DiscussMormonism.com

A very interesting podcast, give it a listen.

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.

What if our political leanings are biologically driven? A consequence of our brain's architecture, subjective. If so, how can this be addressed long term? As Doc pointed out elsewhere, men in particular sort through things by engaging in verbal combat. Are the intense disagreements healthy? When do they become unhealthy? Are we biologically predisposed to these divisions? Is it a feature rather than a bug, allowing power to be divided between different types of thinking? Facilitating progressive change, but tempering it in sensible ways? Perhaps this is why the United States with it's unique division of powers has been so successful.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/03/65412724 ... r-politics

What I have to contribute is that the openness to experience scale in the Big 5 personality trait model correlates strongly with predisposition towards modern social liberalism. Social liberals skew towards political liberalism with a smattering of libertarian types mixed in. A portion of the variance in this trait is hereditary.

Whenever thinking about the personality differences between conservatives and liberals, I'd caution you to remember that the vast majority of people aren't ideological, don't possess anything beyond a surface level knowledge of politics, and are prone to wild shifts in opinion both over time and simply based on how you ask them questions.

I'm not saying that personality explains nothing of political affiliation or that personality doesn't have a hereditary component, but think about demographic shifts in politics. African Americans vote almost universally Democratic. Is it that black people have similar hereditary personalities? No. Or think about the massive shift in poorly educated whites into the Republican camp over the past generation. Was their a recent major change in the personalities of poorly educated white people? No.

"Aha!" you might say. "Republican and Democrat isn't conservative and liberal. It's probably just that parties shifted, but people's ideological predispositions haven't changed."

The thing is, when you ask people about their ideological viewpoints, you will see parallel shifts. Survey poorly educated white people, and they'll tell you that they agree with conservative positions in precisely the way the Republican party has shifted.

This is all because political affiliation is shallow and not ideologically driven. It's not to say that there can't be a hereditary component to personality that affects political affiliation - the openness to experience example is a famously cited correlate - but I wouldn't expect too much out of it.

Water Dog wrote:What if our political leanings are biologically driven? A consequence of our brain's architecture, subjective. If so, how can this be addressed long term?

Heavy metals could be introduced into the drinking water of the Blue Brains rendering them into Right Brains. Once on a level playing field, all could be equally susceptible to the Big Lie approach to politics.