New research suggests that our basic political attitudes are with us at birth
Researchers found a strong correlation between subjects’ political attitudes and their physiological responses to threat. People who showed more “blink startle” and perspiration after a threatening stimulus tended to cluster on the right politically. They advocated capital punishment, school prayer, and defense spending, and they supported the Iraq war.
… “Conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles,” Amodio’s Nature Neuroscience study concluded, “whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity, and novelty.”
