Left, right: The brain science of politics
His latest research also finds that people with higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, are less likely to vote and participate in the political process. Cortisol, which can be measured through blood or saliva samples, was found in higher levels among people whose voting records indicated that they didn’t go to the polls often, and vice versa.
“Consistent voters tend to have low cortisol levels,” Hibbing said, noting that the findings were statistically significant. “Politics is pretty stressful, you could argue…going to the polls could make you nervous, and people with high cortisol tend to avoid that.”Continue Reading
As for any genetic component of current research, Professor Rose McDermott of Brown University stressed to POLITICO that there’s no such thing as a “liberal” gene or a “conservative” gene. But McDermott, who has conducted extensive research focused on the relationship between political behavior and genetics, is part of a group of researchers who are studying how genetics - “broadly construed,” she says - can influence political preferences and ideology.
“It’s not that anyone thinks there’s a gene for liberalism, but to think there are aspects of social and the political world influenced by our genetic and biological tendencies,” McDermott said.
She recently co-authored a long paper summing up where the study of politics and genetics stands today —much of the work has relied on studies of twins, a method that has long been the “gold standard” for exploring genetic links to politics. That process allows researchers to see “what part of the outcome is related to genetics, and what is related to common experience, for example the family you grow up in.” Those studies have found that between 40 and 60 percent of differences in political ideology, across a population, can be explained by genetics.
Even decades ago there were tantalizing signs of the link between biology and politics that researchers are putting more focus on exploring today. One early study from the 1970’s, for instance, found that identical twins correlated more highly than did fraternal twins “on measures of ideology constructed from a scale of attitudes, including the death penalty, ethnocentrism, morality, unions, unemployment, and abortion, among others,” her report said.
McDermott acknowledged that while the study of politics and genetics is growing, it’s not yet “mainstream.” But she sees significant policy implications in the research she has conducted. One study, published earlier this year in the American Journal of Political Science, found that people who she says are genetically inclined to be more fearful—who possess stronger social phobias and feel less comfortable in settings with unfamiliar people—tend to be conservative on issues like immigration.
“So the best way to think about it is, there’s individual difference in how much underlying fear individuals have as they enter the world,” she said. “Some are more prepared to be afraid of things than other people, that’s just individual difference based in part on genetic backgrounds…and so you can show that people who have higher levels of social fear…those people tend to have more anti-immigration attitudes.”