Hatemi Peter K, Verhulst Brad
United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia; Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA United States of America.
Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2015 Mar 3;10(3):e0118106. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118106. eCollection 2015.
The primary assumption within the recent personality and political orientations literature is that personality traits cause people to develop political attitudes. In contrast, research relying on traditional psychological and developmental theories suggests the relationship between most personality dimensions and political orientations are either not significant or weak. Research from behavioral genetics suggests the covariance between personality and political preferences is not causal, but due to a common, latent genetic factor that mutually influences both. The contradictory assumptions and findings from these research streams have yet to be resolved. This is in part due to the reliance on cross-sectional data and the lack of longitudinal genetically informative data. Here, using two independent longitudinal genetically informative samples, we examine the joint development of personality traits and attitude dimensions to explore the underlying causal mechanisms that drive the relationship between these features and provide a first step in resolving the causal question. We find change in personality over a ten-year period does not predict change in political attitudes, which does not support a causal relationship between personality traits and political attitudes as is frequently assumed. Rather, political attitudes are often more stable than the key personality traits assumed to be predicting them. Finally, the results from our genetic models find that no additional variance is accounted for by the causal pathway from personality traits to political attitudes. Our findings remain consistent with the original construction of the five-factor model of personality and developmental theories on attitude formation, but challenge recent work in this area.
近期关于人格与政治倾向的文献中的主要假设是，人格特质会促使人们形成政治态度。相比之下，基于传统心理学和发展理论的研究表明，大多数人格维度与政治倾向之间的关系要么不显著，要么很微弱。行为遗传学的研究表明，人格与政治偏好之间的协方差并非因果关系，而是由于一个共同的潜在遗传因素对两者产生相互影响。这些研究流派相互矛盾的假设和发现尚未得到解决。部分原因在于对横断面数据的依赖以及缺乏纵向的基因信息数据。在此，我们使用两个独立的纵向基因信息样本，研究人格特质和态度维度的共同发展，以探索驱动这些特征之间关系的潜在因果机制，并为解决因果问题迈出第一步。我们发现，十年间人格的变化并不能预测政治态度的变化，这并不支持人们通常所认为的人格特质与政治态度之间的因果关系。相反，政治态度往往比被认为可预测它们的关键人格特质更为稳定。最后，我们的遗传模型结果表明，从人格特质到政治态度的因果路径并未解释额外的方差。我们的研究结果与人格五因素模型的最初构建以及态度形成的发展理论一致，但对该领域近期的研究提出了挑战。
