Left or right?

Peter K. Hatemi, a political scientist at Penn State, is mentioned in an article at Scientific American. Here is an excerpt of the piece:

“Scientists and laypeople alike have historically attributed political beliefs to upbringing and surroundings, yet recent research shows that our political inclinations have a large genetic component.

“The largest recent study of political beliefs, published in 2014 in Behavior Genetics, looked at a sample of more than 12,000 twin pairs from five countries, including the U.S. Some were identical and some fraternal; all were raised together. The study reveals that the development of political attitudes depends, on average, about 60 percent on the environment in which we grow up and live and 40 percent on our genes.

“ ‘We inherit some part of how we process information, how we see the world and how we perceive threats—and these are expressed in a modern society as political attitudes,’ explains Peter Hatemi …”

Read more at Scientific American.