Evolutionary Psychology

Judging by Appearances

/30 Comments/in , /by

How to Judge People by What They Look Like
Edward Dutton
Self-published, 2018
107 pages, $14.19 paperback, free in Kindle

Anthropologist Ed Dutton will be familiar to some readers for his work with Richard Lynn (including the book Race and Sport) and as an occasional contributor to The Occidental Quarterly. He has just published a short book on physiognomy, i.e., the relation between physical features and behavioral tendencies.

We often hear that it is not possible to judge others from appearance, but there is plenty of evidence that we all do so, and not only in the context of mate-seeking. Dutton draws our attention to the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the poet carefully describes the physical appearance of each of the pilgrims, matching these with their personalities as revealed in their behavior and the stories they tell. The Reeve’s thinness of build is supposed to suit his irritability and quickness to anger. The Wife of Bath has a gap between her front teeth to suggest her sexual aggressiveness. There was a whole body of physiognomic teaching in Medieval Europe, where the subject was taught in universities until the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, much of medieval physiognomic lore had an astrological basis, limiting its scientific usefulness.

Might it not be time to reopen the question?

In 1966 psychologists at the University of Michigan conducted an experiment on 84 undergraduates who had never met. They had to sit in complete silence with each other for 15 minutes and rate each other on personality traits, simply by appearance. Each participant also sat a personality test. For three traits — Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness — the students‟ appearance-based judgements significantly positively correlated with the actual personality scores (Passini & Warren, 1966).

A later follow up study replicated the results for Extraversion and Conscientiousness using only mugshots. Read more

Trump’s lewd video: An evolutionary comment

/75 Comments/in , /by

What Trump said:

“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p—y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

So now we have a media frenzy, the theme of which is that Trump has shown himself to be a horrible sexist and abuser of women. “Rape culture in a nutshell” as a writer in the Huffington Post would have it.

As usual, it’s a moral indictment. Of course, moral indictments of Trump have been routine ever since he entered the race, often centered on race and immigration. But now the chorus is deafening. So much so that quite a few Republicans (mainly those who never supported him or did so only reluctantly — i.e., the GOP establishment cuckservatives) are now (surprise!) deserting him.

The implicit assumption here is that the women involved are passive, helpless creatures who are being assaulted by the big bad hairy ape. Heaven forfend! Fainting couch feminism at its finest.

Spare me. Read more

Mechanisms for Cuckservatives and Other Misguided White People

/71 Comments/in , , /by

whites-marching-e1438198072184

The cuckservative meme is beautifully derisive, connoting a man who is cuckholded by his wife and thus perhaps raising another man’s children. The term, or the more generic ‘cuck’ (which could also apply to White liberals), is quite appropriate for Whites across the mainstream political spectrum who are aiding and abetting the process of White dispossession, whether by legal or illegal immigration. (A poll of 100 House Republican “conservatives” found that only 1 favored decreases in legal immigration, so we can conclude that pretty much the entire mainstream Republican party are cuckservatives.) Donald Trump is indeed a breath of fresh air.

The cuckservative idea implies parasitism, and in fact the word ‘cuckold’ comes from a classic parasite, the cuckoo bird. There’s a terrific video of cuckoo birds eliciting feeding from their cuckolded parents after pushing the eggs of the hosts out of the  nest; especially striking are the much smaller warblers feeding their parasites.

Parasites know how to push the buttons of the host. Many animals are basically reflex machines where a particular stimulus automatically results in a preprogrammed response. The cuckoo opens its mouth to be fed and it doubtless looks just like the reed warbler chick’s mouth, so the warbler’s reflex to feed it kicks in. Like your knee joint responding when the doctor hits it with the rubber hammer. Read more

The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation

/23 Comments/in , /by

Graph
The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation
Max Hartshorn, Artem Kaznatcheev and Thomas Shultz (2013)
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 16 (3) 7

Abstract

Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies.

Comment: Ethnocentrism among Whites has been pathologized for decades, while humanitarianism among Whites is constantly encouraged by eliciting spasms of guilt about the White past of colonialism, conquest, slavery, etc., as well as by eliciting the closely related emotion of empathy for non-Whites, particularly refugees and immigrants. Since this anti-White war is massively incentivized, there is no shortage of traitors and selfish Whites willing to aid the ethnocentric strategies of others by, e.g., cooperating with the Israel Lobby, being a cuckservative talking head on Fox News, having a well-paid position with a pro-immigration group, or being a university administrator promoting anti-White indoctrination and special programs for non-Whites — among a myriad of others, even though these are losing strategies in the long run for their people.

At the same time, the ethnocentrism of non-Whites is encouraged and is glaringly obvious. It’s not hard to see the end result.

Charleston, cognitive psychology, and media influence

/78 Comments/in , , /by

It’s worth thinking about some basic psychology in relation to the Charleston events. Cognitive psychologists study heuristics that people use to make judgments about  the likelihood of events that are complexly determined — things like airplane crashes or shark attacks. A heuristic relevant to Charleston is the availability heuristic, where people make judgments and form attitudes based on their memories of past events. Such memories are greatly influenced by media coverage. From Wikipedia: 

After seeing news stories about child abductions, people may judge that the likelihood of this event is greater. Media coverage can help fuel a person’s example bias with widespread and extensive coverage of unusual events, such as homicide or airline accidents, and less coverage of more routine, less sensational events, such as common diseases or car accidents. For example, when asked to rate the probability of a variety of causes of death, people tend to rate “newsworthy” events as more likely because they can more readily recall an example from memory. Moreover, unusual and vivid events like homicides, shark attacks, or lightning are more often reported in mass media than common and un-sensational causes of death like common diseases.[9]

For example, many people think that the likelihood of dying from shark attacks is greater than that of dying from being hit by falling airplane parts, when more people actually die from falling airplane parts. When a shark attack occurs, the deaths are widely reported in the media whereas deaths as a result of being hit by falling airplane parts are rarely reported in the media.[10]

The application to Charleston is obvious. There is wall-to-wall media coverage, so people will easily recall what happened there. Such memories will be easily available to influence attitudes and judgments. Whereas Black-on-White crime motivated by racial hatred is vastly more common than the reverse, such events are rarely reported in the national media, and even local media typically ignore racial designations and downplay racial motivation in such attacks. Read more

On the HBD Chick Interview

/40 Comments/in , /by

The following is from an interview of HBD Chick that appeared on the Hoover Hog. I should say that I am an admirer of HBD Chick and follow her on Twitter.

Hoover Hog: I think it’s fair to say that one of the most polarizing figures in the HBD-o-sphere is Kevin MacDonald, whose work is mostly concerned with the evolutionary psychology of Judaism. I remember reading his book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (long before that Cochran/Harpending/Hardy paper), and thinking that he made a fairly plausible case that Jewish identity could be understood as an evolutionary outcome. But when I got around to reading The Culture of Critique – a genuinely captivating book, whatever its merits – I came away with the impression that it was ultimately more of a polemic than a scientific treatise. Do you see value in MacDonald’s work, or is he off the reservation? More generally – and I could just as easily cite the work of Richard Lynn or Frank Salter in this context – how do you approach scholarly work that seems to be politically motivated?

HBD-Chick: Before I answer any of those questions, I’m just going to come right out and say that I admire Kevin MacDonald (and Richard Lynn and Frank Salter) very much.  Anyone who stands their ground in the face of sometimes truly vitriolic political correctness deserves respect as far as I am concerned. I mean, as far as I can tell (and I haven’t read all of his books), MacDonald has compiled plenty of historical evidence in support of his theories. His theories may be wrong, or you may disagree with his theories or his approach, but he’s not making stuff up off the top of his head. (If he were, that’d be a different story.) If people object to what he has to say, they simply need to refute his evidence and/or argumentation. It’s really that simple. There’s no need for protests in his classroom or personal attacks in newspapers, etc., etc.

I don’t think MacDonald’s work is off the reservation at all – or if it is, so, too, is the work of people like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond (and many others!). I’ve only read A People that Shall Dwell Alone and three chapters from The Culture of Critique that happen to be floating around online – the one on Boasian anthropology, the one on the Frankfurt School, and the one on Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy. I haven’t read Separation and Its Discontents at all. I don’t recall thinking that The Culture of Critique was very polemical, but perhaps that comes out more in the conclusion/other chapters (?).

KM: I am surprised that anyone would think CofC was polemical (I discuss why CofC had not gotten much traction for people like Hoover Hog here). A polemic on that topic could never have been published by an academic press.

I wouldn’t hesitate in reading MacDonald’s books even if he does have an ulterior political motive for writing them for the same reason that I still read Jared Diamond’s and other leftist academics’ books:  because there’s often a lot to be learned from them! And now I’m talking about simply acquiring knowledge – getting my hands on new info or data – although I suppose one could also learn something about what motivates people to write academic books in the manner that they do.  (~_^)  Maybe MacDonald does primarily want to convey his social/political message in his books. So what? And Gould didn’t? It’s not the way I’d like it to work, but as one of my high school teachers once said – she was a nun, by the way – books are for inspiring thought, not dictating it.

KM: For the record, I started out on the left during the 1960s madness and only came to my present views after a lot of reading. Because I was intellectually on the left, the whole thrust of my work beginning in the 1980s was on thinking about culture from an evolutionary perspective and how culture could trump evolution. My first interest was in understanding European family patterns, particularly what Richard Alexander called socially imposed monogamy, where the emphasis was on how the mating patterns of wealthy, powerful males were regulated by social pressures emanating from powerful institutions and lower status males. (This work eventually emphasized both culture and our unique biological heritage.)  Evolutionary psychology tends to theorize in a vacuum in which sexual behavior is determined by evolved modules, with no consideration of how social/cultural processes involving conflicts of interest over mating can affect the actual mating behavior of even very powerful individuals (like European monarchs).   Because of this interest in the social regulation of mating, it was a short step to the idea that groups could regulate themselves — whence the idea of cultural group selection which forms the basis of A People That Shall Dwell Alone. Much of PTSDA describes how traditional Jewish groups regulated behavior within Jewish groups and between Jews and non-Jews. I chose Judaism as the case study because it is so well documented and only much later became a critic of Jewish behavior because, quite frankly, I came to realize that there are and have always been conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews. These conflicts assume center stage in Separation and Its Discontents and, of course, The Culture of Critique. No evolutionist should be surprised that ethnic groups often have conflicting interests — or that conflicts of interest can range from territorial struggles to the ivied halls of elite academic institutions. The tragedy of evolutionary science is that, apart from Frank Salter and me, the vast majority of evolutionists completely ignore selection against their own people that is occurring throughout the West.  Read more

Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…Racially Polarizing Politics, Despite MSM Efforts To Lull Whites

/1 Comment/in , /by

This article is also posted at VDARE.com.

In all the Main Stream Media propaganda about the desperate need for an Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill, you never hear that the bill will speed up the day when whites are a minority. The research of Northwestern University psychologists Maureen A. Craig [Email her] (a white woman) and Jennifer A. Richeson [Email her](an African-American) shows why [On the Precipice of a “Majority-Minority” America: Perceived Status Threat From the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White Americans’ Political Ideology, Psychological Science April 3, 2014]. Shockingly, it turns out that the great majority of white Americans are not at all like neocon Ben Wattenberg who famously asserted that “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.” [The Good News Is The Bad News Is Wrong, p. 84.] In fact, white Americans are afraid of becoming a minority. Being told about their impending minority status provokes whites to endorse attitudes linked to the political Right.

The title of the Craig-Richeson paper is itself interesting. The standard dictionary definition of “precipice” is “the brink of a dangerous or disastrous situation”—which is exactly what Cassandras have been saying about the impending minority status of whites. Giving up majority status in a democracy has obvious grave implications. No ethnic group in history has ever voluntarily become a minority. Israel, for example, is fixated on Palestinian birthrates and absolutely opposed to a “Right of Return” for dispossessed Palestinians. Given that Palestinians are already a majority in the “de facto state of Israel,” a one-state solution would mean that, if Israel remained a democracy, the Palestinians would govern. And that would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Being a minority is always problematic given the reality of ethnic conflict throughout history. This is particularly so when groups harbor historical grudges (e.g., slavery and Jim Crow for African Americans, anti-Semitism for Jews). It is especially worrisome in the case of America because the grievance industry promoted by elites in the MSM, the legal profession, and   academe systematically blames “White racism” for all the problems of non-Whites.

It’s one thing to be demonized when you are the majority, but a far different thing when you are the minority. Read more