The study rests on a large-scale telephone survey conducted by Spain’s Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas between 6 and 15 February 2025, the first national survey the institute has devoted entirely to artificial intelligence. Interviews were completed in 1,131 municipalities across all 50 provinces, with stratified sampling by region and municipality size to ensure the sample mirrors the adult population. The crucial question asked respondents to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, how comfortable they would personally feel undergoing a medical operation performed by a robot. Around that single outcome, the researchers assembled three clusters of explanatory variables: sociodemographic characteristics including sex, age, education, income and political ideology; attitudes toward and familiarity with AI; and perceptions of AI regulation, including awareness of the European Union’s AI Act.

The headline result is sobering for anyone expecting enthusiasm. Overall comfort with robot-performed surgery was moderate to low, averaging roughly 4 on the 10-point scale, and the differences between groups were substantial. Men reported a mean comfort score of 4.83, compared with just 3.77 for women, a statistically significant gap. Even more counterintuitive is the age pattern: comfort rose steadily across the life course, from 3.67 among respondents aged 18 to 34 to 4.79 among those 65 and older, inverting the familiar stereotype of tech-wary seniors and digital-native optimists. Income and education also mattered, with the highest earners, those bringing in more than 6,000 euros per month, recording the highest mean comfort of any income group at 5.23, while people with no formal education scored lowest.

To disentangle these overlapping factors, the researchers built hierarchical linear regression models, entering variables in three theoretical blocks and measuring how much explanatory power each block added. Sociodemographics alone explained 7.1 percent of the variance in comfort. Adding attitudes toward AI pushed the total to 15.8 percent, the single largest jump in the analysis. The regulation block contributed a further, more modest increment, bringing the final model to 16.8 percent of explained variance. The statistics themselves tell a story: what people believe and feel about artificial intelligence matters more for their comfort with robotic surgery than who they are, and governance perceptions, while real, play only a supporting role.

Within the final model, the strongest predictor by a clear margin was the perceived benefits of AI, measured as a count of the domains in which respondents thought AI would do more good than harm, with a standardized coefficient of 0.244. Age followed at 0.207, confirming that older Spaniards were markedly more at ease with the surgical scenario. Positive feelings toward AI, self-reported knowledge, household income, and education all contributed smaller positive effects. On the negative side, agreeing that implementing stricter ethical standards and legal safeguards for AI is one of humanity’s most significant challenges was the strongest reducer of comfort at minus 0.094, followed by being female at minus 0.093 and holding more right-wing ideological positions at minus 0.062.

The gender gap deserves particular attention because it echoes a growing international literature. Previous studies have found that women use generative AI tools less frequently, in large part because they are more sensitive to the social and ethical risks these technologies pose, and research on robotic surgery has repeatedly shown men expressing more favorable attitudes and greater willingness to undergo robot-assisted procedures. The Spanish data are consistent with that pattern, although the authors are careful about interpretation: they did not estimate interaction or mediation models, so they cannot say whether women prioritize harms while men emphasize benefits. Differential risk perception, unequal technological exposure, and differing healthcare experiences all remain plausible explanations to be tested directly in future work.

The age finding is equally puzzling and deliberately hedged. Much research links older age to lower acceptance of digital technologies, and studies of AI adoption among older adults emphasize that the real driver is the combination of age with digital literacy rather than age itself. Yet in this surgical scenario, older respondents were the most comfortable group. The authors suggest several non-exclusive explanations: greater perceived healthcare need, stronger expectations of clinical benefit, cohort effects, or even the way the survey question was worded. What they reject is the leap to a general claim that older citizens embrace healthcare AI more broadly; the result is a context-specific association that requires replication before it can be generalized.

Perhaps the most politically consequential finding concerns regulation. Awareness of the EU AI Act, adopted in 2024 to impose safeguards on high-risk AI applications, and general agreement with AI regulation showed no independent positive association with comfort in the adjusted models. The regulatory block added only about one percentage point to explained variance. In raw means, people who had heard of the AI Act did report slightly higher comfort, 4.65 versus 4.02, and supporters of the law scored 4.88 versus 3.99, but these unadjusted differences may simply reflect confounding by education, income, ideology or AI knowledge. The authors conclude that the formal existence and public visibility of regulation cannot be assumed to translate automatically into comfort with a specific application, a caution that cuts directly against the common assumption that passing laws is enough to win public trust.

The study is explicit about its limits. The outcome is a single hypothetical item about robot surgery, not actual patient behavior, and the survey captured no direct measures of trust in technology, clinicians, hospitals or regulators, leaving trust as a theoretically important but untested mechanism. Most individual variation, more than 83 percent, remains unexplained, and factors such as health status, prior experience with robotic procedures, and knowledge of human oversight were absent from the questionnaire. Spain’s predominantly public healthcare system and its specific regulatory context also shape the findings. Still, the message for policymakers is pointed: deploying the technology, enacting regulations, and issuing public information campaigns are not sufficient conditions for acceptance. Making the role of professionals, the degree of human oversight, accountability arrangements and expected clinical benefits genuinely intelligible to different social groups, the authors argue, is what responsible implementation of healthcare AI must now deliver.

Subject of Research: Public comfort with robot-performed surgery in Spain and its social, political, and regulatory correlates

Article Title: Public receptiveness to healthcare AI in Spain: social, political, and regulatory correlates in a surgical scenario

Article References: Loureiro-Álvarez, I., Savostsikava, A., & Bouzas-Lorenzo, R. (2026). Public receptiveness to healthcare AI in Spain: social, political, and regulatory correlates in a surgical scenario. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1947858. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1947858

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1947858

Keywords: artificial intelligence, robotic surgery, healthcare AI, public opinion, Spain, EU AI Act, political ideology, gender gap, technology acceptance, digital divide, survey research, health policy

The research team asked a deceptively simple question: when do humans start caring about the formidability of the groups they affiliate with, and does this motive differ between the sexes? Formidability, in the language of evolutionary psychology, refers to a group’s capacity to prevail in conflict, and across the animal kingdom it is often a function of sheer numbers. Male lions roar to advertise coalition size, chimpanzees patrol borders with numerical assessment in mind, and dolphins form super-alliances whose advantages scale with membership. Humans, too, have long been theorized to possess coalitional psychology tuned to group size, but the developmental origins of this sensitivity, and its gendered structure, had remained unresolved.

To answer the question, the investigators deployed the same kind of minimal, abstract group stimuli across three distinct life stages, a methodological choice that allowed direct comparison from infancy to adulthood. Preverbal infants watched animated scenes featuring novel agents belonging to groups of different sizes. Preschool children, aged roughly three to six, were familiarized with similar abstract groups and then asked which members they liked or preferred. Adults completed comparable preference measures alongside a battery of political attitude scales. Because the stimuli were stripped of any real-world social markers such as ethnicity, language or gender, any preferences that emerged could be attributed to group size itself rather than to learned cultural associations.

The results were striking in their asymmetry. Among 317 preschool children, boys reliably preferred members of the majority group over members of the minority, while girls showed no such preference, distributing their choices without regard to group size. Among 180 preverbal infants, by contrast, neither boys nor girls chose systematically between majority and minority members; their selections were essentially random. This developmental dissociation is critical. It suggests that the capacity to represent groups and even to infer dominance from numerical superiority is present well before language, consistent with earlier work showing that infants expect larger groups to win conflicts and expect novel agents to join majorities. Yet the motivational pull of the larger group, the desire to affiliate with it, appears only later, once children begin navigating peer relationships independently.

This timing is theoretically meaningful. Infants may understand, in an abstract sense, that bigger groups are more powerful, but they do not yet act on that understanding as a social preference. Preschoolers, by contrast, are entering a world of alliances, friendships and rough-and-tumble play in which coalitional dynamics become personally consequential. Prior research has documented that boys, more than girls, gravitate toward group-based interaction and play fighting, and that coalitional play may serve as a rehearsal ground for intergroup aggression. The new findings suggest that somewhere in the transition from infancy to preschool, a preference for size and strength crystallizes in boys in a way it does not in girls, transforming a cold cognitive representation of power into a hot motivational orientation.

The adult data extend the story into the political realm with remarkable scale. Across 3,467 adults, men liked majority groups more than women did, replicating the childhood pattern. More provocatively, the strength of these coalitional preferences correlated with political ideology. Participants who showed stronger affinity for large, formidable groups also expressed greater support for sustaining intergroup hierarchies, including harsher attitudes toward ethnic minorities, more militaristic foreign policy stances, and greater opposition to social welfare programs. The correlation was robust across analytical approaches, and the researchers used Bayesian methods to quantify the evidence, with data and analysis files made publicly available through the Open Science Framework.

These adult findings dovetail with decades of work on social dominance orientation, a construct introduced by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto to capture individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy. One of the most replicated findings in political psychology is that men score higher than women on this orientation, a pattern documented across cultures and even linked to common genetic underpinnings in twin studies. What the new research adds is a developmental origin story: the gender gap in hierarchy preferences may not be manufactured by adult socialization alone but may trace back to the coalitional motives that emerge when boys first begin forming peer groups. In this view, political ideology is not merely a set of learned positions but, in part, an expression of ancient motivational systems that come online in early childhood.

The authors are careful about what the data do and do not show. The study demonstrates that gendered preferences for group formidability appear early and predict ideology, but it cannot fully disentangle the contributions of biology and socialization. Boys and girls are treated differently from birth, steered toward different toys, activities and social scripts, and any of these channels could shape the observed pattern. Twin and family studies suggesting heritable components to social dominance orientation complicate a purely environmental account, but the present findings alone cannot adjudicate between an evolved predisposition, a socially constructed one, or, most plausibly, an interplay of both. What the study does establish is a timeline: the motive is absent in preverbal infancy and present in preschool, narrowing the developmental window in which the relevant processes must operate.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. If preferences for formidable majorities take root in the preschool years, interventions aimed at reducing prejudice and hierarchy-endorsing ideology might need to begin far earlier than is typical. Educational programs targeting intergroup attitudes often start in middle childhood or adolescence, precisely because that is when explicit prejudice becomes measurable. The new findings hint that the motivational scaffolding for such attitudes is already in place years earlier, at least for boys, and that the playground is where the first hierarchy-building decisions are made. They also resonate with research on the male warrior hypothesis, which proposes that men’s greater investment in intergroup conflict reflects an evolutionary history in which male coalitions were the primary instruments of warfare.

For a field increasingly interested in the deep roots of political behavior, the study offers a compelling synthesis. The same abstract preference for joining the bigger, stronger side, visible in three-year-old boys choosing between cartoon groups, reappears in adult men as a measurable component of their ideological profiles, predicting attitudes on ethnic persecution, militarism and welfare. The continuity across such vastly different contexts, from a nursery task to a national political survey, is what makes the finding viral in its implications. It suggests that the psychology of group dominance is not a late-blooming ideological acquisition but an early-emerging motivational system, gendered from its inception, that quietly shapes how individuals relate to power, coalitions and the distribution of resources long before they can articulate what politics even means. As the authors conclude, gendered motives for intergroup formidability appear rooted in the earliest years of childhood, once children begin navigating peer relationships on their own, and they may echo through a lifetime of social and political choices.

Subject of Research: Developmental and political psychology of gendered preferences for group formidability across the lifespan

Article Title: Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults

Article References: Fonn, E. K., Zahl, J. H., Kristensen, B. D., & Thomsen, L. (2026). Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1

Keywords: social dominance orientation, group formidability, child development, political ideology, intergroup relations, coalitional psychology, preschoolers, gender differences, social hierarchy, Nature Human Behaviour, evolutionary psychology, prejudice

The paradox that motivates the analysis is stark. During the first Trump campaign, public attention focused on low-income families hit by de-industrialization and on middle-income households anxious about their status. Today the movement is openly endorsed by figures such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta donated one million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund despite earlier personal disputes. PayPal founder Peter Thiel backed Trump from the start, and his association with J.D. Vance helped secure Vance’s path to the vice presidency. Elon Musk’s brief tenure at the head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency signaled that the agenda of some technology leaders extends beyond lower corporate taxes and deregulation. It reflects a conviction that the established administrative structures of the federal government should be dismantled to make room for radical innovation.

Yet the fiscal record cuts directly against the interests of the movement’s poorest supporters. The legislation nicknamed the Big Beautiful Bill cuts spending on Medicaid and the food assistance program SNAP by roughly 900 billion dollars through 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. The CBO’s distributional analysis shows that the bill’s tax cuts most benefit the highest income groups while the combined effect of tax and benefit changes is most damaging to the lowest deciles. Rural areas, where Medicaid dependence is high, will bear a disproportionate share of the losses, and rural voters form one of Trump’s most reliable constituencies. In counties where at least a quarter of voters’ personal income comes from government transfers, 63 percent cast their ballots for Trump in 2024. How can a movement simultaneously reward its wealthiest backers and strip benefits from the people who vote for it most loyally?

The demographic evidence deepens the puzzle rather than resolving it. Trump won those with a high school diploma or less by twenty points, and voters who attend religious services monthly or more often by thirty points, yet no single master variable explains the pattern. Gender, ethnicity, religion, education and place all interact: majorities of Black and Asian men backed Harris while most white and Hispanic men backed Trump; 63 percent of rural women voted for him, a 28-point margin. Income categories alone have limited explanatory power, with the lowest income tier split almost evenly, but the shift from 2020 is striking, as Biden’s 19-point advantage among the lowest earners collapsed to roughly one point for Harris. Glassmann’s conclusion is that rational-choice models of voting simply cannot account for behavior this resistant to material self-interest, and that ideology must be doing the work.

The intellectual core of the new ideology is a rejection of the economic theory that underpinned globalization. Classical trade theory, resting on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, holds that all nations gain when each specializes where it is relatively efficient, and that technologically leading economies would keep the high-end of the value chain while others supplied cheap labor. J.D. Vance, in a keynote at the a16z American Dynamism Summit, called this one of two great conceits of the globalization era. Because of network effects, he argued, partner economies inevitably climb into innovative, high-end production, turning economic collaboration into geopolitical rivalry. China, once dismissed as confined to labor-intensive sectors, expanded its share of world manufacturing value added sixfold between 1991 and 2012, from 4.1 to 24 percent, and now contests American technological leadership outright.

Vance’s second conceit is what he calls the hunger of Western economies for cheap labor. In this telling, Western firms were drugged by the promise that offshoring and low-wage competition would secure their competitiveness, so they stopped innovating and moved factories abroad instead. The empirical anchor here is the research on the China shock by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, which overturned the comfortable assumption that the aggregate labor-market effects of trade are negligible. Their work showed that competition from an unequally developed trading partner can impose severe, concentrated and persistent harm on specific regions and on the least educated workers, effectively creating enclaves of opposition to the global system inside democracies themselves. The steady growth of the American trade deficit since the 1970s, and its sharp acceleration after 2000, became the emblem of this failure, even though the United States retains a surplus in services trade and still leads the world in GDP.

What makes the doctrine genuinely unifying is its answer to the question of what should replace redistribution. Vance accuses Democrats of offering nothing but welfare substitutes to communities hollowed out by de-industrialization, a compassion, in his words, devoid of any expectation that reeked of giving up. Labor-market research supports the intuition behind this critique: psychological studies find that low-paid workers often fare better than the unemployed, suggesting that a sense of purpose, not just income, is decisive for well-being. The MAGA movement addresses this deficit existentially and even religiously, promising that radical reindustrialization and a national mission will restore meaning to lives that welfare checks could not. This is why, in Glassmann’s account, the ideology can override short-term material interests: it offers fulfillment of those interests the way a religious narrative offers paradise, deferred and conditional on collective struggle.

The religious register is not metaphorical. In a 2020 essay in the Catholic journal The Lamp, Vance described his conversion from atheist Yale law student to conservative Catholic, criticizing an elite culture obsessed with achievement but silent about the ultimate purpose of education. The pivotal encounter was a 2011 lecture by Peter Thiel, who linked the hyper-competitive misery of elite professionals to the technological stagnation of society at large. Thiel’s famous claim that America has stopped innovating sits oddly beside scholarship celebrating the knowledge economy, but it performs crucial ideological work: it tells both the displaced factory worker and the overworked engineer that they are losers of the same failed order. From this view, questions such as sustainable energy supply are not distributional problems but questions of civilizational survival, and therefore beyond the reach of ordinary redistributive politics.

That framing carries radical institutional consequences. If the existing state structures have blocked the necessary transformation, the argument runs, they are illegitimate and must be swept away; if multilateral institutions constrain national supremacy, they must be abandoned. Glassmann traces the philosophical machinery to Thiel’s adoption, through René Girard’s lectures at Stanford, of the concept of mimetic desire, the unconscious imitation of others’ wants, which Girard believed breeds envy and violence in groups. On this reading, liberal democracy’s promise of equality fuels destructive competition, so liberalism itself must give way to a techno-nationalist ideology wrapped in religious fervor. The result, Glassmann warns, is a strategy of conformity, or Gleichschaltung, extending through media, universities and courts, a drift toward competitive authoritarianism, withdrawal from international organizations, and unilateralism in a multipolar world, with the separation of powers itself under strain.

The article closes with an explicitly historical warning, invoking Hannah Arendt’s observation that the intellectuals who engaged with Nazi ideology were dangerous because they really believed in it, and Leo Strauss’s definition of nihilism as the desire to destroy modern civilization. Glassmann calls the present a Weimar moment, not because dictatorship is inevitable, but because the current administration has both the will and, increasingly, the capacity to overturn the constitutional order. Whether the coalition holds is an open question: inflation and growth problems caused by tariffs and investor uncertainty will test whether welfare-dependent voters continue to endorse policies that enrich tech billionaires. But the central lesson for scholars and for international actors is clear. Trumpism is not an incoherent tantrum of globalization’s losers. It is a coherent, thick, nationalist ideology, engineered to reconcile the interests of the very rich and the very poor around a global technology race, and it must be understood on those terms before its assumptions can be effectively contested.

Subject of Research: The ideological and economic foundations uniting low-income and elite supporters of the MAGA movement in the United States

Article Title: Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?

Article References: Glassmann, U. (2025). Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 367-379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Keywords: Trumpism, populism, political ideology, globalization, China shock, comparative advantage, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, welfare policy, competitive authoritarianism, reindustrialization