The Penn Stater Magazine

From The Magazine: Pete Hatemi on Genes and Politics

September 17, 2013 at 1:38 pm Ryan Jones 3 comments

For our Sept./Oct. issue, I had the chance to interview Pete Hatemi about his research into the ways our genes help determine everything from how we choose a mate to how we vote. Hatemi is an associate professor whose expertise melds political science with biochemistry and genetics, a relatively rare crossover that allows him to work in really interesting areas.

We headlined the Q&A “Are We Born Biased?,” and the short answer to that question is, “It’s complicated.” The interview in our print edition offers more context, but the video below—it’s a couple of years old, timed with the release of his book, Man is by Nature a Political Animal, back in 2011—is a useful primer:

And—this just in—Hatemi was a guest Monday on Voices in the Family on WHYY radio in Philadelphia.

If you’re curious for more—and it really is fascinating stuff—you can Bing or Google Hatemi’s name and find all sorts of stories that reference his research. Some—like this one, published in England last year—tend to generalize and presume levels of certainty that Hatemi and his colleagues never actually state. And of course, there’s a tendency by folks on both political extremes to interpret his work as affirming the correctness of their worldview while mocking that of their ideological foes. If nothing else, Hatemi emphasizes that his findings confirm what common sense should already be telling us: If we want better politics, we need to find ways to get along.

Ryan Jones, senior editor

Entry filed under: The Penn Stater Magazine. Tags: Pete Hatemi, Sept./Oct. 2013.