A Genetic Basis for Social Trust?

Abstract

A propensity to believe that fellow citizens will not act against our interests in social and economic transactions has been identified as key to the effective functioning of democratic polities. Yet the causes of this type of 'generalized' or 'social' trust are far from clear. To date, researchers within the social and political sciences have focused almost exclusively on social-developmental and political/institutional features of individuals and societies as the primary causal influences. In this paper we investigate the intriguing possibility that social trust might have a genetic, as well as an environmental basis. We use data collected from samples of monozygotic and dizygotic twins to estimate the additive genetic, shared environmental, and non-shared environmental components of trust. Our results show that the majority of the variance in a multi-item trust scale is accounted for by an additive genetic factor. On the other hand, the environmental influences experienced in common by sibling pairs have no discernable effect; the only environmental influences appear to be those that are unique to the individual. Our findings problematise the widely held view that the development of social trust occurs through a process of familial socialization at an early stage of the life course.

Social Welfare as Small‐Scale Help: Evolutionary Psychology and the Deservingness Heuristic

“…As demonstrated by a long and important line of research, the input to the deservingness heuristic in the form of perceptions of recipient effort is learned from a large variety of sources (see, e.g., Gilens 2000;Larsen 2006). Recent research even suggests that genetic factors also contribute to variations in how specific individuals perceive others (Sturgis et al 2010). The importance of this variation notwithstanding, the aim here is not to further illuminate the proximate causes of variation in input to the deservingness heuristic, but to illuminate the ultimate causes of the heuristic mechanism itself.…”

The biology of trust: Integrating evidence from genetics, endocrinology, and functional brain imaging.

“…Another recent twin study (Sturgis et al, 2010) also investigated the genetic and environmental basis of trust. In contrast to the Cesarini et al (2008) study, trust was not measured as actual behavior (trust game).…”

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

“…This work includes twin and family models that partition sources of human variation into elements of “genes” and “environment” (Alford, Funk and Hibbing 2005; Bouchard et al 1990; Cranmer and Dawes 2012; Eaves, Eysenck and Martin 1989; Hatemi et al 2007; Klemmensen et al 2012; Martin et al 1986; Smith et al 2012; Stam, Von Hagen-Jamar and Worthington 2012; Sturgis et al 2010; Verhulst, Eaves and Hatemi 2012). As a matter of statistical application, the classic twin design (CTD) estimates genetic and environmental influences independently; yet the theoretical premise behind the twin model is based upon quantitative genetics and assumes that within each of the genetic and environmental parameters resides the potential for an individual’s genes to be correlated with, or conditional upon, environmental stimuli (Plomin 1994; Rutter 2006).…”