New York, NY (PRWEB) July 30, 2014

Anyone who has ever wondered why the gulf between conservative and liberal views seems so unbridgeable might find some answers in the latest issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

In a fascinating article, Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology, three political scientists argue that our political bias is frequently not a conscious choice nor the result of our upbringing, but a product of predispositions rooted in our psychology and even our biology.

Drawing on a growing body of research and on their own experiments, John Hibbing and Kevin Smith from the University of NebraskaLincoln, and John Alford from Rice University, Texas, make the claim that personality, psychology, physiology, and genetics each play an important role in whether individuals will turn out to have conservative or liberal leanings.

Using experiments in which people were shown nice or nasty images or asked to judge facial expressions, the authors found that participants of a conservative bent reacted faster and spent longer engaging with negative images than testees who defined themselves as liberals. The unsavory images included spiders, burning houses, and a maggot-infested wound, and each subjects reactions were gauged by monitoring devices such as eye trackers, which measure involuntary responses.

Hibbing writes:

The logic for our approach is straightforward. Life is about encounters: sights, sounds, smells, imaginings, objects, and people, and the systems employed to sense, process, formulate, and execute a response to stimuli are psychological and physiological. Even if a stimulus is identical, one individual will sense, process, and respond to it differently than another.

We reason that this variation is likely to correlate with the political positions endorsed by each individual. Across research methods, samples, and countries, conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative, and to be more distracted by the negative.

This negativity bias could explain why typical conservatives traits are preference for stability and order, which keep in check potentially threatening change, while liberals are more likely to embrace innovation and reform and the uncertainty and potential chaos they may bring.

Hibbing includes a warning against the temptation to base value judgements on the findings:

Continued here:
DNA Explains Political Preference, New Research Claims