Focus on Resource Acquisition vs. Distribution Divides Us

The Baumeister-Bushman Hypothesis and Its Limitations

Many of us in the United States worry about the increasing hatred between our two major political parties.

Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman attribute some of this hatred to strong differences of opinion on whether we should be more concerned with acquiring and producing resources or distributing and sharing resources. Their ideas appear in a refereed journal article (Baumeister and Bushman, 2023) and a Psychology Today blog post, Why Do Republicans and Democrats Hate Each Other? In these sources, they point out that people on the political right are overrepresented in occupations involving the acquisition or production of resources, while those on the left are found more often in occupations that involve the distribution of resources. They hope that if they can convince people that resource acquisition and distribution are equally important, the political left and right will become less antagonistic and more cooperative.

I think that Baumeister and Bushman have discovered an important issue that divides us, and that their insight may help decrease the hatred between the left and right. However, by their own admission, their hypothesis about resources is limited. "No doubt, political behavior and conflict are shaped and driven by multiple processes. Indeed, some political conflicts (for example, the death penalty, abortion rights, same sex marriage) are not directly linked to resources." (p. 4).

There may be another serious limitation of Baumeister and Bushman's hypothesis. They claim that dispositions toward acquiring and distributing resources are adaptations that evolved 4 million years ago when our ancestors acquired food by hunting, gathering, and fishing, and manufactured limited stone tools by hand. But their analysis seems more relevant to the past 10,000 to 12,000 years because only with agriculture was it possible to store significant amounts of excess food for later distribution. And significant manufacturing of technology appeared even more recently with the industrial revolution. Baumeister and Bushman should distinguish between the kind of resource acquisition and distribution that occurred in hunter-gatherer bands and the kind of resource acquisition and distribution that occurs in modern human societies. They do admit that their focus is on "the most recent century or two" (p. 4) and note that during the hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution, "everyone except the youngest children participated in amassing food, and everyone received a share of it" (p. 8).

The present blog post presents an alternative evolutionary theory that overcomes the limitations in Baumeister and Bushman's theorizing. The theory of dual morality (Fritz, 2020), which I described in an earlier PT blog post can broaden the theoretical basis of Baumeister and Bushman's hypothesis about resources by considering evolved tendencies in the hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution and by explaining how these evolved tendencies generate both attitudes about resources and other issues that divide the left and right.

Outline of the Theory of Dual Morality

The theory of dual morality assumes that all human beings have the capacity to lean politically left or right, depending upon their environment. Political orientation is what David Buss (1991) called an environment-contingent adaptation—an evolved capacity to adjust to the environment beneficially. Buss uses as a simple physical example of such adaptations, the capacity to form calluses on the palms of your hands and soles of your feet in the presence of environmental friction. No environmental friction—no calluses. Environmental friction—the formation of calluses that protect the skin.

Dual morality claims that, for political orientation, the relevant environmental contingency is whether the environment is relatively safe, with plenty of resources, or the environment is relatively dangerous, with not enough resources for everyone. In the former case, people engage in behaviors typical of the political left, such as equitable sharing of those resources with everyone. But in the latter case, people tend to engage in behaviors typical of the political right, focusing on resource acquisition, prioritizing getting the limited resources to the most important people in the group (those highest in the hierarchy), and refusing outsiders who might want to join the group.

People act on their perceptions of environmental safety and danger, and resource plentifulness and scarcity. In our ancestral environment, those perceptions probably corresponded strongly to objective environmental safety-danger and resource availability. If ancient humans' perceptions did not correspond to reality, they would have behaved inappropriately and perished. Baumeister and Bushman affirmed that we can learn about the environment both directly and from what other people tell us about the environment, "anthropologists largely agree that culture is learned socially," but that "a society would fail if all learning were social. That is, if no one is learning from the environment and people only learn from each other, their information will become obsolete" (p. 4).

In our Internet-connected world, all kinds of off-base perceptions can be formed from online chatter, for example, that immigrants are eating people's pets. Buffered from the environment by culture and technology, we probably form attitudes about safety and environmental richness more often by what we hear from friends and family and see on the Internet and TV than from going out into the world and directly observing the environment. This might be especially true when the messages we get from others confirm what we currently believe, due to the well-established principle of confirmation bias. To the degree that our perceptions are stable, regardless of the objective state of the environment, people will be consistently right-leaning or left-leaning.

Fritz (2020) and Pinker (2018) have documented how objective safety and resource availability have increased over historical time, which implies an overall, average movement toward leftist thinking, which has occurred. Baumeister and Bushman make a similar point when they point out that those on the right have, over time, accepted causes initiated by the left: "It is noteworthy that the left has been very successful in moving the mainstream, so that many citizens who identify with the conservative right today accept such leftist causes as affirmative action, government-supported health care, the right of collective bargaining, wide availability of abortion and divorce, and same-sex marriage." (p. 5).

Evolutionary Psychology Essential Reads

Sex Before Sexes: The Evolutionary Case for the Female First

What’s in a Color? For Humans, a Great Deal

The Broad Scope of the Theory of Dual Morality

The third edition of Our Human Herds: The Theory of Dual Morality (Fritz, 2020) contains nearly 1100 pages dedicated to the applications of the theory. From the basic assumption that people lean toward the perception that "we are safe and there is enough for all," or "we are in danger or there is not enough for everyone" Fritz explains how these leanings underlies differences in the way the right and left think about groups and individuals, family, country, God, philosophy, science and technology, art and creativity, pleasure and happiness, war, education, politics, suicide, murder, abortion, history, and a host of other issues. Space limitations for this blog post disallow addressing how dual morality covers all these issues; the reader will have to consult the book for details. The point is that dual morality can incorporate Baumeister and Bushman's relatively narrow view on how attitudes about resources divide the left and right, expanding this view to cover a host of issues that divide the left and the right. If the theory of dual morality is correct and enough people become familiar with it, perhaps the left and right will learn to get along better.