1999) that allows the agent to make a computationally-demanding decision without a great understanding of the domain within which the decision resides.

With the theoretical exploration thus concluded, section 5 will then attempt to integrate the large breadth of literature into a model that can help political scientists to understand the application of the ecologically rational on societal partisanship. We present a model that addresses both research questions. The first part discusses the relationship between individual- and group-level group

identity and what causes an individual to become more or less susceptible to conformity. The second part looks to address this phenomenon as it scales up to the level of society; we describe four common scenarios that occur as groups battle to climb the social hierarchy as well as the effects that are produced.

Finally, in section 6, we take an anecdotal look at three political events in which ideologies appeared to shift inexplicably: the Democrat-Republican platform switch (1860s-1936), Winston Churchill’s defeat in the 1945 British general election and the British vote to leave the European Union in 2016. These events will be described and then analysed alongside the model in order to reify its

conclusions.

The first question will be answered by critically evaluating research from a range of disciplines. The focus of this work will be to gain a deep understanding of agency as well as incorporating the importance of the environment in its mediation of behaviour/cognition. The evidence accumulated

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will be used to construct a model that may represent the first stage in re-conceptualising agency as the interaction between the individual and the environment. This model, it is hoped, will move towards the provision of a realistic and modellable depiction of the agent as a unit of analysis.

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Section 2: Theoretical Framework

Before beginning to approach our research questions, this section will establish a theoretical framework that will serve as this thesis’ foundation. Its first goal is to problematise the concept of agency in social science by depicting how actors have been operationalised within economics and political science. Secondly, two key concepts that my research revolves around – agency and partisanship – require exploring, both in terms of how they are defined within these fields and the way in which those definitions can be challenged. With this in mind, we will begin by illustrating some key themes in the treatment of agents in political science and economics, and subsequently identifying theoretical flaws and oversights. Subsequently, we will discuss theories of agency more generally by offering resolutions from the literature concerning the problems with agency raised previously. As this thesis focuses in on a specific domain of agency – group-level causes of unexpected behaviour – we will introduce the concept of cognitive biases and the social brain. Finally, we will see how these findings dovetail with the notion of partisanship, defend the definition of partisanship used in this paper and revisit our research questions to ensure that the problems they address are conceptually clear.

2.1 Agency in social science

Given that social science research rarely has recourse to clarify its methodological treatment of agents, teasing apart the way in which they are operationalised is not a simple task. We can, however, identify several patterns that reflect the extent to which agents are treated within the study of social phenomena.

Emirbayer and Mische (1998) characterise the problem of agency as one that “has become a source of increasing strain and confusion in social thought” criticising the term’s “elusive, albeit resonant, vagueness” (p.962). The authors point to early thinkers of agency and free will such as John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who stressed the individual power of agents to influence and manipulate their environments. Indeed, debates on how to consider the relation between the individual and her environment have been running through social psychology and sociology for some time, with an early line of reasoning presented in Max Weber’s first chapter in Economy and Society (1922). Weber’s argument was that all social phenomena must be reducible to individual actions, which must themselves be traced back to the motivations and intentions of said individual. Weber’s rationale was methodological, insisting that only individual action is “subjectively understandable”.

Methodologically-speaking, economists Carl Menger and Fredrich von Hayek were two prominent proponents of individualism. Menger suggested that the goal of methodological economics was

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“reducing complicated phenomena to their elements” (1986 p.93). Later, Hayek surmised that economic phenomena would only be made intelligible by understanding the intentions of the agent. Invoking Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand, Hayek’s individualism was not rationalistic. He stressed that individual actions often produced unintended consequences; in other words, the rationale of the individual does not have a linear relationship with the rationale of the collective, but only by reducing collective phenomena to individual action can we hope to gain an understanding. In Hayek’s view, macroeconomic phenomena must always be rooted in microfoundations; a philosophy that undergirded the neoclassical school’s conception of man as a rational maximiser of self-interest (Heath 2015). Indeed, it was his belief in the intractability of a multitude of individual interests that precluded successful central planning; a philosophy that, for reasons that moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt will later help us to understand, remains very attractive to conservative-minded individuals1_.

The prevalent conception of agency within economics is perhaps best captured by Beinhocker who writes:

“Following Newton’s monumental discoveries in the seventeenth century, a series of

scientists and mathematicians, including Leibniz, Lagrange, Euler, and Hamilton, developed a new mathematical language using differential equations to describe a staggeringly broad range of natural phenomena. Problems that had baffled humankind since the ancient Greeks, from the motions of planets to the vibrations of violin strings, were suddenly mastered. The success of these theories gave scientists a boundless optimism that they could describe any aspect of nature in their equations. Walras and his compatriots were convinced that if the equations of differential calculus could capture the motions of planets and atoms in the universe, these same mathematical techniques could also capture the motion of human minds in the economy.” (Beinhocker 2007, p.111)

Gigerenzer characterises this particular modelling of agency as ‘optimization under constraints’ (e.g. 2010, ch.1) in which the search for information is what detracts from the agent’s omniscience. However, this optimisation is itself an assumption that grows in complexity with each realistic constraint added until the model becomes “computationally intractable”. For this reason, ‘bounded rationality’ has been rejected by many in the neoclassical camp (e.g. Arrow 2004) as being simply “fully optimal procedures” in disguise. More generally, the key issue with methodological

1_{Margaret Thatcher, who was greatly influenced by Hayek (Evans 2018), claimed in an interview with}

Women’s Own in October 1987 that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”.

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individualism is that "as long as we are addressing social phenomena, we never reach an end point where there are isolated individuals, and nothing more" (Hodgson (2007, p.218-219). In economics, this became known as the fallacy of composition – the notion that the collective is greater than the sum of its parts (e.g. Mayer 2002). This recondite challenge of pitting the individual against the group to understand where one begins and the other ends is a task that will be taken up in this thesis.

Another problematic treatment of agency was introduced by Kant who dichotomised the causes of behaviour into the conditional and categorical imperative – that is to say, context-dependent causes and biological needs (Emirbayer & Mische 1998). Coleman, despite stressing the emergent nature of macro phenomena, attempted to resolve this problematic dichotomy through a rational choice model, suggesting that “actions are ‘caused’ by their (anticipated) consequences” (Coleman 1986, p.1312). Apart from the fallacy of composition issue mentioned previously, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) note that such theories overlook the effect that the past and future has on the present. George Herbert Mead identifies this issue, proposing that time is a “multilevel flow of nested events.” (1932, p.968) An example of this fallacy can be found in microeconomic theories such as consumer choice theory (e.g. Mankiw 2014), which posits that consumer choice of goods is a function of an agent’s utility and budget constraints. What constitutes this utility function is usually depicted as the extent to which the goods in question are ‘substitutable’. There is no mention of the many complexities involved in decision-making, including Mead’s ‘multilevel flow of nested events’. As Caplain writes, “Economists and cognitive psychologists usually presume that everyone

“processes information” to the best of his ability.” (2011, p.2) Yet the rational choice, or even bounded rationality models can be said to over-simplify agency and neglect society’s “irrational” tendencies.

Furthermore, in political science, conceptions of agency have travelled in different directions. Sibeon admits that “it is… unfortunate that political scientists generally fail to engage in explicit theoretical and methodological debate of agency-structure. Indeed, these terms remain largely undefined in political science” (1999, p.140), which has proved problematic for Lewis (2002) who concluded that “any attempt to conceptualise political phenomena inevitably involves the adoption of some picture of the nature of social being” (p.17) More specifically, Sibeon (1999) further characterises the problem as those social scientists who see “autochtonous” actors creating the environment, and those who see the environment as constructing the individual. To illustrate the debate, Halperin & Heath (2012) suggest that structuralists treat macro phenomena as ontologically separable

categories “analytically independent of their constituent elements…unmediated by human agency” (p.86). By way of example, the authors highlight a tendency to view capitalism as a result of a certain

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“logic” of markets, which act as “autonomous agents”. Specifically, problems emerge when findings at the macro level are applied to individual agents – the ecological fallacy. In contrast, criticism is reserved for those political scientists who ignore the impact of the environment and overemphasise the need to trace the macro to the micro. Landman characterises these problems as “originat[ing] from the same source: the ontological predispositions of the researcher.” (2008, p.43) Giddins’ (1984) solution to this dilemma was to merge the actor and the individual into one duality, rather than as two separable entities (dualism). Opponents of Giddens’ structuration theory argue that the micro-macro injunction precludes the ability to study the unique quiddities of agents (Halperin & Heath, 2012, ch.4). Although a large section of political science now agrees that “explanations that combine macro- and micro-foundations would…provide more comprehensive explanations of political outcomes (ibid, p.91), it does not appear clear how this can be done. This thesis will address this issue explicitly, arguing for a framing of agency as the interaction of the brain and the

environment.

Expanding on this, Emile Durkheim introduced a novel perspective on the above problem, writing that “determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of the individual consciousness.” (Durkheim 1895/1982, p.110) The basic premise is that social phenomena are a result of emergent behaviour/cognition that will always remain more than the sum of its parts. Durkheim who criticised the psychology of, for example, Freud for framing morality solely in terms of individual or pairwise relationships, argued instead for the existence of homo duplex; cognising both at the group and individual level. On the former, Durkheim notes:

"The second are those which bind me to the social entity as a whole; these manifest themselves primarily in the relationships of the society with other societies, and could be called “inter-social.” The first [set of emotions] leave[s] my autonomy and personality almost intact. No doubt they tie me to others, but without taking much of my independence from me. When I act under the influence of the second, by contrast, I am simply a part of a whole, whose actions I follow, and whose influence I am subject to." (Durkheim 1887/1992, p.219-20)

Following on from this observation, Durkheim gives an example of the social mind: “collective effervescence” when emotions are heightened, as in the case of riots, for example (McPhail & Wohlstein 1983, Krahé 2013). This ties back in with Mead’s ‘multilevel flow of nested events’ with ‘collective effervescence’ nesting the group within the individual. Indeed, this thesis will argue that homo duplex offers a promising solution to the direction of causality problem.

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2.2 The irrational agent: cognitive biases and the social brain

Returning to rational choice theory that has dominated agency in economics in recent times, the concept of homo economicus2_{has come under scrutiny. For example, prospect theory}

(Kahneman and Tversky 1979) tested participants in a variety of economic games, and discovered that people are significantly more sensitive to losses than commensurate gains. In one study, the authors had participants choose from two bets: either a 100% chance to gain $50 or a 50% chance to win $100 and 50% chance at winning nothing. 72% of participants (n=387) chose the guaranteed gain. In a follow-up study, the same authors reframed the question: a 50% chance at losing $50 or an equal chance of losing $100 or losing nothing. 68% chose to throw the dice (n=469) (ibid). The authors determined that, from a psychological standpoint, coming to terms with a loss is more repellent than maximising gains is attractive (see figure 1). Furthermore, the endowment effect suggests that this loss aversion is enhanced by sheer virtue of losing something that you already possess (Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler 1990).

Kahneman builds on these biases in Thinking Fast and Slow (2012) in which he catalogues a number of ‘cognitive biases’ that represent deviations from an expected cognitive norm. Kahneman

analogises the mind to two parallel systems: 1 and 2. System 1 is largely represented by subconscious, procedural cognition, such as braking quickly when the car in front slows down. System 2, however, is the more deliberative flavour of cognition, such as deciding whether to buy a new car or repair the old one. The story that Kahneman describes is one in which system 1 produces fallacies in cognition that detract from the superior, rational system 2.

2_{Homo Economicus is the term ironically applied to the neoclassical depiction of man as a rational}

self-maximiser. For a review of the history of the term, see Levitt & List’s (2008) excellent review Homo Economicus Evolves.

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Figure 1. A graphical depiction of Prospect Theory.

Another Nobel prize winning behavioural economist, Richard Thaler, along with Cass Sunstein, advocated a form of ‘libertarian paternalism’, in which the state plays a role in “authoriz[ing] both private and public institutions to steer people in directions that will promote their welfare.” (Thaler and Sunstein 2003, p.179) This led to the creation of the first ever Nudge Unit established by the Behavioural Insights Team, funded and partly owned by the British government, whose remit is captured by the above quote.

The prevailing belief of the researchers mentioned above is that the human capacity for decision-making can lead to conclusions that deviate from rationality. Kahneman, Sunstein, Thaler and other behavioural economists reject rational choice theory, pointing the multitude of ways in which humans are not rational. Section 3 will delve more deeply into this problem, asking whether rationality is definable and whether the evolutionary sciences can theoretically unify the various irrationalities proposed by behavioural economists.

Expanding on Durkheim’s homo duplex, it is worth briefly sketching research conducted on the ‘social brain’. Dunbar (1998) notes that anthropologists have traditionally assumed that “brains evolved to process information of ecological relevance.” (p.178) However, research in the late 1980s

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offered another theory, suggesting that larger brains among primates evolved to create and exist within complex social systems (Whiten & Byrne 1988; Byrne & Whiten 1988). Initially coined as the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis due to the focus of research on the prevalence of deception, studies also decomposed the complexities of cooperation among different species (Harcourt 1989).

Although debate continues about why the social brain emerged (Dunbar 1998), one interesting consequence of its evolution is the notion of group conformity. Festinger (1957) challenged the permanence of individual personality traits by introducing his theory of cognitive dissonance, which describes the holding of two incompatible thoughts by an individual, such as i) slimming down for the summer and ii) whether to order a dessert. Although Festinger focused on the ultimate

resolution, he described the environment as major force in bringing about cognitive dissonance. This built on previous work by the situationist Kurt Lewin (1964) who described behaviour as being a function of the personality and the situation. In The Person and the Situation, Ross & Nisbett (1991) built an empirical case for the power of the situation, proposing that behaviour is the product of a tension system in which “dynamic fields” take stimuli from the environment and push behaviour towards “quasi-equilibria”. Different situations have different effects on these dynamic fields.

Early work on group conformity seemed to speak to situationism. For example, Sherif’s (1935) early work had participants observe the movement of a spot of light on a wall to determine how far it moves in one direction. He found that individual answers differed greatly from those answers discussed in groups, which tended to converge closely around the group’s mean. Interestingly, participants denied any influence of the group on answers given, harkening to the observation that cognition, while often the function of the group, is predominantly interpreted through an individual lens.

In the 50s, Sherif continued his exploration of group conformity with the Robber’s Cave experiment (Sherif et al. 1954/1988), which pitted two groups of boys – divided randomly – against each other in a series of competitions. Over the course of the experiment, the anti-out-group behaviour

transitioned from verbal to physical attacks and forced the experimenters to impose a 2-day cooling off period. Similar and more dramatic effects were observed in the canonical Milgram obedience study (Milgram 1963) and Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo 1973)3_.

Thus, the social brain evolved to harness the power of social systems, a by-product of which is a tendency to conform to group norms. In section 4, this problem will be explored more deeply firstly through an evolutionary biology lens, then finally using research from political science. As the reader

3_{A number of studies have revealed some of the arbitrary ways that the in-group-out-group distinction can be}

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should now have gathered, this notion relates significantly to partisanship, to which we now cast our attention.

2.3 Agency and partisanship

The agent as presented in the above discussion is one whose individuality or personality can be ‘flattened’ by conformity to the group. I argue that this is essentially what partisanship is; the tying of one’s colours to an ideological mast in an act of deindividualised conformity. Although partisanship is defined as “the quality or action of strongly supporting a person, principle, or political party, often without considering or judging the matter very carefully” in the Cambridge English dictionary, much research focuses on the directing of bias towards a specific party. For example, White and Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship (2016) centres exclusively on the party as a “vehicle for ideology”, while studies of partisanship trends similarly use parties as their unit of analysis (e.g. Bartels 2000). I would like to make clear at this point that this thesis will use a more expansive definition of partisanship that extends beyond party affiliation to include any individual or group who can be perceived to represent a certain ideology. Although the reasons for this will be born out in later discussions, the basic rationale for this decision lies in the fact that conformity to group norms does not exclusively occur towards a political party, but also towards individuals and groups who can act outside of the formal political process. For example, revolutions and coups are

organised by groups often acting against extant parties; civil society groups attract large numbers of supporters whose political priorities are comprehensively reflected; non-politicians on social media also command the attention of oftentimes millions of internet users and can influence individuals to a far greater extent than formal political leaders. As the reader may have noticed, the spread of one’s allegiance can be wide, and determining degrees of partisanship towards one group or another is a complex issue that this research will broach.

In sum, this section has so far presented issues with the treatment of agency in economics and political science. Conceptual sticking points can be subsumed into two camps: the first is the notion of rationality, with economics broadly pursuing a depiction of agents as rationally teleological. Debates have emerged over the accuracy of rational choice theories, supplanting the mind of homo economicus with one possessed by a range of cognitive biases. In terms of modelling agency, however, presenting deviations from a prescribed ‘norm’ does not offer a clearer definition of the agent as a unit of analysis. This is one key area that this thesis will address; unifying research in order to be able to empirically model agency in the study of social phenomena. The second can be labelled the agent-structure problem whereby there is a discomfort in understanding the relationship

between the micro-level agent, and the macro-level collective. This problem is a core motivation for the research that is presented in the pages to follow.

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Section 3: The individual

3.1 The rationality relativists

This sub-section will present research conducted by individuals who will be termed the ‘rationality relativists’ due to their rejection of a scale that places individuals from most to least rational. They largely argue that rationality is relative and thus optimisation is, by definition, intractable; if there is no objective, rational goal to aspire towards, optimising a decision to achieve that goal is rendered impossible.

In response to the behavioural scientist’s conception of irrationality, Gigerenzer argues it is not that errors in cognition are deviations from rationality, but rather an evolutionary response to the inevitable uncertainty of the future. Given the limited processing power of the human brain and the computational intractability of the future, neurological techniques have been developed to solve the various challenges we encounter. These techniques are termed fast and frugal heuristics. Sargent summarises this point within economics, in saying that "Ironically, when we economists make the people in our models more ‘bounded’ in their rationality . . . we must be smarter, because our models become larger and more demanding mathematically and econometrically.” (emphasis added, 1993 p.2)

Gigerenzer exemplifies one such heuristic in the case of a baseball fielder catching a high ball. When a ball is hit into the air, the brain is not able to accurately ascertain, measure or process the requisite variables that would pinpoint where the ball will land. Therefore, it must come up with a technique that uses perceptible information from the environment along with the processing power at its disposal. It was discovered that baseball fielders (and, indeed, any catcher of anything) use a simple heuristic that keeps the angle of their gaze constant; if the wind shifts the ball higher, the catcher’s gaze will become more obtuse and direct the catcher backwards, and vice versa (McLeod and Dienes 1996). The gaze heuristic is both fast, in that it relies on immediate feedback from external cues, and is frugal, in that it is not cognitively demanding. In Gigerenzer’s model of cognition, what has

previously been described as irrationality by bounded rationality scholars, is simply ‘ecological rationality’. In evolutionary biology, this is akin to an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ in which a series of genes were produced or ‘turned on’ in a fashion that helps its host to survive and replicate in a given environment, only for the environment to change dramatically and render those genes deleterious (Lieberman 2014)4_.

4_{One such example is type II diabetes, which evolved at a time of sugar scarcity and survives today in a world}

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Expanding on the evolutionary mismatch line of reasoning, Haselton and Buss (2000) developed Error Management Theory (EMT) in which cognitive biases are the result of the ‘least bad error’. EMT looks at the trade-offs between type 1 (false positives) and type 2 errors (false negatives), determining that, assuming that uncertainty would always yield an error of some kind, the least costly error would better promote survival and reproduction, and therefore survive through the generations. To illustrate this, Haselton (2015) asks the reader to imagine a Palaeolithic woman deciding on a mate. One of her most desired traits, fidelity, is not easily ascertained from her interaction with the environment and so a heuristic evolved to resolve the uncertainty. If she incorrectly assumes the potential mate will help her to raise their child (false positive), the

consequences could be severe – the death of her child. However, if she incorrectly imputes infidelity in the male (false negative), there are likely other males that could take his place; the consequences are far less severe. EMT predicts that a bias favouring greater mate-selectivity among females will emerge in the absence of perfect information in order to protect her against perfidious suitors.

Another example requires us to imagine a tribe of hunter gatherers faced with a small group of unknown early humans at the periphery of their village. Anthropologists and social psychologists explored the spread of disease in anthropological records, finding that the influx of a population into a new geographical rea often spelled disaster for its present inhabitants, not, as intuition may suggest, because of warfare, but rather through the new inhabitants’ spreading of a disease previously unknown to their neighbours (Faulkner et al. 2004). EMT predicts that the potential threat of disease and aggression (Schaller 2003) would create a bias against false positives and go some way to explaining contemporary xenophobia. Indeed, Faulkner and colleagues corroborated their theory by analysing attitude to ‘outsiders’ according to the rate of disease, finding that the greater the perception of risk of disease, the less favourably outsiders were viewed (Faulkner et al. 2003).

Hitherto, evidence has been presented that shows the human mind, limited in its ability to process uncertainty, as a collection of disparate systems, all of which evolved independently to help its host navigate challenging environments. These evolutions largely predated the political world in which we all now exist. The final part of this section will now deal with how these disparate systems

interact to represent political ideology, particularly when ideology settles at a stable equilibrium that is embodied by an external individual or group – partisanship.

3.2 The political brain

The title of this sub-section was lifted from Drew Westen’s 2008 book of the same name; however, the argument running through this section is that, in fact, we do not have political brains,

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but rather social brains forced to serve the political world. The implication of this claim is that political ideology – and by extension partisanship – is derived entirely from personality.

A growing body of research is solidifying a stable relationship between political ideology and

personality (Block & Block 2005; Wang 2016) and brain structures (Kanai et al. 2011). Indeed, Hatemi et al. (2014) accumulated 40 years of research on the genetic influence of political orientation, focusing particularly on monozygotic twins raised in different environments. They found that between 30-60% of the variation in ideology is traceable to DNA5_{, a consistently greater proportion}

than any environmental variables. This finding, along with the heritability of virtually all personality traits, has been widely replicated (e.g. Bouchard & McGue 2003). The repercussions of such a finding "would require nothing less than a revision of our understanding of all of human history, much– if not most – of political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as, perhaps, our understanding of what it means to be human." (Hatemi & McDermott 2012, p.527). While

environment plays a significant role on political orientation (see: section 4), this sub-section will seek to understand its genetic and neurobiological roots. Using Haidt’s moral foundations (2013), we will seek to understand the evolutionary origins of the development of the human brain and how the systems produced are applied to the political world.

Velhurst, Hatemi & Martin (2010) formulated one of the earliest attempts to categorise attitudes that influenced political orientation. Using a 50-item index reflecting social and political attitudes (Posner et al. 2006), 26 of the most “explicitly political” items were selected and grouped into four overarching attitudes: religious, sex, out-groups and punishment. The relationship of these attitudes with personality traits and political orientation were tested with varied results. For example,

psychoticism was strongly related to certain conservative positions on sex, religion and punishment, but weakly related to out-group attitudes. Although the categorisation illustrates some interesting relationships, its explanatory power over how our origins caused our present is limited. Religious attitude, for example, does not explain how our minds became primed for religion, which in turn influenced our political preferences.

However, Jonathan Haidt’s work does provide a framework that permits such a testing of long-term causality. First proposed in a 2004 paper (Haidt & Joseph), Haidt and colleagues began to trace political orientation back to their moral foundations. The four initial categories - suffering, hierarchy,

5_{This finding is based on research whereby monozygotic twins (n=12,000) raised apart are found to share}

30-60% of political ideology along a traditional left-right spectrum. Environmental factors are accounted for both as instrumental variables and in studies of dizygotic twins raised apart who showed no statistically significant relationship when accounting for environmental factors. Although there is much to unpick in this debate, several decades of research has uncovered a robust genetic component to both personality and political ideology.

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reciprocity, and purity – were refined over time and are now presented as five principle moral foundations and their opposites: care (harm), fairness/proportionality (cheating), loyalty (betrayal), authority (subversion) and sanctity/purity (degradation). A sixth was added in The Righteous Mind (2013), liberty (oppression), but, due to its absence from much of Haidt’s empirical work, it will be omitted from the discussion that follows. The next section will elaborate on these foundations with a definition, evolutionary justification and effects on political ideology.

Figure 2. A table describing the origins and present manifestations of the five moral foundations. Haidt (2013, p.146)

To supplement the figure above, Graham et al. (2016, p.4-5) offers a more qualitative description of each moral foundation6_:

Moral Foundation Description

Care/harm Mammals have an unusually long period of development during which they are dependent upon their caretakers. Therefore, caretakers who were more sensitive to the needs and distress of their children were more likely to have children survive into adulthood. This sensitivity generalizes beyond our own children, and can be activated when we learn of other people’s children or even see photos of animal babies that activate our urges to care and protect, sometimes linked to anger toward the perpetrator of the harm.

Fairness/cheating All social animals interact with each other, and while there are debates as to whether any non-human animals have a sense of “fairness”, there is little debate that the sense of fairness can be found across human

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cultures, emerges well before the age of five, and possibly before the age of one, and is related to the evolutionary process that Trivers (1971) described in his famous article on reciprocal altruism. People monitor the behavior and reputations of others; those linked to cheating become less attractive as partners for future interactions.

Loyalty/betrayal There are finite resources and coalitions compete for these resources. The coalitions that are most cohesive tend to prevail over less cohesive rival coalitions, while wrestling with the question of the origins of morality. The intuitions generated by this foundation generalize to brand loyalty, political partisanship, and sports fandom today. When people show signs of being disloyal, they are labeled as traitors and may be ostracized from their groups, or even put to death (e.g., treason is an offense punishable by death in the US). When people are loyal group members, they are extolled as virtuous (e.g., as patriots).

Authority/subversion Primates evolved for life in hierarchies. Non-human alpha males are generally more like bullies than like leaders. Human alphas can go either way, but there can be little doubt that the psychology of authority is essential for understanding human political behavior. Groups and companies that have clear lines of authority, in which the authority is respected and seen as legitimate, generally function better than leaderless or normless groups, or groups with autocratic and domineering

leadership. People who do not respect authorities or traditions are often ostracized or punished for insubordination.

Purity/degradation Pathogens and parasites threaten survival, and organisms that avoid contact with these contaminants are more likely to survive than their counterparts. The adaptive pressure to make accurate judgments about disease risk is especially strong for a group-living species whose diet includes scavenging, as seems to have been the case for early humans. The uniquely human emotion of disgust seems well-tuned as a “guardian of the mouth” for a highly social and omnivorous species. Research on the “behavioral immune system” shows that contamination concerns can be generalized to social practices including being fearful of dissimilar others (e.g., immigrants) and a rejection of people who do not live in accordance with the group’s sacred practices (e.g., LGBTQIA individuals in the eyes of many Christians).

Haidt’s premise is that different types of people apply differing weights to each moral foundation. He co-created the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in which he posed a series of moral dilemmas with the initial instruction: “When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?” from a scale from 0 (not at all relevant) to 5 (very relevant). What followed were fifteen questions, three for each moral foundation “such as “whether or not someone was cruel” (for the Care foundation) or “whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for authority” (for the Authority foundation).” (Haidt 2013, p.205). These questions were further refined to “trigger” moral foundations using questions such as “One of the worst things a person can do is to hurt a defenseless animal” to evoke the care item. As participants were anyone

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who came across Haidt’s online questionnaire, which itself had drawn enough attention to draw attention, the graphic below was based on a sample of 132,000 (p.206):

Figure 3. Weighting of moral foundations according to left-right political ideology. Haidt 2013, p.206

As the graphic shows, the degree to which an individual prioritises one moral foundation over another has a clear relationship with political persuasion. Liberals’ worldviews are shaped by how those in power care about humanity (care) as well as how abuses of power impact inequality (fairness), whereas conservatives, although possessing a more balanced moral spectrum, attach more importance to respect for authority and purity/sanctity7_.

To delve more deeply into this finding, Haidt draws on his own previous research on the relationship between morals and taste. For example, our olfactory nerves, which play a significant role in

detecting unpalatable food, were “hijacked” by the social brain in order to steer us away from unpalatable people (Haidt et al. 1997). The same region of our brains that allowed us to avoid noxious substances is now activated when we describe somebody’s behaviour as ‘disgusting’8_.

7_{There remains controversy over the validity of Haidt’s moral foundations. For example, Jarudi (2009) provides}

evidence that reactions to ‘purity’ depend on the object of disgust, with food disgust more closely aligned with liberals and sexual disgust linked to conservatives. Furthermore, as Jost (2012) notes, it is difficult to say whether responses given reflect group norms or the individual’s moral compass. For the purpose of this article, it is of little consequence whether Haidt’s moral foundations are accurate, merely that morality plays a role in determining group identity and membership. Further evidence of this will be provided in sections 4 and 5.

8_{Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) observed that participants have a tendency to “cleanse” themselves after being}

primed to feel shame. The Lady Macbeth Effect tends to be localised so that verbal lies result in greater oral washing, acts of violence induce hand-washing, and so on.

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To raise one of many interesting studies on the neurology of political orientation, a University of College London study found that conservative brains featured enlarged amygdalas – a brain region associated with the processing of negative emotions, particularly fear and threat – while liberal brains saw a greater accumulation of grey matter around the anterior cingulate cortex – a region heavily involved in decision-making, particularly the processing of uncertainty (Kanai et al. 2014). The authors suggest that more resources dedicated to processing uncertainty would leave its ‘user’ less risk-averse and more open to experience, a finding corroborated in personality psychology (e.g. Gerber et al. 2011).

The final matter that requires our attention in this section is how much control we have over these predispositions. A seminal study conducted by Libet et al. (1983) found that the action potential that initiated an act (raising one’s left hand) preceded the ‘will’ to conduct the action by at least several hundred milliseconds, suggesting that our conscious brain is reacting rather than initiating.

According to Wegner, "Rather than conscious will being the rule and automatism the exception, the opposite may be true: automatism is the rule, and the illusion of conscious will is the exception." (Wegner 2003, p.143) The power of reason itself is subject to great scrutiny with, for example, more intelligent people showing a greater ability to produce a detailed rationale for fallacious beliefs (Perkins, Faraday and Bushey 1991). Haidt takes a strong intuitionist approach to reason, likening instinct to an elephant and reason to its rider; when the elephant shifts to the left, the rider has little choice but to follow (e.g. Haidt et al. 2004). Therefore, contrary to the common perception that reason can temper some of our more primordial tendencies, reason in fact serves instinct. As Lerner & Tetlock write:

"A central function of thought is making sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others. Indeed, the process of considering the justifiability of one’s choices may be so prevalent that decision makers not only search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they must explain that choice to others, they search for reasons to convince themselves that they have made the “right” choice." (2003, p.438).

Teppo Felin offers us a perspective to understand how this phenomenon affects perception. He suggests that we each have an umwelt, which extracts a set of stimuli from the environment according to our mental state at the time (Felin, Koendrink & Krueger 2017). Therefore, when conservatives and liberals draw diametrically opposed conclusions from the same stimulus (Hastorf & Cantril 1954, Kunda 1987, Jost et al. 2003), it is likely due to their differing umwelts that seek to justify an instinct that itself is a result of moral foundation weighting. In short, our instincts shape our perceptions, and reason justifies those perceptions.

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In summary, evidence presented in this section has painted a rather bleak picture of the scope of human agency. However, it should be stressed that the limitations presented are not exclusively genetic. In Bandura’s (1991) review of biological and psychological literature on agency, he describes two camps: one which suggests genes have us on a “tight leash”, and one which wields a “short leash”. As subsequent sections will demonstrate, research finding genetic causes of psychological traits miss an important point: “Genes might be thought of as children’s building bricks—broadly similar blocks that are assembled in different species in dissimilar ways. Human and chimpanzee genes could be exactly identical and still work differently because they can be turned on and off to different degrees, in different places, or at different times.” (Laland 2017, p. 16) The environmental impact on behaviour is profound, and will be explored in more depth in section 4.

This section has attempted to draw a connection from humans’ evolutionary past, its effects on brain development, and the present day that demands engagement with political decision-making. Combining anthropology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience and political science, we now have a picture of an agent predisposed to draw certain moral conclusions, with reason a mere passenger whose role is to justify rather than evaluate instinctive reactions. In line with problems of

understanding agentic rationality and irrationality outlined in section 2 and in the first research question, this section suggests we should dispense with any conception of rationality that is isolated within the mind. Instead, ‘ecological rationality’ proposes that only by returning to the ecologies that gave rise to cognition, can we trace behaviour back to its cause/s. Once this has been done, we can then apply this cognition to contemporary environments to operationalise agency. What’s more, rationality is dealt a further blow by the seemingly narrow scope of conscious will. If the agent is limited in her ability to ascertain where intuition ends and reason begins – as seems to be the case – her capacity to employ objective reason is severely vitiated. Importantly, this has ruinous

consequences for methodological individualists (see: section 3.1) who conceive of the agent as a unit of analysis ontologically separable from the environment. The premise that an agent is incapable of distinguishing between endogenous and exogenous influences on cognition imply that extracting environmental causal variables to isolate the individual is an impossible task.

We are, additionally, left with several further doubts. Do these findings of the individual mind scale up to the group level? This is a question that will be addressed in the following section; we will see that group psychology contains some unique characteristics that have an impact on the political process. We may also ask whether these neurological predispositions are impervious to change throughout life. This is a fascinating question that holds the answer to understanding the processes that underlie partisanship, and will be explored in the next section.

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Section 4: The group

"Human rational behavior is shaped by a scissors whose two blades are the structure of task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor." (Simon 1990, p.7)

Assuming the reader is thus far convinced by the depiction of agency as largely governed by instinct, we must ask whether this finding scales up to the group level. As section 3 concluded, agency cannot be understood independent of the group; indeed, Haidt’s moral foundations

presented in the last section evolved precisely to “bind” groups together and enhance their fitness in promoting the well-being of its members (Haidt 2013). With this in mind, this section will begin to unpack this abstruse relationship beginning with an exploration into when the “hive switch” is activated and individuals conform to the group. Beyond this, we will harness several prominent theories from psychology and biology to hone in on the precise conditions that induce this switch as well as the agent’s role in presiding over this phenomenon. This section will conclude with a

consideration of how groups form in order to gain insight not just into how groups interact, but the ontological nature of groups themselves.

4.1 When I becomes we

Group cognition is an understudied field (Theiner, Allen & Goldstone 2010) that would move social scientists closer to a more unified theory on how observed social phenomena are inter-connected. As we have seen, an early thinker in this field was Emile Durkheim (1895/1982) whose homo duplex presents the agent as simultaneously thinking as an individual and as part of a group. Haidt (2013) summarises research on group psychology, concluding that we each have a “hive switch” that can be activated and flip our cognition from the individual to the collective. In considering how this switch is activated, Haidt offers several scenarios such as being connected through nature, raves and the use of psychedelics; however, none of these offer insights into how and when the hive switch can intensify partisanship.

This section has thus far described the existence of macro phenomena that is irreducible to the micro level. Emile Durkheim’s homo duplex sees humans as cognising at the individual and social levels with Haidt suggesting that we activate the ‘hive switch’ under certain circumstances.

Adding further complication to the picture is the capacity of our minds to consciously distinguish between individual- and group-level cognition. Clark & Chalmers (1992), using the language of “extended cognition” grapple with the metaphysical and epistemological boundaries between the

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two states of mind. Referring back to section 3, it is the role of reason to justify intuitions, and it is the nature of consciousness to ascribe individual authorship to thoughts and actions, irrespective of whether they derive from individual, collective or hybrid cognition. As we will see, a form of self-deceptive source amnesia9_{that leaves us unable to relinquish individual authorship of an idea or}

opinion lies at the heart of partisanship. This epistemological black hole is one important source of the abrasion of the agent’s conscious self-control.

4.2 Self-categorization theory (SCT)

Throughout the 1980s, John Turner and colleagues devised and refined a theory that attempted to understand how individuals operate within a group. Self-categorization theory (SCT) anticipated that individuals’ behaviour depended on whether they cognised at the individual or group level, as we saw in previous sections, but the theory went a step further. Turner theorised that Haidt’s hive switch was activated when the individual ceased to see herself as an individual in relation to a group, but as a member of a group in relation to other groups. For example, a group of Ajax Amsterdam fans may argue over independent views on player performances, but when faced with criticism from PSV Eindhoven fans, their differences rapidly converge upon a consensus. This theory emphasises the process of depersonalisation that occurs when group cognition is activated; individual values are suppressed to accommodate group values.

Nearly thirty years later, and in an entirely separate discipline – evolutionary biology – David Sloan Wilson and colleagues devised the multilevel selection theory (MLS) based on a wide range of species who depend on social structures (Wilson, van Vugt & O’Gorman 2008). The authors argue that natural selection operates at different levels – from the genes to cells to the organism, then to groups of organisms of increasing size. Although a literature review of group-level selection is far beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to mention that the viability of selection at a group level is contested (see Dawkins 1976, Pinker 2015); however, Wilson argues that when successful competition for resources depends on group fitness in relation to other individuals and groups, one’s ability to function as part of a group is paramount. According to the authors, between-group

selection begets altruism and within-group selection favours selfishness. Once the group becomes fixed "Individuals and uncoordinated groups are no match for the new superorganisms, which quickly become ecologically dominant." (Wilson, van Vugt & O’Gorman 2008, p.7). This research should bring to the reader’s attention the evolutionary importance of ‘thinking like a group’; the

9_{According to the theory’s founders, source amnesia is the inability to trace a memory or item of knowledge}

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likening of political partisanship to sports team devotion, that the above analogy alluded to, thus begins to make sense when both are subsumed under inter-group competition.

Writing in 2006, Turner and colleagues further refined the theory from the perspective of individual cognition, suggesting that the identity of the individual is contrasted against the perceived ‘fit’ of that identity within the group. The resultant ‘functional antagonism’ thus determines the behaviour. Summarising this problematic relationship, the authors note that

"[p]eople feel like individuals first and foremost, regardless of the forces acting on their behavior. This is not to say that they never feel at one with their fellow group members, but that feeling seems to be much more fleeting. And even when they act as group members – even when they conform to group norms or to direct pressure from group members – they construe that behavior in ways that emphasize their autonomy or uniqueness." (Turner et al. 2006, P.46).

By way of empirical demonstration of this claim, Gaertner, Sedikides and Graetz (1999) found that individual-level threats evoked a stronger negative reaction than those at the group-level even when group-level identification was controlled for. Indeed, conformity to the group is often mistaken for an expression of individuality (Pronin, Berger & Molouki 2007, Cohen 2003)10_{. As Prentice notes:}

"Given pervasive evidence that people do, in fact, conform under many circumstances, it seems likely that these perceived self–other differences reflect an underestimation of conformity by the self rather than an overestimation of conformity by others." (2006, P.48)

SCT builds on the notion that humans oscillate between individual- and group-level cognition, but stresses the importance of considering individual perception of, for example, how they are construed within the group, how other groups perceive their group and how group conformity is often, if not mostly, imperceptible. Framed in this way, individual agents and their groups are inseparable, but what’s more, the perception of one’s group can have a significant impact on whether the agent cognises at the individual- or group-level.

Offering insight into the environmental factors that cause depersonalisation, in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony (2017), Kevin Laland makes a convincing case that natural selection overwhelmingly favoured copying over innovation as a means of learning and adapting to a changing environment. Laland and colleagues ran a free-to-enter tournament called Cultaptation in which, over the course of many rounds, participants had to choose between three options: INNOVATE, OBSERVE or

10_{Cohen (2003), for example, found that participants’ evaluation of a policy was most susceptible to group}

conformity when the opinion of the group was made more salient. When group values were not salient, there was greater variance in evaluations.

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EXPLOIT. Innovators would create a novel means of adapting to an environment, observers would copy the strategies of others and exploiters would employ the technique, whether copied or innovated (Rendell et al. 2010). The game sought to investigate the cost-benefit trade-offs of a group of actors adapting to changing environments and discovered that winning strategies were predominated by copying. Explaining the results, Laland notes: "if individuals are able to copy in a “savvy” fashion—for instance, if they can be selective about when, and how frequently, they copy— there are real fitness dividends. Successful strategies were able to time copying for when payoffs drop, evaluate current information based on its age, judge how valuable information would be in the future, and use all this knowledge to maximize copying efficiency." (Laland 2016, P.104) Expanding further, Laland suggests that there are three rules that determine when social copying strategies are employed: 1) cost – if determining the safety of a food source requires many steps, copying may be employed; 2) uncertainty – sufficient ignorance in an area begets copying; 3) failure – if a social learning strategy fails to lead to satisfaction, the strategy may be changed (ibid). Thus described, social learning offers a theory as to when the hive switch is activated. In line with the argument that this thesis is adducing, when agents perceive a violation of one of the above rules, conformity may lead to higher degrees of partisanship.

4.3 The Elective Affinities Model and Social Learning Theory

Applying this concept more directly to the political sphere, Jost frames the individual-group perception as an antagonism between top-down and bottom-up processes; discursive

superstructures reflect a top-down transferral of social-constructed ideology, while functional superstructures describe a bottom-up ideology as a reflection of psychosocial needs and wants. Borrowing the language of Goethe and Weber (Jost, Federico & Napier 2009), the authors describe this interaction as one of elective affinities which “conceiv[es] of the forces of mutual attraction that exist between the structure and contents of belief systems and the underlying needs and motives of individuals and groups who subscribe to them.” (p.309). The authors then attempt to identify a set of relational, epistemic and existential motives to explain how individuals affiliate with and “stick” to certain political groups. In line with this task, the authors cite Lane (1962): ““the common man has a set of emotionally charged political beliefs” that “embrace central values and institutions” and are “rationalizations of interests (sometimes not his own)” that “serve as moral justifications for daily acts and beliefs”” (Jost, Federico & Napier 2009, p.316) Thus, ideology is not a collection of reasoned policy evaluations, but a reflection of the individual’s psychosocial filter.

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Before elaborating more on how this filter operates, it is worth pausing to process the picture that is emerging. We began with the individual, expanded to the group and the environment, and now find ourselves back with the individual. As the rest of this section will argue, the reason for this ostensibly circular reasoning is that these are inexorable elements in any political decision-making process; our identity is hijacked by the group, activated by the environment and shone through the prism of individual perception. Moving forward, the reader should consider the arguments presented as a function of these variables.

Figure 5. The Elective Affinities Model. Jost, Federico & Napier 2009, p.319

As can be seen above, Jost et al. attempt to connect motivational substructures and discursive superstructures. In their model, epistemic motivations – such as the extent to which an individual is comfortable with uncertainty11_{– is channelled through socially constructed notions of political}

ideology in order to arrive at a ‘conclusion’ regarding, for example, policy evaluation. Broadly, epistemic motivations concern how an individual distinguishes between truth and non-truths; existential motivations deal with the perception of threat; while relational motivations relate to the

11_{The Big 5 in psychology are considered five universal personality categories that lie at the top of an}

embedded hierarchy. A growing body of literature suggests that two of those are particularly useful for understanding political ideology. Trait conscientiousness, one’s need for structure and boundaries, is strongly correlated with conservative values, while trait openness, one’s relationship with novelty and uncertainty, is connected to liberalism. See e.g. Cooper, Golden & Socha (2013) for a review.

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individual in relation to the group. The cultural elements are divided into one’s relationship to change – neophilia or neophobia – and one’s degree of tolerance towards inequality.

In justifying this model, the authors cite a wide range of research on the high sensitivity to threat among conservatives, and the relative comfort with uncertainty among liberals (Bonanno & Jost 2006, Brody & Shapiro 1989, Landau et al. 2004, Lian & O’Neal 1993, Parker 1995). Likewise, a number of social scientists have been able to induce a more conservative line of reasoning among liberals by introducing the perception of threat (Nail, McGregor, Drinkwater, Steele & Thompson 2009, Van de Vyver, Houston, Abrams, & Vasiljevic 2016, Van der Toorn, Nail, Liviatan & Jost 2014).

In sum, Jost’s model presents the finding that much of what distinguishes the liberal from the conservative brain is tolerance of threat, uncertainty and inequality, that are then aligned with social constructions of political ideology that are disseminated by group leaders in a top-down process. Although moving beyond Haidt’s Moral Foundations model by including elements of the

environment, evidence from Haidt’s work (Haidt et al. 1997, Haidt & Joseph 2004, Graham et al. 2018) suggests that alongside threat, uncertainty and inequality, lie other important elements that determine an individual’s political affiliation: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity (see: section 3.2). The next section will seek to tie these variables together through the construction of a unifying model. Furthermore, although Jost’s model does incorporate environmental variables, it does so in an arguably limited way that captures only a part of the complexity of environmental effects on political ideology; a general critique of the field shared by Huddy who writes: "Far more could be done…to understand the role played by different situational factors in shaping identity strength" (2015, p.9).

In conclusion, Jost and colleagues offer a framework to understand what underlying psychosocial traits shape political ideology, which deals with the question of why certain individuals become members of certain groups.

4.4 Network formation theory

This sub-section will collate research on how individuals form groups in society. Much of the research will distinguish between in-groups and out-groups because, as we have seen, humans have a tendency to organise themselves into groups and subsequently perceive certain other groups as competitors (see e.g. Robbins & Krueger (2005) for a review). Specifically, however, we would like to know how these groups emerge and the nature of inter-group competition. Doing so will allow us to gain insight into how individuals determine the object of partisanship (their political group) and how inter-group conflict impacts partisanship levels in a country.

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Sanjeev Goyal and colleagues have presented various models on co-operation within network formation. Bala & Goyal (2000), for example, distinguish between one- and two-way flow networks where the benefits of membership accumulate on one side only, or on both sides of a connection. In their model, the pay-off of membership is a function of gaining access to other members within the network and total number of members; a highly debatable assumption. In a subsequent paper, Dasgupta & Goyal (2016) challenged the notion that individual identities are the main determinant of membership, suggesting that the more identities differ, the greater polarisation of groups12_.

The Law of the Few (Galeotti & Goyal 2010) is based on multiple findings in sociology13_that

demonstrate only a small proportion of a given population contributes information, while the rest ‘free-ride’. The authors arrived at their conclusion assuming that all members of a society require a minimum of ŷ, defined as a minimum acquisition of information relative to costs of acquiring it. A further assumption is the existence of a Nash equilibrium, which, in game theory, is a point at which each player (member) has maximised possible utility given the actions of every other player. Finally, the model assumes a form of perfect information in that actors are able to calculate the range of costs and benefits inherent in deciding on group affiliation. The definition of ŷ can and will be debated in the following paragraphs, but, in theory, the assumption could be said to hold given an accurate representation of the cost-benefit analysis of seeking information can be adduced. Notwithstanding, the supposition that a stable equilibrium exists within group membership is a contentious one, as group membership ebbs and flows dynamically. However, the equilibrium in question could be argued to be a constant, irrespective of which groups exist at any given time; that is to say, every group may always tend towards organising themselves into an information receiver-provider structure.

Finally, as was discussed in section 2.1, economic thinking tends to reduce actors to a state of bounded rationality within which maximising one’s utility is the solitary objective. This paper will argue in the next section that the finding presented by Goyal and colleagues can be hypostasised using theories of social learning (Richerson & Boyd 2006, Laland 2017) (see: section 4.2). A final important note to make on Goyal’s work is that, as networks expand in size, the disproportionate distribution of information-takers and producers increases so that the ‘nodes’ that lie at the ‘core’ of

12_{This is supported by work by Easterly & Lavine (1997), who find that among African nations, higher rates of}

political instability is found in nations with wider ethic fragmentation.

13_{For example, Lazarsfeld, Berelson & Gaudet (1948) found that as the distribution of information became}

concentrated in the hands of the mass media (television, radio and newspapers), 80% of the population sampled relied on 20% of informed citizens for their connection to the outside world. A very similar proportion was found in a study by Adar & Huberman (2000) who established that 25% of users of file-sharing website Gnutella contributed 99% of all files, while two-thirds contributed nothing at all.