14 DAY TRIAL // A team of scientists has determined that people's liberal views may in part be owed to genetic factors, in addition to social conditioning and personal opinions.
Experts at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) and Harvard University conducted the new work, which evidenced that role the dopamine receptor gene called DRD4 plays in underlying political views.
Naturally, the main role in determining a person's views is played by social factors, such as the family, opinion of peers and, later on in life, the individual's own mindset. But genetics apparently play a role too, the group argues.
Experts with the investigation contend that this is the first scientific investigation to correlate political views with the action, or lack thereof, of specific genes in the human body.
For the new study, the experts looked at some 2,000 test subjects, who were gathered from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (NLSAH), AlphaGalileo reports.
The team then proceeded to cross-reference the participants' genetic make-up with the social networks they kept, in search for possible correlations between the two.
The results, which appear in the latest issue of the esteemed Journal of Politics – published by Cambridge University Press – show that a specific variant of the DRD4 gene could be linked to liberal views in adults.
However, there was also a condition, and namely that the individuals who grew to develop these opinion must have had an active social life while in their adolescence.
“These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” says UCSD professor James H. Fowler, the lead researcher on the work.
“It is our hope that more scholars will begin to explore the potential interaction of biology and environment. The way forward is to look for replication in different populations and age groups,” he adds.
Fowler adds that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays an important role in affecting neural processes connected to emotional responses, movement control and the ability to experience pain and pleasure.
“It is the crucial interaction of two factors – the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence – that is associated with being more liberal,” the team concludes.