Perdoem o inglês (disponibilizarei uma tradução em breve) e leiam este texto.
Achei interessante essa estranha iniciativa norte-americana da psicologia evolucionista, com constructos e variáveis de difícil definição e tecendo considerações sóciopoliticas evolucionistas que estão longe de ser conservadoras dentro de seu contexto cultural nacional.
A premissa é curiosa: fazer um correlação entre o coeficiente intelectual dos participantes de um grupo experimental e sua orientação política; ou seja seriam os individuos mais inteligentes, ou menos, de esquerda ou de direita?
Antes de nos atermos a esses dois conceitos de orientação de performance e discurso político tal qual os concebemos no Brasil, com seus conceitos ancorados nos cânones do pensamento político europeu, temos que ter em mente que esta é uma pesquisa norte-americana. As duas tendências política em dialética aqui são o conservadorismo e o liberalismo, o segundo sendo definido como "uma autêntica preocupação por outros não geneticamente relacionados e o desejo de contribuir com maiores quantidades de recursos privados para o bem estar social desses outros."
O resultado? Curioso e ainda mais devido ao discurso que constrói as considerações evolucionistas acerca da superioridade intelecutal de pessoas de ...
Leia o texto.
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It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology
precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to
conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the
welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute
larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others.
In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually
translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward
the government
and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social
welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually
oppose them.
Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like
other species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic toward their
genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of their deme (a group of
intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group. They are not designed to be
altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are not
likely ever to meet or interact with. This is largely because our
ancestors lived in a small band of 50-150 genetically related individuals, and
large cities and nations with thousands and millions of people are themselves
evolutionarily novel.
The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World
Cultures, which describes all human cultures known to anthropology (more than
1,500) in great detail, as well as extensive primary ethnographies of
traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in
these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources, especially food,
is quite common and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while
trade with neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that
people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members
of other tribes.
Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the
very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not
qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its
absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used as
modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to infer that
sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or is not
likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part of our ancestral life.
Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the
Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more
likely than less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.
Analyses of large representative samples, from both the United States
and the United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more
intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less
intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those who
identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood
IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in
early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.
Even though past studies show that women are more liberal than men, and
blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood intelligence
on adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either sex or race. So it
appears that, as the
Hypothesis predicts, more intelligent individuals are more likely to
espouse the value of liberalism than less intelligent individuals, possibly
because liberalism is evolutionarily novel and conservatism is evolutionarily
familiar.
The primary means that citizens of capitalist democracies contribute
their private resources for the welfare of the genetically unrelated others is
paying taxes to the government for its social welfare programs. The fact
that conservatives have been shown to give more money to charities than
liberals is not inconsistent with the prediction from the
Hypothesis; in fact, it supports the prediction. Individuals
can normally choose and select the beneficiaries of their charity donations.
For example, they can choose to give money to the victims of the earthquake in
Haiti, because they want to help them, but not to give money to the victims of
the earthquake in Chile, because they don’t want to help them. In
contrast, citizens do not have any control over whom the money they pay in
taxes benefit. They cannot individually choose to pay taxes to fund
Medicare, because they want to help elderly white people, but not AFDC, because
they don’t want to help poor black single mothers. This may precisely be
why conservatives choose to give more money to individual charities of their
choice while opposing higher taxes.
Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent
complaints among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that
liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other
social institutions. The
Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their
complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the
academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life
(such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals
control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals
are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more
likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel)
modern life.
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