10 ms·

Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)

139 points by kristianc 7y ago

jsnider3 7y ago
Seems like a problem Medicare for all would fix.
- _tb 7y ago
  and building a wall while being a little xenophobic.
__s 7y ago
Was considering this, that the debates about authoritarian vs democractic philosophy are moot currently. There are times where your population must be treated as a herd. While we often see the "father" metaphor for authoritarian leaders, they're really playing the role of shephard. When not dealing with situations where people may totally screw over others unintentionally, this shepharding becomes unnecessary, & ends up only being a power grab
adwf 7y ago
I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?
- lkrubner 7y ago
  That’s seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950. South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less parasites, in contrast to North Korea.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    South Korea really took off after General Park Chung-hee seized power, he built the economy and modernized the country. One of the great success stories is the praziquantel story. Korea had a schistosomiasis problem; they developed a process to synthesize praziquantel cheaply (the original Bayer process was more complicated) as part of the eradication campaign. That was in the late 60s. The Park dictatorship was overthrown only in 1979.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      It should probably be noted that the Park dictatorship was overthrown by another dictator, General Chun Doo-hwan, who's party controlled South Korea until 1988. So the demise of the Park regime was not the end of authoritarianism in South Korea.
    - hwillis 7y ago
      And even up until 1972 the command economy in the north and the (more) liberalized economy in the south hadn't really diverged. NK's growth slowed as they lost the support of the USSR and went negative during the collapse. Not really what you'd expect if authoritarianism was the cause of economic collapse, but exactly what you'd expect if during that time, a hostile state ascended from superiority to supremacy. It's absurd to view the Koreas in isolation since they were both extremely obviously the subjects of a proxy war in which one side lost decisively. The two countries' economies were driven by export and the US and USSR were by far their largest partners. That wasn't an accident.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hwillis 7y ago
  I mean that's pretty clearly much more reasonable. It's even likely that unstable countries which don't foster services to fight disease are also more susceptible to authoritarian coups. More to the point, I think framing it as "authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease" is misleading. The spread is not caused by accident or economic failure, it's caused by apathy (although obviously a failed state can't fight parasites). The reason hookworm is found in relatively wealthy southeast asian countries is the same as the reason it has been found in rural Alabama; the governments don't care about everyone. It's not accurate to call that authoritarianism and it's misleading to assume it's simply economic failure.
hsnewman 7y ago
Correlation is not always causation.
- sykick 7y ago
  I don’t understand why this comment is made as frequently as it is. Do you think the authors of the paper aren’t aware of this fact? Do you think they didn’t think of this when they did their research?
  - sbuttgereit 7y ago
    I imagine that the authors are so likely to be aware of this fact that you can take for granted that they are. Having said that, there is absolutely a valid question of did they incorrectly rationalize their approach, or rely on studies that did so, such that they in their own minds thought they addressed the issue when in reality they hadn't. My sense is that parent comment to which you replied probably didn't read the study, the original studies, or consider the point I'm making (sounds like a shot from the hip after reading the title), but the viewpoint isn't necessarily invalid. Given that some authors have a very real and emotional attachment to ideas they are trying to prove out in such studies... the rationalization error is one to watch for...
    - sykick 7y ago
      What you say is true. I like the way you phrased things. What you write about the authors potentially having a bias that blinds them is nicely put. If someone has reason to think this I’d welcome reading their commentary. I am tired with people just saying that correlation does not always imply causation. As if this is somehow insightful. Whenever I see this I think less of the person who writes it. It’s as if they don’t have enough common sense to assume that authors of a study that relies on statistical analysis don’t know this.
  - jjk166 7y ago
    The comment isn't for educating the authors, it is a reminder for those reading the article not to misinterpret the authors' work.
medymed 7y ago
“Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare.” There are so many varied and interacting and nonlinear threats to human welfare that I don’t know if the number of variables to control for (if even identifiable and measurable and appropriately transformed) would allow for meaningful result with only a few hundreds countries as data points.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
Errr, so if I get this, nations where there are high rates of individual stress are more likely to welcome authoritarianism - and parasites in people indicate one such stress. Pretty much everyone welcomes peace from a "strongman" over chaos of war or economic dislocation. It is hardly "we are all ruled by a secret state of bugs".
lkrubner 7y ago
A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has historically been authoritarian. It’s also worth noting some of those countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories. Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term. While the freed slaves’ constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North America and their descendants, while Liberia’s indigenous population was neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the freed slaves’ descendants, those connected with Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to rage at this skewed system of government.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    > Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge I'd heard of the Freed-Slave-vs-Local-Pop thing in Liberia before, but never about the Masonic Lodge. Got a source?
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      This is so prominent an aspect of Liberian history that a simple Google search "liberia masonic lodge" will give you a great deal of reputable reading material.
- dandanua 7y ago
  Even Russians know that there is Russia and there is Moscow. It's like two different countries. Moscow has 10% of Russia's population and 90% of wealth (probably even more). Moscow has moderate climate. This winter temperature was above 0C most of the time (though this winter was the warmest in centuries). Though I don't believe in that parasite bullshit. The only "parasites" that cause authoritarianism are a parasitic thoughts and parasitic mindset of the population. This is a dead circle since creative people leave authoritarian countries all the time (or being killed if they try to counter the system).
leemailll 7y ago
a plosone paper published in 2013, enough said
- rocha 7y ago
  Can you elaborate? Thanks.
  - leemailll 7y ago
    plos one is one of the journals that most people treated as none significant one in the field, and institutions in China effective ban researchers publish papers on it (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5). And the retractions from this journal is increasing (https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706870026241 https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706...). The reputation is so bad that wikipedia includes a sentence in the entry as "In 2016, Jeffrey Beall described PLOS One as a scientific spammer. Owing to concerns about the peer review process at the time, he considered the journal more as a digital repository than a scholarly publication.[41]" A recent event resonates with this which is described as "CreatorGate" on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate), which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch (https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-paper-that-cites-the-creator/ https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-p...), "The paper, about the biomechanics of hands, gives a shout out to “the Creator” as early as the abstract, which contains this sentence: 'The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.'" If this can be slipped by review process, any thing can happen. I still yet to met any senior scientist who is proud to say in public whose group published on plos one.
    - rocha 7y ago
      Thank you
dwighttk 7y ago
(2013)
- throwawayy477 7y ago
  also (Plos One)
klmadfejno 7y ago
The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both parasites and authoritarianism
- jhawk28 7y ago
  Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?
  - shd4 7y ago
    What came first?
    - datashow 7y ago
      "First" does not equal to "cause" either.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to start. If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings us forward nonetheless.
      - jjk166 7y ago
        First doesn't necessarily cause second, but second almost certainly doesn't cause first.
    - peter_d_sherman 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I don't know if this article is correct or not. I have no stake in it being correct or not. But, as the previous posters touched upon, there are some interesting philosophical issues at play here. First, we have the old correlation vs. causation issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau... Then even if there is causation, we need to ask which came first, the parasite prevalence, or the authoritarian government. Then even if we know the answer to that, we then need to ask if a circular relationship is present, in other words A causes some of B, which in turn causes more of A, which in turn causes more of B. Basically, if a virtuous or vicious cycle is present (virtuous if more of A and B are desired; vicious if less of A and B are desired; in this case vicious, since presumably less of A and of B are desired...) It's sort of like you could ask if "breakdowns in society" are responsibile for authoritarian governments -- or if authoritarian governments are responsible for breakdowns in society... Or, if a little bit of one caused a little bit of the other, which in turn caused more of the first, which in turn caused more of the second, and the cycle became a vicious cycle... So, the roots of what could be a fascinating philophical discussion in that. Its sort of like in Star Wars -- we could ask if the breakdown of society caused the early elements of the Empire, which in turn caused the Rebellion, which in turn caused the furher breakdown of society, which caused the further strengthening of the Empire, which in turn caused the further strengthening of the Rebellion (by opposition)... Vader may have been a key player on one side... but he did not start all of those cycles going...
gigatexal 7y ago
So roughly the plot to V for Vendetta in how the far right UK government came to power.
vergessenmir 7y ago
There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The literature seems to suggest that it's an evolutionary response to protect the community and these biases are difficult to detect because they are so innate in how we assess risk and process threats to a group. I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re-purposed for other use. Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users. It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by patients to follow the spread of a pandemic. The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this pandemic. Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system at risk.
- luckylion 7y ago
  I'm actually surprised that we haven't had a government try to access that kind of data. They've been generally going at it for all kinds of "small" stuff, burglary, riots, and they're not trying to get their hands on it to combat a pandemic?
mateo1 7y ago
If I was Canadian I'd be really angry knowing my tax money funded this man's career. After reading Murray's previous publications I feel like the world is really unfair and I certainly think less of Social Psychologists and Tulane University and UBC.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jonnycomputer 7y ago
I do believe that parasitic load probably has significant effects on a variety of psychological variables and preferences. But the web of causation here is extremely complex; neither do I think testing this hypothesis by looking at state-level governance is particularly useful. Instead, you would want to attain individual psychological response measures related to preference or acceptance of authoritarianism, and related that to individual parasitic load within a particular community; even better would to get longitudinal data showing that within-individual changes in parasitic load are correlated with changes in preference (controlled experiments here face ethical hurdles four obvious reasons). Even then, you are going to have to account for factors that may be correlated with the likelihood of getting parasites and having attitudes that are favorable to authoritarianism.
hirundo 7y ago
> According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens This predicts that governments will become more authoritarian during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. This is unsurprising given the widespread demand for large scale government interventions. Among the major damage Covid-19 leaves behind may be to give authoritarianism a better reputation.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
One area--perhaps the only one--where the Scientologists are right: Damian R. Murray AFFILIATION Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Mark Schaller AFFILIATION Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Peter Suedfeld AFFILIATION Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
stochastimus 7y ago
The title is a tautology.
mcguire 7y ago
How do they address causation in these studies? At first glance, it seems like authoritarianism would be predictive of parasite presence rather than the other way around.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
spanktheuser 7y ago
Guess we’ll have to do something drastic about our billionaire load if we want to get rid of Trump.

139 points by kristianc 7y ago

jsnider3 7y ago

Seems like a problem Medicare for all would fix.

_tb 7y ago
and building a wall while being a little xenophobic.

__s 7y ago

Was considering this, that the debates about authoritarian vs democractic philosophy are moot currently. There are times where your population must be treated as a herd. While we often see the "father" metaphor for authoritarian leaders, they're really playing the role of shephard. When not dealing with situations where people may totally screw over others unintentionally, this shepharding becomes unnecessary, & ends up only being a power grab

adwf 7y ago

I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?

lkrubner 7y ago
That’s seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950. South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less parasites, in contrast to North Korea.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  South Korea really took off after General Park Chung-hee seized power, he built the economy and modernized the country. One of the great success stories is the praziquantel story. Korea had a schistosomiasis problem; they developed a process to synthesize praziquantel cheaply (the original Bayer process was more complicated) as part of the eradication campaign. That was in the late 60s. The Park dictatorship was overthrown only in 1979.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    It should probably be noted that the Park dictatorship was overthrown by another dictator, General Chun Doo-hwan, who's party controlled South Korea until 1988. So the demise of the Park regime was not the end of authoritarianism in South Korea.
  - hwillis 7y ago
    And even up until 1972 the command economy in the north and the (more) liberalized economy in the south hadn't really diverged. NK's growth slowed as they lost the support of the USSR and went negative during the collapse. Not really what you'd expect if authoritarianism was the cause of economic collapse, but exactly what you'd expect if during that time, a hostile state ascended from superiority to supremacy. It's absurd to view the Koreas in isolation since they were both extremely obviously the subjects of a proxy war in which one side lost decisively. The two countries' economies were driven by export and the US and USSR were by far their largest partners. That wasn't an accident.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hwillis 7y ago
I mean that's pretty clearly much more reasonable. It's even likely that unstable countries which don't foster services to fight disease are also more susceptible to authoritarian coups. More to the point, I think framing it as "authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease" is misleading. The spread is not caused by accident or economic failure, it's caused by apathy (although obviously a failed state can't fight parasites). The reason hookworm is found in relatively wealthy southeast asian countries is the same as the reason it has been found in rural Alabama; the governments don't care about everyone. It's not accurate to call that authoritarianism and it's misleading to assume it's simply economic failure.

hsnewman 7y ago

Correlation is not always causation.

sykick 7y ago
I don’t understand why this comment is made as frequently as it is. Do you think the authors of the paper aren’t aware of this fact? Do you think they didn’t think of this when they did their research?
- sbuttgereit 7y ago
  I imagine that the authors are so likely to be aware of this fact that you can take for granted that they are. Having said that, there is absolutely a valid question of did they incorrectly rationalize their approach, or rely on studies that did so, such that they in their own minds thought they addressed the issue when in reality they hadn't. My sense is that parent comment to which you replied probably didn't read the study, the original studies, or consider the point I'm making (sounds like a shot from the hip after reading the title), but the viewpoint isn't necessarily invalid. Given that some authors have a very real and emotional attachment to ideas they are trying to prove out in such studies... the rationalization error is one to watch for...
  - sykick 7y ago
    What you say is true. I like the way you phrased things. What you write about the authors potentially having a bias that blinds them is nicely put. If someone has reason to think this I’d welcome reading their commentary. I am tired with people just saying that correlation does not always imply causation. As if this is somehow insightful. Whenever I see this I think less of the person who writes it. It’s as if they don’t have enough common sense to assume that authors of a study that relies on statistical analysis don’t know this.
- jjk166 7y ago
  The comment isn't for educating the authors, it is a reminder for those reading the article not to misinterpret the authors' work.

medymed 7y ago

“Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare.” There are so many varied and interacting and nonlinear threats to human welfare that I don’t know if the number of variables to control for (if even identifiable and measurable and appropriately transformed) would allow for meaningful result with only a few hundreds countries as data points.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

Errr, so if I get this, nations where there are high rates of individual stress are more likely to welcome authoritarianism - and parasites in people indicate one such stress. Pretty much everyone welcomes peace from a "strongman" over chaos of war or economic dislocation. It is hardly "we are all ruled by a secret state of bugs".

lkrubner 7y ago

A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has historically been authoritarian. It’s also worth noting some of those countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories. Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term. While the freed slaves’ constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North America and their descendants, while Liberia’s indigenous population was neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the freed slaves’ descendants, those connected with Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to rage at this skewed system of government.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge I'd heard of the Freed-Slave-vs-Local-Pop thing in Liberia before, but never about the Masonic Lodge. Got a source?
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    This is so prominent an aspect of Liberian history that a simple Google search "liberia masonic lodge" will give you a great deal of reputable reading material.
dandanua 7y ago
Even Russians know that there is Russia and there is Moscow. It's like two different countries. Moscow has 10% of Russia's population and 90% of wealth (probably even more). Moscow has moderate climate. This winter temperature was above 0C most of the time (though this winter was the warmest in centuries). Though I don't believe in that parasite bullshit. The only "parasites" that cause authoritarianism are a parasitic thoughts and parasitic mindset of the population. This is a dead circle since creative people leave authoritarian countries all the time (or being killed if they try to counter the system).

leemailll 7y ago

a plosone paper published in 2013, enough said

rocha 7y ago
Can you elaborate? Thanks.
- leemailll 7y ago
  plos one is one of the journals that most people treated as none significant one in the field, and institutions in China effective ban researchers publish papers on it (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5). And the retractions from this journal is increasing (https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706870026241 https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706...). The reputation is so bad that wikipedia includes a sentence in the entry as "In 2016, Jeffrey Beall described PLOS One as a scientific spammer. Owing to concerns about the peer review process at the time, he considered the journal more as a digital repository than a scholarly publication.[41]" A recent event resonates with this which is described as "CreatorGate" on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate), which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch (https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-paper-that-cites-the-creator/ https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-p...), "The paper, about the biomechanics of hands, gives a shout out to “the Creator” as early as the abstract, which contains this sentence: 'The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.'" If this can be slipped by review process, any thing can happen. I still yet to met any senior scientist who is proud to say in public whose group published on plos one.
  - rocha 7y ago
    Thank you

dwighttk 7y ago

(2013)

throwawayy477 7y ago
also (Plos One)

klmadfejno 7y ago

The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both parasites and authoritarianism

jhawk28 7y ago
Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?
- shd4 7y ago
  What came first?
  - datashow 7y ago
    "First" does not equal to "cause" either.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to start. If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings us forward nonetheless.
    - jjk166 7y ago
      First doesn't necessarily cause second, but second almost certainly doesn't cause first.
  - peter_d_sherman 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I don't know if this article is correct or not. I have no stake in it being correct or not. But, as the previous posters touched upon, there are some interesting philosophical issues at play here. First, we have the old correlation vs. causation issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau... Then even if there is causation, we need to ask which came first, the parasite prevalence, or the authoritarian government. Then even if we know the answer to that, we then need to ask if a circular relationship is present, in other words A causes some of B, which in turn causes more of A, which in turn causes more of B. Basically, if a virtuous or vicious cycle is present (virtuous if more of A and B are desired; vicious if less of A and B are desired; in this case vicious, since presumably less of A and of B are desired...) It's sort of like you could ask if "breakdowns in society" are responsibile for authoritarian governments -- or if authoritarian governments are responsible for breakdowns in society... Or, if a little bit of one caused a little bit of the other, which in turn caused more of the first, which in turn caused more of the second, and the cycle became a vicious cycle... So, the roots of what could be a fascinating philophical discussion in that. Its sort of like in Star Wars -- we could ask if the breakdown of society caused the early elements of the Empire, which in turn caused the Rebellion, which in turn caused the furher breakdown of society, which caused the further strengthening of the Empire, which in turn caused the further strengthening of the Rebellion (by opposition)... Vader may have been a key player on one side... but he did not start all of those cycles going...

gigatexal 7y ago

So roughly the plot to V for Vendetta in how the far right UK government came to power.

vergessenmir 7y ago

There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The literature seems to suggest that it's an evolutionary response to protect the community and these biases are difficult to detect because they are so innate in how we assess risk and process threats to a group. I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re-purposed for other use. Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users. It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by patients to follow the spread of a pandemic. The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this pandemic. Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system at risk.

luckylion 7y ago
I'm actually surprised that we haven't had a government try to access that kind of data. They've been generally going at it for all kinds of "small" stuff, burglary, riots, and they're not trying to get their hands on it to combat a pandemic?

mateo1 7y ago

If I was Canadian I'd be really angry knowing my tax money funded this man's career. After reading Murray's previous publications I feel like the world is really unfair and I certainly think less of Social Psychologists and Tulane University and UBC.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jonnycomputer 7y ago

I do believe that parasitic load probably has significant effects on a variety of psychological variables and preferences. But the web of causation here is extremely complex; neither do I think testing this hypothesis by looking at state-level governance is particularly useful. Instead, you would want to attain individual psychological response measures related to preference or acceptance of authoritarianism, and related that to individual parasitic load within a particular community; even better would to get longitudinal data showing that within-individual changes in parasitic load are correlated with changes in preference (controlled experiments here face ethical hurdles four obvious reasons). Even then, you are going to have to account for factors that may be correlated with the likelihood of getting parasites and having attitudes that are favorable to authoritarianism.

hirundo 7y ago

> According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens This predicts that governments will become more authoritarian during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. This is unsurprising given the widespread demand for large scale government interventions. Among the major damage Covid-19 leaves behind may be to give authoritarianism a better reputation.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

One area--perhaps the only one--where the Scientologists are right: Damian R. Murray AFFILIATION Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Mark Schaller AFFILIATION Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Peter Suedfeld AFFILIATION Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

stochastimus 7y ago

The title is a tautology.

mcguire 7y ago

How do they address causation in these studies? At first glance, it seems like authoritarianism would be predictive of parasite presence rather than the other way around.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

spanktheuser 7y ago

Guess we’ll have to do something drastic about our billionaire load if we want to get rid of Trump.