Chapter I Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics During the last ten years or so, the terms "neuropolitics," "genopolitics," an»] "biopolitics" have begun to appear—or in the case of the latter, re-appear— the vast literature which links psychology and politics. Neuropolitics ai genopolitics are relatively new at the time of writing, and are still not 1 familiar to many political scientists as they ought to be. One thing I've trlJ to do throughout this book is to explain political psychology in a simple accessible, and direct way. Writing about these topics in that fashion admittedly rather hard to do, though, not least because hardly anyone is d expert in all the areas that these three general approaches or fields of studj draw upon. In order to get a real handle on these subjects, you first of al need to be trained in political science, of course. But you also need to know about cognitive ncuroscicnce, psychology, biology, physiology, primatology, ethology, and behavioral genetics as well! This is a pretty tall order, an I take my hat off to anyone who feels they're truly "expert" in all of theso simultaneously (while retaining a healthy suspicion at the same time about anyone who makes this kind of claim). Part of the problem, of course, goes back to the issues with which w started this book. On the whole, academia has traditionally rewarded tho$ who specialize in narrowly defined areas which, by their very nature, are n< interdisciplinary. As an undergraduate, you will probably take courses it a variety of areas. From one perspective, you are getting exposed to a bro,i< range of topics. On the other hand, it can be hard to see how all of tins "link up," and relatively few courses in universities today even try to do that for you. In other words, our appreciation of the woods tends to get lost in on fascination with particular trees. Writing a PhD thesis, moreover, usual] involves a high degree of specialization within a single field, and both tenur and promotion within political science are hard to achieve without a similar, single-minded focus. Moreover, there is a great deal of bureaucratic resistant I to incorporating genetic explanations (for instance) into the study ol politics, Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 163 Law personally heard people who do this described in private as I........ or "crazies."1 This kind of resistance is perhaps understandable, but ■ III no inhibits the accumulation of learning and knowledge. And of course pi' is the problem of getting natural scientists to "do" politics. Salaries H| jjcnerally higher in the natural sciences than they are in the social ones, so Hty jio to the trouble and expense of working in a political science department Ml) you can make much more money in a department of biology? I I'niiiinately, we are beginning to see more and more individuals trained in ■lliivioral genetics or social neuroscience (for instance) working in political Htluv departments. And an ever-bigger growth industry is the tendency nl uncial scientists to collaborate with colleagues based in natural science ■piutmcnts, and to publish in natural science journals.2 We are increasingly ■ttlng around the "expertise problem" by simply talking to (and working mIh people in departments other than our own. And this tendency, of ■Hirxc, goes back to Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam, both of whom l|« we saw in earlier chapters) realized early on in the development of the < i this book covers that a full understanding of political behavior could lllil he acquired without training oneself in the materials traditionally covered ■||y by non-political science departments. I Aft we shall see in the concluding chapter, these new perspectives also provide a handy way of combining our situationist and dispositionist approaches. All I ii mgh in Chapter 11 we present neuroscience as an approach which is Bloie dispositionist than situationist, in reality both neuropolitics and geno-pnlllics combine dispositionist and situationist arguments to form a more founded explanation of political attitudes and behavior. Neuropolitics and win'politics may yet be formally (or informally) merged with one another to ||it'111 a single approach—possibly with a new and different label that hasn't pirn coined yet—and indeed the terms are often used interchangeably. While llu \ iIn in fact overlap in significant ways and many researchers mix and limit li various elements of these complex topics—they should be logically iIminguished from one another, and it's important that students get a good n i ol this.' While neuropolitics and genopolitics are relatively new additions to the political science oeuvre, biopolitics is a much older and more well-established .....ich which has undergone a major revival in recent years, and both liruropolitics and genopolitics are new approaches within the general label ol biopolitics. Neuropolitics is the study of the role played by the human brain In politics, and is logically separate from genopolitics, which examines 'I.....notic roots of political attitudes and behavior. The two are often linked, though, in the sense that genopolitical arguments often involve a theory of Iio» the brain has evolved and thus become neuropolitical as well. Before 164 The Individual we look ,il areas ol overlap between biopolitics, neuropolitics, and genopolItBH ol course, we first need to understand what these various terms mean. W^B take each in turn. Biopolitics Biopolitics is probably the easiest of the three to describe and undtTslaiiql Setting aside its usage in postmodernism—where it has a rather dilliTitflj and specialized meaning—the term "biopolitical" in political psycholojB refers to approaches which examine the relationship between human biolofl and political behavior.4 It is easily the oldest of the three approaches, IM being used as a term in the \LKH)s and 1930s. Arguably, though, its ul^H a genera] approach can be traced much further back than this, to both F^B and Aristotle and certainly to the "state of nature" arguments of ThonM Mobiles and John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The state of naturtH a real or hypothetical condition employed by a number of thinkers, in vvlilill they imagined what life would be like if government did not exist and inffl and women were essentially left to their own devices. Hobbes famoilll concluded that life under such conditions would be "nasty, brutish, and slioi'li] while Locke and Rousseau both countered that the state of nature would III fact be a state of harmony in which everybody "got along" (to paraplil'W Rodney King). Each of them justified their preferred form of government H these claims, but Hobbes in particular was making a biological (or biopolitli'|H argument about human nature. Human beings, he suggested, are born \vll|| certain predispositions and these "arc" a certain way, regardless of whal might like to be the case. For many years after World War II, biological explanations languiNllli in political science, partly because state-of-nature-type explanations wt|fl regarded as unscientific by the 1950s and 1960s, an era in which behaviardlM reigned supreme in political science. Not to be confused with the behavior liM that we examined in Chapter 5, this was a movement in political sdaftBJ which insisted that cumulative progress could only be made in attallllBj or accumulating knowledge about politics if the appropriate srieiitlllt (usually statistical) techniques were followed. The arguments of theorists Ilk* Hobbes and Locke were often deemed not to fulfill such criteria. I'lnlulily more important, though, was the almost automatic but ill-considered assorial lull which developed in many people's minds between the "Eugenics" movement, Nazism, and biological explanations of politics in general. As we saw eai lii i this book, this movement had an impact not just on Germany—where pseuilu biological theories were used by Nazis to "justify" genocide—but in the tin" States of the 1920s and 1930s, where anti-immigration policies weir dr.iwil Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 165 ■ M|> In response to biological theories which claimed that immigration from I I'ti'iii i n Europe was somehow "poisoning the race." » The political fallout from Nazism and the Eugenics movement tended to B|*l till biological explanations with the same brush, regardless of their precise lliiliin or scientific basis. Taken to their extreme, biological explanations of ■polities like eugenics can become highly deterministic, claiming that human |h li.i\ Kir is fixed and that education or training is therefore effectively a waste IIII lime. If human behavior is fixed and more or less predetermined, why I linilier with educating people and trying to make their lives better? While pHpliiiviorism (with its notion of the blank slate) reigned supreme in the rising ■ Will iillluent America of the 1950s, biological explanations (which suggested I lli.h i lie slate was at least partially filled at birth) were never going to dominate BlMyi hology either. Since the late 1960s though, there have always been 1 IihIiiii.iI scientists like Albert Somit who carried the torch for biopolitical [ H|i|.....k lies during a period where many others considered this odd or quaint. | Mi'i i recently, however, such approaches have been significantly revitalized I I*V developments in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, and RRiihI ol all by advances in behavioral genetics. Moreover, political psychologists I In particular have stressed that biological accounts need not be deterministic ll ill' At the very least, they can be used as a supplement to situationist accounts Hyhlfli claim that your voting behavior (for instance) is entirely determined by Rjfliur lite circumstances. And at their best, they may provide better, independent ■W'" 'lints of behavior which rely on dispositionism rather than situationism. In ■Himiy ways, neuropolitics and genopolitics are both revitalized versions of this I' i tradition, and we'll turn to each of these next. Neuropolitics l Neuropolitics investigates the relationship between the human brain and poli- ■ IIin, dealing with how each influences the other. How does the brain affect | hnlltical behavior? And how, for that matter, does politics then affect our I liliiliis? This is of course a highly interdisciplinary subject, drawing on insights I ||lr,tnrd from political science, neuroscience, biology, and a number of the llilds already mentioned above. Consider some of the classic questions lli.il traditional political scientists ask. Where do our political attitudes come I Itniiii' How do we judge candidates for political office? Are most of us PJpWiully biased, and how does race affect our political behavior? What i.ili dues emotion play in decision-making? Neuropolitics uses the methods I III cognitive neuroscience (most notably, "neuroimaging" techniques) to I Investigate these issues in a way that traditional political scientists were never I «lile lo. 166 The Individual In late 2010, the British actor Colin Firth—best known to Americana his starring (and stuttering) role in The King's Speech—guest-presented episode of a radio program in England. During the broadcast, he casually light-heartedly suggested that scientists should scan the brains of politiciai especially the brains of people who disagreed with him politically! He • gested that there might be differences in brain structure between those U the political left and those on the right (or what are termed "liberals" A|J "conservatives" in the U.S. context). Firth probably did not expect anyone to actually do it, but psychology at University College London took up his challenge. The result was ■ article published in the journal Current Biology the following year which credited the actor and his producer as "co-authors." The real work, 0| course, wasn't done by Firth but by Tom Feilden and Ryota Kanai of 11• ■ ■ university's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. To begin with, they scanned the brains of Alan Duncan, a member of the British Conservative Parfl and Stephen Pound, representing the U.K. Labour Party, using fMRI (of functional magnetic resonance imaging) to map the brain structures of cat li All of this was unusual enough, but the results themselves were even mom surprising. Of course, there is little one can conclude in a social scicntllifl sense from just two cases, so Rees and Kanai continued their research liy adding ninety more subjects. But they found that Firth's intuition was corre^H There are in fact differences in brain structure between those on the left anil those on the right, they discovered, so much so that after the researcher! replicated the study on another sample of participants, they felt able to conclude that it is possible to predict someone's political preferences—witli ,in astounding 72 percent accuracy—just by looking by looking at the structure of his or her brain. How is this possible? The authors argued that certain regions are "thicker" in Conservatives, while other regions are thicker in Labourites, allowing a researcher to predict with a great deal of confidence which ..... they are looking at. Just from the images on a computer screen.6 The invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging has played nil small role in creating the new field of neuropolitics because it has given anyone interested in the political brain new tools to address questions tli.il couldn't really be answered before. Of course, like anything else, fMRI result* need to be used with care. In 2009, neuroscientist Craig Bennett and his colleague Abigail Baird put a dead salmon in their fMRI machine. Amazingly, this produced "evidence" of brain activity, as if the salmon was alive and thinking! This was actually just the kind of random "false positive" that is possibly when this kind of technique is used, but Bennett and Baird did it in ordei to show how easy it is to misinterpret fMRI results. Bennett says that he's "so tired about hearing about 'the brain lighting up.' It makes it sound like you see lights Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 167 ie head or something. That's not how the brain works." Many people, he ics, misunderstand what fMRI results actually mean. Those beautiful colorful maps . . . they're probability maps. They show the likelihood of activity happening in a given area, not proof of activity. According to our analysis, there's a higher likelihood of this region using more blood because we found more deoxygenated blood in this area. It's also correlational. Here's a time frame and the changes we'd expect, so we see which bits of brain correlate with that.7 fyt other words, while fMRI gives us a good indication of brain activity, it lines so indirectly by estimating blood flow in the brain rather than "seeing" i11 mm activity directly. I Some of the first studies in neuropolitics used fMRI techniques to find Out whether there were differences in brain activity between political sophisti-. itcs and non-sophisticates (in other words, between people who knew a lot Bout politics and those who did not). Darren Schreiber and Marco Iacaboni Asked subjects an array of questions while their subjects lay inside an fMRI machine.8 It was a bit like a high-tech version of what Alex Trebek does on the TV show Jeopardy, since the categories involved a mixture of political and non-lolitical subjects. The researchers found that the politically knowledgeable and llie politically ignorant reacted in different ways to questions about U.S. national |M,litics. The knowledgeable showed elevated levels of activity in regions of II u brain associated with social cognition, while political novices showed diminished activity in those same areas. Other early experiments looked At how the brain responds to political candidates and their messages. The neuroscientists Jonas Kaplan, Joshua Freedman, and Marco Iacoboni of UCLA ((inducted experiments like these prior to the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in the United States. At the same time—that is, just before the 2004 presidential election—Drew Westen and his colleagues at Emory University were independently conducting a very similar kind of experiment.9 In both cases, the experiments used fMRI techniques to discover how voters respond to political images. Kaplan, Freedman, and Iacoboni hooked up a Democratic voter called John (iraham to an MRI machine and showed him images designed to evoke emotional responses, such as a Bush campaign commercial which used images from the events of September 11 and the (in)famous "daisy chain" commercial from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. They subsequently followed this up with an imaging study of other Democratic and Republican voters looking at images of George W. Bush and John Kerry.10 More recently, in 2007 (as the campaign for the 2008 election was in full swing) Iacoboni 168 The Individual Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 169 and his colleagues tested twenty subjects—ten men and ten women were self-declared swing voters, and showed them still and moving imagfl various candidates." They also asked subjects to rate candidates on a li .i.Ih "feeling thermometer," from "very favorable" to "very unfavorable." The results the neuroscientists obtained were interesting. For instanoH the 2007 study when men were shown the word "Republican," the aim and the insula both areas associated with anxiety and disgust— act lv(|H quite noticeably, as they did to a lesser extent when both men and w..... viewed the word "Democrat." The experiment also confirmed the cxpei i.iii*.i that voters are divided in their emotions towards Hillary Clinton, bui n unexpectedly they found that the divide on Clinton is as much within i nil party as it is between them. As Iacoboni and his colleagues note, vnl(fl who rated Mrs. Clinton unfavorably on a questionnaire (which subjectN |Hj had to fill out) appeared not entirely comfortable with their asses.n When viewing image's oi her, these voters exhibited significant activity 111 Hj anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused wlffl a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose orilHj looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. ClintjH John Edwards similarly provoked strong reactions. "When looking at picltlH oi Mr. Edwards, subjects who had rated him low on the thermometer NflH showed activity in the insula, an area associated with disgust and other nr.' ill feelings," while "swing voters who did not give him low ratings, when looHH at still photos of him, showed significant activation in areas of the brain conUH ing mirror neurons—cells that are activated when people feel empathy. AM that suggests these voters feel some connection to him."12 A few years earlier—that is, just before the 2004 presidential election «4 Drew Westen and his colleagues were independently working on a hronql similar project.13 While the study by Kaplan and his colleagues investigated ham partisans reacted to images of both their own party's candidate and those oi' tH opposing parties, Westen and his colleagues looked at what goes on inside thjl brains of partisans who are presented with information that puts their candidlfl and the opposing one in a poor light. The experimenters first recruited fif'ttfl strong Democrats and fifteen strong Republicans. While hooked up to an I'M 1(1 machine, the subjects were presented with contradictory statements (in reality, fabricated by the experimenters) supposedly made by both their favored .mil disliked candidates. In each case, the second supposed quote from a candidlfl clearly contradicted the first. The experimenters hypothesized that those parts of the brain that deal with contradiction and negative affect would be activated, quickly removing thi inconsistency in the case of their preferred candidate, and this was in fact whitl they found. Although they do not note the fact, this research is remarkable td ■řxtent that, for the first time, it provides independent neurological evidence Hjlln party identification model. Party ID, it will be recalled, is an affective or H)|nllonal tie to a particular political party, and its originators were much Hjlirnccd by cognitive consistency theory. Westen and his colleagues' study Hnnl.il ly suggests that strong partisans "screen out" unfavorable information Hiii11 their own candidate, and for the first time we can see something which at Hit looks like this process going on in brain scans. HTlic previous chapter noted that one of the most promising avenues for fllli measurement of emotion right now is coming from the field of neuro-Hjriu v. Advances in our understanding of how the human brain w orks, spurred H) kljinificant advances in the technology used to observe its functions, have Hinted the opportunity to increase our understanding of human perception i|liil reasoning, especially our comprehension of the ways in which these are Hneled by emotion. That said, the study of neuropolitics is still in its infancy at Hi time of writing, so much so that there exist very few bookTength introduc-HtiliN to the topic written for political scientists.14 There are of course plenty of Hmhooks aimed at neuroscientists themselves and their students, but as stu-Hlils of politics we face an immediate problem: we are unfamiliar with the Hjtriisive terminology used in the field. As John Ratey notes: The language used to describe the brain is, if anything, more opaque than any of the old psychoanalytic terminology, which was itself so obscure that only trained professionals could wade through the literature. Most people never even bother to learn such terminology, deeming that, like the language of the computer scientists of the early 1970s, it is better left to the nerds. If anyone should doubt it, a brief glance into a modern textbook on neurophysiology is all that is needed to make one want to run and hide.15 Nevertheless, appreciating the potential of neuroscience requires us to Hippie with at least some of the terminology of the brain, since as we have lllr.idv seen, this is central to an understanding of how this growing branch of I'lifmitive science might throw light on a range of political behaviors. The Human Brain 101 The human brain has evolved over millions of years. As Westen notes, "its ■řention was an elegant patchwork of circuits, one grafted onto the next, as |!m edifice grew larger and more complex."16 Moving down from the outer layers of the brain to the spinal cord, the human brain is a kind of living "iii i heological" record of itself. First the brain stem developed—a highly 170 The Individual primitive version of the brains we have today—allowing us to feel ,1111! ililflf ,hhI regulating basic drives such as hunger. Alter this, the cerebrum dcvpUH "Further evolution led to structures higher up that are crucial to o u r 1 \ |.. 11 (il emotion," Westen notes. Among the most noteworthy ol these stnulilM the amygdala, which "is involved in many emotional processes, from idcntjH and responding to emotional expressions in others, to attaching emi)||H significance to events, to creating the intensity of emotional expcricnflH generating and linking feelings of fear to experiences."17 The human brain as it exists now is in some ways like a Swiss army ||^H where each of the components performs a specific task; in other 1. |.< however, it is more like a separation of powers, where different funclinim (fl shared by different components rather than being wholly divided or pof^H out. Westen compares the brain to a "federal system."18 Certain aro(H particularly those that developed first when the brain was in its |>....... state—act as specialized centers for particular functions. The amyg.1 I particularly associated with fear and anger, for instance, while tin m is especially associated with disgust. Other regions, however, play a nilJH a variety of processes, which makes it difficult to generalize about lli As Westen notes, "no single structure has one function, and the DfHj neuroscientists study the brain, the more we realize that every mental 1 1 any consequence occurs through the activation and coordination of clrQ^H throughout the brain, from the more primitive circuits of the brainstem fl the more recently evolved circuits of the frontal lobes."19 On top of the cerebellum lies the cerebral cortex, and the area from |ui(l behind the eyes to the top of the head—known as the prefrontal cortex especially important in reasoning processes. The top and sides of the ceiehul cortex are known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is an area win. I. Westen notes, "is always active when people are making conscious choli'Olfl This is a kind of "reasoning circuit," playing a role when people are wcii'lnn up the costs and benefits of particular actions.20 In the language we h^H been using in this book, it involves primarily "cold" reasoning processes. Th|H there is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved with emotiCJH and emotional reasoning (what we have been calling "hot" cognition). Thin area also seems to act as a link between hot and cold processes. When early doctors began to open up the human skull, they had hull idea what role each part of the rather unattractive grey mass inside played lit I thought. Gradually, however, we began to learn how the human brain functioiiH ) by observing what happens to an individual's behavior when he or she hlfl undergone some sort of neurological damage.21 In the previous chapter, wi briefly described the work of Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist whose work has had a particular impact on how political psychologists are starting to look Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 171 HRiitlou. One of Damasio's most celebrated arguments relates to the 11./mi i' of reason and emotion. This argument is based in large part on H|| happens to individuals who have damage to the area in and around the mm l opposing candidate. It is not clear, though, whether this is happening bectl partisans are suppressing negative emotions in general because these unpleasant, or suppressing positive feelings which they might harbor towi the opponent, or attempting to increase their negative feelings towards opponent.33 Political scientists should also resist the temptation to use brain imafl or EEG for their own sake.34 Like other methods, each is best thought of simply one approach among many. There are times when the use of may be appropriate—again, it seems useful where we have reason to bell that self-reporting techniques are inadequate, for instance—but there are < occasions when better (but less "trendy") methodologies are available. 1 are also behavioral methods for going beyond self-reports, such as measur reaction time to masked stimuli. Imaging may be able to provide us with iikiv images of the brain, but if we are interested in illustrating the link bctv thought and behavior—which is often the case in political psychology-may be better strategies available. Given the high cost of imaging techniqU in particular, we should always ask ourselves whether imaging will tell| something critical that we cannot just as well get somewhere else. Neuropolitics is as much a method as it is a coherent body of theory; neuroscientific approach is clearly dispositionist in the sense that it zeroe on the characteristics of individuals. It is yet another perspective assumes that it is the attributes of individuals—in this instance, their partic brain chemistries—that shape their behavior. As far as political scientist! Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 175 Deemed, there is no value added from political neuroscience unless what ľ« mi in our heads actually makes a difference to how we act politically. On tine hand, neuroimaging might merely show us what changes take place llit- brain when someone feels compelled to act against their own best ■oment or values: an interesting thing in itself, but not something which i 111 \ .i< I< Is much to our explanation of behavior. As Dustin Tinglev notes, pPNerving a pattern of brain activity 'x' alongside behavior V does not ■ ■ I warily give us a better understanding of why 'z' happened, or why |i ii lines from 'z' happened, in the context of the political questions we are lull m sled in.'"' On the other hand, advocates of neuropolitics are united h llieir optimism that our understanding of political behavior is increasing, ill mi imaging has the increasing potential to allow us to "see" ordinary people lilnl nig about politics, and techniques such as EEG (while more limited in what |y can tell us) are appropriate when we are simply interested in whether political message is having some sort of resonance with the voter. So far ľni i isi ientific advances have been employed almost exclusively to understand [tilling behavior, sophistication, and tolerance, and have been used in particular investigate how the brain responds to racial outgroups (a literature we II discuss in Chapter IS). However, they have the potential to revolutionize |W political scientists look at all cognitive processes, and not just those that ■fC conventionally been regarded as dominated by hot cognitive processes. Biopolitics B but certainly not least, comes genopolitics, a term usually attributed to if political scientist James Fowler. As the name suggests, genopolitics is the llily of the genetic basis of political attitudes and behavior, and while it is In i l\ related to the field of neuropolitics—indeed, many of its advocates use |nilli approaches simultaneously—its focus is more on our unique genes as lllini.iiis and unique DNA as individuals than on brain scans or the use of ■(lll'i "logical techniques. It's at the cutting-edge of the most interesting work Ming done by political psychologists today, and offers a chance for social II Ii nir,Is to collaborate with their natural science colleagues.'" The Chronicle of lll/llict Education ran a feature on this topic in 2008, as did The New York Times the Mine year.37 There are essentially two types of genetic argument in the study of politics, both of which qualify as genopolitical: those drawn from evolutionary i Lology, which stress our similarities as a species, and those drawn from Iflliivioral genetics, which emphasize our individuality and our differences. The reader may recall that we briefly alluded to each approach in (li.ipler 1. In the first category, consider the arguments of Konrad Lorenz, III i ihologist who wrote a famous book called On Aggression.™ Lorenz was 176 The Individual interested in probing our true nature, and he was rather pessimistic otl score. But he also developed a more interesting and less straightfol argument than Hobbes or Machiavelli. We often criticize others by it "you're behaving like an animal," but Lorenz would see this statement as hll ironic, because in reality most animals are actually better behaved than us. \Vfl the possible exception of certain types of monkey, we are the only kmM vertebrate which kills its own kind (and perhaps the only one which UH pleasure in doing so). Murder or homicide seems to be almost uniqufl human, as is suicide. The old "nature versus nurture" debate offers us two competing explanation for this tendency. On the one hand, it could be that human beings are inheiciilhj aggressive or warlike, and that this can never be changed (a disposition claim). On the other hand, killing and war could be a learned behavior, a sl course, one of the problems with evolutionary arguments is that they are lllllunit, and even impossible, to test, and others have generated contrasting ■gtimcnts based on evolution that are equally convincing. The military psy-: |i|u il< igist Dave Grossman, for instance, argues in On Killing that we have evolved ■ predisposition not to kill, a position which in many ways jars with that of irfilen/..40 Grossman makes the simple point that, for evolutionary purposes, it In beneficial for the species not to kill its own members (otherwise it would Hiili kly die out). But this means that we need to be trained to kill, since it is not (til our natures. To bolster this argument, he cites the example of "non-firers," Hlildiers who deliberately fire over the heads of the enemy during wars, or llm- don't fire their weapons at all. He cites evidence that non-firing in World War I and World War II used to be quite common, but that it has been far l|rMN so since the Vietnam War. In an argument that combines dispositionist With situationist positions, he argues that since the 1960s the U.S. Army || i rained soldiers to kill far more effectively than it did, breaking down the llrttural resistance to killing with unrelenting behavioral conditioning. Genetics 101 The upshot of all of this is that—for good or ill—many political scientists find evolutionary arguments of this first kind a bit too speculative to be considered "n.il science." For these reasons and others, many have turned to a second Approach to genopolitics, drawn from modern behavioral genetics. Some n iders may have heard of the Human Genome Project, a truly international ind collaborative research program created back in the 1980s whose goal is to Completely "map" human genes and DNA. Almost everyone has heard about ". loning" as well—the artificial manufacture of an identical copy of a human (being, animal, or other living entity—and many political debates, works of || i. nee fiction, and Hollywood movies have focused on whether this is actually possible, and (if so) whether it is actually desirable in an ethical sense. Few of ir., though, have more than a general sense derived mostly from these popular in c es of what genetics really is and whether cloning actually goes on in real lit, "Dolly the sheep" was the first animal to be cloned in 1996 by researchers .ii the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Several other species have been ■ lnued since, but never (as far as we know) human beings. As you might expect 178 The Individual Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 179 this whole area has been enormously controversial, and human < li•ntMllfl banned in a number of countries.41 Popular fear of the uses to win, I, , can be and has been put, unfortunately, often clouds our understanding iif <|^H genetics is and what it can potentially offer us as a social science explanation, 1 It's important not to confuse genes with DNA (a distinction , omuiiM enough in high school biology classes, but not conventionally drawn In |» ,1 scientists). Every member of the human race has (almost) the same set ..I and there are about 20,000 genes in all.42 We share about 9S.S percent iiifdl genes with other humans, and this is what gives broad evolutionary ai jmiiii their force (genetically, we are nearly "all the same"). But there is 4.'> |>< i left over, and the variation between humans comes from this small but \ ii.il 'III \ ference. The 4.S percent affects our physical appearance, for instance V there is no "brown haired gene" or "blonde haired gene," there is a gene loi lull i color, and all of us have subtly different genetic versions that are nil 11..... what make us brown-haired, blonde, or something else. Of course, Inn behavior is a good bit more complex than this, because we all know thai I ml brown-haired people selected at random may be entirely dissimilar otliei wltll (both physically and psychologically). Our DNA and chromosomes are W^H further subdivide us. We can think of DNA as a tiny subset of genes. I >NA* provides a kind of "instruction book" or set of instructions for replii allny an exact copy of you as a person. Your DNA is what makes you uniquely I'HfH (this is why DNA tests are used by policemen and lawyers to prove whetlnifI a particular individual was present at a crime scene, for instance). T^H molecules ol DNA in your cells are in turn organized in chromosomes. Tlia^| chromosomes are then further grouped into short segments of DNA called I genes. These relationships are depicted in Figure 11.1. Fair enough, you might say. All very interesting, but I signed up for a courjH in political science. How does all of this affect political beliefs? How dual ifl affect how I behave when I do political things? I can understand that the lldfl that I have brown or blonde or red hair is coded in my genes. But that'* |fl physical thing, and politics is 100 percent the product of man-made Id. \ and more generally with socially constructed things that come from tin environment around me. Or is it? Is this entirely true? Surely therO^B no "Democratic Party gene" or "Republican Party gene"? Surely there's no "liberal gene" or "conservative gene"? Well, yes and no. As we will see UH what follows, the answers to these questions are complex but compelling. Twin Studies and The Politics in Your DNA When I was growing up in the North of England in the 1970s, my bojH friends were a pair of identical twins called Andrew and Peter (I'll use their 1 Figure I I.I Genes, chromosomes, and DNA Source: Shutterstock. (Compiled from Shutterstock images 47271088 & I 10503349) Mil names here, as they've given me permission to do that). I first met them III primary (grade) school, and while I don't remember meeting them for the Hit time—this was well over forty years ago, around about 1971 they both flillni today that they remember meeting me (both have quite exceptional llieinoi-ics, something I've unfortunately not been blessed with). But I do know llint most people who meet Andrew and Peter for the first time cannot tell them Ipiiil, and although I could tell the difference, it amused me a great deal as D child that many others (including their teachers) very often could not. Both Andrew and Peter are politically conservative as well, and readily concede that tin \ tend to vote for the U.K. Conservative party. Their mother and father are I'rtlily conservative politically, so they were brought up in an environment that Was also quite conservative. I ike all "identicals," Andrew and Peter share 100 percent of their genetic I )N A. In biological terms, this means that the egg they came from was fertilized With the same sperm, and the egg then split into two separate embryos (this type of twin is known technically as MZ, or "monozygotic"). Not everyone knows, though, that there is another kind of twin. In this type, two eggs aie fertilized at the same time by different sperm (these twins are known II l)Z, or "dizygotic"). I also just happen to know twins of this latter kind, whose names are Bill and Mary (again, they've given permission to use their i eal names). They are also English and were born a few years before me. While they may look very similar—indeed, many people often mistake them for 180 The Individual Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 181 one another—Bill and Mary are not identical genetically (like all Q| share about SO percent of the same genetic DNA). Interesting I j leaning politically (he usually votes Labour), but Mary is not (she >>n||| votes Conservative). Why talk about all this, and what could it possibly have to do wild «1 Actually, a good deal, at least potentially. For geneticists— and lm pm scientists like James Fowler, John Hibbing, and Peter Hatemi, who i this area—the comparison between identical twins and non id. mi,,i| offers a real opportunity to find out interesting things about the soui i in u| j political preferences (and behavioral traits as well, such as whether wen |Mi|«jp show up to vote at national elections). More particularly, it offers a .......I. Ii*|f to find out just how much impact your genetic inheritance has on your ,t|||| and behavior. What if we were to compare the attitudes of identical I win non-identical ones and find that the former tend, on average, to be...... (or closer together) ideologically than the latter? Again, the im..... 100 percent DNA, while non-identicals share only SO percent. Firs course, we need to get hold of a large database of different kinds of iwlJ somewhere that also includes data about their ideological views, I nil assume that we have done this. Now, if the identical twins tend to hfl similar ideologically than non-identical ones, we will have good groiiiull concluding that genes are at work in determining ideological prefercmi exactly what several of the twin studies have found. Psychologists and behavior geneticists have been conducting twin -since the mid-1980s, but it wasn't until 2005 that the first political article using this technique appeared in the pages of the American Polin. at ' Review (APSR). John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing looked at | database of MZ and DZ twins in just the way suggested above, and eon that genetics influence the way in which we respond to the environment ' twins are more alike ideologically than DZ twins, they find. While our i don't determine which party we identify with—that bit is pretty much mi constructed, since there are different political parties in different count they do affect the ideological positions that we take, the authors com Nevertheless, the "left-right" divide is identifiably part of political everywhere (at various times and places), and the authors contend that the a biological basis for this. "Hang on a minute—not so fast!" critics have protested. The whole politics or genopolitics approach remains controversial, and some e..... Evan Charney (a Duke University political scientist) have been especially < in denying that these studies are really showing what we think lIn \ showing.44 Twin studies are a simple idea, but if the situationist-disposltll debate were this easy to resolve, wouldn't we have done it by now? I men I..... |||„. iImi I.(.lh Peter and Andrew grew up in a conservative environment, ■tHinits who voted for the Conservative Party. Might it be that they are ■pitin^e simply because they grew up in a conservative household, and T»|» holds also for other identical twins (a conventional situationist killli ni)i' Might MZ twins just be treated more alike because they look K/lid might Bill and Mary have had less partisan or ideological parents, so tin v were less influenced by household environment than Andrew and ..ie siluationism)? The designers of MZ versus DZ studies and those 11 .this research design are of course well aware of these problems, and I nuilml for the effects of environment. In fact, twin studies are used BtyH' they provide a means of doing just that. By measuring the impact i hiii.......lent as well as genetics, they allow us to compare how much of ■•I till ion can be attributed to genetics, how much to other dispositional l|«|ili , .aid how much to situational factors like the household environment. fk[ tin same time, these issues are difficult to overcome entirely. To be Ni |.....nl sure of Hibbing et al.'s findings, we would need to see how n behave in different environments in order to conclude that genetics W llii inlluence attitudes and behavior. As Doron Shultziner puts it: ih. i losest possible method for testing the same genotype under different ■nvlronments is investigating the case of twins who have been separated nl an early stage of childhood and have been reared apart ... a greater ■euive of trait similarity under these circumstances may suggest that Mr same genotype results in similar traits despite developing under Unequal environments, assuming that the upbringing environments are Indeed sufficiently dissimilar.45 Ir'h say that Andrew had been raised in Liverpool, England and Peter in lm. > Ilornco, and that we had a lot of other cases that we could add them to pli quite dissimilar environments, in other words). Sounds fair enough as yPKleai, but the problem is that substantial databases of this sort are thinner ) the ground, since twins are usually raised in the same environment to one piliri. Technically, we would also need to compare not just types of twins, ■ twins to non-twins. Many of these studies simply assume that if the role utilities in behavior is more powerful for identical twins than it is for Hp Identical ones, it must also be powerful for unrelated "non-twins" !,u, two typical members of the population chosen at random). But twin lulu are of course only comparing identical twins to non-identical ones, a twins to the rest of the population. So technically all we can conclude i.....i win studies with 100 percent confidence is that identical twins are more „lil , in altitudes than are non identical twins, and some might question 182 The Individual Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 183 whether we can extrapolate the results to the broader conclusion thai exert a powerful impact on everyone's political behavior. At the sam«i! existing studies provide very few if any reasons for concluding that twin* in their political behavior to non-twins. Allford, Funk, and Hibbing's 200S study provoked enormous contri in the wider field. Many traditional scholars of voting behavior—as w see in Chapter 12, a great many are died-in-the-wool situationists who themselves "reared" on The American Voter—dismissed the result as absu its face. So genetics influence how we vote, and how we see politics in gem They had never heard of such a thing, and the techniques of Alford, Funk, Hibbing were even less familiar to them. The notion that we are born predispositions was alien to them, and even seemed crazy to some. Are pen born as little conservatives and little liberals? How can this be? Others froi out at the very notion of examining the genetics of twins, with its lurl overtones of Dr. Josef Mengele and The Boys From Brazil.™ These pi thought of eugenics and its horrors, and warned of biological determli in social science. Others were somewhat convinced by the study, but counl with other points. It might be, for instance, that genetics can explain attitili but attitudes don't necessarily equal behavior. How about backing up initial study with a study of actual political behavior, then? A follow-up 2008 article by James Fowler, Laura Baker, and Christo Dawes did just this. Focusing on the Los Angeles area, the authors wante use the twin research design to discover whether there was a relation between genetics and voter turnout (as well as other forms of political bel ior). To do this, they compared a registry of twins in LA to voter registral records in that city and to self-reported turnout.47 They found that genes environment both have a significant effect on variations in political bchavl but the biggest surprise for many political scientists—and even many poll psychologists—was of course that there was any relationship at all be genes and voting! Scholars have also moved beyond this stage, looking specific "candidate" genes that might be associated with political behavl and attitudes.48 It is fair to say that at the time of writing this issue has bi difficult to pin down. But the hunt is still on.49 While it might be useful to know which particular genes (or more like combinations of them) are linked to particular personalities, beliefs, aiJ behaviors, given the still-limited state of our knowledge this may be a step too far right now, in terms of the highly complex relationships which exist between particular genes; it seems that behavior is often the product of t lid interaction of several genes together. There is certainly no single "gene foi voting," for instance, and many political scientists would argue that particular genes or streams of DNA are primarily of interest in the natural sciences, ofl political scientists "don't need to know" about this in specificity or Perhaps the most important development, though, is the progress 1.1 I icen made by Hibbing, Fowler, and others in breaking down resistance iiuationists to the basic idea that there might be some genetic basis to Mil and behavior (an uncontroversial claim in biology, but marginalized liln political science as a field). ii recently, Hibbing, Smith, and Alford have written an interesting and nihil- book called Predisposed which examines the biology of political differ-The kind of political fault lines that currently bedevil politics in ihi I"! on D.C. (and the seemingly endless debate over "Obamacare" in par-||«r) are so enduring and hard to resolve because they are in fact biologically i.l i hey claim. While it isn't the case that we are born with "liberal genes" 'I'onscrvative genes," we are born with a whole set of genes which predispose i..u mis one view or another (notice that the authors did not give the book |more forceful title "Predetermined," since they are only arguing that this is Iniullir of tendency rather than fate). We inherit from our parents not just hair III...... eve color or other physical traits, but aspects of our personalities as Mil lis genes which predispose us to particular political views and make it more liclv that we'll be liberal or conservative (such as our views about human ■Urr). Hibbing and his colleagues suggest that liberals and conservatives tend I Muster around other beliefs and attitudes that you might not think of initially bring "political," such as whether you like arugula (a kind of rock salad or ||ll)Age leaf) or can't stand it, and whether or not you like to drink lattes and 111 i I he New York Times in Starbucks or prefer to swill Bud Lite at a NASCAR Itlng. In fact, there is a whole neural architecture behind our ideological lllrl's which sustains and supports them, making everything "hang together." i )ne "deep" factor which seems to affect political preferences, for niple, is the simple perception of threat. Hibbing and his colleagues argue ill liberals and conservatives appear to come pre-packaged with different llllliides toward threat. "Each of us is primed to respond physiologically and |i»yi hologically to certain categories of stimuli—just not to the same stimuli Uml not to the same degree," they argue. "Show a group of people the same •t In 1111 us and some will flatline while others will get a case of the vapors."51 They , in i lu work of psychologist Joseph Vigil at the University of Florida, who finds ii. .1 ihose on the political right (in America, conservatives or Republicans) are Hiiiie likely to perceive an ambiguous signal or communication as threatening lli.in are liberals. And overall, they note that "evidence exists that conservatives perceive disgusting images more unfavorably than do liberals, that llicy perceive threatening images slightly more unfavorably than do liberals, Slid that they perceive positive images more favorably than do liberals."" The research is still suggestive rather than definitive, but research conducted at I . Ml 184 The Individual Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 185 the University of Nebraska by Hibbing and his colleagues suggests that skln> conductivity responses to threatening stimuli (like loud, unexpected noised) may be predictive of attitudes to things like war and capital punishment. Conclusion We noted in this chapter that neuropolitics is basically a dispositionist approach, in the sense that it begins from the assumption that individual differences lead to variations in behavior. If we believe in neuroplasticity—the capacity ol ..... brains to be shaped by the outside world, or by the things to which we have been exposed—then any argument that starts with dispositions must also takflj account of how our brains are themselves molded and shaped by situation*, Genopolitics, of course, starts from the same bio-political assumption. But it III hard to find any practitioners of either approach who are biological determinis) in other words, few (if any) advocates of these approaches argue that biology alone determines our attitudes and behavior. John Hibbing in particulai explicitly argues that political behavior is the result of the interaction between dispositions and situations. This is an intriguing perspective and one which hi a direct bearing on the themes of this book, so we'll come back to it at the verjlf end when we discuss "The Future of Political Psychology." We have stressi 'I also that neuropolitics and genopolitics are both biopolitical approaches and sometimes strongly reinforce one another. For instance the finding that liberal! and conservatives have different brain structures can be used in suppoi I ol the argument that many attitudes are "heritable." On the other hand, they arm logically separate. As we'll see in the next chapter, neuropolitical perspective! often stress the centrality of emotion in voting choice, while many genopolitieal approaches emphasize the extent to which many people's attitudes are alreadj relatively fixed and are thus hard to sway. We have now seen that there are different forms of both situationism and dispositionism. In the final section of the book we shall attempt what is admittedly a rather daunting task: bringing together a number of empirical areas which havM been studied by political psychologists—a highly diverse group operating with « variety of theoretical mindsets and exhibiting a range of interests—under thl rubric of the general organizing device we have been using. As we admitted at the beginning of the book, however, no conceptual framework is perfect, and the reader may sometimes encounter areas of ambiguity where a theory does not appear to fit into one category or another, or rather more commonly, where It seems to fit both simultaneously. This is to be expected, since relatively lew theories emphasize psychological beliefs and personalities of actors to til* wholesale exclusion of contexts, environments, and situations; equally, then' are few theories that are purely situationist in character, saying absolutely nothing about the psychological makeup of political actors. In most areas of political psychology, as we shall see, research within a particular field has emphasized one or the other, with fashions changing over time. Notes 1 It would be impolitic, of course, to identify the people I heard talking in these terms! 2 Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott, "Introduction," p.6 in Hatemi and McDermott (eds.), Man Is By Nature A Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). I John Hibbing, "Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics," Perspectives On Politics, 11: 475-89, 2013. See Jonas Kaplan, Joshua Freedman, and Marco Iacoboni, "Us Versus Them: Political Attitudes and Party Affiliation Influence Neural Response to Faces of Presidential Candidates," Neuropsychology, 45: 55-64, 2007; and Drew Westen, Pavel Blagov, Keith Harenski, Clint Kilts, and Stephan Hamann, "The Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Political Judgment During the US Presidential Election of 2004," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18: 1947-58, 2006. The latter study is also summarized in Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), especially pp.x—xv. 4 See for instance Albert Somit and Stephen Peterson, Biology and Politics: The Cutting edge (New York: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011) and Robert Blank and Samuel Hines, Biology and Political Science (New York: Routledge, 2001). 5 See Hibbing, "Ten Misconceptions." () Ryota Kanai, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, and Geraint Rees, "Political Orientations Are Correlated With Brain Structure in Young Adults," Current Biology, 21: 677-80, 2011. See also David Amodio, John Jost, Sarah Master, and Cindy Yee, "The Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism," Nature Neuroscience 10: 1246-47, 2007. 7 See Maggie Koerth-Baker, "What A Dead Fish Can Teach You About Neuroscience and Statistics," accessed at http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/what-a-dead-fish-can-teach-you.html. H See Darren Schreiber and Marco Iacoboni, "Sophistication in Evaluating Political Questions: Neural Substrates and Functional Mechanisms," paper presented at the Political Methodology Annual Conference, Stanford, California, 2004; and Schreiber, "Political Cognition as Social Cognition: Are We All Political Sophisticates?", in Russell Neuman, George Marcus, Michael MacKuen, and Ann Crigler (eds.), The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 'I See Jonas Kaplan, Joshua Freedman, and Marco Iacoboni, "Us Versus Them" and John Tierney, "The 2004 Campaign: Using MRIs to See Politics On The Brain," New York Times, April 20, 2004. The author is indebted to Dr. Marco Iacoboni, Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory at Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, UCLA and Dr. Jeffrey Bedwell of the Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Central Florida for 186 The Individual Biopolitics, Neuropolitics, and Genopolitics 187 their assistance in answering the author's questions about the utilil\ of i scanning techniques and their role in measuring emotion. Thanks also « Pearl of Washington State University for stimulating my interest in thp fl topic of neuroscience and EEG in particular. 10 Marco Iacoboni, Joshua Freedman, and Jonas Kaplan, Op-Ed, "This Is Yuiii' fä on Politics," New York Times, November 11, 2007. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 See Westen, et al. "The Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning" and WchO'IU Political Brain. 14 The exceptions are George Marcus's excellent The Sentimental Citizen: f ihhoh Democratic Politics (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University I'' 2002), especially Chapters 3 and 4, and Westen's The Political Brain. Also impiir in this growing literature is the work of Darren Schreiber on political communli «II See especially Schreiber, "Political Cognition as Social Cognition," "The EvoH_ of the Political Brain: An Agent-Based Model," paper presented at the J meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 200fl "Monkey Sec, Monkey Do: Mirror Neurons, kinctional Brain Imaging, an.I I —I at Political Faces," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American I'nil Science Association, Washington, D.C., 2005; as well as Joel Weinberger Drew Westen's work on subliminal political advertising. See Weinberger Westen, "RATS, We Should Have Used Clinton: Subliminal Priming in 1: Campaigns," paper presented at the International Society of Political Psychoid Conference, Portland, OR, 2007. For discussions of the utility of neuroscicnflT understanding politics, see Rose McDermott, "The Feeling of Rationality: "fl Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science," Perspectives on PolltliT 691-706, 2004; the special edition of Political Psychology, Volume 24, .'no I neuroscience; Marcus, "The Psychology of Emotion and Politics," in David vj LeonieHuddy, and Robert Jervis (eds.), Oxford Handbook oJPolitical Psycholog \ York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Dustin Tingley, "Neurological Ini.iu as Evidence in Political Science: A Review, Critique, and Guiding Assessment Social Science Information, 45: 5—33, 2006. 15 John Ratey, A User's Guide To The Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Thlti of the Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). 16 See Westen, The Political Brain, p.50. 17 Ibid., p.57. 18 Ibid., p.53. 19 Ibid., p.60. 20 Ibid., pp.60-61. 21 See for instance Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And 0t/| Clinical Tales (New York: Touchstone, 1998). 22 Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New Yor Penguin, 1994). 23 Ibid., p.32. 24 Dr. Marco Iacoboni, communication with the author, December 7, 2007. 25 Ralph Adolphs, "Cognitive Neuroscience of Fluman Social Behavior," Naiun Reviews: Neuroscience, 4: 165-78, 2003; Tingley, "Neurological Imaging as Evidene in Political Science," p. 19. JUnleil in Ticrney, "The 2004 Campaign." Killiimi, communication with the author, i nlioiii, communication with the author, eilu i II, conversation with the author, December 1 3, 2007. 1 |«i nlMini, eommunication with the author. I Quoted in Tierney, "The 2004 Campaign." ■|)Milfl Amen, "Getting Inside Their Heads . . . Really Inside," Los Angeles Times, I | In ember 5, 2007. For instance, Bedwell notes that die sophistication of brain i iging has not yet reached a level where confident predictions can be made i (Iniiil later Alzheimer's in any case. Bedwell, conversation with the author. H Knpl'in, Freedman, and Iacoboni, "Us Versus Them," pp.60-61. H (In this point, see also Darren Schreiber, "Race and Social Norms: An fMRI Study," I |iii|nr presented at the International Society of Political Psychology Conference, I', I. I I. |, It land, OR, 2007. Igley, "Neurological Imaging as Evidence in Political Science," p.6. lies Fowler and Darren Schreiber, "Biology, Politics, and the Emerging ■elcnce of Human Nature," Science, 522: 912 914, 7 November 2008; see also I fowler and Christopher Dawes, "In Defense of Genopolitics," American Political * Silence Review, 107: 362-74, 2013. 1/ Kiiliaril Monastersky, "The Body Politic: Biology May Shape Political Views," I Chronicle oj Higher Education, September 19, 2008; Emily Biuso, "Genopolitics," The I Nmv York Times, December 12, 2008. U Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966). [j|U ||)ld. B Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost oj Learning To Kill In War And S,i, iety (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995). Ml It is currently banned in the United Kingdom, for instance, but not in the I Initcd States. ■} This discussion draws closely on that provided at the website www.23andme.com/ [ uen 101/genes/, which provides a straightforward summary of the basics geared inwards beginning students. 41 John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing, "Are Political Orientations Cienetically Transmitted?," American Political Science Review, 99: 153-67, 2005. [ Sec also Peter Hatemi, John Hibbing, John Alford, Nicholas Martin, and I Indon Eaves, "Is There a 'Party' In Your Genes?," Political Research Quarterly, 62: [ 584-600, 2009; and Jaimie Settle, Christopher Dawes, and James H. Fowler, "The I Irritability of Partisan Attachment," Political Research Quarterly, 62: 601-1 3, 2009.