Nature, Nurture And Your Politics

Enlarge this image toggle caption Angela Hsieh Angela Hsieh

When most of us think about how we came to our political views, we often give a straightforward answer. We believe our stances on taxes, immigration or national security are shaped by those around us — our friends, parents, teachers. We assume our life experiences are the root of our political ideologies.

But what if there is something deeper in us that drives the music we listen to, the food we eat — even the politicians that we elect?

John Hibbing is a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Over the years, he's studied how our political views may also be influenced by our biology.

"We would look at brain scan results and we could be incredibly accurate knowing whether they're liberal or conservative, just on the basis of that," he says.

Genes aren't the only driver behind our political views, though. Hibbing says environment and upbringing play a large role as well. But he has found that, on average, about 30 or 40 percent of our political attitudes come from genetics. And he thinks the idea that our politics may come, at least in part, from our biology may help us to have more empathy for people who disagree with us.

"Our political beliefs are part and parcel of our entire being," he says.

This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you the first of two episodes exploring the psychology of our political identities, and where our partisan beliefs come from.

Additional Resources:

Ahn, W.Y., Kishida, K.T., Gu, X., Lohrenz, T., Harvey, A., Alford, J.R., Smith, K.B., Yaffe, G., Hibbing, J.R., Dayan, P. and Montague, P.R., (2014). Nonpolitical images evoke neural predictors of political ideology. Current Biology, 24(22), 2693-2699.

Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Thomas Lu, and Laura Kwerel. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Camila Vargas-Restrepo is our intern. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.