Abstract
This thesis provides genetically informative data that political and prejudicial attitudes are extensions of deeper traits. We find that specific political attitudes (related to monopolizing territory and resources for the in-group), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO), all covary due to common genetic underpinnings. Further, the genetic variance in the political attitudes under study here are irreducible to big five personality or attachment and are instead highly overlapping with RWA and SDO. In other words, political attitudes cannot be viewed as haphazard collections of attitudes that are simply picked up from the socializing environment in which one finds oneself. We therefore propose that RWA and SDO capture genetically grounded strategies for hierarchy-navigation, which might be an irreducible part of the architecture of the human political mind.
List of papers
Paper I: Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø, Nikolai Olavi Czajkowski, Olav Vassend, Espen Røysamb, Nikolai Haahjem Eftedal, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Jonas R. Kunst, and Lotte Thomsen (2019). Correlations between social dominance orientation and political attitudes reflect common genetic underpinnings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(36), 17741-17746. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1818711116. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818711116 |
Paper II: Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø, Nikolai Olavi Czajkowski, Olav Vassend, Espen Røysamb, Nikolai Haahjem Eftedal, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Eivind Ystrom, Jonas R. Kunst, Line C. Gjerde and Lotte Thomsen. Attachment and politics are two functionally distinct systems, but both share genetics with interpersonal trust and altruism. To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |
Paper III: Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø, Nikolai Olavi Czajkowski, Olav Vassend, Espen Røysamb, Nikolai Haahjem Eftedal, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Eivind Ystrom, Jonas R. Kunst, and Lotte Thomsen. The socio-relational personality: The genetic underpinnings of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explains prejudice beyond big five personality. To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |
Paper IV: Kleppestø, T. H., Eftedal, N. H., & Thomsen, L. (2020). Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). In T. K. Shackelford & V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2602-1. The article is not available in DUO due to publisher restrictions. The published version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2602-1 |