Causality and confounding between Right Wing Authoritarianism, education, and Socio-Economic Status; a twin study

Abstract

While it is well-established that education and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) are quite strongly negatively correlated, it is still unclear why this is the case. There could be causal effects between these variables, in one or both directions, which can be either direct or mediated. And there could also be confounding third variables influencing their association. Using a sample of 320 monozygotic- and 312 dizygotic twin pairs, we were able to control for confounding influences from both genes and the family-environment, increasing our ability to infer causal effects. Furthermore, we investigate the roles of perceived Socio-Economic Status (SES) in both childhood and adulthood; SES in childhood could be a confound between education and RWA, and SES in adulthood could be a mediator. We explore these hypotheses with ACE-β models, which extend the logic of discordant twin designs into a structural equation framework. Our results are consistent with a causal effect of education to reduce RWA. SES in adulthood did not mediate this effect. We find that the negative correlation between RWA and education is further amplified by confounding influences, mostly from the family environment, which are partly associated with SES.

The genetic underpinnings of right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explain political attitudes beyond Big Five personality

“…We looked for evidence in favor of socialization models by exploring the role of the environment shared among twins in predicting variation in RWA, SDO, and Big Five personality traits. We found only one effect of the shared environment, namely on RWA (see also Eftedal et al, 2020;Kleppestø et al, 2020). By contrast, we did not find a shared environmental effect either on SDO or on any of the Big Five personality traits (see also Bouchard & McGue, 2003;de Vries et al, 2022;Kleppestø et al, 2019).…”

Building causal knowledge in behavior genetics

“…Intelligence, mental health, and personality are among the many important phenotypes largely unaffected by the shared environment, and so are sociopolitical traits such as social dominance orientation (SDO; Kleppestø et al, 2019) and justice sensitivity (Eftedal et al, 2022). Notable exceptions include educational attainment, and political conservatism (Willoughby et al, 2021) and authoritarianism (Eftedal et al, 2020), which often have shared-environmental variance components of at least 20%.…”

“…As non-shared-environmental correlations control for genetic and shared-environmental confounders, they can also help narrow our search for pairs of variables that are connected causally. For instance, individual educational attainment is associated with lower authoritarianism even when controlling for genetic and shared-environmental confounding (Eftedal et al, 2020). Surely such knowledge about the underlying nature of latent psychological constructs and their potential causal connections are useful stepping stones in the search for good interventions.…”

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

“…Moral and political attitudes can change over time within individuals (e.g. due to education, see Eftedal et al, 2020), and they certainly change over generations, reflecting the zeitgeist of any historical period. Nevertheless, it is now clear that individual differences in political attitudes does not change willy-nilly, but are relatively stable and trait-like, very much like personality.…”