| Popis: |
One of the most robust findings in political psychology is that political and prejudicial attitudes are predicted by right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and some of the Big Five personality traits. An unresolved question is whether RWA and SDO form a functional package of traits that is independent of common personality variation, or whether they are fully underpinned by it. We use genetically informative data from a sample of 1987 Norwegian twins to shed light on this question, revealing that RWA and SDO are moderately phenotypically correlated, but highly genetically correlated. This suggests that there is a general, heritable hierarchical motive that manifests in terms of RWA and/or SDO depending on environmental factors. Consistent with this, RWA and SDO share a larger genetic substrate with political attitudes that support monopolizing resources and territory for one’s own group (e.g., deporting an ethnic minority) than do Big Five personality traits, while at the same time exhibiting some genetic overlap with two of these personality traits. Overall, these results suggest that Big Five personality traits are not sufficient for explaining prejudicial political attitudes and that the covariation of hierarchy-related traits with political attitudes is best explained by genetic overlap, not common socialization as assumed by key theories in social and political psychology, such as the dual-process model of prejudice. |
