Where do political attitudes come from?
We talk about political views as if people reason their way into them in adulthood. The evidence — from twin studies, three-decade cohorts and cross-national comparisons — says they start forming much earlier, and much deeper.
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Partly heritable
Twin studies show that the link between social dominance orientation and political attitudes reflects common genetic underpinnings — the preference for group hierarchy and the politics that follow from it travel together in part because they share inherited ground. Follow-up work finds that the genetic basis of authoritarianism and dominance explains political attitudes beyond what Big Five personality accounts for. None of this makes attitudes immutable; it makes them earlier than the debates that claim to produce them.
And partly developmental
Genetics is only half the origin story. Following Norwegians across three decades, we found that self-esteem trajectories from adolescence predict opposition to social equality in midlife, and that mental-health trajectories shape later political attitudes and voting. How life treats you at fifteen leaves fingerprints on how you vote at forty-five. Political psychology usually samples adults at one moment; these cohort studies show what that snapshot hides.
Structure shapes psychology — and back
Individual dispositions do not float free of society. In work across many societies, my colleagues and I found that preferences for group dominance track macro-level social inequality and violence — and mediate their effects. Psychology and structure form a loop: unequal societies cultivate the dispositions that then defend inequality. Explanations that stay at one level, whether purely psychological or purely structural, miss the mechanism.
Why this matters for how we argue
If political attitudes were late-forming opinions, debate would be the main engine of change, and the occasional failure to persuade would be puzzling. If they are partly inherited and partly laid down across development, then persuasion is playing on a shorter field than it assumes — and the conditions people grow up under become political interventions in themselves. The wider research programme, from dehumanization to the conditions for peace, is on the intergroup relations strand page.