Exposure to research on the genetic and biological etiology of political attitudes influences warmth toward partisan outgroups and preferences over political compromise

Severson, Alexander. 2020. “Homo Politicus Was Born This Way: How Understanding the Biology of Political Belief Promotes Depolarization.” SocArXiv. April 25. doi:10.31235/osf.io/7qgcr

Abstract: Most individuals perceive ideological beliefs as being freely chosen. Recent research in genopolitics and neuroscience, however, suggests that this conviction is partially unwarranted given that biological and genetic factors explain more variance in political attitudes than choice and environmental factors. Thus, it is worth exploring whether exposure to this research on the biological and genetic basis of political attitudes might influence levels of affective polarization because such exposure might reduce the perceived moral culpability of partisan outgroups for the endorsement of oppositional beliefs. In this paper, I employ an online survey experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 487) to assess whether exposure to research on the genetic and biological etiology of political attitudes influences warmth toward partisan outgroups and preferences over political compromise. I present evidence that nontrivial numbers of participants in the treatment group reject the underlying science and do not update their genetic trait attributions for political attitudes. However, I also find that when the treatment is successful at increasing biological and genetic trait attributions, exposure to this research depolarizes strong-identifying partisans. Moreover, as partisans increasingly endorse biological and genetic trait attributions for political attitudes, they increasingly hold favorable attitudes toward political outgroups. These patterns suggest a potentially profitable inroad for political polarization interventions going forward.