What is the relevance of attachment and life history to political values?

Conservatives and liberals have markedly different ideologies. Conservatives, in comparison to liberals, are risk averse and prefer social inequality, traditionally established and familiar in-group values, and familial allegiance. Liberals are risk prone, are open to new views and ways, value equality and out-group relations, and exhibit high independence and self-reliance. We hypothesize that this variation was functional and socially strategic in human evolutionary history. Conservatives, we propose, are familial and in-group specialists, while liberals are out-group specialists. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the different values are caused proximately by attachment style and associated childhood stresses. Accordingly, low avoidant and high secure attachment and associated low childhood stresses ontogenetically generate conservatives, whereas high avoidant and low secure attachment and associated high childhood stresses give rise to liberals. Results from our study of 123 young adults support the hypotheses. We focus on the psychometric scale of conservatism–liberalism but also examine participants' scores on two additional political scales: social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism. We also analyze participants' scores on time preference scales and life expectancy to test whether political values are related to future-versus-present life history tradeoffs or participants' perceptions of the past. We found no support for conservatism–liberalism's relationship to a future-versus-present tradeoff. Conservatism–liberalism, however, is related to how one understands the past in ways that support the notion that the degree of childhood stress affects political values.