Validating the dual evolutionary foundations of political values in a US sample

Guy A Lavender Forsyth; Ananish Chaudhuri; Quentin Douglas Atkinson

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1189771

Validating the dual evolutionary foundations of political values in a US sample

Front Psychol. 2023 Jun 23:14:1189771. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1189771. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Guy A Lavender Forsyth¹, Ananish Chaudhuri², Quentin Douglas Atkinson^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
² Department of Economics, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
³ Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Psychological research repeatedly identifies two dimensions of political values. Recent work argues that these dimensions reflect the dual evolutionary foundations of human social and political life: a trade-off between cooperation and competition that generates differences in values about social inequality, and a trade-off in managing group coordination that generates differences in values about social control. Existing scales used to measure political values, however, were created prior to this framework. Here, we introduce the Dual Foundations Scale, designed to capture values about the two trade-offs. We validate the scale across two studies, showing it accurately and reliably measures both dimensions. Our results support key predictions of the dual foundations framework and pave the way for future work on the foundations of political ideology.

Keywords: authoritarianism; cooperation; dominance; evolution; ideology; politics; values.