The nature of the relationship between personality traits and political attitudes

Abstract

Building upon a series of works by Thomas J. Bouchard, Lindon J. Eaves, Hans J. Eysenck and other contemporaries, we present strong evidence that the assumed causal relationship between personality and left–right ideology is too simplistic. We suggest the relationship is not predictive and instead is better understood by dividing the overarching left–right ideological spectrum into more meaningful attitude dimensions. In doing so, we find that Psychoticism is strongly related to conservative positions on Punishment, Religious, and Sex attitudes, whereas Social Desirability is related to liberal positions on the same attitudes. Furthermore, the nature of the covariance between Psychoticism and social attitudes is due to a common genetic influence, while covariance between Social Desirability and these attitudes in females is largely a function of common shared environmental covariance.

Introduction

Psychologists, geneticists, and political scientists have long attempted to identify and explain the associations between personality and political preferences (Adorno et al., 1950, Eysenck, 1954, McCloskey, 1958). Most of these early attempts to link personality traits with political attitudes portrayed conservatism as a pathology and focused on connecting conservatives with negative personality traits (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950, Altemeyer, 1981, Altemeyer, 1996). Such a view is exemplified by McCloskey (1958), who labeled conservatives as:

“…social isolates, … people who think poorly of themselves, who suffer personal disgruntlement and frustration, who are submissive, timid, and wanting in confidence, who lack a clear sense of direction and purpose, who are uncertain about their values, and who are generally bewildered by the alarming task of having to thread their way through a society which seems to them too complex to fathom” (37).

Focusing on the causal connection between negative personality traits and conservatism and positive traits with liberalism continues to dominate research in this area, though the language has become more subtle (see Block and Block, 2006, Jost et al., 2003, Jost et al., 2008). For example, researchers have worked very hard to demonstrate that the positively valued Openness to Experience dimension has a strong and consistent negative relationship with political conservatism (see Gosling et al., 2003, Jost et al., 2009, McCrae, 1996, Mondak and Halperin, 2008, Van Hiel et al., 2000, Van Hiel et al., 2004). Recent work however, has also demonstrated that Neuroticism is positively associated with economic liberalism (Leeson and Heaven, 1999, Riemann et al., 1993), though these findings are often dismissed or downplayed in favor or a more positive view of liberalism and negative view of conservatism.

The connection between personality and politics historically rested on the assumption that causality runs from personality traits to political attitudes. This seems plausible as personality is widely understood as some combination of innate dispositions and personal experiences that, in general, guides behavior in a stable predictive manner (Bouchard, 1994, Cattell, 1957, Eysenck, 1990, Eysenck, 1991, Tellegen et al., 1988, Winter and Barenbaum, 1999). This is not to say behavior is predetermined by personality; rather, environmental circumstances provide the impetus for behaviors, and personality predispositions increase or decrease the probability of behavior only if the action is appropriate for a specific situation (Bandura, 2001, Caprara and Cervone, 2000, Mischel and Shoda, 1998). Political attitudes, on the other hand, have typically been viewed as much more capricious (Converse, 1964). Although a plethora of research on attitudes suggest that they can be quite stable over time, rather than being perceived as personal dispositions, political attitudes are typically portrayed as preferences related to the immediate social environment and are thus perceived as entirely context dependent.

Such a view of attitudes, combined with the widely held assumption that, unlike personality, parental-offspring correlations of attitudes were entirely functions of cultural transmission (e.g., Niemi & Jennings, 1991; for an exception see Martin et al., 1986), reinforced the belief that personality traits were causally prior to social and political attitudes. However, such an assumption was unfounded, as the heritability of social and political attitudes has been established and replicated across populations (Bouchard and McGue, 2003, Eaves et al., 1989, Martin et al., 1986, Waller et al., 1990).

Indeed, the genetic covariation between social attitudes and personality was explored over 30 years ago. Eaves and Eysenck (1974) identified a genetic relationship between personality and conservatism. Typical of a Nature Letter, however, while profound and novel, they offered only brief discussion on why this relationship existed. And, unfortunately, these findings went largely unaddressed for several decades, with the exception of a handful of scholars. Among these, Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, and Tellegen (1990) continued to pursue this question (e.g., Bouchard, 1997, Bouchard, 2009, Bouchard and McGue, 2003; Waller et al., 1990). This work has led to a paradigm shift in the connection between personality and politics.

Combining Religiousness, Authoritarian dispositions, and traditional Conservatism into a core attitude/world view system, Bouchard (2009, p. 36) drew on other contemporaries (e.g., Saucier, 2000), and synthesized a theory that more accurately integrated attitude dimensions and personality traits. Such a synthesis implies that whatever relationship exists between personality and political attitudes cannot be strictly causal; rather, it seems likely that the relationships among political attitudes and personality traits are in part expressions of the same underlying genetic liability. Verhulst, Hatemi, and Eaves (2009) provided strong support of such a position and offered the first replication of Eaves and Eysenck’s (1974) findings presented some 35 years earlier. Using a large US twin sample (over 6000 pairs), they found that the vast majority of the covariance between Psychoticism and Militaristic/Defense attitudes was due to a common underlying genetic influence.

Building upon a series of works by Bouchard, Eaves, Eysenck and others, we examine the assumptions made in the existing literature regarding the causal connection between personality traits and political attitudes. Specifically, we estimated the genetic and environmental sources of covariation between personality traits and political attitudes and extended the findings of Verhulst et al. (2009) by focusing on specific attitudinal dimensions of political attitudes and personality traits in a very large sample of Australian Twins.