<story><title>Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)</title><url>https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonnycomputer</author><text>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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)</title><url>https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>medymed</author><text>“Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare.”&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>