Many people will be familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s five (or six) moral foundations and his key finding that liberals tend to be sensitive mainly to care, fairness (and liberty), whereas conservatives tend to be equally sensitive to all foundations. Unfortunately, Haidt offers little insight regarding the origin of these moral foundations as his work was based on cultural research and he seems to assume that the moral foundations are a matter of culture, at least more so than genetics. However, I would argue that Haidt’s foundations are really instincts and that people have different sensitivities regardless of their cultural upbringing.
The following table (from : Russil Durrant Evolutionary Criminology) presents evolutionary selective pressures and selection processes for the different instincts:
We can see that the liberal (only) instinct can all be produced by kin selection and generalised altruism (indirect reciprocity), whereas the conservative instincts require some level of gene-culture coevolution. I have argued that the transition from foraging to farming required a high level of gene-culture coevolution and increased reliance on cultural learning, including from authority. Moreover, if we look at the environments and selective pressures we find that group threat (food and livestock raiding), authority (non-existent among foragers) and sanctity (communicable diseases are higher among sedentary people) are all considerably higher among sedentary farmers than nomadic foragers.
One thing I have always considered wrong about Haidt’s model is the claim that conservatives value all foundations equally:
I would argue that liberals (forager types) value fairness and (outgroup) as well as liberty (which is in direct opposition to authority) HIGHER than conservatives (farmer types), which is the reason why liberals are generally among the first people to cry foul, even when they themselves and their ingroup aren’t concerned at all.
Another interesting thing is the guilt/shame distinction between liberals and conservatives here. Shame is a sense of having failed to meet the standards imposed by one’s group whereas guilt is a sense of having failed to meet one's own self-imposed standards. Joseph Henrich noted that people outside WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) generally tend to feel shame rather than guilt. Shame helps fix a person’s relationship with one’s ingroup. Foragers hardly require shame as there are few social norms Put in Michele Gelfand’s terminology foragers are “loose” and farmers are “tight”.
The liberal/conservative dichotomy does not perfectly reflect the forager/farmer distinction. Pastoralists are low on authority as they tend to be egalitarian (at least regarding their in-group), and high on liberty, so they often tend to be liberal or libertarian. However, they are probably even higher when it comes to in-group loyalty. Societies that had a long history of pastoralism (e.g. Arabs) tend to have an honour culture where the feeling of shame can be so great that it can lead to honour killings among family members.
Mark Moritz writes in”A Critical Examination of Honor Cultures and Herding Societies in
Africa”:
A feature of many honor cultures is that men are prepared to use violence and even die to defend their reputation as honorable men. Moreover, aggression in these specific contexts is institutionalized, regarded as legitimate and necessary by the society at large. Other features associated with many, but not all, honor cultures include a concern with the chastity
of women, extreme vigilance about one's reputation and a sensitivity to insults, male autonomy, patrilineal kin groups, and assertive and often violent relations outside of the kin groups.
It is interesting to note that honour killings are absent among nomadic pastoralists but tend to become more common once they become sedentary:
On the basis of anthropological studies of African pastoral societies, cultural psychologists have linked the psychological roots of pastoral aggression to the cultural complex of honor. This article is a critical examination of this link. It argues, first, that honor cultures are likely to be found among peasant pastoralists, but not among tribal pastoralists.
Richard Nisbett hypothesised that the southern US honor culture was a cultural heritage of immigrants who had been herders in Ireland and Scotland. It is equally likely the southern honour culture was influenced by genetic heritage. The frightful thing about this story is that an evolutionary instinct to do the right (moral?) thing can lead to such horrible acts as killing your own family members. It’s clearly not an evolutionary adaptation, but it can be explained by evolutionary psychology.
For more check out my book: Mapping Human Nature and Culture: Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists
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