From the Archives: We often make friends today who turn into foes tomorrow. It’s all part of the way we’ve evolved as cooperative and competitive animals.
In July of this year, Donald Trump Jr. came under widespread criticism for having met in 2016 with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on the Democratic nominee for U.S. president, Hillary Clinton. In response, President Donald Trump tweeted: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”
This is what we call “flexible coalitional psychology”—the ability to form strong bonds with various social groups but also to break those bonds and move on to other groups when we will benefit from doing so. This ability is a result of evolution. When individuals compete with one another, they often do so as part of groups that are defined in terms of shared culture traits, such as ideology, language, religious beliefs, or ways of dressing.
Other studies have shown that it is also surprisingly easy to get people to form strong coalitions in more controlled settings. For example, in the 1970s, the pioneering social psychologist Henri Tajfel and his colleagues had people rate paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and then they divided the participants into two groups based ostensibly on their preferences.
Anthropologists have also documented our flexibility in forming coalitions. In the early 1990s, professor John Q. Patton, from California State University, Fullerton, studied coalitions in the village of Conambo in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a setting where small-scale warfare is still common. Because there are no named lineages or chiefs, the political situation in Conambo is continually shifting in unpredictable ways.
Such findings from both social psychology and anthropology can help us understand the results of the 2016 election and many other things about our political behavior. The kinds of voting shifts that we saw in 2016 and that we have seen repeatedly throughout American history represent not an aberration but rather an adaptation.
If the Trump campaign had been thinking more in the style of Manchester United fans, they would have recognized that their greater loyalty had to be to the United States as a whole, as much as they might have wanted to win the election. Nearly 50 years ago, another political candidate, Hubert Humphrey, did understand this. When Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin offered to help his campaign financially, he refused.
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