This week I came across one of the best blogs I have ever seen. Its author: Robin Hanson, research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. The title of my favourite blog post: Two Types of People (in fact, I was once tempted to write a similar post title “Two Kinds of People”). So, here are the two types of people:
TYPE *A* folks eat a healthier more varied diet, and get better exercise. They more love nature, travel, and exploration, and they move more often to new communities. They work fewer hours, and have more complex mentally-challenging jobs. They talk more openly about sex, are more sexually promiscuous, and more accepting of divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and pre-marital and extra-marital sex. They have fewer kids, who they are more reluctant to discipline or constrain. They more emphasize their love for kids, and teach kids to more value generosity, trust, and honesty. Type A folks care less for land or material possessions, relative to people. They spend more time on leisure, music, dance, story-telling and the arts. They are less comfortable with war, domination, bragging, or money and material inequalities, and they push more for sharing and redistribution. They more want lots of discussion of group decisions, with everyone having an equal voice and free to speak their mind. They deal with conflicts more personally and informally, and more prefer unhappy folk to be free to leave. Their leaders lead more by consensus.
TYPE *B* folks travel less, and move less often from where they grew up. They are more polite and care more for cleanliness and order. They have more self-sacrifice and self-control, which makes them more stressed and suicidal. They work harder and longer at more tedious and less healthy jobs, and are more faithful to their spouses and their communities. They make better warriors, and expect and prepare more for disasters like war, famine, and disease. They have a stronger sense of honor and shame, and enforce more social rules, which let them depend more on folks they know less. When considering rule violators, they look more at specific rules, and less at the entire person and what feels right. Fewer topics are open for discussion or negotiation. Type B folks believe more in good and evil, and in powerful gods who enforce social norms. They envy less, and better accept human authorities and hierarchy, including hereditary elites at the top (who act more type A), women and kids lower down, and human and animal slaves at the bottom. They identify more with strangers who share their ethnicity or culture, and more fear others. They are less bothered by violence in war, and toward foreigners, kids, slaves, and animals. They more think people should learn their place and stay there. Nature’s place is to be ruled and changed by humans.
So, who are those two kinds of people? As Hanson notes, they seem to be liberals and conservatives. However, these are facts about foraging and farming people he had collected from the literature. Of course, Hanson wants to stress the uncanny resemblance between farmers and conservatives and foragers and liberals. I was amazed how similar his observations are to mine. In fact, in one of my earliest posts about the hunter-gatherer vs farmer type hypothesis I provided this table (common ideas highlighted):
hunter-gatherer | farmer |
High on personality trait “openness”, low on “conscientiousness” | High on personality trait “conscientiousness”, low on “openness” |
Strongly (actively) egalitarian | status-conscious |
Tendency towards out-group sociality, more accepting of diversity (e.g. different sexuality, refugees, etc.) | Tendency towards in-group sociality (identifies more strongly with a core group, like family, religious group, country or sports team) |
More liberal ideology | More conservative ideology |
Less sexual dimorphism | More (display of) sexual dimorphism |
Later onset of puberty | Earlier onset of puberty |
Tendency to wanting fewer children | Tendency to wanting more children |
Relaxed child-rearing attitude | Authoritative child rearing, “helicopter parenting” |
Night owls | Early risers |
“Lazier” when it comes to routine work Hyperfocus on relevant/interesting work | More hard-working and ambitious, good focus on planning and routine |
highly rebellious when feeling personal freedom and values are threatened | status-seeking, but also more conformist and highly loyal to their core group(s) |
Less interest in small-talk | Higher interest in small-talk |
Despite having very similar ideas Hanson come to a completely different conclusion as I do and it's quite surprising:
We live a farmer lifestyle when poor, but prefer to buy a forager lifestyle when rich.
This idea probably stems from the fact that many rich people nowadays are liberal/hunter-gatherer types, in particular the people who get rich through innovation: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, Anne Wojcicki, and many more. Many of these people do not only live a forager lifestyle, but they are also proponents of ideas like universal welfare and universal basic income - ideas that are tough to take for conservatives/farmer types. However, things are really more complex than that and at the end of the day, the majority of rich people back the conservative party.
My conclusion is that we still carry those forager and farmer traits in our genes. Of course, most people are mixed nowadays, but due to assortative matings our dominant traits show in our personality types (in Myers-Briggs temperaments):
This is why the Myers-Briggs test was soon to be used for career counselling. Hunter-gatherer types typically have difficulties with 9-5 routine “farmer” jobs and prefer to work in more creative areas ranging from writing, music to science and engineering.
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