The role of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism on mask wearing and vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a large nationally representative study in the United States, we explored the role of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism on adhering to protective measures against COVID-19. Controlling for one's politics, perception of risk, state policies, and important demographics, we find higher grandiose narcissism predicts less vaccination and less mask-wearing, but more telling other people to wear a mask, if one wears a mask. The individual facets of higher entitlement/exploitativeness predicted less mask-wearing and less vaccination while higher authority/leadership-seeking predicted telling others to wear a mask, but not getting vaccinated. Regarding vulnerable narcissism, higher self-centered/egocentrism predicted less mask-wearing or vaccination, while higher oversensitivity-to-judgement predicted more mask-wearing and vaccination. Our results are consistent with expectations that reflect narcissism's multidimensionality, and present a nuanced picture of narcissism's role in adhering to protective policies. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03080-4.

Narcissism in Political Participation.

Much attention has focused on the social, institutional, and mobilization factors that influence political participation, with a renewed interest in psychological motivations. One trait that has a deep theoretical connection to participation, but remains underexplored, is narcissism. Relying on three studies in the United States and Denmark, two nationally representative, we find that those scoring higher in narcissism, as measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory-40 (NPI-40), participate more in politics, including contacting politicians, signing petitions, joining demonstrations, donating money, and voting in midterm elections. Both agentic and antagonistic components of narcissism were positively and negatively related to different types of political participation when exploring the subfactors independently. Superiority and Authority/Leadership were positively related to participation, while Self Sufficiency was negatively related to participation. In addition, the combined Entitlement/Exploitativeness factor was negatively related to turnout, but only in midterm elections. Overall, the findings support a view of participation that arises in part from instrumental motivations.

Dispositional Fear and Political Attitudes.

Previous work proposes that dispositional fear exists predominantly among political conservatives, generating the appearance that fears align strictly along party lines. This view obscures evolutionary dynamics because fear evolved to protect against myriad threats, not merely those in the political realm. We suggest prior work in this area has been biased by selection on the dependent variable, resulting from an examination of exclusively politically oriented fears that privilege conservative values. Because the adaptation regulating fear should be based upon both universal and ancestral-specific selection pressures combined with developmental and individual differences, the elicitation of it should prove variable across the ideological continuum dependent upon specific combinations of fear and value domains. In a sample of ~ 1,600 Australians assessed with a subset of the Fear Survey Schedule II, we find fears not infused with political content are differentially influential across the political spectrum. Specifically, those who are more fearful of sharp objects, graveyards, and urinating in public are more socially conservative and less supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of death are more supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of suffocating and swimming alone are more concerned about emissions controls and immigration, while those who are more fearful of thunderstorms are also more anti-immigration. Contrary to existing research, both liberals and conservatives are more fearful of different circumstances, and the role of dispositional fears are attitude-specific.

Ethics in field experimentation: A call to establish new standards to protect the public from unwanted manipulation and real harms.

In 1966, Henry Beecher published his foundational paper "Ethics and Clinical Research," bringing to light unethical experiments that were routinely being conducted by leading universities and government agencies. A common theme was the lack of voluntary consent. Research regulations surrounding laboratory experiments flourished after his work. More than half a century later, we seek to follow in his footsteps and identify a new domain of risk to the public: certain types of field experiments. The nature of experimental research has changed greatly since the Belmont Report. Due in part to technological advances including social media, experimenters now target and affect whole societies, releasing interventions into a living public, often without sufficient review or controls. A large number of social science field experiments do not reflect compliance with current ethical and legal requirements that govern research with human participants. Real-world interventions are being conducted without consent or notice to the public they affect. Follow-ups and debriefing are routinely not being undertaken with the populations that experimenters injure. Importantly, even when ethical research guidelines are followed, researchers are following principles developed for experiments in controlled settings, with little assessment or protection for the wider societies within which individuals are embedded. We strive to improve the ethics of future work by advocating the creation of new norms, illustrating classes of field experiments where scholars do not appear to have recognized the ways such research circumvents ethical standards by putting people, including those outside the manipulated group, into harm's way.

Correction: The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196600.].

Are Moral Intuitions Heritable?

Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks.

The Pennsylvania Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (PALSPAC) Twin Registry.

The Pennsylvania Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Twin Registry was developed to capture a representative sample of multiple births and their parents in the state of Pennsylvania. The registry has two main efforts. The first began in 2012 through recruitment of adolescents in Pennsylvania schools. The second effort began in January 2019 in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Health to capture the birth cohort of twins born from 2007 to 2017. Study recruitment, sample demographics, focus and measures are provided, as well as future directions.

To Go Forward, We Must Look Back: The Importance of Evolutionary Psychology for Understanding Modern Politics.

As new waves of populism arise and cause disruption around the globe, there is both great interest in attempting to explain the origin of this dynamic as well as a need to ameliorate its potentially destructive impact. Perhaps the greatest signal of seismic change is the global dismantling of American institutional control of the postwar world following the election of Donald Trump in the United States. In the wake of such dramatic changes, it may seem odd to turn to evolutionary psychology which looks deeply into the past to try to understand current events, but, in fact, modern technology has dramatically changed the shape of political communication in just such a way as to make politics more personal once again, increasing the need to understand and interpret modern politics through an evolutionary lens. In fact, current modern political turmoils demonstrate how important evolutionary themes are and how critical they remain to understand how current forms of populism tape into older tribal sentiments and drives. Modern technology allows for a form of interpretative politics that no longer need to be mediated by political institutions or larger social structures, including enduring ones such as marriage. Indeed, in any ways, as we have technologically advanced, we have also regressed to more immediate, emotional, and personal forms of political communication. And it is only in understanding the nature of that personal political psychology that we can begin to grapple seriously with the challenges of today, including the consequences of global populism.

The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change.

Extant research shows that social pressures influence acts of political participation, such as turning out to vote. However, we know less about how conformity pressures affect one's deeply held political values and opinions. Using a discussion-based experiment, we untangle the unique and combined effects of information and social pressure on a political opinion that is highly salient, politically charged, and part of one's identity. We find that while information plays a role in changing a person's opinion, the social delivery of that information has the greatest effect. Thirty three percent of individuals in our treatment condition change their opinion due to the social delivery of information, while ten percent respond only to social pressure and ten percent respond only to information. Participants that change their opinion due to social pressure in our experiment are more conservative politically, conscientious, and neurotic than those that did not.

The relationship between physical aggression, foreign policy and moral choices: Phenotypic and genetic findings.

Previous work has demonstrated that both leaders and other individuals vary in dispositional levels of physical aggression, which are genetically influenced. Yet the importance of individual differences in aggression for attitudes toward foreign policy or context-laden moral choices, such as sacrificing the lives of some for the greater good of many, has yet to be fully explored. Given the global importance of such decisions, we undertook this exploration in a sample of 586 Australians, including 250 complete twin pairs. We found that individuals who scored higher on Buss-Perry's physical aggression scale were more likely to support aggressive foreign policy interventions and displayed a more utilitarian moral calculus than those who scored lower on this scale. Furthermore, we found that the majority of variance in physical aggression lay in genetic factors for men, whereas the majority of the variance was in environmental factors for women. The source of covariation between aggression and political choices also differed between the sexes. A combination of genetic and environmental factors accounted for most of the cross-trait correlations among males, whereas common and unique environmental factors accounted for most of the cross-trait correlations among females. We consider the implications of our results for understanding how trait measures of aggression are associated with foreign policy and moral choices, providing evidence for why and how individuals differ in responding to complex social dilemmas. Aggr. Behav. 43:37-46, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The genetic and environmental foundations of political, psychological, social, and economic behaviors: a panel study of twins and families.

Here we introduce the Genetic and Environmental Foundations of Political and Economic Behaviors: A Panel Study of Twins and Families (PIs Alford, Hatemi, Hibbing, Martin, and Smith). This study was designed to explore the genetic and environmental influences on social, economic, and political behaviors and attitudes. It involves identifying the psychological mechanisms that operate on these traits, the heritability of complex economic and political traits under varying conditions, and specific genetic correlates of attitudes and behaviors. In addition to describing the study, we conduct novel analyses on the data, estimating the heritability of two traits so far unexplored in the extant literature: Machiavellianism and Baron-Cohen's Empathizing Quotient.

Political attitudes develop independently of personality traits.

The primary assumption within the recent personality and political orientations literature is that personality traits cause people to develop political attitudes. In contrast, research relying on traditional psychological and developmental theories suggests the relationship between most personality dimensions and political orientations are either not significant or weak. Research from behavioral genetics suggests the covariance between personality and political preferences is not causal, but due to a common, latent genetic factor that mutually influences both. The contradictory assumptions and findings from these research streams have yet to be resolved. This is in part due to the reliance on cross-sectional data and the lack of longitudinal genetically informative data. Here, using two independent longitudinal genetically informative samples, we examine the joint development of personality traits and attitude dimensions to explore the underlying causal mechanisms that drive the relationship between these features and provide a first step in resolving the causal question. We find change in personality over a ten-year period does not predict change in political attitudes, which does not support a causal relationship between personality traits and political attitudes as is frequently assumed. Rather, political attitudes are often more stable than the key personality traits assumed to be predicting them. Finally, the results from our genetic models find that no additional variance is accounted for by the causal pathway from personality traits to political attitudes. Our findings remain consistent with the original construction of the five-factor model of personality and developmental theories on attitude formation, but challenge recent work in this area.

Lindon J. Eaves, Ph.D., M.A. (Oxon), D.Sc. Theory-model-data.

We begin this special issue by providing a glimpse into the career of Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, from the perspectives of a student, postdoc, instructor, assistant to associate and full professor over the last 20 odd years. We focus primarily on Lindon's contributions to methodological issues and research designs to address them, in particular those related to models for extended twin-family designs, for the development of adolescent behavior, for genotype-environment covariation and interaction, and their application to the Virginia 30,000 and the Virginia Twin Study of Adolescent Behavioral Development. We then introduce the collection of papers in this special festschrift issue of Behavior Genetics, celebrating Dr. Eaves achievements over the last 40 years.

Genetic influences on dietary variety - results from a twin study.

The heritability of variety seeking in the food domain was estimated from a large sample (N = 5,543) of middle age to elderly monozygotic and dizygotic twins from the "Virginia 30,000" twin study. Different dietary variety scores were calculated based on a semi-quantitative food choice questionnaire that assessed consumption frequencies and quantities for a list of 99 common foods. Results indicate that up to 30% of the observed variance in dietary variety was explained through heritable influences. Most of the differences between twins were due to environmental influences that are not shared between twins. Additional non-genetic analyses further revealed a weak relationship between dietary variety and particular demographic variables, including socioeconomic status, age, sex, religious faith, and the number of people living in the same household.

Genetic influences on political ideologies: twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations.

Almost 40 years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30 and 60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences. However, these findings have not been widely accepted or incorporated into the dominant paradigms that explain the etiology of political ideology. This has been attributed in part to measurement and sample limitations, as well the relative absence of molecular genetic studies. Here we present results from original analyses of a combined sample of over 12,000 twins pairs, ascertained from nine different studies conducted in five democracies, sampled over the course of four decades. We provide evidence that genetic factors play a role in the formation of political ideology, regardless of how ideology is measured, the era, or the population sampled. The only exception is a question that explicitly uses the phrase "Left-Right". We then present results from one of the first genome-wide association studies on political ideology using data from three samples: a 1990 Australian sample involving 6,894 individuals from 3,516 families; a 2008 Australian sample of 1,160 related individuals from 635 families and a 2010 Swedish sample involving 3,334 individuals from 2,607 families. No polymorphisms reached genome-wide significance in the meta-analysis. The combined evidence suggests that political ideology constitutes a fundamental aspect of one's genetically informed psychological disposition, but as Fisher proposed long ago, genetic influences on complex traits will be composed of thousands of markers of very small effects and it will require extremely large samples to have enough power in order to identify specific polymorphisms related to complex social traits.

The Influence of Major Life Events on Economic Attitudes in a World of Gene-Environment Interplay.

The role of "genes" on political attitudes has gained attention across disciplines. However, person-specific experiences have yet to be incorporated into models that consider genetic influences. Relying on a gene-environment interplay approach, this study explicates how life-events, such as losing one's job or suffering a financial loss, influence economic policy attitudes. The results indicate genetic and environmental variance on support for unions, immigration, capitalism, socialism and property tax is moderated by financial risks. Changes in the magnitude of genetic influences, however, are temporary. After two years, the phenotypic effects of the life events remain on most attitudes, but changes in the sources of individual differences do not. Univariate twin models that estimate the independent contributions of genes and environment on the variation of attitudes appear to provide robust baseline indicators of sources of individual differences. These estimates, however, are not event or day specific. In this way, genetic influences add stability, while environment cues change, and this process is continually updated.

Gene-Environment Interplay in Twin Models.

In this article, we respond to Shultziner's critique that argues that identical twins are more alike not because of genetic similarity, but because they select into more similar environments and respond to stimuli in comparable ways, and that these effects bias twin model estimates to such an extent that they are invalid. The essay further argues that the theory and methods that undergird twin models, as well as the empirical studies which rely upon them, are unaware of these potential biases. We correct this and other misunderstandings in the essay and find that gene-environment (GE) interplay is a well-articulated concept in behavior genetics and political science, operationalized as gene-environment correlation and gene-environment interaction. Both are incorporated into interpretations of the classical twin design (CTD) and estimated in numerous empirical studies through extensions of the CTD. We then conduct simulations to quantify the influence of GE interplay on estimates from the CTD. Due to the criticism's mischaracterization of the CTD and GE interplay, combined with the absence of any empirical evidence to counter what is presented in the extant literature and this article, we conclude that the critique does not enhance our understanding of the processes that drive political traits, genetic or otherwise.

The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress.

For the greater part of human history, political behaviors, values, preferences, and institutions have been viewed as socially determined. Discoveries during the 1970s that identified genetic influences on political orientations remained unaddressed. However, over the past decade, an unprecedented amount of scholarship utilizing genetic models to expand the understanding of political traits has emerged. Here, we review the 'genetics of politics', focusing on the topics that have received the most attention: attitudes, ideologies, and pro-social political traits, including voting behavior and participation. The emergence of this research has sparked a broad paradigm shift in the study of political behaviors toward the inclusion of biological influences and recognition of the mutual co-dependence between genes and environment in forming political behaviors.