Human Nature And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The topic of human nature encompasses a very large body of philosophical and psychological literature. For the most part, observers discussing human nature refer to those endogenous aspects of genetic, biological, and psychological functioning that rest inside the individual and appear immutable. For example, a person’s physical appearance might be considered part of human nature, including the color of an individual’s eyes or hair. Similarly, aspects of individual character or temperament can be seen to reflect a person’s basic nature; some people seem more anxious, depressed, or energetic than others from birth, regardless of the situations they confront.

This phenomenon is most often contrasted with that of nurture, which concerns those features of socialization and environmental stimuli assumed to control, constrain, or potentiate particular aspects of human behavior. This traditional view presents a false dichotomy between human nature and nurture. Since the late twentieth century, advances in behavior genetics and neuroscience, working within a theoretically evolutionary paradigm, demonstrate the truly constitutive relationship between human genes, brain development, environmental interactions, and subsequent political and social behavior.

Human Nature As Dichotomized Variable

Political science, in general, has had difficulty clarifying the concept of human nature. Human nature has often been ignored, conceptualized in narrow and unrealistic terms, or as neorealists argue, assumed irrelevant in the face of institutional constraint. This partly results from the fact that the discipline remains invested in its ability to intervene and change outcomes. If a structure or institution appears responsible for undesirable outcomes, such as poverty, child abuse, or violence, then changing that system can mitigate the problem. However, if the cause lies inside human instinctual responses, change becomes harder to achieve.

Implicit models of human nature exist in many political science theories, although they often remain unexamined. For example, classical realists such as Hans Morganthau assume a fearful, power hungry, and rational human nature. Moreover, human nature is assumed to be endogenous, fixed, and given. Once endowed, it remains unchanging regardless of specific environmental contingencies. For structural realists like Kenneth Waltz, a static conception of human nature renders its worth meaningless, because universal and constant features cannot explain variation in outcome. In both the classical and structural realist approach, there exists an implicit claim that human nature manifests universal tendencies, with little individual variation.

Other political science models tend to ignore the importance of human nature, arguing that explanations for important behavior reside solely in environmental factors, subject to intervention and improvement. Many institutional models, as well as prominent theories of voting, rest on implicit notions that while human nature cannot be changed, human behavior remains amenable to modification when properly incentivized or constrained by the external environment. For example, economic models that presume human behavior can be economically incentivized may not be wrong, but remain restricted to certain circumstances. People continue to do things for status, sex, or even a sense of honor that might not provide the best financial outcome.

Environmental models that stress the importance of social processes are not wrong. Rather, they omit an important half of the story, which encompasses the biological, psychological, and physiological nature of humans. For instance, models demonstrating the important effect of socialization on party identification do not encompass recent evidence suggesting that the strength, if not the direction, of partisan affiliation may have a genetic component. Such unnecessarily restrictive constructions of human nature actually serve to bolster the conception that human nature does not reflect the reality of the human body’s adaptive, malleable, and individually variable complex system.

What Human Nature Is Not

What constitutes a realistic portrait of human nature? Perhaps the first thing to examine is what human nature is not. Human nature is not most of the things that have been attributed to it: it is not distinct from nurture; it is not universal; it is not static; and, importantly, it is not restricted to negative emotions such as fear, greed, and anger.

Nature and nurture do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they continually cocreate one another, such that environmental contingencies constantly interact with genotype to write and rewrite expression that produces a unique phenotype over time. Even twins with the same genotype do not necessarily evince identical disease traits, even for illnesses with established genetic components. In schizophrenia, for example, identical twins share a probability of being stricken at about a 50 percent likelihood, which while much higher than the odds in the general population, do not come close to certainty, at least partly due to different environmental experiences and precipitants. Social experiences and relationships can also influence biological changes, even in other animal species, just as any honeybee can become queen after the reigning bee passes away. Some animals even change sex under the right environmental circumstances.

Importantly, human nature is not universal, and therefore can prove quite useful in explaining unique outcomes. While some aspects of human physiology have proven so effective as to drive out much variation, such as color vision, these universal features do not constitute the main focus of interest and attention in political science. Rather, aspects of human nature that preoccupy the discipline relate more to seemingly broader aspects of human social and political behavior, such as the conditions under which people cooperate, how aggression manifests, what prompts in-group loyalty and out-group discrimination, how identities are constructed, and so on. These expressions of human character, which again emerge and change in interaction with environmental cues and triggers, demonstrably differ across individuals and across populations.

Human nature is not fixed or static. Rather, human nature develops and changes within the context of constant interaction with other people and the environment. All of these social forces can literally change brain chemistry and development, thus affecting behavior.

Human nature is also not restricted to the negative repertoire of emotions emphasized by political theorists from Thomas Hobbes to Kenneth Waltz. Clearly, fear, greed, and anger represent part of the normal panoply of human emotional responses. But just as clearly, positive emotions ranging from hope to happiness do as well. Importantly, humans are the only animals to evolve into a position of self-reflection, where humans are now capable of rewriting their own genetic structure, not only through medical intervention and environmental manipulation, but also through the ability to reflect and reason about one’s self and one’s institutions. The political implications of this are clear: the political and social institutions that can work in concert with basic human desires and instincts, even though those may remain variable, are more likely to prove effective and enduring than structures that work in direct opposition to prevailing tendencies.

Alternative Conceptions Of Human Nature

Scholars such as political scientist Robert Jervis have reflected on more novel conceptions of human nature resting on demonstrated common tendencies in human psychology. For example, in his 2004 article, “The Implications of Prospect Theory for Human Nature and Values,” Jervis noted the ways in which prospect theory offers a particular view of human nature; this rests on cognitive foundations that focus on the importance of loss aversion, the centrality of subjective well-being, and the critical role of change in explaining and predicting human behavior. These tendencies indeed hold true across the majority of people, although certainly not all people espouse these proclivities.

An additional empirical basis for locating a foundation for an interactionism view of human nature lies in evolutionary models drawn from biology or psychology. Such models posit a functional, adaptive construction of the human mind, which allows both for individual variability, environmental responsiveness, and positive emotions. Evolutionary psychology supposes a set of content-laden, domain-specific mental programs that developed in response to repeated challenges confronted by human ancestors. Some strategies proved more important for survival than others, and these constitute superordinate psychological mechanisms; when necessary, these mechanisms either potentiate or restrict other actions, thoughts, and behaviors. Emotions likely function in this manner, at least in part. For example, when confronting a predator, fear instigates a series of actions that include enhanced sight and vision, increased ability to mobilize muscles for running or fighting, subjective diminishing of pain sensitivity, and a transfer of blood away from the periphery to the core of the body. When the evolution of such behaviors led to the successful resolution of repeated challenges, and these responses conferred a comparative reproductive advantage, such structures proliferated. When the behaviors were not successful, they died out. Since different strategies may work differently depending on local ecology, individual genetic variation of complex social and political behaviors inevitably emerge.

Future Directions

Traditional images of human nature present a static and fixed set of responses. The problem with such models is that they introduce an unrealistically constrained view of endogenous human processes. Human genetic and biological mechanisms interact with their environments in complex and sophisticated ways to produce political and social behaviors of interest.

More accurate and comprehensive models of human nature would explicitly embody the myriad ways in which human brains interact with the environment to prompt change in both. Such attempts should rest on an integration of behavior genetics and evolutionary theory, which recognizes genotypic variance across individuals and populations, and also seeks to understand and appreciate the functional purpose and potential adaptive advantage of any given behavior. In such a way, it becomes possible to develop a more accurate and coherent understanding of the interplay between genes, brains, environment, and behavior.

Bibliography:

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Hatemi, Peter K., John Alford, John Hibbing, Nicholas Martin, and Lindon Eaves. “Is There a Party in Your Genes?” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2009).
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Morganthau, Hans. Politics among Nations. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948. Plomin, Robert, and Kathryn Asbury. “Nature and Nurture: Genetic and Environmental Influences on Behavior.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 600, no. 1 (2005): 86–98.
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