Evolutionary Psychology, Politics, and the Humanities

Several podcast appearances

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

I’m currently finishing a co-authored, interdisciplinary book on human belief and delusions (titled “The Social Roots of Delusions”), as well as several essays I’ll be publishing here over the next few weeks on a wide range of topics, including political disagreement, social media, tribalism, and ideology.

In this brief post, I will highlight and comment on several podcasts I appeared on recently.

Humans are evolved apes!

One respect in which I’m extremely unusual as a humanities academic is in taking seriously the fact that humans are apes that evolved through a process of natural selection in ways that are highly relevant for understanding our psychology, behaviour, and societies. That is, I endorse the core idea behind evolutionary psychology, which is extremely and inexplicably controversial throughout much of the humanities and the social sciences.

Given this, I was really grateful to be invited onto “Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)", hosted by the great Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof, two of my favourite social scientists. David Pinsof also writes one of my favourite Substacks.

We talked about the evolutionary psychology of belief, self-deception, “misinformation”, and the role of strategic, social forces in shaping human psychology, including the most puzzling and paradoxical aspects of our psychology. We also discussed the challenges (and perhaps impossibility) of achieving objectivity in domains like politics, as well as the question of whether it is ever legitimate to object to ideas not on their merits but because they might be “weaponised” by bad people. I think that such objections are generally really harmful to political debate and academic culture, but it’s a complex issue that we tried to grapple with in good faith.

David introduced me to the term and concept of “pseudo-belief”, which I love!

The Good Fight

I was honoured to be included as a panellist on The Good Fight Podcast to discuss politics and current affairs with Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, and Sabina Ćudić. We discussed the health of American democracy, the politics and impact of misinformation, especially in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and how RFK Jr’s remarks about autism, Tylenol, and vaccines help to illustrate how the left/right divide in American politics increasingly involves a more fundamental epistemological divide over the nature and sources of knowledge.

The Good Fight Club: Hounding Political Opponents, Misinformation, and Autism

One thing I tried to get across in different ways is that in thinking about politics, we have to try to inhabit the different worldviews of others. If we assume that others see the world we do, their behaviour will often seem extremely stupid, malevolent, or simply crazy. But people view the world through radically different pictures of reality, and it is only by trying to understand those pictures that you can make sense of their behaviour.

For example, liberals such as myself see Trump’s self-evident corruption and character flaws and are baffled at how anyone could support him. However, this bafflement reflects the assumption that people share our basic factual understanding of reality, which they typically don’t. As I note in the podcast, many Republicans either view Trump as the victim of persecution or view him as the lesser of two evils. Given this, they might (and most often do) share core values about the evils of corruption and the importance of democracy. They simply diverge on where the most egregious violations of these values actually reside.

As Walter Lippmann observes in Public Opinion, political judgements rarely involve moral judgements on a group of facts. They involve “a moralized and codified version of the facts”, such that “the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them.”

The Humanities and Critical Theory

I also had an interesting conversation with Anna Gát and others as part of an Interintellect salon. We touched on challenges facing the humanities in the US and UK, Critical Theory, academic status competition, ideological homogeneity in universities, the concept of motivated ignorance, and the difficulties of addressing certain topics in parts of academia. We also talked about trying to maintain intellectual honesty in polarised environments.

AI Sessions

Finally, because I’m increasingly convinced that artificial intelligence is going to be one of the most transformative forces over the next several decades, I’ve started a series of regular conversations about some of the big debates in the area with my friend Henry Shevlin, an ethicist and philosopher of artificial intelligence at the University of Cambridge. The first conversation is here, along with a reading list for those who are also interested in learning about this topic: