Washington: Do people make a rational choice to be liberal or conservative or is it a matter of genetics?
Scientists say that neither conscious decision-making nor parental upbringing fully explain why some people lean left while others lean right. "Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA," said political scientists John Hibbing and Kevin
Smith from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and John Alford of Rice University. "These natural tendencies to perceive the physical world in different ways may in turn be responsible for striking moments of political and ideological conflict throughout history," Alford said.
Using eye-tracking equipment and skin conductance detectors, researchers have observed that conservatives tend to have more intense reactions to negative stimuli, such as photos of people eating worms, burning houses or maggot-infested wounds.
Combining their own results with similar findings from other researchers around the world, the team proposes that this so-called "negativity bias" may be a common factor that helps define the difference between conservatives, with their emphasis on stability and order, and liberals, with their emphasis on progress and innovation. "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," researchers said.
The researchers caution that they make no value judgements about this finding. The harm caused by negative events, such as infection, injury and death, often outweighs the benefits brought by positive events. "We see the 'negativity bias' as a common finding that emerges from a large body of empirical studies done not just by us, but by many other research teams around the world. We make the case in this article that negativity bias clearly and consistently separates liberals from conservatives," Smith explained.
The study was published in the journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences.
