The More Chicken, the More Conservative

[Doug]

DOUG
This confirms what I have thought for a long time...


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Political views are often so staunchly held that one wonders whether they aren't hard-wired into a person's genes. Indeed, in the past, twin studies have suggested that DNA may play a role in determining political attitudes. Although no one has yet discovered a gene for, say, supporting the war in Iraq, a small new study by political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and other institutions reports another association between a person's biology and his politics.

The study, published in the September 19 issue of the journal Science, involved 46 Nebraska residents with strong political convictions. Researchers examined the link between each participant's stated political views and his or her physiological response to a perceived threat in the lab. People with stronger measurable threat responses, the study found, tended to adhere to "socially protective" political policies, or those that suggest more concern for preserving the social unit — for example, supporting the Iraq war and the death penalty, but opposing abortion rights and gay marriage.

...To measure that sensitivity, researchers conducted two tests. In one, they showed volunteers a series of photos that included some threatening images — for example, a picture of a man with a spider on his face or an infected, open wound — while measuring the electrical conductance of the volunteers' skin, a technique also used in polygraph testing. In a separate experiment, researchers subjected the volunteers to sudden bursts of loud white noise to test their startle reflexes, measured by sensors that were attached to the muscle below the eye and recorded how hard people blinked.

People who blinked harder than others and registered a heightened response to threat on the conductivity test also tended to support the death penalty and military spending. People with a mellower startle response were more likely to support abortion rights or gun control. The study also looked at several broader political tendencies, including compromise (the willingness to yield to a middle-ground solution) and obedience (the tendency to follow a set path), and found that people who were more sensitive to threat were less amenable to the former and more inclined to the latter.

See See here.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

1) that's a very small study
2) that's a very localized study
3) I'd love to have some history on the subjects - sounds to me like it indicates that "conservatives" were abused children (since you get those tendencies - follow orders, venerate authority, etc - with abused kids), which doesn't surprise me at all.