Social psychologists have long held that attitudes--whether about America's role in Iraq or the importance of one's physical appearance--are largely the product of environmental forces, a combination of upbringing and culture.
But a handful of studies show not only that attitudes are partly, though indirectly, heritable, but that attitudes with high heritability influence people's actions more strongly than those with weaker genetic bases. Indeed, highly heritable attitudes, such as political persuasions, may even steer our choices of the social "niches" we carve out for ourselves, such as where and with whom to live, according to one line of psychological research.
"When I first started this work in the 1970s, the definition of an attitude was a response conditioned 100 percent by an individual's experiences," notes University of Georgia social psychologist Abraham Tesser, PhD, who has conducted innovative studies on the social implications of highly heritable attitudes. "I think the zeitgeist has changed since the advent of the Human Genome Project--the idea that a behavioral system has a strong genetic component is hardly an issue anymore."
