Why are Conservatives Less likely to Attribute Individual Differences to Genetics?
According to a recent study, conservatives are less likely than liberals to attribute individual differences to genetics; a possible explanation is that they are more likely to believe in free will, and hence more likely to attribute individual differences to personal choice
A recent paper by Schneider et al. (2018) published in The Journal of Politics reached the interesting and somewhat surprising conclusion that conservatives are less likely than liberals to attribute individual differences to genetics. Their abstract reads as follows:
Many scholars argue that people who attribute human characteristics to genetic causes also tend to hold politically and socially problematic attitudes. More specifically, public acceptance of genetic influences is believed to be associated with intolerance, prejudice, and the legitimation of social inequities and laissez-faire policies. We test these expectations with original data from two nationally representative samples that allow us to identify the American public’s attributional patterns across 18 diverse traits. Key findings are (1) genetic attributions are actually more likely to be made by liberals, not conservatives; (2) genetic attributions are associated with higher, not lower, levels of tolerance of vulnerable individuals; and (3) genetic attributions do not correlate with unseemly racial attitudes.
The authors asked their respondents to partition the influence on each of 18 traits (e.g., height, intelligence, obesity) into three potential causes: genetics, the environment, and personal choice––so that the percentages summed to 100%. They then averaged the percentages in each of the three categories across the 18 traits for each respondent. Their first main finding was individuals who attributed a higher percentage of influence to genetics were less likely to identify as conservative:
One possible explanation for this finding is that, according to several recent studies, conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe in free will. The most widely used instrument for measuring belief in free will is from a paper by Paulhus and Carey (2011). It includes items such as ‘people have complete control over the decisions they make’, ‘people must take full responsibility for any bad choices they make’ and ‘people can overcome obstacles if they truly want to’.
Recall that Schneider et al. distinguished between three potential causes of individual differences: genetics, the environment, and personal choice. In the online supplement to their paper, they provide a table indicating whether conservatives or liberals were more likely to attribute influence on the various traits to each of the three potential causes:
The table shows that conservatives were less likely to attribute individual differences to ‘genetics’ not because they were more likely to invoke ‘the environment’, but because they were more likely to invoke ‘personal choice’. This rather strongly suggests that Schneider et al.’s findings can be explained, at least in part, by conservatives’ greater tendency to believe in free will.
Furthermore, ‘personal choice’ is a somewhat odd category for the authors to have utilised, given that it is much more conceptually proximate to the traits in question than either ‘genetics’ or ‘the environment’. Indeed, an individual’s personal choices can be seen as being influenced by her genetics and her environment. It would therefore be interesting to repeat Schneider et al.’s study using slightly different potential causes: ‘genetics’, ‘family background’ and ‘peer group’, say.
