Conservative vs Liberal: May have Biological, Genetic Basis

[stromboli]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/inquiring-minds-john-hibbing-physiology-ideology

"Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."

Jefferson didn't have access to today's scientific machineryâ€"eye tracker devices, skin conductance sensors, and so on. Yet these very technologies are now being used to reaffirm his insight. At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.

"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above). "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patternsâ€"how they think about things, what they pay attention toâ€"to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently."



This is not fringe science: One of Hibbing's pioneering papers on the physiology of ideology was published in none other than the top-tier journal Science in 2008. It found that political partisans on the left and the right differ significantly in their bodily responses to threatening stimuli. For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud noise were stronger in conservatives. And after being shown a variety of threatening images ("a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," according to the study), conservatives also exhibited greater skin conductanceâ€"a moistening of the sweat glands that indicates arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body's fight-or-flight response.

It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuliâ€"and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.


The results of Hibbing's study were clear: The conservatives tended to focus their eyes much more rapidly on the negative or aversive images, and also to dwell on them for a lot longer. The authors therefore concluded that based on results like these, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."

"Maybe you've had this experience, watching a political debate with somebody who disagrees with you," says Hibbing. "And you discuss it afterwards. And it's like, 'Did we watch the same debate?' And in some respects, you didn't. And I think that's what this research indicates."

One of the biggest differences clearly involves the emotion of disgust. Hibbing isn't the only one to have found a relationship between conservatism and stronger disgust sensitivityâ€"this result is also a mainstay of the very influential research of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies how deep-seated moral emotions divide the left and the right (see here). In one study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage. It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion.

That word, "primal," helps us begin to understand what Hibbing and his colleagues now think ideology actually is. They think that humans have core preferences for how societies ought to be structured: Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers, whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find them threatening. Hibbing and his team have even found that preferences on such matters appear to have a genetic basis.

Thus, the idea seems to be that our physiology, who we are in our bodies, may lead us to experience the world in such a way that basic preferences about how to run society emerge naturally from more basic dispositions and habits of perception. So, if you have a negativity bias, and you focus more on the aversive and disgusting, then the world seems more threatening to you. And thus, policies like supporting a stronger military, or being tougher on immigration, might feel very natural.

And when you combine Hibbing's research on the physiology of ideology with waves of other studies showing that liberals and conservatives appear to differ when it comes to genetics, hormones, moral emotions, personalities, and even brain structures, the case for politics being tied to biology seems pretty strong indeed.

So how do we then live with the other sideâ€"with those who disagree with us, for reasons over which they may not have full control? Hibbing believes that understanding that you don't fully control your political orientation, any more than you do your sexual orientation or your left-hand/right-hand orientation, promotes political tolerance. "My dad was left-handed," says Hibbing, "and he got beat on the hand with a ruler when he was a kid." Nowadays, Hibbing continues, that would never happenâ€"we've grown much more tolerant because we recognize that left-handed is just the way some people are.

So maybe the same can happen for politics. "We have this silly and naive hope, maybe it's more than that," says Hibbing, "that if we could get people to see politics in the same light [as left-handedness], then maybe we would be a little bit more tolerant, and there will be a greater opportunity for compromise."

Sooo.....conservatives are a bunch of paranoid fraidy cats.  I feel so manly right now.

[SGOS]

I always find these studies interesting, and the fact that this is hardly the first of it's kind, while it strongly reinforces earlier data, suggests that it isn't bullshit.  The first time I read one of these, I thought it painted such a negative picture of conservatives that I figured it was some kind of left wing propaganda.  Yet, when I read these things, they make sense.  There is such a gap between the left and the right that even recognizing that the gap is skillfully contrived in a large part by politicians, pollsters and operatives for their own selfish purposes, there's just too much there that defies logic, while it supports the notion of an irrational/emotional quality of our species.

In recent years I've reconnected with a long lost cousin who turns out to be wildly conservative, and also perplexing.  I cannot fathom where his views come from or how he processes information.  Granted he is the quintessential example of a totally brainwashed party cheerleader.  No matter how stupid a republican behaves, he defends them, and no matter how brilliant or helpful a Democrat might be, he hates them beyond reason.

But even considering the fact that party fan boys are hopelessly indoctrinated, the question remains, how does anyone submit their brain to a ideology and then apparently just stop thinking?  Is it some lazy "commit and forget" approach to life?  No, I think there has to be more.  There something in the brain, perhaps there are things like fear and paranoia at the root of it, but why does the fear and paranoia pervade the processing of information so much that it becomes blinding?  But it does seem to run in families.  It's not as overriding as the religious beliefs of your parents, as children more often assume a party affiliation different from parents than they do a different religious affiliation, unless perhaps they possess the strong conservative mental patterns discussed in your article.  This is interesting stuff.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

It might explain the right wings absolute anal retentive thing about guns.

[SGOS]

It might explain the right wings absolute anal retentive thing about guns.

I think there are more emotions and mental processes that form a thread of continuity through the conservative mind than just fear and paranoia, but the gun thing could more easily be understood by simple fear and paranoia than some of the other conservative notions.  Consider the campaign propaganda of the NRA.  Does it focus on enjoyment?  Does it focus on the American right to go hunting, be it deer or ducks with the companionship of your favored Labrador retriever?  No.  Nor does it focus on the joy of competitive target shooting, or positive healthful activities  of the biathlon.  It's all focused on the negative (as pointed out in the research).  According to the NRA, you arm yourself against a hostile world of thugs surrounding your home and breaking in at any moment to rape your wife, and kill your kids.

The gun propaganda does play to the negative focus of the conservative mindset.