Physical fitness predicts political violence

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.03.006

Commentary

Research has found a link between individual physical fitness and support for attitudes toward modern warfare, with a single individual's physical fitness having a negligible effect on the outcome of large-scale military and state-level aggression involving complex military technology.

The fact that stronger individuals support such aggression suggests a psychology that specializes in small-scale coalition aggression, with the strength of coalition members making a non-negligible contribution to net coalition strength.

In this study, we investigated whether power, as opposed to mere support, also explains participation in contemporary political aggression. Given that contemporary political aggression occurs primarily within states, we focused on intra-state forms of political violence, particularly violent anti-government protests.

N = 6283 interviewees were quota sampled from the YouGov online panel to generate a representative sample of the online adult population.

In a multinational analysis, we found that self-perceived strength significantly predicted willingness to participate in political violence and self-reported participation, and that this association was stronger among younger interviewees, but not among men. The predictive power of strength was modest, but comparable to the predictive power of gender, an established predictor of aggression.

The fact that strength is associated with political violence was noteworthy for a number of reasons, and for suggesting a new research agenda for studying contemporary political violence using insights from evolutionary research.