The political animal: The roles of genetics, environments, evolution, attachment, and personality in the formation of political attitudes
Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This thesis provides genetically informative data that political and prejudicial attitudes are extensions of deeper traits. We find that specific political attitudes (related to monopolizing territory and resources for the in-group), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO), all covary due to common genetic underpinnings. Further, the genetic variance in the political attitudes under study here are irreducible to big five personality or attachment and are instead highly overlapping with RWA and SDO. In other words, political attitudes cannot be viewed as haphazard collections of attitudes that are simply picked up from the socializing environment in which one finds oneself. We therefore propose that RWA and SDO capture genetically grounded strategies for hierarchy-navigation, which might be an irreducible part of the architecture of the human political mind.
Author: Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3164330451