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AbstractMost of what is known regarding political socialization treats parent–child concordance as evidence of transmission. This direct-transmission approach remains agnostic regarding how socialization occurs, whether traits have a role in a child's ability to identify and understand their parent's values or their motivation to adopt their parents' values. This article advances a perception-adoption approach to unpack these microprocesses of socialization. The authors test their model using three independent studies in the United States that together comprise 4,852 parent–child dyads. They find that the transmission of partisan orientations from parent to child occurs less than half the time, which is qualitatively different from the generally held view. More importantly, the findings provide a greater understanding of how key predictors facilitate the political socialization process. Specifically, politicization improves child perception, but has no role in the child's motivation to adopt parental values. Closeness and parental value strength influence children to want to be like their parents, but do nothing to improve children's ability to recognize their parents' values. And education, previously thought to have little role in transmission, does not influence a child's ability to understand their parent's affiliation, but appears to make children more likely to reject whatever they believe it to be.

In 1966, Henry Beecher published his foundational paper "Ethics and Clinical Research," bringing to light unethical experiments that were routinely being conducted by leading universities and government agencies. A common theme was the lack of voluntary consent. Research regulations surrounding laboratory experiments flourished after his work. More than half a century later, we seek to follow in his footsteps and identify a new domain of risk to the public: certain types of field experiments. The nature of experimental research has changed greatly since the Belmont Report. Due in part to technological advances including social media, experimenters now target and affect whole societies, releasing interventions into a living public, often without sufficient review or controls. A large number of social science field experiments do not reflect compliance with current ethical and legal requirements that govern research with human participants. Real-world interventions are being conducted without consent or notice to the public they affect. Follow-ups and debriefing are routinely not being undertaken with the populations that experimenters injure. Importantly, even when ethical research guidelines are followed, researchers are following principles developed for experiments in controlled settings, with little assessment or protection for the wider societies within which individuals are embedded. We strive to improve the ethics of future work by advocating the creation of new norms, illustrating classes of field experiments where scholars do not appear to have recognized the ways such research circumvents ethical standards by putting people, including those outside the manipulated group, into harm's way.

AbstractThe connections between narcissism and political orientations have been theorized by scholars and increasingly evoked by political parties, politicians, public intellectuals, and the media. Yet surprisingly little research has been undertaken to empirically asses the veracity of these claims. We address this lacuna by identifying the relationship between narcissism, political ideologies, and partisanship in a nationally representative sample taken days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism. Specifically, we find that the entitlement facet of narcissism is uniformly related to more conservative positions, whereas exhibitionism is related to more liberal values, including political party identification. Narcissism, as a complex multidimensional construct, has an important role in understanding political ideology.

Explorations of political attitudes and ideologies have sought to explain where they come from. They have been presumed to be rooted in processes of socialization; to be imposed by elites through partisan affiliations, the social milieu, and experiences; or to result from psychological traits. Far less attention has been focused on the inherent component of attitudes and where attitudes lead. Synthesizing research across academic fields, we propose that attitudes are a core constituent element of individual temperament, with far-reaching influence on many aspects of psychological and social functioning. Once instantiated, political values guide human behavior across domains, including affiliation into social networks, mate selection, physiological perception, psychological disposition, personality characteristics, morality construction, decision making, and selection into the very environments that influence political preferences. Here, we reconceptualize the ontology of political attitudes and ideologies from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective and as a combination of biological and environmental processes that drive an entire suite of coordinated downstream effects across the life course.

Neurobiological advances appear critical for explicating individual differences in attitudes, values, behaviors, cognition and evaluation, but only recently has the neurobiological tool kit been applied to questions of interest in international relations. In this review, we first provide an overview of historical approaches from two domains of enduring interest to the field: leadership and political violence. We then explicate the ways that the neurobiological revolution has so far furthered our understanding of these domains.

Biology and culture continually and interactively cocreate. In order to fully understand culture, the biological pathways that co‐occur must also be appreciated. And in order to determine how biological influences manifest in social behaviors, culture cannot be discarded. Here we discuss the interaction between genes and culture and show the ways in which each influences and informs the other. We argue that this interaction is profoundly important in shaping a wide variety of political and institutional differences across populations, including critical processes such as cooperation and conflict. We apply a levels‐of‐analysis approach to the study of individuals, cultures, and populations. In doing so, we discuss the potentially critical role of gene‐environment mismatch in precipitating many political and social problems, especially those related to political violence.

AbstractHumans, despite the country they inhabit, the social structures they constitute, and the forms of governments they live under, universally possess political attitudes; that is, those attitudes towards sexual norms, out-groups, resource allocation, cooperation and fairness. It has been proposed that this near universal manifestation across societies remains ingrained in the psychological architecture of humans because of human evolution. However, there is enormous variation in political attitudes within and across populations, and this variation is not merely a function of social differences but derives, in part, through neurobiological differences within human populations. Thus, there is great confusion on the difference between what has evolved as universal, and what is due to individual variation. This confusion, results, in part on the lack of integration of the theoretical mechanisms that addresses how humans vary within evolutionarily adaptive universals. Here we seek to fill this lacuna by explicating how evolutionary biology and psychology account for the universal need for humans to have political attitudes while neurobiological differences account for variation within those evolved structures.

In this article, we respond to Shultziner's critique that argues that identical twins are more alike not because of genetic similarity, but because they select into more similar environments and respond to stimuli in comparable ways, and that these effects bias twin model estimates to such an extent that they are invalid. The essay further argues that the theory and methods that undergird twin models, as well as the empirical studies which rely upon them, are unaware of these potential biases. We correct this and other misunderstandings in the essay and find that gene-environment (GE) interplay is a well-articulated concept in behavior genetics and political science, operationalized as gene-environment correlation and gene-environment interaction. Both are incorporated into interpretations of the classical twin design (CTD) and estimated in numerous empirical studies through extensions of the CTD. We then conduct simulations to quantify the influence of GE interplay on estimates from the CTD. Due to the criticism's mischaracterization of the CTD and GE interplay, combined with the absence of any empirical evidence to counter what is presented in the extant literature and this article, we conclude that the critique does not enhance our understanding of the processes that drive political traits, genetic or otherwise.

A great deal of foreign policy analysis relies on social and environmental factors, or anecdotal evidence. In seeking to address this problem in a more systematic manner, we move from an investigation centered around state actors to one focused on variation in individual behavior account for the combination of social, cultural, environmental, psychological, and biological differences. Our proposed approach to the study of political violence requires the integration of methods and skills from geneticists and neuroscientists with those in the behavioral and social sciences. Specifically, we seek to introduce an approach to study political violence which: (i) quantifies the effects of genes, environments, and their interaction on behavior; (ii) identifies specific genetic and environmental contexts that lead to such behavior; (iii) develops a comprehensive model of the biological and social pathways to political violence; (iv) identifies populations under specific circumstances which pose a higher or lower prevalence for any specific genes, neurobiological or environmental mechanisms which pose an increased liability for political violence; (v) develops mechanisms to identify individuals within given populations who are most at risk for committing violence, as well as those most resistant to such action; and (vi) creates environmental responses which can mitigate risk among those individuals. Adapted from the source document.