Por que nos unimos a grupos ideológicos? : explicações evolucionistas para as discordâncias políticas

Abstract

Throughout the research contained in these papers, we sought to answer why do such divergent and diverse political and ideological groups exist. In trying to do so, we decided that we would first need to understand such groups and, for that, two approaches were most interesting: a a "bottoms-up" approach, trying to see the groups through the ideas and policy proposals they defended; and a a "top down" approach, which tried to understand the groups by studying the people that composed them. It was noted that both methods have some flaws; however, the bottoms-up aproach was least useful, due to the difficulty to find a consensual and representative explanation of whatever represented the political-ideological groups commonly observed, i.e., right and left political movements. Using the top-down perspective, the question was split in two: why groups are formed in general, and why specific groups have been formed. We managed to arrive at a partial answer, that research in this field should be made taking into consideration modern evolutionary theory and should try to understand people who compose those groups, in order to minimize biases and ideological advocacies. Finally, we also concluded that using the Moral Foundations Theory is a possible path towards sucessfully explaining political and ideological groups and linking both the bottomsup and the top-down approaches.