Metabolic morality is a term I coined to describe the immense and under-appreciated impact of biology, specifically the physiology of energy management, on our moral and political dispositions.
Evidence consistently finds that, on average, political views move from more liberal in our youth to more conservative in our later decades. These studies are conducted on recent cohorts of people in the western countries who have seen a rise in individual wealth and access to calories over the same period. Most importantly the cohorts do not include significant periods of famine or pathogenic threat (up to and possibly including the recent pandemic). People who grow up in, or live through deprivation-stricken environments are more likely to undergo dramatic shifts towards authoritarianism1. The Inquisition, the Third Reich, the Khmer Rouge and many other authoritarian movements can be seen emerging on the heels of significant stressors such as hunger, plague or a combination of the two.
The “behavioral immune system” is an evolutionary process that describes behaviors enacted through personality, including moves toward authoritarianism. This system has intellectual origins in the work of evolutionary biologist Dr. Randy Thornhill and colleagues. Their work shows that pathogen loads and inflammation have a significant impact on what we consider core personality traits and those traits underpin political views.
In her book, “How Emotions are Made” (2017), Lisa Feldman Barrett uses the term ‘body budget’ to more clearly describe allostasis, which involves predicting and meeting the needs of the body prior to immediate demand. It was previously known that the mind creates massive predictions based on external stimuli’s error updates. Dr. Barrett and her colleagues have shown that the full interoceptive network follows the same pattern of predicting and scanning for errors
The allostatic system manages much of our psychology and physiology together. For example, the warmth of a social connection is not simply a metaphor; it is also an expectation that the person will be a resource in the face of environmental or social threats that alter the way the body manages energy.
Specifically, the body allows for more active repair and increased reproductive function to the extent one is in an environment of either warm social connections or warm weather. On a fundamental level, these two are equivalent. I will delve more into the relevant environmental and physiological signals in later essays.
The behavioral immune system and the allostatic regulation mechanism are describing the same system. Those looking at the behavioral immune system have found evidence for a portion of what the allostatic model would predict, though the two schools of thought do not yet overlap. In the allostatic-body budgeting framework, expecting to have a pathogen incurs a significant energy cost, and our psychology will change coincident with that expectation. The individual’s ability to handle such a load will also be considered, and behaviors, mood, and personality will be the result of such calculations. The behavioral immune system literature finds that inflammation and pathogenic loads drive conservatism.
Dr. Barrett’s work implies that pathogens are among the metabolic stressors that the brain has to manage, and that the brain does so using the same systems that regulate behaviors and emotions. She notes:
“Our work demonstrates a single brain system that supports not just allostasis but also a wide range of psychological phenomena (emotions, memory, decision-making, pain) that can all be explained by their reliance on allostasis. Other studies have already shown that regions controlling physiology are also regions that control emotion” and “Regions controlling and mapping of inner body physiology lie in networks that also control and map social affiliation, pain, judgments, empathy, reward, addiction, memory, stress, craving, decision making, etc.”.
We are fully integrated mind and body, with body budgeting being the primary evolutionary reason for animals evolving a brain:
“The brain evolved to regulate allostasis. All psychological functions performed in the service of growing, surviving, thriving, and reproducing (such as remembering, emoting, paying attention, deciding, etc.) require the efficient regulation of metabolic and other biological resources.”
Everything we feel and think is related to our expectations of how we will be or do energetically as a brain-body system. If we expect low metabolic resources or high energy demands our personality, emotions, and thoughts will reflect those expectations.
In recent publications2, Dr. Barrett and her colleagues have come much closer to directly addressing specific aspects of the behavioral immune system. They elucidate to the emergence of an emotional ‘sense of should’. This sense solely refers to doing what others expect of us. This is what I refer to as the desire to conform.
The metabolic reason for conforming is to reduce errors in predicting others’ behaviors in a community. Predicting human behaviors is of critical importance since the brain is a primary user of metabolic resources. Predicting the motivations of others is a primary driver of reproductive success and thus, of cognitive resources.
As we expect to obtain less metabolic resources relative to demands, we will seek to behave and influence others to behave in more predictable manners. To put it in another way, metabolism and metabolic expectations influence how much a person and a social group display their culture or religion in authoritarian terms. Our moral disposition is heavily determined by the environmental conditions in which we find, and previously have found, ourselves in.
By environment I include all stimuli that change our physiology.
Selected Resources
Books:
This Is Your Mind On Parasites
Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval
Articles:
The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters)
An active inference theory of allostasis and interoception in depression
Evidence of Interoception network
Motivation in the Service of Allostasis
The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure
I’m using the language of psychology to describe the pattern chronicled in Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith by Philip Jenkins 2021. Cited papers include: Anderson, R. Warren and Johnson, Noel D. and Koyama, Mark, Jewish Persecutions and Weather Shocks: 1100-1800 (December 30, 2013). GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 13-06, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2212323 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2212323
Theriault JE, Young L, Barrett LF. The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure. Phys Life Rev. 2021 Mar;36:100-136. doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2020.01.004. Epub 2020 Jan 23. PMID: 32008953.
This makes a lot of sense. I'm fairly certain you are on the right path. I'm curious about how this works in the longer term. Which would be necessary for a population and or societal connection. Clearly I can see the connection for immediate management and balance of the metabolism over the course of a day, week, or even a month, perhaps? Preparing to run a marathon seems stressing and your metabolism would adapt as would your personality...all self induced environment. Makes sense that the environment, not self induced, would trigger similar responses. That is crystal clear and most likely correct. It is far less clear how over the course of a year, for instance, our bodies could adapt and balance our metabolism based on some predicted environment--famine ahead--as an example. Unless we were already heading in that direction...then perhaps features or characteristics emerge within a larger group that seem connected... A lot of human behaviors within groups might be explained. Including, societies in general and other cooperative characteristics. Uncooperative characteristics wouldn't make sense. And as a species we are pretty uncooperative. War, for instance, wouldn't be a thing if our metabolism's were making energy decisions for survival purposes as the most stark example. I guess, perhaps, as hunter gathers, if War triggers a physiological response akin to something like "The Hunt" and our bodies were predicting the abundance of meat and protein we would be very excited. Just like the excitement in a wolf pack prior to a hunt...etc. Perhaps I answered my own question...not about time scale though. But those behaviors could literally just emerge...they could be completely wrong if the predicted environment doesn't follow the triggers...and that would signal confusion and dissent in the population... I like the theory. No I idea how to put any of it into practice to make things better...other than with the tools we already have. Religion, sports, war, advertising/media, and pharmacology...