Where Attitudes Come From

I think that at this point most ELS scholars are comfortable with the notion that attitudes play a crucial role in judicial decision making, even if that role varies by judge, by court, and even by case. The well-established importance of attitudes in judicial decision making leads to the question of where attitudes come from.

Social background theory argues that attitudes come from shared environmental influences, such as one’s father’s occupation, the region where one went to college, and other such factors. This model, though, almost certainly overstates the case of shared environmental influences. Psychologists and behavioral geneticists have been amassing evidence for decades now showing that the extent to which personality factors are influenced by one’s environment, they are largely determined by the idiosyncrasies experienced by the individual, and less so by the environmental factors that one shares, say, with a sibling. Evidence for this includes the findings that the correlation between unrelated siblings (i.e., adopted children raised as siblings in the same household) is fairly small. Alternatively, the correlation in personality among identical twins reared apart is fairly substantial. These and other twin-based studies suggest a substantial heritable component to personality.

Recent work by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing reports similar findings for political attitudes (Hibbing and Alford, December 2004 Perspectives on Politics; Alford, Funk and Hibbing, May 2005, American Political Science Review). They report heritability effects on political attitudes ranging from .41 (school prayer) to .18 (support for federal housing assistance) with an average heritability coefficient across 28 political items of .32. The average effect for the unshared environment is a robust .53, but the effect for the shared environment (e.g., fraternal twins reared together) is only .16.

I provide here the heritability coefficients for other political attitudes likely to be of interest to judicial scholars:

Socialism .36

Death Penalty .31

Censorship .30

Gay Rights .28

Abortion .25

None of this means that there are specific genes for these policies, but more likely, that there are combinations of genes that influence egalitarianism, openness to outgroups, a desire for order, etc., that in turn influence these attitudes.

Hibbing and Alford suggest implications of these findings for the criminal justice system, war, and the creation of political institutions.  For those unfamiliar with their work, it's well worth reading.

Comments

[Jeffrey Segal]

Bill's "interaction" question is a crucial one, because genes often require environmental cues to be turned on. Thus it could well be that a predisposition for xenophobia (Alford, Funk and Hibbing report a heritability factor for immigration attitudes of .33) requires a perception of threat in order to be activated.

Thus if political self-selection is involved in geographic choices, the impact on national divisions could be more than merely additive.

[Jeffrey Segal]

In response to Jeff Y.:

Certainly nothing in the heritability literature prevents attitudes from changing over time. I will note that Corey Ditslear had a paper at the Midwest this year that makes use of the fact that
1) virtually every Supreme Court clerk has come to the Court from the USCA, and
2) the most liberal justices pick clerks almost exclusively from Democratic judges, and the most conservative justices pick clerks almost exclusively from Republican judges
to come up with a time-varying exogenous indicator of judicial preferences. Unfortunately, I cannot find the paper posted anyplace.

[William Henderson]

That clarification is helpful. But how does this inheritability interact with increased social mobility? It seems to me that red state/blue state could be an outcome that was several decades in the making. Further, inheritability interacting with mobility is going to affect the range of content of unshared environments on a location by location basis.

Obviously, I'll need to refer to the sources you've cited. My idle speculation could be all wrong. Very interesting stuff. bh.

[Jeff Yates]

This is a very interesting post that leads to a number of questions. What are the implications of this for analyzing the voting of Supreme Court Justices? Are their attitudes stable over time or do they change? If so, how do we best measure this?

Jeff S's comment above suggests that any change that might occur is likely to come from particular events, some of which might be measureable (through justice bios) and some not. Some behavioral research (I think Carsey and Layman, but I could be wrong) suggests that peoples' attitudes may change over time as their party shifts ideologically. I imagine that there may also be life events (again some discernable through justices' bios, but some not) that may also tend to yield attitudinal change, on average.

Further, might one of those "particular events" be the individual's assessment of public opinion? Perhaps, this type of analysis could potentially yield a measure of ideological change for justices over time that avoids the circularity problem?

[Jeffrey Segal]

The fact that political attitudes are heritable does not mean that they are only heritable. The genetics argument is not nature vs. nurture, but rather, nature and nurture. There's still plenty of room for environmental forces, but those forces appear to work mostly through one's "unshared environment", rather than through one's "shared environment."

Again, the best example of this is that biologically unrelated individuals who grow up as siblings show little correlations in their personalities or attitudes. That is, there's little systematic impact of their shared environment. But particular events, conversations, books, peers, and other aspects of one's unshared environment still have a substantial impact.

[William Henderson]

Jeff, I enjoyed this post, but it ends with a bit of a teaser. If virtually every social attitude is heritable, what role are we to assign to political discourse? Especially in an age of high mobility, perhaps our various metropolitan areas reflect a peculiar self-selection that augurs greater red state/blue state polarization with each passing year.

In other words, if determinism is one of the "implications" of these findings, that would be worth posting as well. bh.