474 2015 biology & politics (10 15) up

BIOLOGY & POLITICS
Mark Peffley
PS 474G, Political Psychology

Pros andCons
I. Preliminary questions about studying the
biological basis of political behavior.

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 LEBANON, N.H. (AP) — Here's the scoop: Some apartment complexes
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Political scientist John Hibbing on “The Daily Show”
 John Hibbing had his fifteen seconds of fame last night on “The
Daily Show.” For those who, like me, retire for the evening
shortly after dining on the early bird special, here’s a replay.
 Paging Dr. Mandvi - Political Genes

A. Why have political
scientists been so slow to
latch onto the advances in
biology and social sciences?
Practical, moral and historical issues.

Man Is by Nature a Political Animal:
Evolution, Biology, and Politics
Rose McDermott, Peter K. Hatemi
“A primer of what has been
happening at the
intersection of political
science, biology, and
cognitive neuroscience for
the past twenty years.”
--John M. Orbell, University
of Oregon,
(ostracized by his poli sci
dept.)

B. Why should political
scientists care about
biology? Scientific,
philosophical insights.

Emerging areas of research
 Genetics (e.g.,Alford, et al., Hatemi)
 The brain (neuroscience) (e.g., Iacoboni, et al)
 Evolutionary psychology (e.g., Pinker)

• Alford, Funk and Hibbing, “Are Political Orientations Genetically
Transmitted?”
• Economist article (based on Hatemi and McDermott, “The genetics of
politics.”
Genetics, Twin Studies

Why focus on genetics?
 Political philosophers and theories of government start with
assumptions of human nature.Why not test them?
 Aristotle (4thC BC) :
 “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is
by nature a political animal.”
 Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Framers, others start with assumptions
of human nature.
 The nature vs nurture debate should be informed by empirical
research on genetic and environmental influences on human
traits.
 Nurture side of the debate won:Through social learning we have
essentially transcended our biological predispositions.
 Recent studies find support for nature (genetics), too.
 New perspective on the complex interplay between genes and the
environment, and gene–culture coevolution.
 Genetic predispositions may make some behavioral tendencies
may be easier to learn and harder to unlearn.

Twin research as a “natural
experiment”
 Trait variation across individuals =
 Heredity + Environment (shared & unshared)
 E = Shared Environ. + Unshared Environ.
= % H + % E

MZ twins share 100% of genetic
material, DZ share 50%

C. Findings
 Data: Australian and U.S.Twin studies that
have genetic and survey data on 30,000
twins.
 What are the findings of Alford et al about the
degree to which heredity versus the
environment explains individual variation in
political and social attitudes?
 Which attitudes have a high heredity
component and which do not?

Estimates ofTwin Correlations & Genetic & Environmental
Influences on PoliticalAttitudes, 2005,Alford et al.
• Some show strong genetic influence. Some show little.
• Identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins.

Refined estimates, 2010,
adding regular siblings and parents in the analysis so not
just twins, which could be unusual or unrepresentative
•Hot button social issues are strongly heritable (school prayer, X-rated movies, gay
rights, immigration)
•Unique environmental effects are smaller than heritability effects, but larger than
shared environment
•There are also differences across males and females in heritability, etc.

Peter Hatemi & Rose McDermott (2009), review of
89 peer-reviewed articles on political matters.
Political Knowledge (or rather, presumably, an innate
predisposition to acquire such knowledge) is highly genetically determined.
Identification with a particular political party, by contrast, is largely a
question of family upbringing.

Peter Hatemi & Rose McDermott (2009)
Attitudes in order of their heritability.

Political ideology by zygosity over the life
course
 Once children left home, DZ co-twin correlations markedly dropped, whereas MZ co-twin
correlations stayed the same (Figure 2).The home environment keeps DZ co-twins more
similar.Once children leave home, they develop their own individual attitudes based on
unique experiences, the ability to choose their own environments freely, and individual
genetic dispositions

 “The study of political traits is moving from
social determinism (nurture only) to one that
recognizes that beliefs are influenced in part
by genetics, interacting with the
environment in countless and reciprocal
ways, leading to a new understanding of the
genesis of political behavior.”

D. Implications for politics
 Challenges assumptions of environmental
determinism and the primary role of family
socialization
 Implications for: Human nature, rational choice
and environmental determinism
 The (political) properties of heritable
attitudes (Tesser) as easier to learn and
harder to unlearn

E. Problems & Questions with 2005 study--
beginning to be addressed in subsequent research
 Evan Charney (2008), Alford et al. is just too
contrary to prior knowledge to accept.
 “If [their study is] true, it would require nothing less
than a revision of our understanding of all of human
history, much, if not most of political science,
sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as,
perhaps, our understanding of what it means to be
human.”
 Response: If this is grounds for rejecting new
knowledge, then we’d still believe the world is
flat and the sun revolves around the earth.

E. Problems & Questions with 2005 study--
beginning to be addressed in subsequent
research
 Heritability coefficients of twin studies are a
black box that lead us to more questions: by
what process and what causes what?
 What is the process by which particular genes
(alleles) interact with the environment and
predispose particular political attitudes and
behaviors?
 To answer these and other questions, political
scientists are teaming up with geneticists

Another problem:
Alford et al give us a “black box”

James H. Fowler and Christopher T. Dawes. 2008. "Two Genes
Predict Voter Turnout." The Journal of Politics 70
(03):579-94.
Political scientists working to fill in the black box
•Studies of twins show that voter turnout has
very high heritability.Why?
•MAOA and 5HTT genes are prime candidates
for explaining heritability of turnout because
they exert a strong influence on the serotonin
system in parts of the brain that regulate fear,
trust, and social interaction.
•Individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA
gene are significantly more likely to have voted
in the 2004 presidential election.
•The association between 5HTT and turnout is
moderated by exposure to religious social
activity.
•Caveat:We know more about the
black box, but still have many more
questions than answers.

Peter Hatemi, et al. 2010. Journal of Politics. “A Genome-Wide
Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes.”
Example: Gives us a better idea of how researchers identify genes
that are associated with political attitudes & behavior.
 Which genes are associated with liberalism-
conservatism?
 Method of locating genes:
 We have twin data on 20,000 individuals’ DNA &
political attitudes.
 Which genes are linked to big differences in
liberal-conservative attitudes?
 Speculate on how genes might influence political
attitudes.

 Measuring liberalism-conservatism with 50
questions.

•Search for chromosomes & genes associated with big
liberal-conservative differences in the sample.

 Speculate about why particular genes are linked to
liberal-conservative differences.
 Receptors (NMDA) linked to flexibility in information
processing and cognition. By definition Conservatism and
Liberalism have much to do with flexibility of opinion in the
face of a changing world (Wilson 1973).
 Genes that regulate fear and anxiety .
 Receptors related to sense of smell and disgust.There is a
relationship between disgust, political preferences, and
sense of smell and individuals with more conservative
political positions have a higher predisposition to feel
disgust.
 Use these findings as a basis for further research to answer
the questions,Why? & How?

 Caveats
 The process is mind-numbingly complex : The
pathway from DNA to social behavior is certain to be
convoluted, involving networks of genes, multiple
intervening neurobiological processes, development,
and a multitude of environmental contingencies.
 No single gene contributes more than a small portion
of explaining complex behaviors.
 We’re just beginning to study the connections
between genes and social behaviors.
 Stay tuned!

Douglas R. Oxley,1* Kevin B. Smith,1* John R.Alford,2
MatthewV. Hibbing,3 Jennifer L. Miller,1
Mario Scalora,4 Peter K. Hatemi,5 John R. Hibbing1†
“Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits,”
Science 321, 1667 (2008)
Two clear indicators of scientific success:
1. NSF video, here.
2. “Daily Show” segment here.

Physical response to perceived threat
 Is physical sensitivity to threat associated
with political beliefs?
 Two types of physical responses to threat we
know a lot about
 Changes in skin conductance
 Blink amplitude

Oxley et al’s measure of support for (18)
“socially protective political policies”
 Similar to ideology in twins studies
 Military spending, warrantless searches, the death
penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism,
the IraqWar, school prayer, and Biblical truth; and
opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control,
foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay
marriage, abortion rights, and pornography.
 Not liberal and conservative?

Changes in skin conductance
in response to:
 Three separate threatening images
interspersed among a sequence of 33 images
 Very large spider on the face of a frightened
person
 A dazed individual with a bloody face
 An open wound with maggots in it
 Three nonthreatening images
 A bunny
 A bowl of fruit
 A happy child

Changes in skin conductance among low &
high supporters of protective policies
(i.e., liberals & conservatives)

Blink amplitude in response to 7 startling
noises among “liberals” & “conservatives”

Explanations
 Socialization? Parents could both socialize their
children to hold certain political attitudes and
condition them to respond in a certain way to
threatening stimuli?
 But conditioning involuntary reflex responses
takes immediate and sustained reinforcement and
punishment, and it is unlikely that this
conditioning varies systematically across political
beliefs
 Biological source: Political attitudes and
varying physiological responses to threat may
both derive from neural activity patterns.

Terminology boot camp
 Allele?
 Limbic system
 Cortex
 Universalism
 Determinism
 Eugenics
 Traits
 Variation
 Trait variation = H + E
 Heritability
 Correlations
 Interactions

“This IsYour Brain on Politics”
“IfYour Brain Has a 'Buy Button,‘What Pushes It?”
The Brain (neuroscience)

Will fMRI’s replace surveys?
 Brain activity, as measured by an fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging)
versus observing behavior and verbal self-
reports.

Measuring blood flow
Two brain imaging techniques, PET and fMRI, measure blood flow through the
brain. Active areas of the brain use more energy and so need a greater supply of
oxygen and glucose. More blood is directed to these areas to meet the demands
of the active neurones. PET tracks blood flow by using labeled chemicals, while
fMRI monitors the oxygen content of the blood.

Drugs and your brain
Many drugs work by copying or blocking the
effects of naturally occurring chemicals in your
brain.

Brain imaging
 New mothers respond uniquely to their own babies. As this
movie representing data from a functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan illustrates, one area of
the brain, shown in red, activates when mothers see their
own infants; another area, shown in blue, activates when
they see someone else's infant. (Movie courtesyTerry
Oakes, Lab for Affective Neuroscience, UW-Madison).
Why?Who cares!
3.4Mb Quicktime movie
(still graphic)

By Marco Iacoboni,Joshua Freedman andJonas Kaplan of the
University of California, Los Angeles,Semel Institute for
Neuroscience; Kathleen HallJamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy
Center at theUniversity of Pennsylvania; andTom Freedman, Bill
Knapp and Kathryn Fitzgerald of FKF Applied Research.
Opinion: “This Is Your Brain on Politics”
November 11, 2007

Method
 IN anticipation of the 2008 presidential election,
we used functional magnetic resonance imaging
to watch the brains of a group of swing voters as
they responded to the leading presidential
candidates. Our results reveal some voter
impressions on which this election may well turn.
 We observed their brain activity for nearly an
hour in the scanner at the Ahmanson Lovelace
Brain Mapping Center at the University of
California, Los Angeles. Afterward, each subject
filled out a second questionnaire.

Men’s brains* were activated when they looked at the words “Democrat”
and “Republican,” but not “independent.”
*The images do not represent individual brains, but rather reflect the
combined data gathered from several - in some cases all - subjects

Photos of Hillary Clinton elicited increased activity in the
anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that processes
conflicting impulses, in swing voters who reported having an

Men and women reacted differently to still pictures of Hillary
Clinton. Men (left) showed little engagement, while women
responded strongly

In response to images of Democratic candidates, men exhibited
activity in the medial orbital prefrontal cortex, indicating
emotional connection and positive feelings.

Looking at photos of Mitt Romney led to activity in the
amygdala, a brain area linked to anxiety.

Subjects who had an unfavorable view of John
Edwards responded to pictures of him with
feelings of disgust, evidenced by increased
activity in the insula, a brain area associated
with negative emotions.

“The Moral Instinct “
By STEVEN PINKER,
Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at HarvardUniversity
IV. Evolutionary Psychology
“The Colbert Report” here

Evolutionary psychology defined
 …studies how natural selection predisposes
not just physical traits suited to particular
contexts, but psychological traits and social
(political) behaviors that enhance the
preservation of one’s genes.

B. Methods
 Documenting universal behaviors in:
 Cross-cultural studies
 Animal studies
 Hormonal and genetic studies
 Brain imaging
 Functional analysis (E.g., men are attracted to
females with certain body types so that behavior
must have been selected to further the survival of
our forebearers)

1. Research on sexual
differences (in mate attraction)
 Gender differences in behavior. Females are:
 more socially sensitive,
 less physically aggressive,
 more socially connected and nurturing
 positively evaluated
 Gender differences in mate attraction (Buss):
 Men are attracted to female features associated
with fertility (body types, younger), while women
prefer older men with more status and power.

3. Problems
 Hindsight explanation
 Long leash of biology
 Can reinforce gender and other stereotypes

Jonathan Haidt
Steven Pinker
Moral and ethical judgments

“The Emotional Dog and Its
Rational Tail,” Jonathan Haidt
 Research on moral judgment has been
dominated by rationalist models where moral
judgment stems from moral reasoning (e.g.,
Kohlberg).
 Moral judgment is usually a post hoc
construction, generated after a judgment has
been reached.
 Moral judgment is generally the result of quick,
automatic evaluations (intuitions)
 Moral intuitions come first and cause moral
judgments.

Do any of the following moral
situations repulse you? Why?
 Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with
her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be
interesting and fun if they tried making love.They are very
diligent about using contraception.They both enjoy the sex but
decide not to do it again.They keep the night as a special secret,
which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think
about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?
 A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old
American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it
up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
 A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house.They heard
that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body to
cook it and eat it for dinner.
 How often did you say, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know
it's wrong."

The Trolley Problem
 On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the
track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the
trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger.
You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will
divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately,
the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on
the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to
save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”
 Now consider now a different scene.You are on a bridge
overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley
bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the
trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path.And the only heavy
object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you
throw the man off the bridge?

Moral judgment as moral reasoning (S2)
Moral judgment as intuition and post hoc reasoning (S1)

A Universal Morality?
 People everywhere, at least in some
circumstances and with certain other folks in
mind,
 Think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them.
 They have a sense of fairness: that one should
reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish
cheaters.
 They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity
among its members and conformity to its norms.
 They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate
authorities and to respect people with high status.
 And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while
loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

Consider how much money someone would have to
pay us to do hypothetical acts like:
 Stick a pin into your palm.
 Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)
 Accept a wide-screenTV from a friend who received it at no charge
because of a computer error.
 Accept a wide-screenTV from a friend who received it from a thief
who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)
 Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a
talk-radio show in your nation.
 Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a
talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)
 Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
 Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy
skit. (Authority.)
 Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for
30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on
stage.
 Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for
30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage.
(Purity.)

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