By Chris Mooney
You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavorial and Brain Sciences.
If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique
practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance
is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then
the original author responds to all of them.
The approach has many
virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of
scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or
provocative scientific idea.
And in the latest issue of the journal,
this process reveals the following conclusion:
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.
That's a big deal.
It challenges everything that we thought we knew
about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our
upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic
interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can
really change (most of us, anyway).
It is a "virtually inescapable conclusion"
that the "cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are
quite different."
The occasion of this revelation is a paper
by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that
political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are
physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting)
stimuli in their environments.
The paper can be read for free here.
In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary
responses of political partisans to different types of images.
One
finding?
That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and
aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "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," as one of their papers put it.
In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its
major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement,
resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem
well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.
The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an
evolutionary imperative.
"One possibility," they write, "is that a
strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it
would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.
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Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science. He was a science journalist and podcaster for Mother Jones and host of Climate Desk Live from 2012 to 2014. He is now a staff writer at The Washington Post.
