Many of us in the United States worry about the increasing hatred between our two major political parties.

Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman attribute some of this hatred to strong differences of opinion on whether we should be more concerned with acquiring and producing resources or distributing and sharing resources. Their ideas appear in a refereed journal article (Baumeister and Bushman, 2023) and a Psychology Today blog post, Why Do Republicans and Democrats Hate Each Other? In these sources, they point out that people on the political right are overrepresented in occupations involving the acquisition or production of resources, while those on the left are found more often in occupations that involve the distribution of resources. They hope that if they can convince people that resource acquisition and distribution are equally important, the political left and right will become less antagonistic and more cooperative.

I think that Baumeister and Bushman have discovered an important issue that divides us, and that their insight may help decrease the hatred between the left and right. However, by their own admission, their hypothesis about resources is limited. "No doubt, political behavior and conflict are shaped and driven by multiple processes. Indeed, some political conflicts (for example, the death penalty, abortion rights, same sex marriage) are not directly linked to resources." (p. 4).

There may be another serious limitation of Baumeister and Bushman's hypothesis. They claim that dispositions toward acquiring and distributing resources are adaptations that evolved 4 million years ago when our ancestors acquired food by hunting, gathering, and fishing, and manufactured limited stone tools by hand. But their analysis seems more relevant to the past 10,000 to 12,000 years because only with agriculture was it possible to store significant amounts of excess food for later distribution. And significant manufacturing of technology appeared even more recently with the industrial revolution. Baumeister and Bushman should distinguish between the kind of resource acquisition and distribution that occurred in hunter-gatherer bands and the kind of resource acquisition and distribution that occurs in modern human societies. They do admit that their focus is on "the most recent century or two" (p. 4) and note that during the........

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