Dominic Johnson: University of Edinburgh Reader in Politics & International Relations

A recent explosion of work suggests a key role for human physiology and evolutionary psychology in understanding political behaviour, from genes to hormones to cognition. However, the entire notion of an evolutionary basis for human behavior meets a traditional skepticism in the social sciences, and political science in particular. One common conception is that psychological biases are “mistakes” or “errors” that cause policy failures, disasters, or wars. The book sets out the argument that psychological biases have their roots in the evolution and biology of the human brain. Consequently, they are far from “mistakes”, but rather they are adaptive heuristics that were favoured by natural selection because they brought important advantages in our evolutionary past. The question that remains is whether (and when) they continue to be triggered in appropriate contexts today. Given the social and political differences between the environment of our past and the environment of today (mismatch), an evolutionary approach offers fresh predictions for when, why and how psychological biases will worsen, or at other times improve, contemporary political decision-making. The book examines five common psychological phenomena that have commonly been used to explain decision-making failures in political science: (1) overconfidence, (2) cognitive dissonance, (3) the fundamental attribution error, (4) prospect theory, and (5) in-group/out-group bias. It is argued that all of them can equally be adaptive rather than maladaptive in some contexts. The idea is that in doing so, political scientists will be forced to rethink whether biases may have a functional rather than destructive role, implying an evolutionary origin. The book is intended to be provocative, showing that false beliefs can paradoxically lead to more effective decision-making–”just as they were “designed” to do by natural selection. But effectiveness depends on context, because behavioral mechanisms are contingent, not fixed. An evolutionary approach therefore offers us the tools to improve our understanding and predictions of political phenomena.