Political ideology varies substantially between people. While traditionally such variation has been assumed to be purely socially-acquired, emerging evidence in behavioural genetics suggests that political ideology is largely heritable. This opens the door to such questions as: why are we political at all? Has evolution played a role in the differences we see across party lines? Is man “by nature a political animal”, as Aristotle once claimed?

The evolutionary foundations of political ideology was the focus of my PhD in Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Along with my supervisor Quentin Atkinson, we developed a dual evolutionary theory of political ideology that can explain the emergence of distinct but related dimensions of political attitudes and values: economic and social conservatism (see paper here). We theorised that these two dimensions reflect behavioural drives for cooperation (vs. competition) and group conformity (vs. individualism), respectively.

Over the course of my PhD, we tested this theory by relating political attitudes and values to cooperative and conformist behaviour in a representative sample of New Zealanders. We found that people who cooperated more in behavioural tasks were more economically progressive, expressed support for increased welfare and taxation, and reported more pro-environmental behaviour to mitigate climate change. By contrast, people who were more conformist in a social information use task were more socially conservative and expressed support for religious instruction in schools.


Further Reading

Claessens, S., Chaudhuri, A., Sibley, C. G., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2022). The evolutionary basis of political ideology. The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, 22.

Claessens, S., Fischer, K., Chaudhuri, A., Sibley, C. G., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2020). The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(4), 336-345.

Claessens, S., Kelly, D., Sibley, C. G., Chaudhuri, A., & Atkinson, Q. (2022). Cooperative phenotype predicts climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour. Scientific Reports, 12, 12730.

Claessens, S., Sibley, C. G., Chaudhuri, A., & Atkinson, Q. (2023). Cooperative and conformist behavioural preferences predict the dual dimensions of political ideology. Scientific Reports, 13, 4886.

Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (2009). A dual-process motivational model of ideology, politics, and prejudice. Psychological Inquiry, 20(2-3), 98-109.