Why is It Urban Liberals vs. Rural Conservatives?

By SAM URETSKY

Gilbert and Sullivan fans, which is anybody who knows they wrote something besides H.M.S. Pinafore, will recognize these lines:

I often think it’s comical – Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!

It was an astute observation, and has given rise to extensive study. In the field of neurobiology there have been demonstrations that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, while greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. Similarly, a field of study, now called disgustology, the study of how people respond to disgusting images such as vomit, feces, or mutilation. This would correlate, at least in part, to the differences in brain structure. Even so, while these studies answer the “what” they don’t deal with the “why.” Neuroanatomy may be inherited but may also change. The number of nerve cell connections in the brain may be altered as facts and subjects, are learned, or over time with experience.

A related question is why people who live in major urban areas tend to vote for Democrats while rural residents are more reliably Republican. An interesting study of this was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Washington (May 2017) under the title “The crowded life is a slow life: Population density and life history strategy.”

Life history began as a study of evolutionary ecology, a study of species adaptation and evolution to maximize species survival. In large part this is related to Darwinian Natural Selection. It is essentially a study of energy requirements for resources and reproduction which determine the optimal pattern for species survival. Some species have a large number of offspring, but have a large number of natural enemies. It is rather like the fable of the lioness and the fox, which ends with the lion saying “What you say is true; you have a great many young at a time, and often; but what are they? Foxes. I have but one, but remember that that one is a Lion.”

Life history has been adapted as a study of human behavior and life choices. This may consider the choice between finding a job immediately after high school (fast life history) versus going to college in order to find a better job at a later time (slow history). Other trade-offs may include parental age at birth of first child, and total number of children, and investment in a retirement plan.

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review (July-August 2017), Dr. Oliver Sng, the principal author of the J. Personality and Soc, Psych. paper said “... we did the experimental studies. In the first one, we asked half our participants—people recruited online from all over the United States—to read a fictitious New York Times article about how the US population was growing at an unprecedented rate. We then had them answer questions designed to gauge their future orientation, such as ‘Would you want to get $100 tomorrow or $150 in 90 days?’ The other half, our control group, read no article but took the same survey. We found that people given the article showed a greater preference for the delayed but larger rewards. Though small, the effect was significant. By artificially introducing the idea of high density, we seem to have pushed people to think more about the long term.”

A second experiment simply exposed the study group to crowd noises and the control group to unrelated sounds, yet it had the same effect on the answers to choices in the study.

It’s not clear why thinking about living in an area of higher population density would lead to making choices for a slower life history, but one hypothesis is that crowds in some way create the image of competition for resources, so that people respond by acquiring survival skills – more time spent on education and savings for the future– or by reducing the need to provide resources – having fewer children and having them later in life.

When the results of the study were plotted on a state by state basis, the states showing the slowest life history were Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Those where people had the fastest life history were Idaho, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada.

These rankings roughly correspond to the percentage of the population with advanced degrees, where Massachusetts is first, Maryland second, followed by Connecticut, Virginia and New York. Interestingly, states with the highest percentage of high school graduates score lower on advanced degrees. Montana ranks first in percentage of high school graduates, but is 32nd in advanced degrees. North Dakota is sixth in high school graduates, but has the lowest percentage of people with advanced degrees in the United States. (US Census 2013-2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates).

A limit of this study is that results were plotted on a state by state basis, rather than regions of high and low density within a single state, but, for practical purposes, this intrastate research is already being done on the first Tuesday after the first Monday each November.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2019

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