Work

Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: The assumption in the personality and politics literature is that a person's personality motivates them to develop certain political attitudes later in life. This assumption is founded on the simple correlation between the two constructs and the observation that personality traits are genetically influenced and develop in infancy, whereas political preferences develop later in life. Work in psychology, behavioral genetics, and recently political science, however, has demonstrated that political preferences also develop in childhood and are equally influenced by genetic factors. These findings cast doubt on the assumed causal relationship between personality and politics. Here we test the causal relationship between personality traits and political attitudes using a direction of causation structural model on a genetically informative sample. The results suggest that personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes; rather, the correlation between the two is a function of an innate common underlying genetic factor.

Source: American Journal of Political Science

DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00568.x

Authors: Brad Verhulst, Lindon J. Eaves, Peter K. Hatemi

Institutions: Virginia Commonwealth University, The University of Sydney, Pennsylvania State University

Language: English

Topic: Personality Traits and Psychology

Subfield: Clinical Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse

Awards: EPIDEMIOLOGY OF ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION, BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF ALCOHOL, Research Education in Statistical Genetics of Substance Abuse