Egalitarianism: psychological and socio-ecological foundations

Abstract

Individual differences in social and political attitudes have their roots in evolved motives for basic kinds of social relationships. Egalitarianism is the preference for the application of the one of these relational modelsequality-over that of another-dominance-to the context of societal intergroup relations. We present recent research on the origins of egalitarianism in terms of universal social cognitive mechanisms (activated as early as infancy), systematic (partly heritable) individual differences, and the affordances and constraints of one's immediate and macro-structural context. Just as the psychological impact of socioeconomic conditions depends on the mind being equipped to perceive and navigate them, so the expression of the evolved underpinnings of inequality concerns depends critically on social and societal experiences. Highlights: • Societal politics and ideology are undergirded by basic relational strategies rooted in dilemmas of resource distribution. • Core representations and motives for equality and hierarchy emerge in infancy. • Individual differences in egalitarian strategies manifest in infancy, stabilize in adolescence, and are partly heritable. • The extent, consensuality, and predictive power of egalitarianism depend on societal context. • A multi-level approach is needed to account for both the biological and socio-ecological foundations of egalitarianism.

Political games of attack and defence

“…Conflict emerges when the interests and values of interdependent (groups of ) individuals are incompatible [3,4]. When political, conflict often revolves around changing the distribution of power and resources between societal groups [3,12,18,19,26,27]. Political conflict thus involves, for example, opposing standpoints on economic policy for taxation and the governance of public goods like education, or on social policy with regard to traditional social and religious values, justice, minority rights or freedom of speech [12,28].…”

“…individuals high in social dominance orientation) may fight for changing current socio-economic policy geared at creating equality, a change that is opposed by agents who reject inequality (i.e. individuals low in social dominance orientation) [26,27,40]. Depending on the status quo, those high or low in social dominance may seek to revise the governing principles that promote equality or inequality among groups or, alternatively, defend the principles that promote inequality or equality among groups (figure 1b).…”

“…Extant work has identified psychological differences between people endorsing leftist versus rightist political ideologies. People endorsing more liberal ideology typically favour policy that reduces inequality between societal groups and endorse forward change more than those endorsing more conservative ideology [11,12,18,19,26,27] (also see figure 1a,b). Our analysis clarifies that people with more liberal political ideologies may, however, not only endorse forward change [11,12], but also, as 'modernists', resist backward change [35].…”

Separation/connection procedures: From cleansing behavior to numerical cognition

“…In developmental psychology, the core cognition approach argues that infants' learning is guided by a stock of innate primitives that include conceptual representations (Carey, 2009;Spelke, 2017). This includes basic cognitive concepts (e.g., magnitude and agency) and social concepts (e.g., authority and equality; Sheehy-Skeffington & Thomsen, 2020;Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011): Although large and up imply power universally in general, exactly what needs to be large and up is learned from culture (Schubert, 2020). Interestingly, the approach assumes that these core concepts are combined (Spelke, 2017) or complemented by culturally driven learning (Carey, 2009).…”

Evolution and egalitarianism: A behavioral account of managers' performance pay decisions

“…In the same way that individuals' risk preferences, economic tastes, or personality characteristics vary, so too do individuals' preferences for egalitarianism (see, e.g., Bartling, Fehr, Maréchal, & Schunk, 2009;Balafoutas, Kerschbamer, & Sutter, 2012;Erlei, 2008). This view of managerial preferences as exogenous, and therefore resistant to organizational and cultural socialization processes, is supported by evidence that individual differences in egalitarianism manifest early in life, stabilize during adolescence, and are in part genetically transmitted (Batrićević & Littvay, 2017;Funk, Smith, Alford, Hibbing, Eaton, Krueger, Eaves, & Hibbing, 2013;Sheehy-Skeffington & Thomsen, 2019).…”