The genetic underpinnings of right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explain political attitudes beyond Big Five personality

The paper, in plain language

Testing the standard model of ideology

The influential dual process model treats authoritarianism and dominance orientation as products of personality and upbringing. In this Journal of Personality study — the first to model RWA, SDO, the Big Five and political attitudes together in a twin design — Thomas Kleppestø, Lotte Thomsen, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and our team used the same Norwegian twin cohort as our earlier PNAS work to ask whether the hierarchy-related traits are genetically their own thing.

A dedicated, heritable package

They are. RWA and SDO shared 78 percent-level genetic correlation despite modest surface correlation, and their genetic overlap with political attitudes — on immigration, deportation, development aid — survived controlling for the genes they share with the Big Five. Openness showed the expected genetic link to both ideologies, but could not absorb them. Shared family environment mattered for exactly one variable, RWA, and even there did not explain its link to politics — a quiet blow to the parenting account running from Adorno onward.

Why it matters

The conclusion we draw is not that politics is fixed — twin designs cannot name mechanisms, assortative mating biases estimates, and the sample is one homogeneous Norwegian cohort. It is that orientations toward group hierarchy constitute a dedicated psychological system for navigating intergroup struggle, not a byproduct of general personality. That reframes both the dual process model's causal ordering and where interventions should look — and it converses directly with my experimental work showing these same orientations are calibrated by context.