2015-16 CASBS fellow Rose McDermott: "The Genetics of Politics"

"While traditionally social factors have been considered to have primary influence on political behaviors and preferences, more recent research shows that there's also a strong heritable component to ideological attitudes. Rose McDermott, professor of International Relations at Brown University and a 2015-16 CASBS fellow, will discuss her research on the influence of genetic contributions to political and social behavior. McDermott has described her work as intended to offer “…a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to the interaction of psychological processes and political outcomes.""

McDermott studies the biological influences which interact with environmental factors to shape ideology across the political spectrum in cultures around the world. Her research has included conducting embedded experiments on attitudes toward gender equality in numerous countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Uganda, Indonesia, Mongolia and India.

The author of Political Psychology in International Relations and co-editor of Man Is by Nature a Political Animal , McDermott was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 02013. McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard. She has held numerous fellowships, including the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University. She is also a past and current fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

She is the author of three books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over a hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as experimentation, emotion and decision making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior."

Get the book here: https://goo.gl/olXF6x