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Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Value Orientations: A New Twin Study of Political Attitudes
Abstract
Recent analyses of twin study data find evidence for a sizeable heritable component of liberal-conservative ideological orientations. Those findings are largely based on a single index of ideological orientations, the Wilson-Patterson scale, created from attitude positions across a large number of issue-of-the-day items. The underlying assumption of these studies, particularly Alford, Funk and Hibbing (2005), is not that attitudes on specific issues are heritable, but that issue positions reflect a set of heritable core value orientations. This paper reports results from a new twin study of adults in the U.S. which allows us to directly test this assumption. The survey was funded by the National Science Foundation and included more than 1100 twins from the University of Minnesota twin registry. It is the first survey of its kind dedicated to a detailed assessment of the political attitudes and value orientations of twins and includes a new index of bedrock social orientations. Here, we test the degree to which genetic and environmental factors influence these social orientations and compare these findings with similar analyses on the Wilson-Patterson index of liberal-conservative ideological orientation, self-identified ideology, right-wing authoritarianism, and egalitarianism.
... We will focus attention in this paper on data concerning the political similarity of individuals with varying genetic concordance; namely, monozygotic twins, who share virtually 100 percent of their genetic heritage, and dizygotic twins, who are on average share approximately 50 percent of their genetic heritage, as do all traditional full siblings. Political science research that builds on the techniques and results of behavioral genetics (Martin et al. 1986; Eaves et al. 1999 ) finds a sizeable heritable component of liberalconservative ideological orientations, vote choices, and specific issue positions (Alford, Funk and Hibbing 2005; Hatemi et al. 2007; Funk et al. 2009; Bell, Schermer, and Vernon 2009; Hatemi et al. 2010). Habitual voting behavior (i.e., voter turnout) also appears to be influenced, in part, by genetic factors (Fowler, Baker and Dawes 2008; Klemmensen et al. 2010) as does intensity of partisan attachment (Settle, Dawes and Fowler 2009; Hatemi et al. 2009). ...
... To provide a baseline to assess the results for attitude intensity we look first at the overall W-P index that measures attitude direction. Wilson-Patterson indexes are arguably the most common measure of political attitudes analyzed in empirical heritability studies (see Alford, Funk and Hibbing 2005; Funk et al. 2009; Hatemi et al. 2010; Smith 2010). These studies consistently indicate significant genetic and unique environmental influence on issues attitudes, with little role for the common environment. ...
New research suggests a portrait of political man that includes not only social influences but also genetic, physiological, neural, and very early developmental influences on adults’ attitudes toward and participation in democratic governance. To this point, empirical investigations have been hindered by a dearth of data on the biological concepts that potentially link to the variables of central interest to most political scientists. The present study helps to address this problem by highlighting a new twin study of adults in the U.S. that permits direct tests of the genetic and environmental sources of a wide range of political concepts. Most past findings in the area pertain only to genetic influences on the direction of attitudes or on voter turnout. Here, we test the degree to which genetic and environmental factors influence a much broader array of political variables, including specific types of political involvement, political knowledge, interest in politics, efficacy, political participation, and the extremity and intensity of attitudes on a wide array of issues. These analyses make it possible to look more deeply at the wellsprings of people’s connection to their political system.
... Yet, political attitudes are also relatively stable over time (Ansolabehere et al., 2008) and also develop before adulthood (Hatemi et al., 2009). Moreover, twin studies find that personality traits and political attitudes are correlated but point out that the influence of genes on political attitudes is only to a limited extent mediated by personality traits (Funk et al., 2013). These insights raise awareness that not all studies support the assertion that personality traits shape political attitudes and further research is necessary to address the nature of this relationship (Feldman, 2013). ...
We still do not fully understand why attitudes toward the European Union differ among citizens. In this study, we turn to the Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism as antecedents of European Union attitudes. In a national survey, we focus on attitudes toward widening and deepening of the European Union, trust in European Union institutions, identification with the European Union and negative affect experienced toward the European Union. We theorize that the Big Five traits are heterogeneously associated with the different European Union attitudes. We confirm that the Big Five traits are indeed associated with some but not all European Union attitudes. Accordingly, personality is expected to shape how citizens' respond to changes in the institutional setup of the European Union.
Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy, and are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This handbook takes on the big questions about public opinion and the media both empirical and normative focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Bringing together the thinking of a team of academic experts, its chapters provide an assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections. Emphasizing changes in the mass media and communications technology the vast number of cable channels, websites and blogs, and the new social media, which are changing how news about political life is collected and conveyed they describe the evolving information interdependence of the media and public opinion. In addition, the handbook reviews the wide range of influences on public opinion, including the processes by which information communicated through the media can affect the public. It describes what has been learnt from the latest research in psychology and genetics, and studies of the impact of gender, race and ethnicity, economic status, education and sophistication, religion, and generational change, on a wide range of political attitudes and perceptions. The handbook includes extensive discussion of how public opinion and mass media coverage are studied through survey research and increasingly through experiments using the latest technological advances.
Social scientists have long recognized and sought to explain a connection between religious and political beliefs. Our research challenges the prevalent view that religion and politics constitute separate but related belief sets with a conceptual model that suggests the correlation between the two may be partially explained by an underlying psychological construct reflecting first principle beliefs on social organization. Moreover, we also push this challenge further by considering whether part of the relationship between political and religious beliefs is the result of shared genetic influences, which would suggest that a shared biological predisposition, or set of biological predispositions, underlies these attitudes. Using a classic twin design on a sample of American adults, we demonstrate that certain religious, political, and first principle beliefs can be explained by genetic and unique environmental components, and that the correlation between these three trait structures is primarily due to a common genetic path. As predicted, this relationship is found to hold for social ideology, but not for economic ideology. These findings provide evidence that the overlap between the religious and the political in the American context may in part be due to underlying principles regarding how to understand and organize society and that these principles may be adopted to satisfy biologically-influenced psychological needs.
This study quantified genetic and environmental roots of variance in prejudice and discriminatory intent toward foreign nationals and examined potential mediators of these genetic influences: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and narrow-sense xenophobia (NSX). In line with the Dual Process Motivational (DPM) model, we predicted that the two basic attitudinal and motivational orientations – RWA and SDO – would account for variance in out-group prejudice and discrimination. In line with other theories, we expected that NSX as an affective component would explain additional variance in out-group prejudice and discriminatory intent. Data from 1,397 individuals (incl. twins as well as their spouses) were analyzed. Univariate analyses of twins’ and spouses’ data yielded genetic (incl. contributions of assortative mating) and multiple environmental sources (i.e., social homogamy, spouse-specific, and individual-specific effects) of variance in negativity toward strangers. Multivariate analyses suggested an extension to the DPM model by including NSX in addition to RWA and SDO as predictor of prejudice and discrimination. RWA and NSX primarily mediated the genetic influences on the variance in prejudice and discriminatory intent toward foreign nationals. In sum, the findings provide the basis of a behavioral genetic framework integrating different scientific disciplines for the study of negativity toward out-groups.
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