Angst kan een belangrijke motor zijn in politieke voor- en afkeuren, maar onderzoek aan de universiteit van Penn State en de Virginia Commonwealth University doet vermoeden dat er ook een genetische component is die er voor zorgt dat mensen bepaalde angsten hebben die hun politiek gedrag beïnvloeden.

Het onderzoek ziet zo een sterke correlatie tussen sociale angsten en een anti-immigratie houding.

“It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative. People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security,” stelt McDermott een van de onderzoekers. (bron)

Dit wil echter niet zeggen dat alles genetisch verklaard kan worden, integendeel. Scholing blijkt de genetisch oorzaak ruim te kunnen compenseren.

Abstract van het onderzoek:

Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out-groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out-group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti-immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out-group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes.