Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275

by kristianc • 6 years ago

139 86 6 years ago

journals.plos.org

__s• 6 years 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• 6 years 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?

lkrubner2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

hwillis2• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Correlation is not always causation.

sykick3• 6 years 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• 6 years 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...

jjk1662• 6 years ago

The comment isn't for educating the authors, it is a reminder for those reading the article not to misinterpret the authors' work.

goodmachine• 6 years ago

I believe the authors are aware of this.

medymed• 6 years 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• 6 years 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".

lkrubner2• 6 years 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.

Mediterraneo102• 6 years 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• 6 years 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?

dandanua• 6 years 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).

leemailll2• 6 years ago

a plosone paper published in 2013, enough said

rocha2• 6 years ago

Can you elaborate? Thanks.

leemailll2• 6 years 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). And the retractions from this journal is increasing (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), which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch (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.

dwighttk• 6 years ago

(2013)

throwawayy477• 6 years ago

also (Plos One)

klmadfejno• 6 years ago

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

jhawk28• 6 years ago

Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?

shd4• 6 years ago

What came first?

chongli• 6 years ago

Why not parasites causing both poverty and authoritarianism? A big part of the reason Bill Gates is so committed to fighting parasite diseases like Malaria is that there's strong evidence that this alleviates poverty. After all, it makes sense when you consider the effects a case of Malaria would have on a family: children unable to go to school, adults unable to work. If the baseline load of Malaria cases is high enough then it's not hard to see how that would continually depress the economy.

boomboomsubban7• 6 years ago

The article notes that famine also predicts authoritarianism, which is predominantly caused by things outside human control like weather and plant diseases. Even the Great Chinese Famine was started by much of the agricultural land getting no rain, though the authoritarian government's response was what led to most of the deaths.

This would say that the criseses that impact the poor are what lead to authoritarianism. You need the support of the poor to grab power for yourself, but it's hard to make supporting such a cause appealing unless death is the alternative.

jrs95• 6 years ago

I don't think authoritarianism intrinsically causes either of those things. It could just easily do the opposite -- it depends entirely on what the authoritarian government decides to use its power for.

_bxg13• 6 years ago

Yeah, I have to be skeptical when a study is titled in such a way that your mind latches on to a seductively fascinating causation hypothesis ("parasites cause authoritarianism!") when in reality it's just a correlation, and that correlation has other much more banal explanations.

boomboomsubban7• 6 years ago

The title states that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism, not causes it. That's not a causation hypothesis.

specialist5• 6 years ago

I've been wondering if there's a correlation between authoritarianism and lead pollution. Like how leaded gasoline seems to correlate with violence and crime. Then that cohort (boomers, more or less) became the largest voting block and changed politics.

In my grossly oversimplified worldview, authoritarianism is shorthand for heightened fear response and lowered empathy.

luckylion3• 6 years ago

shorthand for heightened fear response and lowered empathy

Isn't it plausible that those are related? Fear takes the driver seat and pushes empathy into the backseat.

jart3• 6 years ago

Then what word would you use describe the political leanings of a nation whose people feel threatened by something, like maybe the World Bank and IMF rolling in, and want a stronger government to prevent it from happening?

brabel• 6 years ago

If you read the study, this is obviously addressed - please try to provide specific feedback on the methodology they used that you feel do not address your concerns rather than assuming the authors did not consider obvious points.

ukabwlsbeux2• 6 years ago

Low power study, sample size of 31, p-value of 0.04, and a regression stating that somehow gdp per capita, gini coefficient were not significant?

Shrug. Sounds tenuous.

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

That's not the elephant in the room. That some obvious speculation over the contents that everybody will understand but has no place in a scientific paper.

Or, in other words, the paper's title does mean "hey, we got some more evidence that poverty causes authoritarianism (or the other way around)", it's just encoded in Academish.

SilasX• 6 years ago

What about parasites -> poverty -> little surplus time across the population -> little scrutiny or protest of political leaders -> authoritarianism.

throwaway49872• 6 years ago

...because researchers are idiots and HN knows better.

dang4• 6 years ago

It's a problem, but supercilious disses don't help anything.

gigatexal• 6 years ago

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

vergessenmir• 6 years 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.

luckylion3• 6 years 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?

vharuck• 6 years ago

It might happen eventually. Possible explanation for why it hasn't happened yet: it's influenced by how the government employee views their relationship to the individual.

I work with very detailed patient data in a state health department. It's been drilled into me that patient privacy is above everything. Everyone I work with is out to help these people. We would be ashamed if we looked at, let alone made decisions with, data beyond what was necessary.

Law enforcement is different. One of their major tasks is to gather data. Data on people suspected of a crime. Or data from innocent people that can lead to suspects.

Maybe convincing public health to push the boundaries of collecting personal data to combat this disease will be as hard as convincing law enforcement to be less gung-ho. It goes against long history of professional ethics.

I have no sources, so take it with a tub of salt.

elliekelly• 6 years ago

I thought I had read that South Korea was using cellphone geolocation data of people who had tested positive in order to identify/alert others who may have had contact with them while they were contagious?

Edit: Not quite as big brothery as I thought it would be https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru...

Adverblessly• 6 years ago

Reportedly happening in Israel, though they don't call out the method of cellular tracking they use: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/coronavirus-cases-in-isr...

... The government approved the tracking of cellphones by the Shin Bet security service in order to inform people who were unwittingly close to someone diagnosed with the virus during the two weeks prior to the diagnosis. ...

mateo1• 6 years 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.

jonnycomputer• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

stochastimus• 6 years ago

The title is a tautology.

mcguire• 6 years 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.

spanktheuser• 6 years ago

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

Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)

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