Violent, organized conflict is a near constant in human history.

But why?

Often, large-scale conflicts and wars are explained in material or political terms: humans engaging in conflict over land, resources, or ideologies.

But as Rose McDermott, the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of International Relations, sees it, these explanations fail to fully account for war’s existence and persistence throughout the long history of our species.

To do that, McDermott argues that we need to take more seriously the ways that human psychology — shaped by our evolution as a species — predisposes some of us to violence.

On this episode, Dan Richards spoke with Rose McDermott about how millennia of human evolution have wired our brains — particularly male brains — for war; what this means for modern society; and how we might think about building structures and institutions to help chart a new, more peaceful path for humanity.

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson school of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Violent and organized conflict is a near constant in human history. But why? Usually, war is explained in material or political terms. Groups of humans fighting over land or resources or ideologies. But as Rose McDermott, the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of International Relations sees it, these explanations fail to fully account for war's existence and persistence throughout the long history of our species.

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To do that, McDermott argues that we need to take more seriously the ways that human psychology, particularly the parts that have been shaped by millennia of human evolution predisposes some of us to violence. On this episode, I spoke with Rose about how millennia of human evolution have wired our brains, particularly male brains, for war. We also looked at what this means for our politics today, and how we might think about building structures and institutions going forward that could help chart a new, more peaceful path for humanity.

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Rose McDermott, thank you so much for coming back on to Trending Globally.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: It's my pleasure, Dan, it's always nice to talk to you.

DAN RICHARDS: To start, could you define evolutionary psychology for listeners?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, it's a branch that came out of evolutionary biology. So if you think about the people who worked on evolutionary biology, really going back to Darwin. So you think about his famous trip on the Beagle to the Galapagos and looking at the way that animals changed across generations.

And then there have been lots of important people who've worked on evolutionary psychology. The person I trained with at Santa Barbara was Leda Cosmides and her husband, John Tooby. And what Leda pioneered in lots of ways, was this notion of not just thinking about evolution in biological terms, but to think about how those biological factors, genetic factors, environmental factors affect human psychology-- so restricted to the mind, as opposed to biology being all parts of the body, like the immune system and all those other kinds of things. So this is really much more about the study of human mental architecture.

So not just the things that we learn in our environment, but the things that we come into the world prepared to do because we have this very long history of our ancestors contributing to the genetic structure that we are born with when we come into the world.

DAN RICHARDS: So it's still about evolution and about biology and how evolution shapes human biology, but about how those changes in the human body and the human mind affect our psychologies?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Absolutely. That's a much better characterization. And the one thing that I think a lot of people get really wrong about evolution is they think that it's determinative.

DAN RICHARDS: What do you mean by that?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: It's an essential thing that what evolutionary psychologists say is regardless of the environment, this is what you're going to do because this is what your genetics say. And that's a really fundamental misunderstanding because the way that the work in evolutionary psychology really works is to talk about the way that those factors, biological, genetic factors, interact with the environment, because that's how we learn which mental programs to operationalize. Given a particular environmental demand.

DAN RICHARDS: There is an interplay between these fundamental, as you say, like biological architecture-type components that have been brought into humanity through evolution and the environment in the outside world. So before we get into how evolutionary psychology can help us understand human conflict and war, I wanted to look at an example of where some of this tension can exist in humans, between how their brains have evolved and the environment we find ourselves in today. And this doesn't have to do with conflict and war, but I think might be helpful. And that is the human desire for sweet foods. The sweet tooth, and what it's presence illustrates about this tension between some of our core characteristics and how we actually want to be in the world today.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think it's a great example of the way in which things that worked in the past doesn't necessarily mean it works in the current environment. So if you look at humans in general, but it even starts in babies within hours of when they're born, they will prefer sugar water to just plain water. So what advantage did that provide across human history? And most of human history, people lived in lots of environments of food scarcity. They couldn't get a lot of food. And so those who had a preference for sweets, that was a really functional adaptation to be able to get enough calories when there's not a lot of food.

But now I can go to Safeway and get bags of Reese's peanut butter cups, and I don't have to worry about food scarcity. But then I'm going to gain a lot of weight. I'm going to be a lot more susceptible to the plethora of modern diseases-- obesity, especially diabetes, but also cardiovascular disease. Now, why wouldn't that have been a problem in the past? Partly it was because people couldn't get fat. There weren't enough calories, but also because they didn't live that long. And so a lot of these diseases that come up happen when you're older, after you're past your reproductive prime. And so it was adaptive in the past, but it doesn't mean it's functional now. And I think that there's lots of things besides sweet preference that work that way. But we just don't think about it that way.

DAN RICHARDS: It's always an interesting and at times difficult thing to be thinking about a concept like evolution in the context of contemporary challenges because the time scales of the things we're talking about are so different. These traits, they don't rise and fall in one individual. It's in generations. And it's really outside of the scale. We think about a lot of times. And I just wanted to pin that as we're trying to think about this idea of evolution in the context of our politics, which is where I want to get into.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Absolutely. And I think part of it also is that there can be really, really, really tiny differences in the advantage that certain kinds of traits have over others. But the reason it matters over time is you're talking about billions of people across millions of years. It has this multiplicative function, so even small differences can have a really strong impact down the line.

DAN RICHARDS: All right. So keeping these kind of scales of thinking in mind that maybe we don't always apply to some of our conversations about politics, I want to turn to what a recent article of yours was focused on that I think can help us think about a lot of issues today. How understanding evolutionary psychology can help us understand the existence and persistence of war and conflict in society. As you write, the rationales for war are often explained in material terms. It's about gaining territory or gaining access to a natural resource like oil. But why, in your view, is understanding the way that human psyches have evolved evolutionarily-- why is that so important for understanding warfare and conflict?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: So the first thing I'll just say is it's not that material stuff doesn't matter. I mean, it does matter. It's for lack of a better term, to go back what we talked about earlier. It's the environmental trigger. You want oil, you want territory, you want some resource-- rare earth minerals, whatever. That can be the environmental trigger that makes people want to fight. But the psychology that allows the ability to fight and what you fight over and how you actually conduct the war depends on a certain set of psychological mechanisms that make humans different than other animals.

So chimpanzees will engage in raids, but you don't get the systematic patterned violence that you get in humans. And that's a function of the fact that humans have particular kinds of psychological structures that allow for coordinated behavior. And lots of things go into that. One obvious one is language. And the other part is, how do you do that coordination? So there's some debate within the evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology crowd about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative. Peace and love and the bombs will go away. And it's just fighting over these particular material things that make people fight.

And those who say, no, no, no, no, no. The reason we learned to cooperate was to be able to engage in combat more effectively. I'm part of that crowd. So the motivation probably for language, as well as I mean, this is Richard Wrangham's argument. This is not original to me, but a lot of the reason that these capacities developed was to be able to engage in combat more effectively.

DAN RICHARDS: So you're saying that it's not just that humans developed through evolution an ability to cooperate and coordinate their efforts and that of facilitates war. You're saying that the very ability to cooperate and coordinate was maybe developed specifically for committing violence. Is that right? So could you just talk us through though, why is that evolutionarily-honed skill set so intimately linked to violence in your mind? I mean, humans obviously also coordinate and cooperate in peaceful ways, but what does it actually have to do with violence in its origins as you see it?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, I think the simplest way to understand it is if I kill my opponent, then I live to have kids, and my opponent does not live to have kids. And so the difference in that regard is that those who kill are much more likely to survive and pass those tendencies and dispositions onto their offspring than those who don't because they're more likely to be killed.

DAN RICHARDS: But still, I guess, what exactly does that have to do with human cooperation and coordination? Because I guess what I'm saying is that humans could also coordinate in ways that promotes peace and mutual understanding and positive-sum thinking. Why is it in your view, something that is linked to violence and conflict?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: We definitely are huge cooperators. I mean, humans are amazing cooperators. They're usually in-group cooperators. But even across groups, at least from Nineteen Forty-Five until Twenty Sixteen, we did a pretty good job of cooperating. And there have been other long periods in human history. Think about the Concert of Europe, and so on.

But my point is that the origin of that cooperation was to engage in combat more effectively. And the reason that matters is because it wasn't like you lived in an environment without threats. Think about hunter gatherers. They have threats from animals. They have threats from climate and the environment, and they have threats from other groups of people who are trying to take over their territory or other resources they have. And part of it is in an environment that's not an advanced industrialized society, you have a lot of resource scarcity. You may run out of water. You may run out of food. But the other thing that there were historical a lot of raids for was for women. If you didn't have enough women in your society, you couldn't have children.

And so if you think about it, historically over time, the anthropological record in this regard, if you kill off half the men in a population, it'll recover in a generation. It's just not a problem. But if you kill off half a women in the society, that society will never recover.

DAN RICHARDS: Why is that.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Because it takes nine months for a woman to have a baby. And so if you don't have enough people who can actually gestate and have kids, you can't get the population to recover.

DAN RICHARDS: This all really I think highlights the way to that resource scarcity or the perception of resource scarcity maybe triggers some of these more base evolutionarily-honed impulses then living in a society, in a life where you don't feel those deep senses of human scarcity.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I think that's so smart, Dan, because I've thought about it a lot in terms of climate change. When you have climate change, and you have these increased resource scarcity, and the resource will be land as sea level rises. But it's also things like fresh water because the glaciers are melting. Even if people don't think about it consciously, I think they're aware in the back of their mind that things are just a lot more scarce than they used to be. They're harder. There's too many people for how many resources there are, and I think it does raise the level of aggression. It makes it much more likely that you get these civil conflicts because people realize it's him or me.

I remember years ago when Richard Wrangham was talking about the difference between chimps and bonobos. So chimps are quite aggressive and bonobos are pretty peaceful. I was like, what's the difference? And he was like, well, bonobos live in these environments where the food is scattered and there's not a lot of resource scarcity. So you can get plenty of bananas and you don't have to climb really high in the tree. But chimps have much more concentrated food. So you have to fight with one another to get to the food at the top of the tree and stuff like that. And so part of what happens is those who are stronger, the stronger male chimps are going to be able to control the resources more or go out and kill a smaller animals or whatever. And so you get really different societal structures out of the resource distribution. And you see that chimps versus bonobos and humans have gone much more in the chimp direction.

DAN RICHARDS: So as you're saying, between humans, two closest genetic relatives, chimps and bonobos. We evolved more like chimps in this regard. And that chimps that were more willing, perhaps even inclined to hurt other chimps. They were the ones that obtained more resources. And then that trait, that predisposition towards committing violence is passed on to the next generation. And so over many generations. Through evolution, this will go from being a trait that is present in some animals and not others, into something that's much more consistently in the hardwiring of chimps and humans.

We've been talking about male chimps and male bonobos here. And I want to talk a little bit about biological sex because it's a big part of this evolutionary lens as you see it. You write in the piece about male coalitional psychology and how generally this of violent coordination is a more male trait, and I want to hear your thoughts on that. And also how to think about this because it can be a little tough when talking about this stuff. It can start sounding a little deterministic like all men are x and all women are y. And which you make clear in the piece is not how we should be thinking about it. But that said, we do need to factor in these differences. So how do you think we should be thinking about the concept of biological sex, and what that then looks like when looking at society and gender today?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I don't think any of these evolutionary arguments should be understood as all men are x or all women are y. These are probabilistic tendencies like any other distribution in other characteristics. However, on average, you can show that there are different psychological tendencies that tend to operate in certain populations. So the best example I can give is that with regard to conflict, that male psychology on average is very coalitionary, meaning you like to have lots of people around.

So if you go to football games, baseball games, you just see a lot of people around. For men who are fighting predators, who are fighting another group of humans. The more people you have, the more likely it is that you'll win, right. And so that coalition is a really, really important part of the fundamental psychology. Again, that doesn't mean every person is like this. It just means that on average over time and evolution is very backward looking, so maybe that's not how it's going to be going forward, but that's what built us from the past.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, turning more to the present, I want to look at some examples of conflict escalation we've seen in the world recently. And look at how thinking about evolutionary psychology can help us see them in a new light. So two that have come to mind recently. The first, in early January, the United States carried out a military operation in Venezuela and ousted its president, Nicolás Maduro. And then more recently, in January, Trump really upset some key allies by saying that the US should and would take control of Greenland. And he's since backed off the most forceful versions of that claim.

But it still it felt like a type of aggressive posturing that I think to a lot of observers, didn't make a ton of sense. There were material reasons, but it feels like was there something else there. And I'm curious your thoughts about that. So maybe let's start there. How can an evolutionary lens help us understand what we're seeing coming from Trump's foreign policy? And maybe to start with around Greenland.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I just think there's so many pieces to the Trump and Greenland thing. I mean, I'm not sure that-- evolution is not always as great at explaining a temporally immediate problem like what's going on today as opposed to patterns over time. It doesn't mean that it doesn't help explain the psychology of somebody who wants dominance. I think that does have a really long evolutionary history that I know it's not a popular term, but you think about the alpha males in particular, primate communities. Somebody who wants to dominate everybody in the group.

Across evolutionary history, part of what's interesting about that is that if you have, a dominant individual who does not actually take care of the community, does not protect the community against threats, and so on, a group of lower ranked males usually will try to take him out. In animal communities, that looks like killing. But in modern societies, it can look like throwing somebody out of power in a democratic regime.

The problem is, it's very hard to track those things when you're at 330 million people as opposed to a troop of 50 animals, or a group of 150 people where you can track the extent to which a leader is exploiting his constituents or his community. I've been surprised that I haven't seen more of a stronger coalition of Congress people trying to really challenge Trump. But of course, on the Democratic opposition, the numbers aren't there. But there should still be some Republicans who are ambitious enough in their own right that they want to say, I'm going to be the next leader. And that's surprising. And to my mind, disappointing.

DAN RICHARDS: I can't help but think, as we're talking about all this, about what we were talking about earlier in terms of the role scarcity plays in maybe highlighting some of these more basic human drives. And I think on one hand, when you see a world like we have with nuclear weapons, it's hard to think of any military conflict as rational because the risk seems to so outweigh the benefits.

But I think especially with what we saw around Trump and Greenland, when things get framed as a protection against a threat, whether it's a climate threat or a geopolitical threat, it brings up some of this scarcity framing. And that is a framing Trump discusses a lot. There are too few jobs. There are too many people trying to come into the United States to take our jobs and take our resources, and we need to protect ourselves. Selves does this framing trigger a return to a more violent outlook towards the world in contemporary politics, would you say?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah. When you frame things in a way that's designed to emotionally manipulate a population through fear or through anger, you can do it because it's true. You're being invaded by another country, but you can also do it because you want to get support for policies that actually don't help the population, but help you as a leader. So the leader can emotionally manipulate the population, claiming that it's a defensive fight. If you don't join me in this fight, you're going to really be destroyed, when in fact, what it really is striving for personal, political, or financial gain. That form of manipulation works really well to give them what they want for other reasons.

And it's not always rational. Like here, I think about what Putin did invading Ukraine. You know, was it rational for Putin to invade Ukraine? Clearly, he got incorrect information about the level of resistance he would find in the Ukrainian population. So from that perspective, it doesn't look rational. But if you don't think of rationality in a cost-benefit sense that economists do about what's going to happen in the near future, if you think about it in longer psychological terms, well, he wants a particular legacy.

Maybe when people say, would he use nuclear weapons? I think if he was really sick and he thought he was going to die, he had some kind of advanced cancer. What does he care if he takes the rest of the world with him? And he's not the only one. I mean, I think there's other world leaders that are like that. But he's an obvious example where people say it's not rational, but then there's lots of suicide bombers and that's technically not rational. In an evolutionary sense can actually understand suicide terrorism.

DAN RICHARDS: How so? I mean, can we just unpack that for listeners a little bit?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Because if those people are acting in an environment of resource scarcity where they have no job, they have no money, they have no other opportunities. And the organization says, if you engage in this suicide bombing, we're going to take care of your family. We're going to give them a house. We're going to give them a refrigerator. We're going to make sure that they survive. Then even if who benefits is not your children, but your nephew, your first cousin, you're actually helping genetically, your relatives to survive. It's completely irrational you're not going to have a good life for yourself, but you can understand the motivation that wants to make your genetic structure immortal.

DAN RICHARDS: When you think about the pressures of evolution, the classic ideas of rational human behavior start to look a little different or have some holes in them for explaining things.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: There is a rationality. It's not an economic rationality. It's an ecological rationality.

DAN RICHARDS: Recently, in an interview with CNN journalist Jake Tapper, the president's advisor, Stephen Miller, in defending Trump's decision to invade Venezuela in December said,

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- You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.

But are you saying that since the beginning of time? But in terms of --

DAN RICHARDS: I guess, in your view, is he essentially correct in his analysis? And if there's something off about it, what's off there? And if he's right, what does that mean for how you think about Trump's politics? I think a lot of Trump's critics took a very dark view of that statement. But I wonder what you think of that statement.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: He's not wrong historically in terms of might makes right. But that doesn't mean we have to be that way. Again, humans have the capacity for cooperation and they have the capacity for conflict. But we can choose cooperation. That is also an evolved trait. And we've done pretty well with it, relatively speaking, since the end of the second World War. And so it doesn't have to be that way. So I always find it very odd when you see these guys who physically are not formidable themselves, deciding that they have to go beat up other people. That seems like a wish fulfillment thing to me.

And I think that was Mark Kelly's point in doing the video with Elise Slotkin to say, hey, if one of these crazy guys tells you to do something that's illegal, immoral, unethical, unconstitutional for his own ego, his own selfish purposes, you don't have to do it. And I think that was part of the point was to say don't have to follow a leader who's asking you to do something that's wrong. And I also think that's an even deeper part of human psychological architecture going back before the development of the state. You see it in hunter gatherer communities, if your leader is exploiting you get together and you overthrow the leader.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to look at how all of this can maybe help us think about any ways to enlist our psychologies, our evolutionarily built traits, to help create a world where there's less war and less violence. I guess what I'm asking is, are there any ways this thinking can help us to actually push back against these-- what you see as human drives towards conflict and war?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think that's a hard question. I think that part of the challenge with human evolution is it's slower than technological innovation. It takes much longer to have an intergenerational transfer than it does to build a new technology. It doesn't mean that we can't create cooperative venues. We have that's what the UN was. We have these other kinds of organizations where we try to achieve some level of cooperation, but I think it has to be done consciously. It's not going to happen necessarily automatically.

And so working toward it is supported by a greater understanding of human psychological architecture. Because if you build a system that doesn't align with preferences, it's not going to work right. So if you build a system that says you have to broccoli more than chocolate chip cookies, it's just not going to happen. Like maybe one in 100,000 people will prefer broccoli to chocolate chip cookies, but basically telling people that they have to prefer broccoli isn't going to happen. You can set up all kinds of structures where they will eat broccoli as opposed to chocolate chip cookies, but it doesn't mean that they like it better. So understanding the fundamental drives of human psychological architecture can help us try to design institutions, norms, and procedures that align with what's natural, as opposed to fighting against instinct. Because that's not going to work.

DAN RICHARDS: Are there examples of those types of institutions? You mentioned the UN, but in some ways is the UN maybe an example of saying we wish everyone eats broccoli and then people-

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I'm not saying it's successful. I'm just saying that there have been various attempts. And that's an attempt. I think part of the problem is it's really hard to do it at scale. Human psychological architecture doesn't really think about 330 million people.

DAN RICHARDS: Never mind 8 billion.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: 150 people. It's really hard to keep track of all these things. And so we assume that these huge things are how we would understand it in a small scale. But that's not actually how it works.

DAN RICHARDS: I was trying to think, as I was reading your paper, what ways that today we already tend to more of the psychological and maybe I'd say emotional side of international affairs and policy in the international realm. And one that came to mind to me was speaking with people at the Watson school and elsewhere who have worked in the Foreign Service and done diplomatic work, and that these less formal moments of really connecting with people can play an important role in maybe pushing back against some of these instincts towards violence and conflict. I wonder what you think about that?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think that's the foundation of cooperation is individual relationships that develop over time. And that's why I think one of the most destructive things the Trump administration has done is to gut out the State Department because you have, 400 years of experience, walk out the door. And even if you decide, hey, let's rebuild this. Somebody can't walk into that role and develop a relationship with a compatriot in Germany or the UK or France or whatever in a day. Like these relationships have built up over decades.

And so when you pull those individuals, you can't assume that it's plug and play with the next person. And so I think that understanding that these individual relationships is actually how you build out cooperation, that's the foundation of it. That's how we think of, again, smaller groups, and then you build it out to scale. And without that, I just don't think it's possible.

DAN RICHARDS: I think about the power of relationships that are closer to one on one, or at least a personal relationship. You mentioned something in the piece. I think you were quoting another scholar who said that male coalitions constitute the original and universal political institution, akin only to marriage in its ubiquity and time and place. And I guess in your analysis, then, would you say that there is something inherently male and masculine in political states? And if so, are we doomed to keep pushing in these realms of violence that you say are built into male psychology on average, through evolution?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think the data and evidence would support that. It doesn't mean that women can't be aggressive. They are. They're particularly in defense of their children or motivating men to protect them.

DAN RICHARDS: Of course, there have been women leaders who have gone to war in history.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Absolutely. And that's what I mean, like Margaret Thatcher Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, you can think of lots of them. Although not as many as male leaders who did that. And so it's not exclusive. It's just that when you think about how dominance hierarchies play out, they tend to be predominantly male. And those dominance hierarchies are inherently unstable because lower ranked people want to be higher ranked people. And so that leads to aggression. You want to take out the person above you so that you can be the person in control.

And so violence comes out of those dominance hierarchies. And it doesn't mean that that's the way it has to be. It's just again, backward looking like you think about how it has been through human history. That's predominantly what it looks like. Doesn't mean that it has to be what it is going forward, but we have to put more intention into changing it if we want to change it.

DAN RICHARDS: And understand the power of that history that has brought us into this current predicament.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: And historically, a lot of it is about physical formidability. Men, on average, have 8 times more upper body strength than women on average. Which means that if a woman tries to do something a man doesn't want her to do, he beats her up. And look at rates of domestic violence, that has not changed.

DAN RICHARDS: Absolutely.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: That really has not changed. But in the international environment, that should be inconsequential because you have mechanized warfare. But that doesn't mean that you get the same level of interest in dominance or the same level of interest in mechanized warfare among women as you do among men, on average. And again, I know that this is really a dicey way to talk about things because especially liberal people in America don't tend to want to bifurcate these things. But again, these are averages. It's just probabilistic. I'm not saying it's determinative.

DAN RICHARDS: Going back to bonobos and chimps, something you wrote about as well was that in terms of the way environments can shape behavior-- and correct me if I'm wrong in how I summarized this, but there's evidence that male bonobos also have a tendency towards violence. But there is, in fact, more robust structures put in by female bonobos to put a check on that violence. And so it's not just a matter of male bonobos have a less violent architecture psychologically, it's that their environment has helped create a less opportunities for violence.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, it's more than that. What you have in bonobo communities is female coalitionary behavior. Females join with other females to keep junior males controlled, and it's often done through the mother-son diet. So sons hang out around mothers for long periods of time. And in chimp communities, females have to leave to find another troop. And bonobo communities, it's the males who leave to find another troop. And so the exfiltration of genetic migration is different. So you get these female coalitions that stay intact in ways that you don't get in humans or in chimpanzees.

DAN RICHARDS: It was at least-- I felt like there was a ray of hope in reading about that arrangement for a way that a broader environment can help shift some of these tendencies towards violence.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Absolutely. And that is the lesson that I do in all my women and nations classes, is the single most important thing is to develop female coalitions. The innate thing is to privilege men for all kinds of reasons over their female affiliations. And that's why men continue to be able to politically dominate women, because they can form strong coalitions that survive individual differences. And female groups have a much harder time doing that. But when you can develop strong female coalitions, then you can actually make a difference in terms of political power.

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Think about the Civil Rights movement. Part of the reason that was more successful in some ways, is because there were men and women working together for political power against another group. So I do think the solution is to develop stronger female coalitions, and that takes some effort.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, have certainly given us a lot to think about, and I'm jealous of your students who get to explore these ideas with you more. But unfortunately, I think we have to leave it there for today. But thank you so much for coming back on to the Trending Globally and talking with us.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate it.

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DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield with additional music from the Blue sessions. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu Again, that's all one word, trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

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