How is "Views on Economic Policy" encoded by the genome?
No matter the state of the economy, you're bound to hear about— unemployment, inflation, job markets, stock markets, and more. But how attached you are to economic policy, and how involved you become in it often depends on the person.
Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models that economists and political scientists use to predict behavior. Recently, genetic research in economic and political behavior has drawn attention because of its potential to identify genetic markers that may be used in social science research as predictive factors for identifying individuals at risk for certain behaviors.
Scientists did a large genome-wide study to discover more about the underlying genetic effects on economic and political preference using a larger sample size. In this study, researchers investigated the underlying genetic effects on economic and political preferences using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data obtained from 9,836 Swedish twins. A part of the Political Attitudes Battery was used to measure five dimensions of political preferences: immigration/crime, economic policy, environmentalism, feminism/equality, and foreign policy. As for measuring economic policy, participants were asked to indicate their views of various proposals, such as “Decrease the public sector”, “Decrease taxes” and “Have more private companies in health care”. Answer choices were presented in a Likert-like scale with five choices ranging from “Very good proposal” to “Very bad proposal.” The results revealed that moderate correlations may exist between economic policy and rs7101446 in the SLC22A9 gene and rs2360111 in the NXN gene.
The analysis of individual SNPs does not reveal any associations of significance. The results are unsurprising in light of accumulating evidence for the complexity of social science traits. Even so, then larger samples will be needed to detect those variants.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22566634/
Are you interested in learning more about your genetic tendency for how you view economic policies? You can log in to your Genomelink TRAITS to see this new genetic trait.
