How the Frontier Mentality Evolved

Man in a cowboy hat atop Humphreys Peak in Arizona, US

Credit: Todd Diemer

‘Wild West’ mentality lingers in US mountain regions | University of Cambridge

The American 'Frontier' mentality, closely associated with fundamentalist religiosity and Creationism, evolved by a classic Darwinian 'advancing wave' process, according to research by a team from Cambridge University and published yesterday in Nature Human Behaviour.

The team were looking specifically at a possible correlation between a personality type that fits with 'frontier settlement theory' and topography (elevation in relation to the surrounding region).

Ironically, this correlation between fitness for the (new) environment and the environment, is exactly what we would expect from applied Darwinian evolution by natural selection. As a species advances into a new niche, selection pressure increses so as to concentrate the characteristics that made the new niche exploitable in the first place. This selection pressure works on any founder effect to polish and hone the descendants of the initial collonisers to become more and more fitted to the new environment as thery advance more and more deeply into it, and to diverge from the parent population. This works like an advancing wave of increasing fitness in the population and increasing difference from the parent population.

The harsh and remote environment of mountainous frontier regions historically attracted nonconformist settlers strongly motivated by a sense of freedom. Such rugged terrain likely favoured those who closely guarded their resources and distrusted strangers, as well as those who engaged in risky explorations to secure food and territory. These traits may have distilled over time into an individualism characterised by toughness and self-reliance that lies at the heart of the American frontier ethos. When we look at personality across the whole United States, we find that mountainous residents are more likely to have psychological characteristics indicative of this frontier mentality.

Friedrich Götz, Lead author Department of Psychology Cambridge University

The qualities the team looked at in the results of 3.3 million online personality tests of Americans were:

• Strongly motivated by a sense of freedom.
• Guarding resources and distrusted strangers.
• Engaging in risky explorations to secure food and territory.

These traits may have become distilled into an individualism characterised by toughness and self-reliance which is what the team looked for.

Included in this self-reliant individualism is a rejection of government and scientific authority and a view of authority as elitist and enemies of 'freedom', couple with a paranoid suspicion of outsiders. This cult-like mentality includes the belief that the in-group is somehow at odds with the out-group, who are seeking to overthrow their belief system, so beliefs are, perhaps counter-intuitively, held on the authority of the cult leaders such as priests and pastors who are seen as a more reliable guide to truth than are outsiders such as scientists. The cult survives by being self-reliant, self-sufficient and self-referencial, and anything that conflicts with the cult-think is automatically rejected as hostile. The cult becomes conspiracist by nature.

And so we have the Bible-belt scientific illiteracy, conspiracism and rejection of 'heretical' beliefs as a threat - the very qualities creationists and fellow charlatans depend on for their success.

Ironically, this personality type may have evolved and become embedded in the fundamentalist culture by simple, Darwinian evolution.

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