Edward Bell

The University of Western Ontario | UWO · Department of Sociology

Two studies were performed to determine whether political orientations were related to loci-of-hope, which are where one acquires or sustains one's hope that one's goals may be achieved. Study 1 employed a nationally representative sample of Canadian English-speaking adults (N = 866), who completed the Locus-of-Hope Scale (Bernardo, 2010) that meas...

Background: This study investigated the relationships between the Dark Triad of personality (sub-clinical psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) and four political variables: socio-religious conservatism, support for greater economic equality, overall liberal-conservative orientation, and interest in politics. A theoretical approach that f...

Previous research has shown that the use and appreciation of humor are related to various political phenomena. However, to date very little has been done to examine the association between specific styles of humor and left-right political orientations, the relationship between humor styles and political engagement, or the issue of whether political...

We examined the association between intelligence, party identification, and political orientations using genetically informative data gathered from German twins and their families (n = 9553 individuals including 1524 adolescent and young-adult twin pairs). The results indicated that supporters of the Pirate Party and the Green Party had levels of i...

We investigate the link between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement using a new data set containing information on a large sample of young German twins. The TwinLife Study enables us to examine the predominant model of personality, the Big Five framework, as well as traits that fall outside the Big Five, such as cognitive ability,...

A new paradigm has emerged in which both genetic and environmental factors are cited as possible influences on sociopolitical attitudes. Despite the increasing acceptance of this paradigm, several aspects of the approach remain underdeveloped. Specifically, limitations arise from a reliance on a twins-only design, and all previous studies have used...

Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher, The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals about Ourselves, Our History & the Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 282 pages. ISBN: 9780691164748. Hardcover $29.95. - Volume 37 Issue 1 - Edward Bell

Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are widely used constructs in research on social and political attitudes. This study examined their hierarchical and correlative structure (across sexes, generations, and rater perspectives), as well as how genetic and environmental factors may contribute to individual differe...

We argue that consilience, or the unity of all knowledge, is an important goal for all researchers to pursue. The philosophical foundations of this position are explored, and then an empirical study is presented that illustrates what could be gained by melding behaviour genetic, sociological and other perspectives on politics. Twin data are analyse...

An established position, long recognized in the literature, maintains that political party identification (PID) arises mainly from familial socialization and has a major impact on political outlooks and behaviors. An alternative view, also entrenched in the literature, holds that the direction of causation may go the other way, with political orien...

Since the pioneering work of Eaves and Eysenck (1974) appeared in Nature some 40 years ago, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and behavioral geneticists have investigated the effects of nature and nurture on the formation of social attitudes. It has consistently been found that manifestations of social attitudes (i.e., preferences,...

Despite the fact that the recently evolved Microcephalin and the related Abnormal Spindle-like Microcaphaly Associated (ASPM) alleles do not appear to be associated with IQ at the individual differences level, the frequencies of Microcephalin have been found to correlate strongly with IQ at the cross-country level. In this study, the association be...

Social inequality is a social phenomenon which varies across cultures. However, it does not only depend on social and cultural influences (e.g., public ideological opinion), but also on basic individual attitudes and values that promote socio-political decisions and behaviour. Behaviour genetic studies across several nations have found that individ...

Since the pioneering work of Eaves and Eysenck (1974) appeared in Nature some 40 years ago, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and behavioral geneticists have investigated the effects of nature and nurture on the formation of social attitudes. It has consistently been found that manifestations of social attitudes (i.e., preferences,...

Since the pioneering work of Eaves and Eysenck (1974), it has consistently been found that socio-political attitudes are genetically influenced. More recently, researchers have sought to clarify the nature of those genetic effects. In particular, they have examined the role of basic personality traits (Kandler et al. 2012; Verhulst et al. 2012). In...

There is an ongoing debate among political scientists and others about the relationship between partisan attachment (i.e., affiliation or identification with a particular political party) and political orientations. An established position, long recognized in the literature, maintains that partisanship is the lens through which people view the poli...

This article examines the hypothesis that although the level of democracy in a society is a complex phenomenon involving many antecedents, consanguinity (marriage and subsequent mating between second cousins or closer relatives) is an important though often overlooked predictor of it. Measures of the two variables correlate substantially in a sampl...

A General Factor of Personality (GFP) was extracted in two studies in order to examine its relationship with political variables. Only one of nine phenotypic associations between the GFP and variables measuring left–right political orientations was significant, which suggests that people who score highly on the GFP are not typically “left” or “righ...

A recent paper [Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330, 686–688] presents evidence for the existence of a general collective intelligence factor, ‘c,’ which may undergird performance on a variety of group tasks. This factor appears to be on...

This article provides a behaviour genetic heritability analysis of several political issues, including social and economic conservatism, general interest in politics, attitudes toward the major Canadian federal parties, federal party identification and national vote choice. Substantial genetic effects were found for four of six political attitude s...

In 2004 the Alberta Progressive Conservative party won an election that prolonged their political dynasty, which had begun some thirty-three years earlier. Dynasties seem to characterize Alberta politics, and over the years several researchers have formulated models to explain them. This paper uses the 2004 election as a case study to evaluate the...

Written for the Dept. of Sociology. Thesis (Ph.D.). Bibliography: leaves 225-234.

In 1971, Peter Lougheed's Conservatives put an end to the long rule of the Social Credit party in Alberta. Many accounts maintain that large-scale social change that occurred in the province as a result of the postwar oil boom was responsible for this important change of government. Urbanization, in particular the expansion of the urban middle clas...

Many interpretations of the Social Credit movement in Alberta are based on assertions regarding the class basis of its popular support. Since no previous study of Social Credit has offered an empirical account of its popular class base, such an account is provided here. The author analyzes the provincial election of 1935, in which Social Credit fir...

This article questions the conventional wisdom concerning the class basis of mass support for the Social Credit movement in Alberta. Most accounts maintain that the petite bourgeoisie -- specifically, independent farmers and small businessmen -- provided disproportionately high levels of support for the movement. A careful review of the literature...