Pathfinders – Dark factors and dodgy populists
With all the far-right demagogues, mad dictators and murderous wars in the news, people may be inclined to lean into their own confirmation bias and say ‘What do you expect? People are just evil’. You can’t make a silk purse or a functional liberal democracy, much less world socialism, out of a sow’s ear. But a new Copenhagen study of nearly 2 million people across 183 countries, as well as all 50 US states, concludes that people are more likely to be nasty, or in the terminology, display ‘aversive, “dark” personality characteristics such as selfishness or spitefulness’ if they happen to live in ‘prior aversive societal conditions’ (ASC), which is to say ‘societies characterized by corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’.
According to the research authors, there has been a lot of previous work on the various types of aversive behaviour, and ‘Recent advances in personality research have provided strong evidence for the existence of a single disposition underlying all aversive traits.’ They define this disposition, which they call ‘The Dark Factor of Personality’, or ‘D’ for short, as ‘the general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility—disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others – accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications’.
Thus, D is ‘the essence of aversive (“dark”) personality traits such as narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism’, so the study looked at data from multiple countries and states in combination with individual behavioural questionnaires. It found higher ‘D’ levels in high-ASC countries, ie, ‘in societies where rules are broken without consequences and where the conditions for many citizens are bad’, such as Indonesia and Mexico, and interestingly also Louisiana and Nevada. D was correspondingly lower in countries or states perceived to have better societal conditions, for example Denmark and New Zealand, and US states such as Utah and Vermont.
They go on to discuss the various ways that this correlation reinforces itself, through ‘customs, daily practices, norms’, ‘situational affordances and demands’, and ‘state-behaviour feedback loops that reinforce or discourage certain behaviors’.
So the society you grow up in is a strong influential factor on your character. Well, ‘duh’, you might say. Everyone knows that a badly treated dog is more likely to be savage and dangerous than a well-treated one. Even those hippy chimps, bonobos, have been known to turn violent when confined in zoos. But from a socialist perspective, this study is worth noting. Last month’s Socialist Standard cover feature dealt with that favourite go-to of the anti-socialist, human nature, and the received wisdom that the human ‘inner demon’ is only kept in check by authoritarian rule. If that were really true, socialism would be impossible.
What the Copenhagen study shows is that humans have what it calls ‘adaptive phenotypic plasticity’, which is to say that we model our behaviour on our social surroundings. So the correlation of high state-level ‘corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’ with high individual levels of anti-social traits must be largely causative too. Individuals wouldn’t be antisocial if the society they live in wasn’t also antisocial. Even so, couldn’t the causation be the other way around, ie, that antisocial people make for an antisocial society? This hardly seems likely, given that antisocial personality disorders are estimated to affect only around 1-4 percent of the population . Mind you, the capitalist rich elite are probably only 1-4 percent of the population, and they are a walking, talking antisocial disorder.
None of this constitutes empirical proof, of course. The problem with personal questionnaires is that one can’t be certain how truthful the respondents are being. Are people in ‘nasty’ cultures generally more prone to being nasty, or are they simply less inhibited about admitting it, compared to ‘nice’ cultures where such behaviour is presumably frowned upon and thus potentially more covert? This is the same subjectivity problem that plagues ‘Happiness Index’ and many other such lists. A 2016 list of the 63 most and least empathetic countries, based on the same kind of personal questionnaires, revealed that Ecuador was the most empathetic, and Lithuania the least. This is bafflingly counter-intuitive. Ecuador has experienced years of ‘iron fist’ authoritarianism, and high levels of drug-related gang violence, whereas Lithuania has low crime, affordable living costs and a high standard of healthcare. Even stranger is the fact that Saudi Arabia, notorious for public executions and judicial maimings, scores second place, and the UAE, another authoritarian monarchy with no democracy and little press freedom, scores fifth. One might attempt an intellectual contortion by proposing that workers in violent or repressive states are more likely to stick together. But Denmark, once again near the top at number 4, is very hard to explain, while its not wildly dissimilar neighbours Sweden, Norway and Finland wallow deep down in the low forties and fifties, along with the UK. Can one really learn anything useful from such studies?
Perhaps more encouraging for socialists and others is a recent Basel study which looked at 30 years of data from 26 European countries to determine the stability or otherwise of populist governments, or those including a significant populist element. They focused on governments whose ‘term of office ended prematurely’, interpreting this ‘as a sign of instability.’ The study found ‘that cabinets with populist parties break up more often and sooner—regardless of the type of coalition’ and that ‘The probability of early government dissolution is about 60% to 65% higher for alliances involving populist parties than for those without.’ This wasn’t about the specific left or right-wing ideologies though, it was about how populists tend to operate. They have a strong centralised leadership, with little internal democracy, and they adopt radical and uncompromising positions that no other groups can work with. ‘Populism proved to be a constant indicator of government breakdown throughout the study period, irrespective of other influencing factors such as economic crises’.
To sum up, there is evidence that a prosocial society like socialism fosters prosocial behaviour, and that populist governments tend to collapse. Take that, Nigel Farage.
PJS