Two hypotheses about belief in high gods supportive of human morality were tested with data from the Ethnographic Atlas and the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. A significant positive relation between the size of societies and such a belief is demonstrated, and this relation appears to be independent of both regional differences and differences in stratification of the societies. On the other hand, stratification itself is also significantly related with the belief in high gods supportive of human morality, but this relation could not be shown to be independent of regional differences or differences in size.

In parliamentary committee oversight hearings on fiscal policy, monetary policy, and financial stability, where verbal deliberation is the focus, nonverbal communication may be crucial in the acceptance or rejection of arguments proffered by policymakers. Systematic qualitative coding of these hearings in the 2010–15 U.K. Parliament finds the following: (1) facial expressions, particularly in the form of anger and contempt, are more prevalent in fiscal policy hearings, where backbench parliamentarians hold frontbench parliamentarians to account, than in monetary policy or financial stability hearings, where the witnesses being held to account are unelected policy experts; (2) comparing committees across chambers, hearings in the House of Lords committee yield more reassuring facial expressions relative to hearings in the House of Commons committee, suggesting a more relaxed and less adversarial context in the former; and (3) central bank witnesses appearing before both the Lords and Commons committees tend toward expressions of appeasement, suggesting a willingness to defer to Parliament.

The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 bans the development and possession of biological and toxin weapons. Yet the threat that a country may acquire and use biological and toxin weapons (BTW) persists—not all nations are party to the treaty, and doubts remain about the compliance of countries who are. Seventy of the 118 nations who are parties to the treaty met in Geneva from September 9 to 27, 1991, to review the performance of the treaty and to grapple with its weaknesses. This was the third such conference convened since the treaty went into force in 1975. The relatively low level of participation in the Third Review Conference was not the result of any protest, but most likely a reflection of disinterest or neglect.

Disgust has been consistently associated with greater political conservatism. Two explanations have been proposed for this link. According to a pathogen threat model, disgust serves a pathogen-avoidance function, encouraging more conservative ideology, whereas a sexual strategies model suggests that this link is explained by variability in short-term versus long-term mating goals. In two preregistered studies using a college student and community sample (total N = 1,950), we examined whether experimentally manipulating pathogen threat and mate availability produced differences in political ideology and whether these differences were explained by disgust and sociosexual attitudes. Across both studies, we did not find evidence that manipulating pathogen threat or mate availability resulted in change in political ideology. In Study 1, manipulating mate availability was indirectly associated with greater political conservativism through stronger sociosexual attitudes that favor monogamy. These findings failed to replicate in Study 2. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

Social scientists have begun to uncover links between sleep and political attitudes and behaviors. This registered report considers how diurnal morning-night associations relate to political ideology using data from the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences Study, a large-scale online data collection effort. Measures encompass perceived cultural attitudes and social pressures regarding diurnal preferences and explicit and implicit measures of both morning-night attitudes and morning-night self-concepts. Together, the analyses demonstrate a relationship between morning orientation and conservatism for explicit morning-night self-concepts and, to a lesser extent, explicit morning-night attitudes. This relationship is not present for implicit associations, and associations with perceived cultural attitudes and social pressure are also largely absent. This study reinforces the notion that morningness and eveningness as explicit identities are associated with political ideology.

The World Commission on Dams marks a moment of real progress in the large-dams controversy. It does so in at least two ways: as a statement of the norms that should govern dam-related decision-making and as a process of dialogue between dam proponents and critics. Whether this progress translates into consistently better dam-related decisionmaking is a question that remains to be answered. Also unanswered is the larger question of whether the WCD experience will prove to be a replicable model for other environment-development controversies. The Commission emerged from a curious situation in which both dam builders and dam critics felt stymied in their ability to achieve their aims, and in which both saw opportunities in the idea of stakeholder dialogue. Such windows of opportunity may prove rare. The skillful leadership and interpersonal dynamics among the commissioners that helped forge a consensus document may be difficult to reproduce.

Local and regional environments have for many centuries been seen as, or as being composed of, “natural resources,” which have generally been considered fully available for human use, irrespective of any use to which other species, purposefully or not, might put them. The global environment has more recently, though less routinely, been seen in this way. I examine full-human-use arguments in three widely credited philosophical traditions: the Judeo-Christian-liberal, the Aristotelian-Cartesian-rationalist, and the utilitarian or neoclassical economic. I find each tradition's full-human-use argument unsatisfactory. I then discuss, and ultimately recommend, an alternative, an all-species-use argument based on Albert Schweitzer's much admired but seldom adopted reverence-for-life ethic. I find revealed by this alternative argument a previously unnamed good, one worthy of honor, protection, and enlargement; I call this good “the commonwealth of life.” In conclusion, I consider important implications of accepting commonwealth-of-life reasoning, including foundational changes in ethics.

Background: If successfully implemented and enduring, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) stands to expand health insurance access in absolute terms, reduce inter-group disparities in that access, and reduce exposure to the financial vulnerabilities illness entails. Its durability—meaning both avoidance of outright retrenchment and fidelity to its policy aims—is thus of scholarly interest. Past literature suggests that social constructions of a policy’s beneficiaries may impact durability.

Questions: This paper first describes media portrayals of ACA beneficiaries with an eye toward answering three descriptive questions: (1) Do portrayals depict beneficiaries as economically heterogeneous? (2) Do portrayals focus attention on groups that have acquired new political relevance due to the ACA, such as young adults? (3) What themes that have served as messages about beneficiary “deservingness” in past social policy are most frequent in ACA beneficiary portrayals? The paper then assesses how the portrayal patterns that these questions uncover may work both for and against the ACA’s durability, finding reasons for confidence as well as caution.

Methods: Using manual and automated methods, this paper analyzes newspaper text from August 2013 through January 2014 to trace portrayals of two ACA “target populations” before and during the new law’s first open-enrollment period: those newly eligible for Medicaid, and those eligible for subsidies to assist in the purchase of private health insurance under the ACA. This paper also studies newspaper text portrayals of two groups informally crafted by the ACA in this timeframe: those gaining health insurance and those losing it.

Results: The text data uncover the following answers to the three descriptive questions for the timeframe studied: (1) Portrayals may underplay beneficiaries’ economic heterogeneity. (2) Portrayals pay little attention to young adults. (3) Portrayals emphasize themes of workforce participation, economic self-sufficiency, and insider status. Health status, age, gender, and race/ethnicity appear to receive little attention.

Implications and Conclusions: Existing literature suggests that these portrayal patterns may both support and limit ACA durability. In favor of durability is that ACA beneficiaries are depicted in terms that have been associated with deservingness in past American social policy—particularly being cast as workers and insiders. Yet, the results also give three reasons for caution. First, ACA insurance-losers are also portrayed as deserving. Second, it is unclear how the portrayal patterns found may impact the durability of the ACA’s efforts to cut insurance disparities by age, health status, and especially race/ethnicity. Third, portrayals’ strong casting of beneficiaries as workers, and limited attention to beneficiaries’ economic heterogeneity and to young adults, may do little to help cultivate beneficiary political engagement around the ACA.

American social scientists rarely ever use evolutionary concepts to explain behavior, despite the potential of such concepts to elucidate major social problems. I argue that this observation can be understood as the product of three influences: an ideologically narrowed political liberalism; a fear of “Social Darwinism” as a scientific idea, rather than a scientific apostasy; and a widely believed criticism of evolutionary thinking as deterministic, reductionistic, and Panglossian. I ask what is to be done to encourage social scientists to learn and to apply evolutionary lessons. I answer with four solutions. First, evolutionary social scientists should more effectively educate their non-evolutionary students and colleagues. Second, they should publicize, even popularize, accessible refutations of perennially misleading criticisms. Third, they should more credibly assure skeptics that evolutionary theory not only keeps the “social” in social science but better explains social behavior than can any individual-level theory, such as rational-choice theory. Fourth, they should recall that biology took generations to become Darwinian, and they must understand that the social sciences may take as long to become evolutionary.

The current research climate provides an auspicious opportunity to undertake foundational investigations at the intersection of the natural and social sciences to produce transformative work with broad import for society. A great deal of relevant work examining the genetic, neurobiological and neuropsychological bases of social and political behavior has already taken place. But much of this work has been conducted simultaneously in a variety of different fields and disciplines. In addition to needlessly duplicating some research paradigms, thus wasting time and resources, such efforts have often also lacked a coherent core of social and political models and theories to guide such inquiry. With proper coordination and leverage, such efforts can achieve tremendous gains in terms of harnessing the skills, methods, and models of the natural sciences in service of addressing some of the most destructive and endemic social and political problems which plague our planet.

Analyses of American public opinion about abortion rarely consider what light other cases might shed on the U.S. controversy. This paper argues that there are striking parallels between the politics of abortion in the U.S. and Canada. These parallels extend beyond courts and interest groups; they also apply to public opinion. Gallup data indicate aggregate similarities in how both publics view the legalization of abortion in the last fifteen years, and World Values Survey data show that Americans and Canadians hold similar views about abortion even when the controversy is lifted out of its legal context. Probit analysis demonstrates that the same variables similarly predict where these publics stand on abortion when health and discretionary aspects of the debate are taken into account. Postmaterialist value orientations may provide important clues about what future direction the abortion debate in the U.S. may take.

The emergence of the state and similar forms of large-scale, stratified society from the matrix of primitive egalitarian social relations poses a problem sui generis for political anthropology. On the one hand, since the Neolithic, hierarchical stratification and political domination have evolved in a relatively short time from the patterns of kinship bonds and ephemeral leadership characteristic of primitive society (Service, 1975; Carneiro, 1978). On the other hand, the extent of the division of labor and of hierarchical stratification in even the most primitive corporate political groups is significantly greater than that found in egalitarian bands and tribes. This difference lends support to very specific explanations such as the theories of cataclysmic sociocultural change of political anthropology (Service, 1975:15).

This study examines the cognitive and affective factors of candidate appraisal by manipulating candidate attractiveness and levels of issue agreement with voters. Drawing upon research in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this analysis proposes that automatic processing of physical appearance predisposes affective disposition toward more attractive candidates, thereby influencing cognitive processing of issue information. An experimental design presented attractive and unattractive candidates who were either liberal or conservative in a mock primary election. The data show strong partial effects for appearance on vote intention, an interaction between appearance and issue agreement, and a tendency for voters to assimilate the dissimilar views of attractive candidates. We argue that physical appearance is important in primary elections when the differences in issue positions and ideology between candidates is small.

What causes people to see their political attitudes in a moral light? One answer is that attitude moralization results from associating one’s attitude stance with feelings of disgust. To test the possibility that disgust moralizes, the current study used a high-powered preregistered design looking at within-person change in moral conviction paired with an experimental manipulation of disgust or anger (versus control). Results from the preregistered analyses found that we successfully induced anger but not disgust; however, our manipulation had no effect on moral conviction. Additional exploratory analyses investigating whether emotion and harm predicted increases in moral conviction over time found that neither disgust, anger, nor sadness had an effect on moralization, whereas perceptions of harm did predict moralization. Our findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current theory and research into attitude moralization.

During the 1984 presidential campaign, questions were raised concerning President Reagan's cognitive integrity in the televised debates. He hesitated before answering questions, appeared to lack attentiveness, and had difficulty remembering and finding words to accurately express his thoughts. These signs, sometimes indicative of early dementia, were reportedly intensified during the 1987 Reykjavik Conference, at which time the President was criticized by James Reston–admittedly an unsympathetic critic–the New York Times columnist. According to Reston, there may be “a human problem at the top of the government [that] … will have to be addressed with uttermost sympathy and care” (December 21, 1986). These questions were again raised by the Iran-Contra affair. For the President of the United States to have even a hint of cognitive dysfunction carries profound implications.