Commissioned Book Review: Michael Ryan, The Genetics of Political Behavior: How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Ideology
| Author | Berfin Çakin |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211001241 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(2) NP7 –NP8
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1001241PSW0010.1177/14789299211001241Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
The Genetics of Political Behavior: How
Evolutionary Psychology Explains Ideology by
Michael Ryan. London: Routledge, 2020. 204
pp., £39.99, ISBN 9780367568559
Recent literature has presented significant find-
ings in the field of political psychology regard-
ing the evolutionary connections between
rightists and leftists. Michael Ryan’s book,
The Genetics of Political Behaviour: How
Evolutionary Psychology Explains Ideology, is
the result of such efforts, attempting to explore
the relationship between psychology and politics
through an evolutionary psychological frame-
work. For this purpose, the author compiles an
extensive range of literature regarding neurosci-
ence, genetics, and psychology in order to
explain the biological differences between right-
ists and leftists that lead to ideological differ-
ences. With the help of this theoretical
framework, the author details how specific per-
sonality traits that are attributed to leftists or
rightists have shaped human history and the
future of civilisation, economy, and religion.
The book is comprised of 12 information-
packed chapters discussing the differences
between rightist and leftists, mainly analysing
the role of genetics and environment in shaping
personality traits. The principal argument of
the book is that rightists and leftists differ not
only ideologically, but also biologically,
because they react differently to events – such
as the perception of threats that result in devel-
oping specific traits – and these are the key
sources of ideological differences. Existing
empirical studies compiled by the author dem-
onstrate that leftists are more cooperative, open
to experiences, solution-oriented, and have
more abstract thinking abilities and greater
mental representation; rightists, on the other
hand, are more fearful, competitive, sensitive
to threat, intolerant to uncertainty, and support-
ive for the status quo and order. Although some
scholars have previously discussed that traits
result from acculturation, the author’s evolu-
tionary psychological approach handles traits
in relation to the harmonisation of genes and
environment. This refers to personality traits as
stemming from biological factors such as brain
region differences and genes, but they are com-
pleted when they take an adaptive form based
on the environment.
Based on biological differences between
rightists and leftists, the author analyses his-
torical transformations, religion, economics,
geography, art, and civilisation by pointing to
two critical constituents in the shaping of
human history: genetics and environment.
Brain regions – the amygdala, anterior cingu-
late cortex, and anterior insula cortex – and
responsible genomes constitute the biological
differences between rightists and leftists. The
amygdala is responsible for threat percep-
tion, aggression, and male rivalry, which are
associated with rightists, and the largeness of
the amygdala affects fear and aggression. In
contrast to rightists, leftists have a larger
anterior cingulate cortex, which handles cog-
nitive control, behavioural flexibility, and
pro-social emotions. The book largely
focuses on genes, emphasising the activation
of genes in the environment through the evo-
lution of different adaptive behaviours,
namely historical transformations. Thus,
genes are activated as a response to environ-
mental conditions, coping with stresses and
threats by altering the human being’s role and
direction. In this context, one can analyse
becoming a rightist or leftist related to our
adaptations to archaic environments, devel-
oping specific traits accordingly.
The book’s greatest contribution to the lit-
erature is establishing a link between these
traits and human history, filling an important
gap in the political psychology literature by
looking beyond context-dependent interpreta-
tions, drawing a holistic picture regarding the
bond between evolutionary practices of our
civilisation outputs and personality traits. Our
ancestors with conservative traits shaped early
human history and developed adaptive traits
for avoiding existing danger in early human
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