Are Hungry People More Liberal?
A recent news story about a finding about the neuroscience of “self-control” ventured that the reason that someone “who works very hard not to take seconds of lasagna at dinner winds up taking two pieces of cake at desert” was that the person had used up their mystical and mythical self-control resource. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that an alternative – dare I say simpler? – explanation would be that the person who didn’t take a second helping of lasagna was still hungry when the desert tray appeared. Similarly, one need not posit a resource to explain why hungry judges are more punitive or hungry people are less patient. Generally, as organisms get hungrier and hungrier, we should expect their behavior to change, prioritizing acquiring food over other tasks, taking greater risks to obtain food, and, of course, when food is available, eating more of it.
Hmmmm....
One talk at the HBES conference I discussed in a recent post presented some research that extended this idea in an intriguing new direction. Michael Bang Petersen and colleagues reasoned as follows. As people get hungrier, they ought to adopt strategies that will aid in either acquiring food from others coercively – showing more aggression, selfishness, etc. – or acquiring food from others voluntarily. In modern environments, one way that people can increase the chance of receiving aid from others is through the welfare machinery of the state. (This might be a good time to mention that the lead author on the study, Petersen, is at Aarhus University, Denmark…) So, the authors reasoned, maybe hungry people will be more favorably disposed towards policies that result in wealth transfers than people who have recently eaten.
This strikes me as something of a bold prediction. After all, people’s positions on particular political issues are supposed to be more like traits than states, reasonably consistent features of the person, driven by, if one believes political scientists, their ideological commitments and so forth. Further, if we take people’s policy position to be an expression of where their interests lie – a big “if,” of course, and one I’m not defending – then it would be odd that people’s positions changed based on their temporary state, given that their longer term interests aren’t changing as they go from being sated to hungry over the course of the day.
To look at this issue, Petersen and colleagues report a series of studies, one of which strikes me as particularly clever. They looked at data collected as part of the Danish National Election online survey which, because it was administered online, contained a field that indicated when the survey was taken. They looked at several hundred responses from people who took the survey between 11 and 12 – and so were between meals – compared to data from people who took it between 1 and 2 – right after, presumably, the respondent had eaten. Specifically, they compared agree/disagree responses on items such as, “Too many get social welfare without needing it.” After controlling for a set of variables – age, income, etc. – they find that, indeed, hungry people have more pro-welfare views. The authors replicated this finding in an additional survey using a similar method, and then conducted a third study in which they directly asked people how hungry they were, to see if they would find the same effects, which they did.
This is obviously a first step in a new direction, but the work strikes me as interesting and innovative. My guess is that hunger is a much better explanation for a set of effects that others have attributed to “depletion,” and I look forward to seeing more work pursuing this idea.
Speaking of which, I should mention that there was also a very interesting poster at HBES presenting some research designed to get at a related idea. I’m probably going to mangle this horribly because while I was looking at the posters, I 1) didn’t have a pen and 2) had taken advantage of the open bar, but, if I have this right, I think that the research was designed to compare people’s moral views (in the Jon Haidt Foundations sense) during a time when food was plentiful and when food was scarce in a field site in East Africa. The prediction was, I think, that moral views would change depending on season. (The work was patiently and competently explained to me by Isabel Scott, and if I’ve butchered it, sorry about that.)
Anyway, interesting work, and particularly nice to see evolutionary approaches making additional inroads into political science.
Reference
Petersen, M. B., Aarøe, L., Jensen, N. H., and Curry, O. (2012). Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short-Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare.
Note: This post has been slightly updated from the original; I corrected one error, having reversed “traits” and “states” in the third paragraph. Thanks: Willem Frankenhuis.
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