Although men and women often differ in political attitudes and behavior, there is no widely accepted scientific explanation of such phenomena. After surveying evidence concerning gender differences in the fields of social psychology, ethology, neurology, cultural anthropology, and political science, five hypotheses concerning the way males and females respond to social cues are derived from the neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection. The predicted differences in the mode of political cognition are then shown to be consistent with findings from experimental studies of emotional and cognitive reactions to televised facial displays of political leaders.

How do members of different ethnic or racial groups differ in their responses to the same political events? Previous research has shown that when leaders are seen on television, the viewers' episodic emotional and cognitive responses can influence their attitudes and subsequent voting behavior. In an experimental replication, using excerpts of all candidates in the 1988 American presidential election, episodic emotions elicited by facial displays were again found to produce positive attitude change in white viewers. For blacks, however, the emotions felt while watching leaders—including Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis, who elicited highly favorable responses—did not influence posttest attitudes. This contrast between black and white viewers' emotions and attitudes differs from the effects of nonverbal behavior associated with personality or gender. These findings suggest that nonconscious factors may play an important role in the way blacks perceive and react within the American political system.

The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research has two primary aims: (1) to develop and refine theoretical frameworks for understanding relationships between biology, law, and human social behavior; and (2) to develop new ways to facilitate the integration of biological theories and findings in law, economics, and public policy.

Despite advances in fields like genetics, evolutionary psychology, and human behavior and evolution — which generally focus on individual or small group behavior from a biological perspective — evolutionary biology has made little impact on studies of political change and social history. Theories of natural selection often seem inapplicable to human history because our social behavior is embedded in language (which makes possible the concepts of time and social identity on which what we call “history” depends). Peter Coming's Holistic Darwinism reconceptualizes evolutionary biology, making it possible to go beyond the barriers separating the social and natural sciences. Corning focuses on two primary processes: “synergy” (complex multivariate interactions at multiple levels between a species and its environment) and “cybernetics” (the information systems permitting communication between individuals and groups over time). Combining this frame of reference with inclusive fitness theory, it is possible to answer the most important (and puzzling) question in human history: How did a species that lived for millennia in hunter-gatherer bands form centralized states governing large populations of non-kin (including multi-ethnic empires as well as modern nation-states)? The fragility and contemporary ethnic violence in Kenya and the Congo should suffice as evidence that these issues need to be taken seriously. To explain the rise and fall of states as well as changes in human laws and customs — the core of historical research — it is essential to show how the provision of collective goods can overcome the challenge of self-interest and free-riding in some instances, yet fail to do so in others. To this end, it is now possible to consider how a state providing public goods can — under circumstances that often include effective leadership — contribute to enhanced inclusive fitness of virtually all its members. Because social behavior needs to adapt to ecology, but ecological systems are constantly transformed by human technology and social behavior, multilevel evolutionary processes can explain two central features of human history: the rise, transformations, and ultimate fall of centralized governments (the “stuff” of history); and the biological uniqueness of Homo sapiens as the mammalian species that colonized — and became top carnivore — in virtually every habitable environment on the earth's surface. Once scholars admit the necessity of linking processes of natural selection with human transformations of the natural world, it will seem anomalous that it has taken so long to integrate Darwinian biology and the social sciences.

From July 31 to August 6, 1993, the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College cosponsored a Faculty Seminar on “Biological Perspectives in the Social Sciences” at Dartmouth. Participants included scholars and graduate students from anthropology, communications, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology, as well as representatives from business and the public sector.