May 2 1997: Political Nature or Nurture?

I wake up confused. Much the same way I fell asleep.

The Labour Party under Tony Blair won yesterday’s election, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. Mind you, not just a basic win but rather a landslide victory.

The entire political landscape, and society, has shifted fundamentally.

Not to mention I remain guilt ridden, as I did not even vote. I felt unable to act from indecision and lack of confidence. As a full-time student, I just simply did not have time to come to an informed opinion on tax policy, job creation, social benefits, and the myriad of other issues that were at play.

Some of my friends are distressed by this shift in leadership. However, many more are ecstatic.

I don’t understand either polarizing reaction.

Like my friends, the electorate at large somehow not only formed conclusions in order to vote but ones in which they are also absolutely passionate about.

However, more confusing is how my group of friends, who are all similar in culture, educational background, and family history, are politically opposed. How do people so much alike come to radically different conclusions about the best way to solve our country’s problems?

Shouldn’t this common environment lead to common political views?

Little did I know at that moment that there was literally not a single person on the planet that knew the answer to my questions.

In fact, it would take the sequencing of the genome three years later, the mass popularisation of personal genomics 18 years later, and a huge army of researchers tracking down tens of thousands of identical twins separated at birth to help me understand my current, 1997 confusion.

Yes, a scientific answer to my questions would take more than 20 years to emerge.

2019 – 22 Years Later: Science to the Rescue

Today, I know the answers. And, frankly, they are shocking.

The answers to my questions are counter intuitive, and point more to nature than nurture when it comes to our political beliefs and preferences. So no matter how you grow up, chances are you will vote (or not vote at all) just like your mum and dad, as opposed to your mates.

However, before we dig into the answer, let’s define some terms in this Nature versus Nurture debate to make the answers easier to understand:

Nature: refers to the role our inherited genes play in making us who we are.

Nurture: refers to anything else, meaning non genetic, that makes us who we are like our family, our environment, and our friends – but not because of our inherited genes and sometimes because of pure, random chance.

Variances: We will look at the role that Nature and Nurture play in explaining the variances we see in a normal population. We will ask what percentage of the variance we see across people in a particular trait is due to Nature versus Nurture. These are population averages, and so individual mileage will vary.

Genes are more important than you think

The first thing I learned is that science proves our genes play a much bigger role in making us who we are than almost anyone believes. On key dimensions like general intelligence, school achievement, weight, and stomach ulcers, science shows us that our inherited genes determine between 50-70% of the variance we see in the population. That’s huge, but contrary to popular belief.

When surveyed on the topic, the UK population estimated that our inherited genes determine just 30-40% of the variance across these measures. People think most of the variance is due to Nurture, when actually it’s mostly due to Nature.

However, the UK population is not alone in thinking nurture beats nature in political leanings. Even the most brilliant minds believe in this nurture bias. Recently, I attended a conference with fifty of the smartest people I know, ranging from astrophysicists and authors to data scientists and successful investors. I surveyed them on this same topic.

The result: they ranked Nature slightly higher than the general public, but still underestimated the importance of genes by an average of 30 points versus the scientific consensus. Even a group of mostly analytical, technical experts put much more emphasis and belief in nurture versus nature when it comes to why we behave or act in the ways we do.

Politics is in our genes

Political ideology is one of the most heritable traits there is. 58% of the variance we see in a population is because of our inherited genes. This explains why so many people around me in 1997 were seemingly jumping to conclusions about the policies they wanted. Their genes predisposed them to be favourable to one policy over another.

Scientists started to realise this only around 2005. Until then, political scientists were mostly unaware of the heritability of social attitudes.

It is fascinating to note that while the overwhelming majority of the variance we see in political ideology across the population is because of our inherited genes, the overwhelming majority of the variance we see in political party identification is not. In fact, about 95% of the variance in party political identification is because of Nurture; in other words the social and environmental factors like parenting and peer groups.

One conclusion I draw from this is that campaigns can likely pressure people into political party identification, but will not really change a person’s underlying political ideology.

Also, the correlation between a person’s ideology and his or her party identification is not as high as you might imagine. For example, my mother voted Conservative because my father did. We were a Conservative family.

However, I’m convinced her political ideology didn’t align with her party identification. The statistics above suggest this is common.

A more recent example is Brexit, where many people seemingly voted against their self-interest and even their party affiliation. Likewise, in recent American elections, it seems to me that many people voted based on reactions to specific campaigns rather than based on their core values.

Campaigns (nurture) are shifting people’s behaviour, even if they aren’t shifting people’s underlying political ideology, which comes mostly from nature.

Mythbusters: Politics according to science

On this scientific journey, I learned three big myths that nearly everyone believes are true.

Let’s walk through them.

Myth #1: Your psychological traits determine your political ideology. FALSE

There is a common assumption that a person’s psychological traits predict a person’s political ideology. This is false.

There are two personality traits that play a role in helping to predict a person’s political ideology:

1. Openness to new experiences predicts liberalism
2. Conscientiousness predicts conservatism.

The correlations are modest, and most personality traits are “neither significantly nor consistently related to political values,” to quote Robert Plomin in Blueprint.

I think these two modest correlations are the reason many people believe that political ideology is determined by personality. The press love to equate ‘there is a relationship between two things’ with ‘one thing determining the other’. This is shoddy logic. There are many things in the real world that have a relationship, but where one doesn’t determine the other.

To quote Robert’s book: “The overwhelming majority of genetic influence on political traits are unique to the traits, and not accounted for by personality, morality, or other psychological constructs.”

Does this mean that Nature evolved political ideology as a separate and advantageous aspect of who we are? Fascinating! The reasons why are a worthy topic in and of themselves for a future investigation.

Myth #2: A personality trait is driven by a single gene. FALSE!

When it comes to personality traits, political ideology or most physical traits, it is almost never a single gene that determines where you sit on the spectrum. It is actually thousands of genes that determine where you are on the spectrum for any one trait. Each of which plays a very small role in influencing the outcome.

Again, I think people believe in ‘a gene’ for things because of faulty logic from news reports. It is easy to confuse ‘scientists have found a gene that influences X’ with ‘there is a gene that determines X.’

Myth #3: Nurture controls most of the outcome. FALSE!

I work hard to be a good parent. For example, I make a point to read to my kids, help them to care about school achievement and, most of all, to be good, kind boys in a world that can seem to be desperately lacking good, kind male role models.

Although they’re only 7 and 9 years old, I can see good, kind, smart people emerging. Of course, that makes me believe my efforts are working!

Not so fast!

Actually, science says my efforts likely don’t make that much difference.

Proof point: Siblings growing up in the same home grow up to be as different in personality and physical traits as siblings that grow up in separate homes. What?

It turns out that parenting is mostly about doing things your genes tell you that you should do, and your kids’ genes predispose them to be receptive to that input. So, for example, reading to my boys likely wasn’t Nurture at all. My genes predispose me to think that’s a good thing to do, and the boys enjoy reading and being read to because of their genes.

Furthermore, 60% of the variance in school achievement is directly tied to inherited genes.

Perhaps I can at least take credit for the 40% hard work?

What do we do with this information?

I’m sure you are reacting much the way I first did. With disbelief or even a bit of despair. How can it be true that our inherited genes play the majority role in determining who we are?

Every piece of research shows that we all believe Nurture outscores Nature by a large percentage, in spite of it not being true. We can’t change this reality.

So what can we do?

Perhaps we use this information to have greater empathy towards others not like us and to take a broader perspective. For example, this scientific data tells me I have even more privileges than I knew. I am a white British male, and I am blessed to have genes that make me more likely to read, strive for further education, work hard, and be a good parent.

This new knowledge also helps me understand our political differences. I try now to understand these differences rather than debate them or ignore them. Perhaps we could all step back and take time to appreciate our differences that we are given at birth. Science could be the key to a kinder, less polarized planet.

 

Source material:

I’ve included many links in my article, but I also leveraged information in a ton of scientific papers, a Behavioural Genetics textbook, and the easy to read and brilliantly written book Blueprint by Robert Plomin, a psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. Also, I highly recommend Chapter 14 of the Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology and Society covers Genetics and Politics.