Can genetics explain political partisanship?
New research published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences shows growing support for the theory that nurture may not be as powerful as nature when it comes to partisanship.
"A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology and even traits like physiology and genetics," writes Chris Mooney for Mother Jones.
The debate took the scientific limelight this month when University of Nebraska political scientist John Hibbing published a paper arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias". He found that conservative thinkers are more physiologically sensitive to negative stimuli, such as the image of a frightened woman with a large spider on her face.
Through experiments with monitoring devices such as eye trackers, Mr Hibbing measured the various involuntary responses of liberals and conservatives to certain imagery. He found that conservatives have faster responses to threatening stimuli than their liberal counterparts.
Findings such as these, says Mooney, challenge our very understanding of political opinion. It alters "the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests", and it calls into question "the notion that in politics, we can really change".
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28315145
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