The Biology Of Political Persuasion

According to an article published in New Scientist in February, there are strong links between one’s genetics and their political leanings. The basic premise of the argument for this genetic link is a correlation between personality traits, which have a large genetic component, and political orientation. Studies involving twins have found that identical sets are more likely to give the same answer to political questions than non-identical twins, and scientists believe this difference is explained by genetics. Overall, the idea of some, even a very minute, involvement of genetics in shaping our political beliefs seems highly plausible.

Apparently the five major heritable personality traits (conscientiousness, openness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) correlate well with political persuasion. For instance, studies found that people who scored highly on openness (which includes tolerance for ambiguity, ability to accept new ideas, and interest in different cultures) were almost twice as likely to be liberal. A few interesting findings were people with a fear of death were almost four times more likely to hold conservative views, and conservatives also preferred “simple and unambiguous paintings, poems, and songs”.

One of the criticisms of the studies has been that conservatives come off in a quite unflattering light, with one conservative commentator stating he was waiting for a negative correlation between conservatism and penis size. All I can say is facts speak louder than words.

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