Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Abstract

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences

“…A growing body of research finds that political orientations vary with an array of broader constructs such as personality traits [4 -7], moral foundations [8,9], core values [10 -16], baseline neural structures [17], neural activation in response to unexpected stimuli [18], self-reported sensitivity to threat [19], tendency to perceive threat in faces [20], physiological response to threat [21], sensitivity to disgust [22,23] and possibly even genetics [24,25].…”

The Physiology of Political Participation

“…To be sure, none of this rules out the possibility that political participation could cause alterations in broad physiological responsiveness but we do feel the somewhat strained nature of this alleged relationship gives us some justification for hypothesizing the causal order we do. This certainly is the direction of the relationship hypothesized by the few existing studies connecting individual-level physiological variations to political variables (Amodio et al 2007;Oxley et al 2008; Kanai et al 2010;.…”

“…To be sure, none of this rules out the possibility that political participation could cause alterations in broad physiological responsiveness but we do feel the somewhat strained nature of this alleged relationship gives us some justification for hypothesizing the causal order we do. This certainly is the direction of the relationship hypothesized by the few existing studies connecting individual-level physiological variations to political variables (Amodio et al 2007;Oxley et al 2008; Kanai et al 2010;.Moving beyond "which comes first" in order to elaborate on our deeper theoretical vision, we believe that physiological measures such as the one we are about to employ are the best routes to achieving an indication of the "running tallies," "standing decisions," "habits," "predispositions," "motivated social reasoning," "automaticity," "longstanding dispositions," and "antecedent conditions" that have long been seen as crucial to political decisions (Jost et al …”

“…In terms of political behavior more specifically, EDA has been used as a measure of disgust response that predicts support for sexual morality policy , as a gauge of threat response to predict support for socially protective policies (Oxley et al 2008), and as a measure of anxiety in the face of negative political campaigning (Mutz and Reeves 2005).…”

Biology and ideology: The anatomy of politics

“…In 2008, Alford, Hibbing, Hatemi and others measured how people reacted to threatening images and sudden, loud noises 9 . People who blinked harder and showed heightened sensitivity -as gauged by their skin conductance -were more likely to favour gun rights, capital punishment and the war in Iraq than were those who showed less sensitivity.…”