Society & Culture - Posted by Courtney Coelho-Brown on Wednesday, February 6, 2013 12:05 - 3 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The genetics of fear can shape political views
"It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative. People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don't know, and things they don't understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security," says Rose McDermott, professor of political science at Brown University. (Credit: "danger sign" via Shutterstock)
BROWN (US) — People who are genetically predisposed to have higher levels of social fear are more likely to support anti-immigration policies, research shows.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
It’s no secret that fear is a mechanism often used in political campaigns to steer public opinion on hot-button issues like immigration and war. But not everyone is equally predisposed or influenced by such a strategy, according to new research published in the American Journal of Political Science.
By examining the different ways that fear manifests itself in individuals and its correlation to political attitudes, the researchers found that people who have a greater genetic liability to experience higher levels of social fear tend to be more supportive of anti-immigration and pro-segregation policies.
Thus far, research examining the link between fear and political attitudes has seldom accounted for trait-based fear, with transitory state-based fear being a more common focus area.
Using a large sample related individuals, including twins, siblings, and parents and children, the researchers first assessed individuals for their propensity for fear using standardized clinically administered interviews.
Looking at subjects who were related to one another, the researchers were able to identify influences such as environment and personal experience and found that some individuals also possessed a genetic propensity for a higher level of baseline fear. Such individuals are more prepared to experience fear in general at lower levels of threat or provocation.
Next, the researchers surveyed the sample for their attitudes toward out-groups—immigrants in this case—as well as toward segregation. Participants were also ranked on a liberal-conservative partisanship scale depending on how they self-reported their political attitudes.
Genes and education
The research indicates a strong correlation between social fear and anti-immigration, pro-segregation attitudes. While those individuals with higher levels of social fear exhibited the strongest negative out-group attitudes, even the lowest amount of social phobia was related to substantially less positive out-group attitudes.
“It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative. People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security,” says Rose McDermott, professor of political science at Brown University.
The researchers make clear, however, that genetics plays only part of the role in influencing political preferences.
Education, they found, had an equally large influence on out-group attitudes, with more highly educated people displaying more supportive attitudes toward out-groups and education having a substantial mediating influence on the correlation between parental fear and child out-group attitudes.
“In this way, the definition of unfamiliar may shift across time and location based on experience and education, and a genetically informed fear disposition is hardly permanent or fixed,” the study reports.
McDermott says that while more research is needed to determine how various genetic, biological, and developmental pathways influence fear and what other factors might influence attitudes in concert with these forces, there are still several takeaways to the study, not least of which is how political campaigns might be manipulated to affect some people more than others.
The study also highlights the role emotion plays in the political process.
“We can roll our eyes and get really frustrated at Congress for being paralyzed, but we’re applying a rational perspective to it because we’re detached. But we have to recognize that a lot of what’s driving the paralysis and disagreement has to do with emotional factors that are not necessarily amenable to or easily shifted by rational arguments,” McDermott says.
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Virginia Commonwealth University contributed to the study.
Source: Brown University
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3 Comments
truth
Sarah Ruth
wow……. what a long schpeel of hate-mongering bytes
let me guess…… you mainline Fox News and believe everything they say
regurgitation 101
struth
Crickey!
Apology for the anxious?
Monologue from a maniac?
Or just a futile spurt of venom from a cowering goat lover who failed to study logic or old fashioned rhetoric because that was taught in the leftist courses such as philosophy?
This appears to be just another example of Left wing post-modern social scientists, attempting to slap a derogatory or defamatory label on those who refuse to toe the line and swallow whole their Leftist prescriptions , and their subversions of democracy.
It’s just another version of claims…..
…. that a person who disagrees with gay marriage is homophobic
….that a person who is not in favor of porous borders is xenophobic
…..that a person who doesn’t think affirmative action works is xenophobic or pro-segregation
…that a person who abhors late-term abortions for other than medical reasons is a misogynist
……that a person who doesn’t want the landscape defiled by wind turbines is anti the environment
….that a person who sees fraud and fakery in the ever-burgeoning entitlement industry, and wants those in real need through no fault of their own to be the recipients of help, but wants the indigent to be encouraged and required to join the workforce—– is just a person with no compassion.
…..that a person who examines a great deal of the science and sees that the warmist claims are unsupported by facts, is a creationist or a ‘flat-earther, or a ‘shill’ for big tobacco or whatever.
Conservatives are not ‘ people who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security’.
That’s just Leftist propaganda.
Neither are conservatives less educated—although they’re much less likely to have bothered with a social science education.
That manipulation of political campaigns by[ presumably] the fear that you’re on about, would be manipulation by evil conservatives like Karl Rove [I'm sure you mean] of emotional, fear-crazed uneducated [ you think] conservatives who are [you deduce] unable to process rational argument.
What a sick joke, and a convenient excuse to leave important issues unexamined —the bogus, narcissistic moral certainty of the lunatic Left.
Your universities would do better to put their funding into investigating the role they’ve played in the massive fraud of CAGW—the damage it has done to lives and economies as funds sorely needed elsewhere instead went into grants to the pet climate ‘scientists’ whose half-baked ‘science’ was deemed a useful tool for a global agenda.
They should concentrate on what they might do to atone.