This article by Duke University science writer Robin Smith originally appeared on Duke Today.
The contentious 2024 U.S. presidential election may be over, but Americans across the political spectrum remain baffled by the other side.
The percentage of U.S. adults who see the nation as divided on key values is higher than at any point in the last three decades.
Nearly half of Americans think members of the opposing political party aren’t just wrong, but bad people.
But how do we end up leaning toward one party over another in the first place? It’s a question that’s been nagging at one Duke University team.
“Why do some people come to identify as Republicans, and others as Democrats?” said political science professor Chris Johnston, who co-directs the Worldview Lab in the Kenan Institute for Ethics.
He and Worldview Lab co-director Stephen Vaisey, along with Duke sociology professor Jessi Streib, wanted to know more about this process.
But the more they read about the origins of our political leanings, Streib said, the more they realized how little was known.
Some of the best-known studies to date tracked people from the end of high school onward, following them once or twice a decade until they reached middle age.
But when it comes to political views and orientation — one’s preferences about issues such as abortion, gender roles, whether a person identifies as liberal or conservative — studies suggest that most people’s core beliefs start to crystallize much sooner, before they reach adulthood.
That leaves researchers guessing about how the experiences we have up to that point influence our perspectives.
“We have very little data on what happens during those early periods,” Johnston said.
Furthermore, previous studies followed people during a different political era, from the 1960s to the 1990s, when Americans were less ideologically divided and the media less fractured than they are now.
In an effort to fill the gaps, the researchers have teamed up with Bass Connections to launch a new study of children and their parents, starting with 10- to 12-year-olds.
They’re following them once every two years until they reach voting age to better understand how various influences during those formative years shape our politics.
Many factors — including family and religious upbringing, peer pressure, the media, even our DNA — all have a hand in shaping a person’s political ideology.
Typically, parents are one of the earliest influences on young people’s politics, Streib said.
But family dynamics can be complicated, she added. While most U.S. teens share their parents’ political loyalties, some kids grow up in right- or left-leaning families only to cross party lines as adults.
Streib said she’s particularly interested in the values and political messages kids are exposed to at home, and how children respond when those messages conflict.
It may be that their parents talk about equality at the dinner table, while acting differently in their day-to-day lives — by living in a gated community, for example, or treating people with disdain or suspicion just because they’re poor.
“How do kids make sense of mixed messages like that?” Streib said.
As we get older, “other influences come into play too,” said Duke sophomore and Bass Connections team member Suhhyun Lee, recalling her first access to social media at age 13.
Add to that what kids pick up from their friends, at school, from elsewhere on the Internet.
“We want to know where kids are hearing about politics, what they’re interested in finding out for themselves and how that all shapes the way they ultimately develop,” Streib said.
“It is hard to pin down what causes what [in the relationship between personality and politics]. To get at this, we need to start early to capture the period before these links are formed, so we can observe the causal sequence.”
— Christopher Johnston, Worldview Lab co-director
Some researchers argue that our political beliefs may be even more deep-rooted, embedded within our very nature or psychological make-up.
For example, studies have found that people with certain personality traits tend to lean toward one party or the other, Johnston said.
Republicans and Democrats tend to differ in how they relate to novelty and uncertainty, hence the stark divisions between the two parties on immigration issues such as border security and pathways to citizenship.
But just because there is a connection between personality and politics doesn’t prove that one caused the other, Johnston said.
“It is hard to pin down what causes what,” Johnston said. “To get at this, we need to start early to capture the period before these links are formed, so we can observe the causal sequence.”
Johnston stressed that the goal isn’t to teach kids about politics or shape people’s perceptions, but rather to understand how they grow up to hold a range of political views. “We want a diversity of perspectives,” he said.
To do that, the researchers are looking at participants’ views on a variety of issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, their personality traits, and their responses to questions like, “Which is more important to you, curiosity or good manners?”
Aided by undergraduate students, the team conducted the first round of surveys with children and their parents this past fall, before the 2024 election, and will follow up with them with more in-depth interviews this spring.
And while today’s tweens won’t be eligible to vote in a presidential election until 2032, preliminary interviews suggest they already have nuanced views on politics.
“I think we were all really surprised at how much they knew,” said Duke junior and Bass Connections team member Hava Stone. “They just really wanted to talk about what they thought.”
“Kids are much more mature than you think they are,” Johnston said.
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