How do the adaptive challenges of
human evolutionary history shape the way
modern citizens think about mass politics?
The Politics and Evolution Lab (PoNE Lab) is a research unit dedicated to investigating how the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history shape the way modern citizens think about mass politics.
In the lab we integrate theories from evolutionary psychology and methods from neuroscience into the study of politics. On this basis, we investigate the extent to which the psychological imprints of ancestral social life in small hunter/gatherer groups reveal themselves in the vote choices and political attitudes of modern individuals.
Findings from our lab consistently suggest, first, that the factors people intuitively rely on when producing political choices are factors of relevance in ancestral, small-scale social environments and, second, that the political solutions that people find intuitively correct are solutions that worked within such environments.
The Politics and Evolution Lab (PoNE Lab) is directed by Michael Bang Petersen is hosted by the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.
