From the Boston Globe:
… researchers found a strong correlation between subjects’ political attitudes and their physiological responses to threat. People who showed more “blink startle” and perspiration after a threatening stimulus tended to cluster on the right politically. They advocated capital punishment, school prayer, and defense spending, and they supported the Iraq war.
In contrast, liberals – who supported “less protectionist” policies such as gun control, open immigration, and increased foreign aid – showed significantly less physical response to the threatening stimuli. … And the degree to which a person was startled by threatening stimuli indicated how much he or she advocated policies that protect society from external and internal threats such as wars and crime. [¶ ¶]
When researchers compared subjects’ physical responses with their political opinions, they found a striking correlation. “It was clear,” Hibbing said, “that some individuals have certain central-nervous-system reactions in the part of the brain involved in fear – there’s a genetic basis for this – and this brain activity underlies both their startle response and their political views.”
Eve LaPorte, Born to Party, Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 2008 (emphasis added; hat tip: Hacker News).
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