We Really Have no Idea Why Political Attitudes Change (or Not). A Guest Blog by Bernard Winograd

The four best sources to answer your questions: Rural White Liberals – a Key to Understanding the Political Divide | JayMan's Blog An HBD Summary of the Foundations of Modern Civilization | JayMan's Blog where do emmanuel todd’s family types come from? | hbd* chick How Inbred are Europeans? | JayMan's Blog We do have a considerable amount of data that goes a long way towards solving these mysteries. Though of course there is still much more to learn.

All very well said...it's a real problem. Evidence now makes it pretty clear that personality differences and personality types are pretty much the same everywhere, but culture greatly shapes their expression. Japan has extraverts and introverts just like the US, but Japanese extraverts act much more introverted than American ones, and American introverts seem extraverted to Japanese. Similarly for other personality issues. The other big personality thing is the disproportionate effect of sociopaths and psychopaths, because they often want power and will stop at nothing; no rational or moral considerations affect them. Otherwise, though...The biggest change in politics, and everything else, in my lifetime has been the inexorable rise in the power and wealth of giant corporations, and the relative decline of everything else. Folk society has completely collapsed, intellectual life has gotten more and more distorted by mass-produced pop culture, and politics has now been almost completely corrupted in the US and most other countries. This is the real force that has changed politics. The other big thing I see is shifting group loyalty. People were much more loyal to "class" when I was a kid. Unions were powerful and the rich were all Republicans. By contrast, the vote in both the last presidential elections was about evenly split all across the class lines. But now racism and religious bigotry have enormously rebounded (partly because of a "black man" in the "White" House) and seem to me as bad as when I was young (before the Civil Rights movement)--though less legally enforceable. I think group loyalty and power rivalry--competition to see who forces whom to do what--are the drivers. best wishes--

I don't think we can take it for granted that personality variation is innate in the usual sense of being determined by DNA sequence differences. Michael Gurven and colleagues have recently reported that the Big Five personality system is a poor fit to variation in the Tsimane, one of the few populations of non-modern people to receive close examination. In addition to conventional genetic and cultural effects on personality, we now also have to consider epigenetic contributions to traits such as personality. Like culture, epigenetic inheritance confounds the nature-nurture dichotomy. As Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argued some years ago, much of the variation in political opinion in the US is regional. Areas of the country with many Protestant Scots-Irish immigrants differ substantially from other regions. Lesley Newson and I argue that many changes in values over the last century and a half around the world are associated with urbanization and other aspects of modernization. Much contemporary variation in values is associated with how far along the ongoing trajectory of modernization a population is. Even in my "Left Coast" state of California, support for such liberal causes as gay marriage is concentrated in the major urban areas and the conservative opposition is disproportionately in rural and small town parts of the state, and so it is the rest of the country. Gurven, M., von Rueden, C., Massenkoff, M., Kaplan, H. & Lero Vie, M. (2013) How universal is the Big Five? Testing the five-factor model of personality variation among forager–farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104(2): 354-370. Newson, L. & Richerson, P. J. (2009) Why do people become modern: A darwinian mechanism. Population and Development Review 35(1): 117-158. Nisbett, R. E. & Cohen, D. (1996) Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, Westview Press. Petronis, A. (2010) Epigenetics as a unifying principle in the aetiology of complex traits and diseases. Nature 465(7299): 721-727.

Really interesting piece. I noticed there was no mention of the gender gap in politics and or personality. While there is a huge range of attitudes across both genders, it's definitely a thing in the US, with women on average being more liberal on both social and economic issues across different demographic and economic subgroups. I'm assuming some of it is because women as a group and as individuals are more negatively affected by the social and economic status quo than men are, but women are also more likely (for instance) to approve of laws allowing same-sex marriage, even if the issue does not affect them directly. I can think of a host of explanations for this, but I'm curious whether a similar gender gap exists in other cultures and whether this is possibly something that could provide additional information if it's better understood.

@Peter Richerson: I don’t think we can take it for granted that personality variation is innate in the usual sense of being determined by DNA sequence differences. Michael Gurven and colleagues have recently reported that the Big Five personality system is a poor fit to variation in the Tsimane, one of the few populations of non-modern people to receive close examination. Why does variation in the structure of personality traits across (genetically different) populations make genetic explanations difficult? And why would that somehow invoke Lamarckian epigenetics?

Thanks for these comments, one and all. As Thanksgiving reminded many of us, it is possible for there to be wide variation in views among the closest of genetic relations, who usually also share common cultural histories. If what accounts for those differences is the genetic variation of individual personalities, we have part of the answer of how that happens. But we have then made it harder to explain how populations behave over time, which is the focus of my puzzlement.

What about age? Can it be that certain genes just switch off at certain age just like lactose tolerance genes do?:) So people have open minds until they are, let's say, twenty years old and after that their worldview, political attitudes included, is set in stone for a lifetime?:) And only a minority, because of a relatively rare mutation, keep the ability to be "persuadable by inconvenient facts that challenge our worldview"?:) Just like a small proportion of people can keep drinking raw milk well after their childhood. Anyway, this kind of research is a slippery slope. I can see how it's results can be easily abused.

Please see the book Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us (www.OurPoliticalNature.com). It answers nearly all of these questions. The conclusion in particular explains why some aspects of public opinion change over time while others do not.

Your first two suggestions for more research, viz: -At a minimum, it would be interesting to trace what we know about what has been stable in public opinion and what has changed, and to develop a measurement of how quickly shifts occur that could be used to analyze the data. -Comparative research among countries also seems likely to be a source of insights, given the obvious differences in public opinion by country that would seem likely to be uncorrelated with the mix of personalities in each case. can be approached through the collection and statistical analysis of historical evidence, at least in modern societies, where travelers have been describing the beliefs and behavior of their neighbors for a few centuries now. This is quite different from collecting ethnographic information on small societies (Human Relations Area Files) or self-reported data on values and beliefs (World Values Survey). Data-gathering of this kind was hard work just a decade ago (the historian Paul Langford's book, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850, is a rare example), and documents whose value in this sense was unrecognized were hidden on dusty shelves or, worse, disappearing. With the arrival of internet and the slow but steady digitalizing of libraries the job is becoming far easier and the data is being saved. Personality research has demonstrated that analysis of trait frequency is a viable and productive procedure, and there is no reason that it cannot be extended into historical documents. Do all French, German, American and Spanish travelers notice the same phenomena when they visit England at the same period? If the Germans don't notice a behavior that all the others have seen, why not? And do the English see themselves as the others do? Data of this kind does not need to be "scientific" or "objective", but it must be first-hand. It is the numerical analysis which can give it value, and capture change over time.

Great question. I like the demographic factors, but I would add 2 more: 1. A lot of opinion is socially determined, based on almost a market logic of what sells to friends/family/community/enemies. Everyone wants to look good socially, and if the opinion market has a new trend, people will jump on board. Why do market manias start? Why do bubbles end? 2. Irrationality has a peculiar logic of its own. Game theory sheds some light on this, but I've only seen it in simplified 2-person game settings (like chicken). In n-person games, the proper use of irrationality for survival is even more important but very few people study this (n-person games are notoriously complicated and no one really understands them). Also, by disposition, scholars just don't give irrationality/contradiction the respect it deserves. Just because people aren't persuaded by reason, doesn't mean they aren't persuaded by unreason. Unreason spreads all the time, and quickly. Sometimes its socially caused (like 1 above), sometimes, it's more similar to the logic of superstitution. Even some socially untrendy superstitutions never seem to die out.