As Aristotle said, all human beings are "political animals" and each one has a way of understanding public affairs. But to what extent does inheritance weigh on our vision of society? Do we come into the world with a serial ideology? Well, it seems that genes have a lot of influence, as shown by two recent investigations .
The first, led by psychologist Cary Funk, analyzed the ideas of 8,000 pairs of twins – who share all their DNA – and twins – who share only half – born in the US state of Minnesota.
After subjecting them to various questionnaires, Funk and his colleagues estimated that genetic factors accounted for up to 56% of the differences in their political leanings . They came to this conclusion after finding that identical twins agreed more often in their views than twins , when both groups had received similar education and environmental stimuli.
The other study, which was just published in the journal Behavior Genetics , actually crosses data from three different investigations that tracked the ideology of 12,000 twins and twins from five democratic countries over four decades. The calculation of these specialists is a little less precise than the previous one, but they believe that genes can determine between 30 and 60% of the variation in our social and political attitudes.
