We wrote a popular rather than an academic book about political predispositions for a reason: We think it is important for a wide range of people to understand why not everyone sees the world the same way they do. Recent scholarly research on biology’s connection to political temperament might increase political understanding by making it easier to deal with political differences and conflict, but these studies are not readily accessible to a general audience. Reports published in professional academic journals often include eye-glazing technicalities and, when the results of this research are picked up by the popular press, much is lost in translation. We appreciate the media making research accessible to a broad audience, but the often-brief summaries tend to leave a false impression of the central findings. Our aim is to provide a book-length treatment that summarizes the recent research in a detailed but readable fashion. Our message is not one that everyone will like, but please don’t kill the messenger. We did not construct the complex, fascinating, flawed, and infuriating creatures called humans; we just study them. By understanding the human condition, warts and all, we think it might be possible to build and maintain political systems that work better than they currently do. We know for sure that pretending that humans are something they are not will only lead to frustration and further polarization of the political arena.
We are eager to acknowledge the valuable assistance we received in writing this book and in conducting the research that made it possible. First, primary financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation in the form of grant BCS-0826828. Second, our students throughout the years have shaped our thinking and improved our research dramatically. We were fortunate that during the drafting of this book we had an unusually talented group of graduate students, including Tim Collins, Kristen Deppe, Balazs Feher, Amanda Freisen, Karl Giuseffi, Frank Gonzalez, Mike Gruszczynski, Carly Jacobs, Jayme Neiman, John Peterson, and Ben Seiffert. Jayme comes in for special thanks. She was absolutely indispensable in many roles: reading the entire manuscript, offering insightful suggestions, designing figures, and tracking down fugitive bibliographic and other information. Colleagues and administrators at our respective universities, and in particular in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, have been wonderfully supportive. Matthew Hibbing and Jessica Mohatt provided crucial feedback on earlier drafts and saved us from many errors. We thank our colleagues around the world, in a variety of disciplines, who are also engaged in investigations of the sources of political attitudes, sometimes in collaboration with us and sometimes independently. We enjoy being their fellow travelers. We thank our editor at Routledge, Michael Kerns, for his support, encouragement, and guidance on this project, as well as his excellent taste in wine. And we thank our agent, Judy Heiblum, for being such an unflagging advocate for this project despite the fact that it happened when she was busy moving to a different continent and having a baby. Mostly, we thank our spouses, a couple of whom (Anne Nielsen Hibbing and Kelly Smith) were dragooned into reading the entire book and providing critiques, support, and suggestions.