Few ideas have enjoyed as much popular success over the past several decades as the proposition that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them” (Surowiecki, 2004, p. xiii).

Popularized by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, this idea has been invoked to explain phenomena ranging from financial markets and democratic governance to prediction tournaments and scientific discovery. Its central claim is simple: aggregating many independent judgments can produce estimates that are more accurate than those of either experts or ordinary individuals acting alone.

Yet history provides no shortage of reasons for scepticism. Financial bubbles, moral panics, ideological extremism, and episodes of mass hysteria demonstrate that groups are also capable of becoming collectively irrational and spectacularly wrong.

This apparent paradox has motivated more than a century of scientific inquiry seeking to answer the question: under what conditions does aggregating many judgments improve accuracy, and under what conditions does it merely aggregate error?

The answer to that inquiry is neither a unilateral endorsement nor outright rejection of the notion of collective intelligence. Under some circumstances, crowds really do outperform experts. Under others, experts outperform crowds. Diversity of opinion can improve collective accuracy, but social influence and conformity can undermine it. Whether a crowd becomes wise or mad depends both on the crowd itself and the conditions under which judgments are formed and aggregated.

Yet for all the influence the wisdom of crowds now enjoys in economics, political science, forecasting, and popular belief, its scientific origins are surprisingly humble: a dead ox, a crowd of people, and a statistical anomaly that would fascinate researchers for more than a century.

Death of an Ox and Birth of an Idea

While Surowiecki’s 2004 book popularized the wisdom of crowds within the zeitgeist, the scientific study of the phenomenon is among the oldest in the social sciences, first put to empirical test in 1906 by the founder of the eugenics movement, Francis Galton.

To evaluate whether the judgments of crowds in aggregate were superior to the judgments of any individual taken at random, Galton analysed a weight-judging competition held at the annual West England Poultry and Livestock Show in Plymouth. Nearly 800 farmers, butchers, and other attendees entered a competition to guess the weight of an ox that was to be slaughtered, with prizes awarded to those whose estimates came closest to the correct answer. Each competitor had only one interest in mind: personal gain. There was no socio-political motivation for participation beyond self-interest. Further, with a sixpence entry fee (roughly £4 or $5 today), pranksters who might otherwise have submitted absurd guesses for personal amusement would have been discouraged from entering.

The ox weighed 1,198 pounds. The median estimate - not the average of the group, but the value falling in the middle of the distribution of responses - was 1,207 pounds, just nine pounds (0.8%) higher than the ox’s actual weight. Looking at individual responses, however, a quarter of participants overestimated the ox’s weight by 45 pounds or more, while another quarter underestimated it by at least 29 pounds. Half of all participants were off in their estimates by an average of 3.1%, whereas the median estimate of the crowd was off by less than 1%. The mean estimate, calculated by averaging all responses, was 1,197 pounds - just one pound below the ox’s actual weight.

Today, the idea that the crowd of ordinary people could even come close to the correct answer to such a bizarre task seems almost miraculous, but the people attending this exhibition would have been broadly familiar with how much an ox might weigh. The attendees were predominantly those involved in animal husbandry - people who routinely traded livestock and would therefore possess a reasonably good sense of an ox’s mass. In other words, this was a sample of, if not experts, then at least individuals with substantial practical knowledge of the subject: how much meat and bone makes up the body of an ox.

Even so, the fact that the crowd’s mean estimate was off by only a single pound has remained such a startling result for more than a century that it served as the framing device for James Surowiecki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which popularized the term.

Surowiecki opens his book by describing, in flourishing detail, the natural experiment that occurred in England in 1906, focusing on just how close the crowd came to the truth. However, while the mean estimate was indeed off by only a pound, the standard deviation of responses was 62 pounds, representing a considerable spread of guesses.

Galton himself reported the median score, not the mean, and it’s difficult to say if a anyone correctly guessed the ox’s weight or was even similarly off by a pound, due to the conflicting nature of Galton’s notes. Regardless, in the context of vox populi, the voice of the people in jury decision-making regarding damages, which was the subject that concerned Galton at the time and which he discussed directly in a response to a reader letter published in Nature, the median estimate was the statistic of interest, not the mean. Moreover, because Galton’s own notes and publications contain numerous inconsistencies and errors, all of his results are called into question.

That the mean estimate in one version of these data happened to fall so close to the true value was, at best, a stroke of fortune. It was less evidence of collective wisdom than of statistical error cancellation. The crowd did not arrive at the correct answer through consensus or insight, but rather, averaging a large number of inaccurate estimates from an inaccurate record-keeper happened to produce a figure that was remarkably close to the truth.

Galton’s poorly recorded experiment, upon which so much of the wisdom of crowds literature rests, is not quite the magical demonstration of collective intelligence it is often portrayed as being. The crowd being off by only a pound sounds considerably less impressive when one considers that the median estimate was off by nine pounds and that half of the participants were wrong by at least 37 pounds, while the remainder produced estimates ranging from 29 pounds below the true weight to 45 pounds above it.

The foundation upon which much of the modern wisdom of crowds narrative is built, including the opening example of the book that popularised the term, is a shaky one, to put it mildly. Neither group consensus nor crowdsourcing produced a correct answer. Instead, a sufficiently large collection of errors happened to cancel one another out in aggregation. The crowd did not magically discover the truth. It merely averaged its way towards it through the cumulation of many significant errors.

In 2014, econometrician Kenneth Wallis re-examined Galton’s experiment and noted not only the large standard deviation of the estimates, but also the unusual kurtosis of the data. Kurtosis refers to the “tailedness” of a distribution, that is, the extent to which observations cluster in the centre versus the extremes. Galton’s figures exhibit fat tails, meaning that a substantial number of participants weren’t just wrong, but very wrong in estimating the ox’s weight. Wallis also noted that the distribution was skewed. Rather than forming a symmetrical bell curve, the estimates were distributed asymmetrically around the true value. This suggests that the crowd’s mean estimate being off by only a single pound was, in effect, a statistical anomaly.

Yet the fact that the example popularised by Surowiecki relies on a questionable statistical interpretation of questionable data does not mean that the wisdom of crowds is entirely illusory.

The same year that Wallis published his re-examination, Ulrik Nash also revisited Galton’s original research to better understand the curious anomaly of the crowd’s skewed distribution. To explain why Galton’s data departed so markedly from a normal curve, Nash developed a mathematical model suggesting that people do not evaluate all available information equally or holistically. Instead, they tend to focus on particular cues and use them to infer the characteristics of the whole.

In the case of Galton’s ox, attendees, who were experienced with judging the weight of animals, may have focused on specific indicators of the animal’s weight, such as its musculature, shoulder width, or whether its ribs were visible. Something about the ox in Galton’s experiment appears to have encouraged participants to overestimate how heavy the animal was. While such cues would typically indicate a heavier animal, in this case they did not. As a result, when people focus on a limited number of cues rather than the full range of available information, the distribution of estimates can become skewed.

To test whether collective judgement is indeed more accurate under normal conditions than abnormal ones, Nash analysed more than 3,000 forecasts made by economists regarding GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation between 1969 and 2011. He found that in years when economic conditions were relatively normal, economists’ forecasts tended to cluster closely around real outcomes. In years characterised by unusual economic changes; however, their predictions became considerably less accurate.

For example, if economic indicators point towards a strong year, most economists might forecast growth of 5% to 7%, with a few outliers predicting 3% to 9%. If growth ultimately reaches 10%, most forecasters will have been wrong simply because they made the safer prediction. Even experts, whether the farmers and butchers at the West England Poultry and Livestock Show or professional economists over four decades, tend to predict normality based on the cues available to them.

The farmers and butchers who observed Galton’s ox likely concluded, based on its visible characteristics and their experience with other oxen, that it must weigh more than twelve hundred pounds. Similarly, economists tended to underestimate unusually large economic outcomes because they relied upon historical patterns and norms. If crowds, even crowds of experts, possess special wisdom, they appear to be most accurate when the external circumstances are ordinary rather than extraordinary.

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Consider this simple scenario: a clear glass, partially filled with water, is tilted to one side. What orientation does the water surface assume? The correct answer - that the water remains level with respect to gravity - is a basic principle of physics, requiring no specialized training to understand. It is a phenomenon that each and every one of us has observed directly.

Despite this apparent simplicity, empirical research spanning more than eight decades has demonstrated that a substantial proportion of the population fail to answer this question correctly when it is presented in abstract or diagrammatic form. Crucially, these errors exhibit a consistent pattern: men significantly outperform women in correctly answering the aforementioned “water level task.”

This observation raises a set of important questions. At a superficial level, one might ask whether such errors reflect a misunderstanding of the task itself. Perhaps women are simply more likely to assume that they are being asked to rotate a static, 2-dimensional representation of a glass, rather than a 3-dimensional object. At a deeper level; however, the findings invite consideration of whether they instead reveal underlying sex differences in spatial cognition; the ability to mentally represent and manipulate spatial relationships.

Spatial cognition constitutes a domain of cognitive functioning that is strongly associated with success in a range of technical and scientific disciplines, including engineering, physics, architecture, and surgery. Persistent sex differences in these abilities, if robust, have implications for understanding broader patterns of educational and occupational specialization between men and women.

Over several decades, a large body of research has identified consistent sex differences across multiple measures of spatial ability. Among these, the most pronounced and reliably replicated effects are observed in tasks involving mental rotation; the capacity to simulate and manipulate objects in three-dimensional space within the mind. The magnitude, persistence, and cross-cultural replication of these differences have made them one of the more extensively studied and yet debated findings in cognitive psychology.

This topic remains controversial, despite decades of data and debate, because of its potential socio-political implications. If differences in spatial cognition are both real and systematically distributed across populations, they may contribute to observed disparities in participation across STEM fields. Such conclusions would challenge widely held assumptions not only about the relative roles of socialization and biological predisposition across the sexes, but one of the core concepts of Enlightenment philosophy - the blank slate hypothesis.

Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition

Spatial cognition isn’t a single skill. It’s a family of abilities that allow us to understand objects, layouts, and movement in space.

Newcombe (2018) organized these abilities along two key dimensions. First, spatial reasoning can focus on the inside of objects (such as imagining how a shape rotates or folds), or on relationships between objects and places, like reading a map or navigating through a city. Second, these skills can involve either static structures (understanding how an object is arranged) or dynamic transformations, like imagining yourself moving through an environment. Together, these dimensions give us four core abilities: understanding object structure, mentally transforming objects, perceiving spatial relationships, and navigating or shifting perspective within space.

A large meta-analysis by Voyer, Voyer, and Bryden (1995), drawing from 286 studies, found consistent differences between men and women across a wide range of spatial tasks. These included mental rotation, judging spatial relationships, rod-and-frame tests (where participants must identify true orientation despite a misleading background), paper form board tests (which involve combining shapes into a whole), and the water level task, which I will explain in detail shortly. Of all these measures, the largest and most consistent differences appeared in mental rotation tasks.

Mental rotation isn’t an abstract, meaningless skill only of interest within the laboratory. The ability to mentally rotate objects plays a key role in success across many STEM fields. Geologists must visualize how structures change across time and space. Chemists need to understand the three-dimensional orientation (chirality) of molecules. Architects and engineers translate flat designs into physical structures. Surgeons and radiologists interpret cross-sections of the body in three dimensions. Astrophysicists rely on understanding how objects move and rotate through space, and so on.

So, if women, on average, perform worse than men on certain spatial tasks, particularly mental rotation, that difference may help explain why fewer women choose to enter STEM fields. If these tasks are fundamentally more difficult or less intuitive for women then ,of course, that difficulty will serve as a barrier to entry. But how exactly do men and women’s spatial abilities differ? To answer that, let’s start with one of the simplest and most surprising tests of spatial cognition - the water level task.

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War, war never changes - but Trump’s war with Iran has caused a dramatic split in the coalition of Republicans, Libertarians, disaffected Democrats and Independents who once voted for him based on a seemingly simple shared goal: placing America and Americans first in all political considerations, both domestic and international. A civil war of sorts has also been declared simultaneous, with lines drawn between Trump and what some have termed “New MAGA”, including the likes of former Never Trumpers such as Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham versus “Old MAGA,” including long-time Trump supporters such as Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, MAGA-adjacents such as Thomas Massie, and more fringe elements of the right, such as Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.

Those opposed to Trump’s war see it as a fundamental betrayal of his guarantees of, well, no new wars, a promise for which he recently and repeatedly demanded a Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, key domestic promises that bound this broad coalition - reducing H1B immigration, mass deportations of immigrants, “draining the swamp,” Epstein transparency, and lowering the cost of living and homeownership - have all been abandoned or broken, seemingly in favour of a foreign war no one asked for and that very few appear pleased with in the polls, with only 32% of Americans in support as of April, 2026.

Yet while many feel betrayed, many also seem compelled to stand by Donald Trump and “stick with their vote.” This isn’t a phenomenon limited to this particular political habitat. It appears to be a feature of democracy rather than a bug. After all, one of the reasons so many supported Trump was a shared belief that finding a politician who actually lives up to their promises is like finding a needle in a haystack and Trump was that golden spindle.

To be clear, the “sticking with your vote” phenomenon is also in no way limited to the right. Just thinking back to recent memory in U.S. politics - for which Biden gaffe was there not an endless stream of rationalisations and justifications from Democrat pundits and voters alike? But why, then, are some people so unwilling to even voice dissent when the person they voted for fails to meet expectations?

The answer, as usual, lies in human behavioural psychology and specifically in cognitive dissonance: a state of psychological discomfort that arises when our past actions or beliefs conflict with our present ones. Either we were wrong then, or we’re wrong now, and that tension must be resolved by changing either behaviours or attitudes to alleviate the “psychic pain” (to steal a phrase from the authors of Anti-Politics) dissonance creates.

Cognitive dissonance in the political context does not just occur when a politician fails to live up to expectations, as we will discuss later. Almost every aspect of the democratic process is potentially dissonance-inducing.

Most people vote for a candidate whom they not only believe is a good choice for achieving the change they want to see, but also someone that they believe can actually win. Hence the perpetual fear of “splitting” or “wasting the vote” by backing an unwinnable candidate. But when our preferred candidate wins, that victory itself serves as proof of their competence and legitimacy. When our preferred candidate loses, that loss, in turn, is often taken as proof of incompetence.

And yet, we voted for them. The vast majority of people wouldn’t intentionally vote for someone they believed to be incompetent or unfit, right? These duelling actions and beliefs - that we chose the best candidate, and yet that candidate lost - produce dissonance.

To manage this discomfort, we may shift our attitudes; evaluating the loser more negatively and the winner more positively. In elections, this has been described as “outcome-based” dissonance, where the result determines whether a voter experiences that psychological pain.

This dynamic is not hypothetical; it has been observed empirically across contexts.

Beasley and Joslyn (2001) analysed data from the National Election Survey collected both before and after elections in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 to examine whether winning or losing an election alters voters’ opinions of candidates. They measured this using changes in “attitude distance” between candidates, operationalized through a feeling thermometer.

For example, if a voter rated Bill Clinton at 75 and Bob Dole at 40 before the 1996 election, but after Clinton’s victory adjusted those ratings to 70 and 50 respectively, the evaluative distance between the two candidates would have narrowed.

Across five of the six elections assessed, voters reported wider attitude distances between candidates in the post-election period relative to non-voters. The sole exception was the aforementioned 1996 election between Clinton and Dole, where no significant change in favourability distance was observed. This may be attributable to the relatively moderate positions both candidates held within their respective parties. Additionally, the 1996 election was unusual in that independent candidate Ross Perot captured a substantial share of the popular vote; around eight percent. Overall, the race was comparatively non-hostile, moderate, and widely perceived as low-stakes relative to both earlier and later elections. Whoever won, a moderate would occupy the White House, which may explain why 1996 stands as the lone case where post-election attitude distance did not increase.

With that exception aside and counterintuitively, it was actually voters for the losing candidate whose attitudes toward the winner improved the most. While supporters of the winning candidate did report slightly more positive attitudes toward their own candidate, the increase was minimal. Supporters of the winning candidate also expressed more positive attitudes toward the loser, while supporters of the losing candidate became significantly more negative toward their own preferred (now defeated) candidate.

The political climate of the 1970s through the 1990s was, of course, very different from today’s social media-saturated, post-Trump environment. Still, the underlying logic is consistent. If my preferred candidate loses, it becomes psychologically convenient to conclude that he simply wasn’t very good and that I never really liked him all that much anyway. But if my candidate wins, then his victory becomes validation: proof that he was the better choice, and that I was right to support him because the public has collectively affirmed that judgment.

Because I backed the winner, I don’t have to grapple with the psychological cost of defeat. I’m free, instead, to soften my view of the loser and perhaps even to concede that he ran a good race, or to notice qualities I can now afford to appreciate from the victors’ podium precisely because the competition is ended and the outcome decided. Vox populi, vox Dei.

Obviously, things have changed in American politics since 2016, to put it mildly. While an exact replication of Beasley and Joslyn’s methodology has not been conducted, a 2023 analysis of affective polarisation by Reiljan and colleagues, drawing on data from 102 elections across 40 countries between 1996 and 2019, offers a useful point of comparison. Their findings suggest that there are only a handful of countries where leader-based affective polarisation exceeds party-based polarisation. The United States is one of just three.

Affective polarisation refers to the extent to which voters hold positive sentiments toward their own party while harbouring negative sentiments toward opposing parties. In most countries, this dynamic is primarily party-driven rather than leader-driven. The United States is a notable exception. While it is not alone in exhibiting relatively high levels of leader-focused polarisation (countries such as Serbia, Mexico, Portugal, Slovakia, Italy, the Czech Republic, Romania, Uruguay, South Africa, Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Turkey also rank highly), it is one of only three countries, alongside Mexico and Peru, where leader-affective polarisation exceeds party-affective polarisation. In the remaining 37 countries studied, the reverse was true.

In other words, the United States is one of very few political systems where individual leaders appear to drive polarisation more than parties themselves, at least since 1996. Thus, we should not expect American voters today to exhibit the same post-election attitude shifts towards losers observed in earlier decades. When political identity becomes tethered to individuals rather than institutions, the psychological mechanisms that once allowed voters to soften toward losing candidates, or to distance themselves from their own losing choices, may no longer function in the same way.

Across all nations examined, the strongest predictor of both party- and leader-affective polarisation was self-identified partisanship, with left–right ideological distance playing a much smaller role. Both forms of polarisation were also less pronounced in countries where citizens expressed low confidence in government. Additionally, a greater number of political parties was associated with lower levels of both forms of affective polarisation. The authors also found a weak but statistically significant effect of time, indicating that both leader- and party-based polarisation have increased in recent decades globally.

Of course, these are broad international trends, and the model accounts for less than 50 percent of the variance in leader- and party-affective polarisation. There is no single, uniform pattern, but individual political figures can tend to exert outsized influence. Specifically, leaders such as Donald Trump, Robert Fico, or Milo Đukanović demonstrate how strongly polarising personalities can reshape political landscapes. This also means that it is entirely possible that levels of polarisation within a nation may shift once such figures exit the political stage. When Trump leaves office, for example, the current feverish polarisation of the American public could potentially dissipate.

Although Reiljan et al.’s analysis cannot account for the effects of pre-existing dissatisfaction with electoral politics, it may help explain relatively low levels of collective polarisation in cases such as the 2015 UK general election, where dissatisfaction was directed more toward Labour leader Ed Miliband than toward the Labour Party itself. The next major test of this dynamic will likely come in the 2029 United Kingdom general election, where overtly polarising figures, including Nigel Farage, Zack Polanski, and Rupert Lowe are set to compete.

If polarisation explains how people feel about politics, partisanship explains why those feelings tend to foment into patterns of behaviour.

Once someone becomes a partisan, they tend to remain one, if only to avoid the psychological discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Over time, their attitudes toward parties or leaders may shift in intensity, but the underlying alignment is remarkably stable. The question, then, is not just why people stay partisan, but how that process begins in the first place.

Often, it begins with the most basic component of the democratic process: the act of voting.

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This now well-worn aphorism is often attributed to the post-apocalyptic novel, Those Who Remain by G. Michael Hopf from 2016, but the sentiment is truly ancient. The Greek historian Herodotus attributed a somewhat similar idiom, perhaps the root of it, to the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in the 5th century B.C., who claimed: “soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors do not grow from the same soil.” But, is that saying of good times, hard times, and men really just a saying, or is it demonstrable, empirical fact?

In this essay, we will explore not only the scientific evidence that hard times create strong men and good times create weak men, but also what happens when mass immigration of people from poor or unstable countries move to prosperous ones; transferring from hard times to good times, and the long-term effects on the societies immigrants move to in terms of the amount of men and types of men that immigration produces by looking at one of the most well-documented, but perhaps scientifically and politically under-appreciated, measurements of the health of the human species : sex ratios at birth, the number of males versus females born within a population.

You may already be aware that more human males are born than human females, but sex ratio at birth is also a silent, ambient, measurement of the relative health of a given society for, as it turns out, yes, hard times create strong men by resulting in fewer, fitter males, and good times create weak men by resulting an excess of less fit males and an over-production of females across every civilization throughout human history.

The human sexes are not equal. Not socially and not biologically. A revolutionary statement, I know. While women often outnumber men in total national adult populations, more males are born than are females, to a small but consistent degree across time and place. The average sex at birth ratio globally is around 1.05 to one, meaning that for every 100 girls born, 105 boys are born. Both the male skew in human sex ratio and its relative stability over time have long been detected by curious observers, and was first formally identified by the founder of demography, John Graunt in 1662. But why are more boys born than girls?

Biologists have long speculated as to the answer to this question, one possible explanation is that more males are born as a form of compensation for higher male mortality, even in utero. A meta analysis from Mondal et al (2014) found that males are approximately 10% more likely to be stillborn than females, hence a need to produce more male embryos so that more are able to survive till birth.

A review of literature from Inkster, Fernández-Boyano and Robinson (2021) relatedly reported an increased likelihood of preterm birth, stillbirth and SIDs in males, again evidencing the necessity that more males be produced in the womb and more males be born, so as to reach relative parity between the sexes for those that survive past infancy. Outside of the increased infant and prenatal mortality risk, men also just tend to die more, and they always have, be it in war, labouring, or via increased relative propensity for recklessness and risk-taking behaviours.

Because both before and after birth more males die than do females, it would logically follow that more males are needed for the population just to compensate for their increased mortality rates. So why then would a human population stop over-producing male offspring despite our biological need to overproduce them to reach a relatively even distribution of the sexes in adulthood? Obviously if there’s too many men or too many women, someone in society is going to be unhappy with that set-up.

The answer may lie in the Trivers-Willard hypothesis.

Although 1.05 is the global average, no two countries consistently report identical sex at birth ratios. If we look at the SRB of children born in different countries, we can quickly see that there are differences, just as there are for the sexes in natal and perinatal mortality. In the main Anglosphere nations; the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, which I will be focusing on in this essay because, well, I speak English and I’ve lived for a long time in two of them as both a citizen and an immigrant; the SRB is about the same as the global average, ranging from a low end of 104.75 in the US to a high end of 105.59 in Australia as of 2023. Some nations; however, produce far more males while others produce far fewer, and this has changed across history.

We can track sex ratios at birth in a single nation and compare them to significant periods of strife, such as economic crises and war, which I’ve done for the US and UK, alongside the total population’s sex distributions for these two samples based on census data. In the US, there was a significant drop in the ratio of males born year by year directly following the economic panics of 1857 and 1893, the Civil War, the 2^nd World War, and the Korean war, as well as in the 1980s, the later of which can be attributed to stagflation, pollution and the oil crisis, but is a bit more complicated to explain. I will offer a data-based hypothesis later for it, but for now, put a pin in both the 1980s SRB decline and its subsequent rise and in the 2000s, maintaining relative normalcy over the proceeding decades. The total male portion of the US population in proportion to the female population fell consistently between the first world war and remained stagnant until after the Gulf War.

In England and Wales, there was a significant drop in the ratio of males born year by year for a consistent period between 1841 and the 1880s, increasing during the Victorian Golden age and falling during the late Victorian depression, increasing dramatically during the pre-WWI economic boom and falling following the first war, remaining depressed until the end of the second when it rose again and falling consistently since the baby boom until the 2010s. The total male portion of the UK has never once reached parity with females over the entire data collection period I looked at, between 1841 and 2025.

There are many potential reasons for this, from high male emigration, to generally high male mortality due to occupational hazards, as well as war casualties from the Napoleonic and World wars. The sole spike over the last 2 centuries wherein UK population’s total sex distribution almost reached parity was in 1900, but this was likely due to excess deaths of women attributable to tuberculosis, which disproportionately affected young girls. While still not at parity, as of 2025 the UK is approaching a near equal adult sex distribution for the first time since 1900, due in large part to foreign immigration.

We can also track changes in SRB in relation to specific, short-term, events such as natural disasters, human tragedies, and epidemics, as seen in a meta-analysis of 25 articles from Fontanesi et al (2023), who found a decrease in number of American males born comparative to females, across the state of Utah in the wake of the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1920, in the Turkish SRB after the Gölcük earthquake of 1999, in Iranian SRB 11 months after the Bam Earthquake of 2003, the Chilean SRB following the Tarapaca earthquake of 2005, the Indian SRB following the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, the Greek SRB 13-months after a series of seismic activities in the Island of Zakynthos in 2006, the Italian SRB 9 months after the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, the Icelandic SRB following the Eyjafjallajökull eruption of 2010, and the Japanese SRB in the aftermaths of the Great East Japan earthquake of 2011 and the Kobe earthquake of 2005. After all of these natural disasters, fewer males were born compared to the norm for each country.

It’s not just natural disasters, but also epidemics that affect SRB, although the relationship is less direct in some cases. While the Japanese SRB decreased in December of 2020, 7 months after lockdown to 102.9 as did the South African SRB in June of 2020, only a few months into lockdown, the Iranian SRB increased between 10 and 13 months after the start of the pandemic, compared to the SRB 36 months before the pandemic.

Further, the SRB of England and Wales dropped non-significantly in June of 2020 but rose significantly above the norm by December of 2020, indicating that while early lockdowns may have represented a time of fear and uncertainty, staying at home for prolonged periods as the pandemic waged on perhaps represented very comfortable conditions, and in the case of Japan, the authors speculate the increase may have been a direct result of the nation winning the Rugby World Cup, resulting in fewer males at first, but excess males later on.

SRB does not always result in fewer males following a tragedy, as after Hurricane Katrina hit the US east coast in 2005, the SRB rose. It also rose following tropical cyclone Yasi for Australian women who were in the early stages of pregnancy during the disaster. These increases may be due to the ability for prosperous nations to provide aid to those who suffered from these natural disasters, likely not improving their conditions above the baseline in most cases, but instead representing social stability. A woman’s body need not discard excess males even if conditions directly around her are dire when the national conditions are stable and able to support her.

Maltese paediatrician, Star Trek enthusiast, and the man whose strange research introduced me to this topic, Victor Grech, studied the effect of all sorts of events on a population’s SRB. He found that the SRB of New York City declined five months after 9/11 by about 5% and remained lower than the average for up to 10 months after the attacks.

It fell in Ireland during the Troubles compared to the period directly preceding them; in Los Angeles four months after the Rodney King riots, in Connecticut after the Sandy Hook shooting, and, ironically for the broader subject of this essay, in Norway following Anders Brevik’s terrorist attacks, motivated in large part by foreign immigration to the country. Even political discourse can alter the SRB, as Grech found that it fell in Quebec following two referendums held on the issue of secession from Canada in both 1980 and 1995.

Even minor changes to the environment can alter a population’s SRB as, for example, Helle, Helama, Jokela (2008) found that between the 18^th and 19^th century, in the Sami people of northern Finland, a 1-degree Celsius increase in average temperature resulted in a 1% increase in sons born annually. Arima (2023) found that in the Japanese Goto islands, located due south of the Korean peninsula, aerosolised pollutants predominantly from China began to significantly increase as China’s industrial sector did, resulting in seasonal changes to the SRB of the islands, with fewer males born in the winter, following progressively oxidant-polluted springs. Increased nitrogen dioxide levels in the air of the heavily industrialized city of Yazd, Iran were related to an excess number of females born in the area, according to a study from Pormazar et al (2023).

Radiation has been found to decrease the number of males born while also decreasing the total number of births, as found by Grech (2015) in regions of Canada, the USA, Mexico, Central and Southern Europe, and South America that were nearby atomic bomb testing sites, as the number of tests per year increased, or close the Chernobyl reactor. Scherb and Grech (2020) found that the 1996 refurbishment of and 2011 upgrades to a nuclear reactor near the city of Mainz, Germany, was related to decreases in all births, but particularly in female births. Both sexes have pre-natal susceptibilities to radiation exposure; females to excess mutational load from the double X chromosome, and males to developmental stressors from the single one.

While one might expect that the availability of hormonal birth control might be a factor that contributes to a nation’s SRB directly, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Vartiainen, Kartovaara, and Tuomisto (1999) tracked the SRB in Finland for over 250 years using baptismal records and detected a long-term increase in Finnish SRB over time between 1750 and the second world war, after which point it started to decline for the first time in centuries, preceding the widespread use of hormonal contraception.

By the year 2000, SRBs in Finland were about the same as they were in the 1800s, despite very high SRBs in young mothers in the 1960s and 70s, advances in medicine, climbing GDP, and increasing immigration. Because we have access to birth records dating back centuries, we can track minor and major changes in a society alike in comparison to SRBs, which Golian and Liczbińska (2022) similarly did for the population of Detva, Hungary, between 1801 and 1900, and found that SRB dropped during conflict, economic crises, crop failures, and major fires, dating all the way back to the Napoleonic wars.

Taking a birds-eye view, if we look at these two graphs I’ve put together of economic crises and war in the US and UK, we can see that when conditions are comparatively poor, either short-term or long-term, fewer men are born and when conditions are better long-term or relatively, sex birth ratios return to around 105.

Because males are more likely to die in utero, shortly after birth and just in general as war casualties or in the workforce, more males than females are constantly needed to reach gender parity. Despite the 105 average sex at birth ratio, evidence from fertility research has indicated that the sex ratio at conception is even higher, and considerably so. Tarin et al (2014), for example, compared the ratios of embryos created through two artificial processes; in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to determine, essentially, what the sex ratio of human embryos are in ideal conditions.

For intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in which the sperm cell is directly injected into the ova using a pipette, sex ratios at fertilization or implantation of an embryo were 1.07, above the stable average; however, for in-vitro fertilization, in which many sperm cells are introduced to an ova, allowing for more naturalistic survival of the fittest approach to fertilization, the sex ratio of blastocysts was between 1.29 and 1.5 male to female.

In ideal laboratory conditions then, if every embryo created developed to term, would mean that for every two girls born, 3 boys would be born at the upper limits of this ratio. This would seem to indicate that humans have a fairly significant skew towards producing male embryos over female embryos and that any sperm cell, selected at random, is more likely to result in the creation of a male than a female. The same laboratory environments that produce these results; however, particularly IVF, may be affected by precocious X-chromosome inactivation, which occurs as a result of such environments being overly oxygenated.

As females have two x chromosomes, the genes associated with it are doubled, which can result in a toxic gene expression if one of the chromosomes is prematurely turned off, a process called X-chromosome inactivation, that normally occurs during the blastocyst stage of development, about five to seven days after fertilization. Laboratory environments high levels of oxygen can cause precocious inactivation of the X-chromosome, which is initially active directly following fertilization, resulting typically in death.

Given that this issue only affects females, those extreme sex ratios found in embryos produced via IVF are likely due in part to the loss of female embryos from precocious x chromosome inactivation. Biology, women most affected, but, hence why we do not regularly see sex ratios at birth that skew so heavily male but we do consistently find less extreme male skewing. Because there are numerous other natural difficulties faced by males during early development that do not affect females; however, more male fetuses are lost, but even so, typically, more males are born than females.

In truth, women not most affected but rather, just staying alive is more difficult for men from the moment of conception than it is for women. ICSI pregnancies tend to result in fewer relative male births, as seen in research from Du et al (2023) who found a SRB for ICSI, again directly injecting a single sperm into an ova, at 50.1%, considerably lower than the average demonstrating the role that environmental factors play in embryo survival from conception to birth, even with the use of fertility treatments.

The point is, in optimal conditions, sperm directly meeting egg, males are far more commonly produced than females, but environmental factors then influence those embryos, which results in sex ratios at birth around 1.05 to 1. But, again why? Why are so many more males created and more, if lesser than that at conception, born and why is the ratio of males born in comparison to females lower during periods of economic crisis, war, and natural disasters?

In 1973, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (whose name recently appeared in the Epstein Files discussing transgenderism, but that’s, thankfully, not related to his hypothesis) and computer scientist Dan Willard hypothesized that because subsequent successful reproduction is less likely for males than it is for females – that is that there will be a few very highly reproductively successful males chads, many males who will reproduce a few times, and some males who will never be able to reproduce at all, it is therefore disadvantageous for a woman to carry a less genetically fit, referred to in the literature as a “fragile” male, to term in times of social upheaval or uncertainty because he is less likely to proceed to pass on his genes to his own offspring compared to a female to do the same, regardless of her genetic fitness.

When the conditions surrounding the mother are unstable, making pregnancy all the more potentially perilous, her body may not support the continued development of a male that would be less likely to be successful in gene propagation. Biologically, our one and only drive is the survival of our genes, along with the rest of life on Earth, from the smallest of microscopic lifeforms to the largest of animals, and so to maximize her odds of passing on her genes to subsequent generations, gestating a fragile male is, essentially, a wasteful project, for the body to commit resources to when resources are less abundant. This is the Trivers-Willard hypothesis.

As a result, when times are good, more males are born, because a female, of any species, biologically, does not need to be as concerned about her sons’ ability to reproduce when she has access to the resources necessary to produce more offspring. If one of her male offspring is a dud, a genetic dead-end, but resources are plentiful, she can roll the dice again while still devoting these excess resources to caring for the offspring she already has to maximize the potential for her genes to be propagated across future generations.

When times are difficult; however, and a female does not have easy access to the resources necessary to gestate offspring, the time and energy investment necessary to produce and care for a less genetically fit, fragile male, represents, in harsh, biological terms, is a waste of those resources for the purpose of ensuring the continual reproduction of her genes. Unlike males, there are far fewer females who will be unable to mate and, thus, a female offspring is preferable for the continual genetic propagation under strenuous circumstances.

The Trivers-Willard hypothesis and it’s evidence in human biology and demographic trends means that hard times create strong men and good times create weak men who otherwise would be terminated in-utero. So, knowing as we do that SRB generally hovers around 105, how do good and bad times in different countries and cultures affect sex ratios at birth?

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This oft quoted excerpt from Roald Dahl’s the Twits, is a nice sentiment, but is it true? Do ugly thoughts twist and distort the face and body such that nastiness on the inside is reflected physically on the outside?

The political left’s public reaction to the assassination to Charlie Kirk was one of particular and unique ugliness, for example, but similar ugliness was displayed by many in the political right’s public reaction to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. It is perhaps the callous, cruel, reactions, more so than the events themselves, that are even more emotionally distressing than the events themselves.

In the case of Charlie Kirk, while mass vigils filled stadiums full of mourners in the United States, in England, Japan, and South Korea anti-immigration protests carried images of Charlie alongside symbols of national pride; thousands of other people were unable to contain the sheer joy they felt at the murder of a man whose crime was disagreeing with them politically, yet always willing to engage in civil debate. In the case of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, while memorials were constructed and anti-ICE protestors carried signs bearing their names; thousands of others could not help but respond glibly with: “Fuck Around, Find Out.”

Ugly. I can think of many words to describe this phenomenon, but high amongst them is the word “ugly.”

Let us test the veracity of that Roald Dahl quote. Does having ugly beliefs, thinking ugly thoughts, saying ugly words and committing acts of unspeakable ugliness warp and contort the physical form? Is one side of the political aisle uglier than the other because they have uglier thoughts? In this article, I will demonstrate, with scientific data, the particular ugliness of the political left (although not exclusive to it), from appearance to thoughts to actions and through the use of mass scale datasets, provide an explanation for the lower levels of violence typically ascribed to them. The answer is not that the left is in any way less violent, as is often claimed, but rather that they are less competent at enacting violence yet more likely to believe violence is a justified course of moral action. This is political ugliness.

But what does political ugliness look like and what forms does it take? Despite being oft said to be in the eye of the beholder, physical ugliness is in many ways easier to assess than ugliness of the mind. Thus, let us answer this question that has persistently plagued public discourse: is one side of politics uglier than the other in their beliefs, thoughts, actions and appearance? Let’s start from the outside, the body, before the delve deeper into the mind and, ultimately, the soul.

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The kindest hearts can be moulded into the deadliest weapons. In Minneapolis, a mother of three, driven by concern for strangers, drove into a real-life battlefield, and paid with her life. But was her “compassion” entirely pure? What if empathy is being twisted into a tool for manipulation, self-gain, and even violence? Psychometric data points to a chilling link between dark empathy and modern politics, where performative caring leads to real destruction. Stick around for this in-depth scientific analysis - you may never see “empathy” the same way again.

We live in the age of empathy. Every brand has feelings; every corporation, a conscience and every person, a cause. Empathy has ceased to be a virtue and become, instead, a form of social currency. In politics, the left often touts empathy as being core to their political identity; their empathy as moral proof. But is this genuine compassion, or merely the performance of compassion driven by self-interest and used as a tactic to obtain political goals?

Empathy has been, perhaps, one of the most overused terms in modern political discourse. If you don’t care about a certain cause, you must be unempathetic, a monster, a psychopath. As such, many feel compelled to perform empathy as a display to others that they are none of those things and are, instead, good, decent, and moral.

The shooting of Renee Good is amongst the strongest yet tragic example of how ostensibly good intentions can lead to ill-advised, illegal action, and ultimately, to death. Her widow described Renee as deeply empathetic; someone who lived by one guiding belief, that:

“there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow…we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.”

But Renee Good’s story and the outrage and chaos it sparked, along with the Alex Pretti story, are only two of but countless examples of an uncomfortable notion: that empathy can be and has been weaponised. That it can and has been used to manipulate people into action they wouldn’t otherwise take, and more heinously, even to justify cruelty and violence from the mass celebration of the murder of Charlie Kirk, to random acts of aggression targeting anyone that is determined to “look like” an ICE agent based on the type of car they drive, the kind of clothing they’re wearing, or the colour of their skin - to perform morality rather than to truly live it.

Not because they are unilaterally evil, but because they believe they are virtuous. In some cases, people who appear the most empathetic may actually be amongst the most dangerous, both to themselves and to others by encouraging certain behaviours through the pulling of heart strings or by merely acting compassionate only in order to receive compassion for themselves in return. The goodwill of good people is oft contorted into a tool for someone else’s end.

To understand how empathy, a moral good, can be a tool for personal gain, we must first understand the basics of the paradoxes of empathy.

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The Empathy Paradox

Stories like that of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are tragic but simultaneously revealing of how empathy, something most people see as a universal good, can be warped with disastrous consequences - what professor Gad Saad, whose work in marketing relies on evolutionary psychology theory, as well as countless political pundits and commentators, have described as suicidal empathy.

But the term “suicidal empathy” describes how empathy itself that can be harmful, and not how the manipulation of empathy can be used for personal gain. Twisting the human empathetic system allows for compassion, often sincere compassion, to result in danger and even death when it is misplaced and misappropriated. Feeling deeply for others can push us toward courage but it can also push us toward dangerous acts under certain conditions. This is a current political problem, but its basis lies in psychology and sociology. The tension between self-preservation and compassion sits at the heart of what Yale psychologist Laurie Paul describes as the paradox of empathy.

First, we need to define what empathy even is, because, clearly, it means different things to different people or even the same person in different circumstances. Empathy refers to the capacity to understand and share another person’s emotional state while maintaining self–other distinction (see: Decety & Jackson, 2004). Sympathy, by contrast, is an other-oriented response of concern or sorrow for someone perceived to be in distress and does not require emotional sharing (see: Eisenberg et al., 2010). These definitions reflect standard usage in psychology and the social sciences and are the ones that I will be using here.

In her 2021 article, Paul laid out two paradoxes that occur in situations where empathising with someone significantly alien from oneself can be psychologically dangerous. First is the epistemic paradox of empathy. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, how we come to know things. Opening oneself up to new information has the potential to radically change one’s mind and understanding of the world. If you care about truth, you should be open to new perspectives. But if you already believe your position is rational, why risk contaminating it with what you see as irrational beliefs?

Second is the moral paradox of empathy, in which opening oneself up to new avenues of compassion has the potential to radically change one’s existing moral judgements. If you care about being morally right, you should consider different viewpoints. But if you believe those viewpoints are immoral, why expose yourself to them?

To exemplify this paradox, consider a conversation between an atheist and a Christian regarding the existence of the Divine. The Christian may speak of the spiritual and life satisfaction that he receives from his faith, but this faith is not the result of reasoning in the sense of Pascals wager; it is supernatural. The atheist skeptic has no common frame of reference and, seeing no evidence for the existence of God, concludes that the Christian is irrational; seeking comfort in a delusion. The atheist, from his perspective, is the clearer thinker of the two, but to the Christian, the atheist’s perspective misses the point, as in order for the atheist to understand divine agape, he must be first open to experiencing it.

The atheist may be invited to participate in religious activities, such as attending church or reading Scripture. These things would allow the atheist to take the epistemic stance of the believer, his way of knowing the world, but the skeptic cannot earnestly engage with religion this way because he already knows it is a lie. To play-along would be another act of self-deception, and engagement with Christian ritual could corrupt his rationality. The Christian cannot un-feel his personal religious experiences and, as such, neither can truly empathise with the other without sacrificing a core part of their respective identity, both from an epistemic and a moral perspective. To truly empathise would require sacrificing either rational or emotional standpoints.

This disconnect between the Christian and the atheist isn’t about the existence of God, not really; the same paradox applies to any deeply held beliefs, be they religious, social, or political. A man cannot truly empathise with a woman as he cannot become a woman without sacrificing his identity as a man. A liberal cannot truly empathise with a conservative as she cannot become a conservative without sacrificing her identity as a liberal. This is the paradox of empathy.

Empathising, in these instances, could result in cognitive dissonance, a form of psychological discomfort. Dissonance occurs when one’s previous behaviours or beliefs misalign with their current behaviours or beliefs. As such, not only is empathy often paradoxical, but empathising also has the potential to cause a sort of “psychic pain” and thus is avoided given our natural biological aversion to pain.

To truly understand others, you risk losing yourself, and that fear of being changed, particularly in those with high opinions of themselves, is not an alluring option. Why then would someone act empathetic when they have no intention to empathise, either to avoid psychological discomfort or to avoid the moral and epistemic paradoxes of empathy? The answer lies in one of the oldest and most primitive forms of deception known to the human species. Thus, let’s explore what this non-genuine empathy is, how it is enacted, and why humans developed the ability to empathise for personal benefit - tactical empathy.

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For the past nine years, I’ve been translating academic research into YouTube videos, primarily drawing from social psychology, neuroscience, and communication to help explain the strange contradictions of modern politics and society.

Those videos are, at their core, literature reviews: summaries and syntheses of peer-reviewed research, applied to real-world phenomena. But video is an entertainment medium first. Important nuance gets compressed, sources are harder to browse, and arguments unfold linearly rather than being searchable, referenceable, or easily revisited.

This Substack exists to solve that problem

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Prospectus and Purpose

Behind every video is a full literature review, often many thousands of words long, built from academic papers, books, and theoretical frameworks. Publishing here allows that work to exist in its natural form: written, cited, searchable, and accessible at your own pace.

Before YouTube, I completed a Master’s degree in Communication with an emphasis on social psychology and mediated communication. I began doctoral studies shortly afterward. My original prospectus was simple: to contribute positively to the wealth of human knowledge. I came to believe that the Internet offered a far greater opportunity to do that than any classroom or academic journal.

This project is an extension of that prospectus.

Modern politics often feels incoherent. It’s emotionally charged, irrational, and contradictory; however, much of what we observe makes sense when viewed through the lens of human psychology, evolution, social dynamics, and communication systems. My aim is to apply established scientific theory and statistical evidence to contemporary reality, helping contextualize behavior, social movements, and conflicts that otherwise feel inexplicable.

Here, you’ll find long-form literature reviews and analysis designed to bridge the gap between academic research and socio-political reality, without institutional barriers, minimal and translated jargon, and without assuming prior expertise.

Community for the Curious

I’m interested in building a community of intellectually curious people; readers who value evidence over narrative, inquiry over tribalism, and understanding over emotional comfort.

Modern politics often rewards certainty, outrage, and simplified stories. This space is meant as its antithesis.

While I hold strong personal political convictions of my own (as everyone does), my commitment here is to present scientific findings as faithfully as possible. My interpretations are transparent, but the underlying research is always offered directly, so readers can evaluate the evidence and draw their own conclusions.

I also want to reduce some of the structural barriers that keep this knowledge locked away: academic paywalls, dense jargon, and fragmented findings scattered across journals and papers. My work focuses on translating research into plain English and synthesizing disparate studies into coherent frameworks that are applicable in real life.

If you’re someone who prefers uncomfortable truths over comforting truisms, who enjoys thinking carefully about complex systems, and who believes that better information leads to better agency, you’ll probably feel at home here.

What to Expect

I publish one long-form literature review and analysis each month.

Each piece synthesizes academic research across the social sciences, applying those findings to contemporary political and social phenomena. These essays typically range from 9,000 to 15,000 words and include accessible citations and links, so readers without institutional access can explore the original sources directly.

In addition to the written essays, each post will also be available in audio form.

Subscriptions work as follows:

Free subscribers receive:

• Access to a portion of each monthly article

• Access to a portion of the audio version

• Occasional shorter updates or notes

Paid subscribers receive:

• Full access to every long-form literature review and analysis

• Full access to the complete audio versions

• A searchable archive of all past work

All current supporters on Patreon and SubscribeStar will get full access free for the first month and I will link all subsequent articles through those platforms for those at Knight tier or higher.

The intent is to make this material available in whatever format fits your life, whether you prefer reading carefully, listening while tackling other tasks, or returning to specific sections later.

This is slow content by design. Each piece is the result of extensive reading, synthesis, and careful framing. I’m less interested in reacting to daily news cycles than in building durable explanations for why things unfold the way they do.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for being here, and for taking the time to read.

If you’re curious about understanding the world more clearly, value evidence over narratives, and appreciate careful, long-form thinking, I invite you to subscribe. Whether you join as a free reader or a paid supporter, you’re helping make this work possible and accessible. My hope is that what you find here gives you better tools for navigating modernity, and a little more clarity in a confusing world.

Subscribe if you’d like to follow along, friends.

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